Conservative Icon Weyrich Warns 'Moral Minority' Still Dwindling
By Lawrence Morahan
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
January 14, 2002

Washington (CNSNews.com) - The good news to come out of Sept. 11 - as veteran conservative strategist Paul Weyrich sees it - is more and more Americans are putting their trust in God. The bad news is, many of the same people are turning to big government for protection, just in case.

"God is back in the public square, for how long I don't know," Weyrich said in a recent interview after chairing one of his weekly strategy meetings - attended by a Who's Who of Washington conservatives - at the Free Congress Foundation headquarters.

Complications from a 1996 accident have left Weyrich confined to a wheelchair. But restricted mobility hasn't dampened his zeal for conservative causes. This year, the man credited with inventing some of the strategies that helped get conservatives into power - including Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich - celebrates 25 years as head of the Free Congress Foundation. He also has plans to expand the organization.

What concerns Weyrich today is that many defenders of civil liberties, including some of his luncheon guests and a majority of Republicans in the Senate, now want to entrust the government with special powers, "as if government is actually going to protect us. They're not," Weyrich said.

In many ways, Weyrich notes, today's political climate resembles the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when Americans looked to "big government" to protect them and the Republican right began to lose the ground it had gained in the previous year's election.

Since Sept. 11, the number of big government opponents has almost disappeared, Weyrich said. What's worse, he added, many of today's government advocates are former ardent government reformers.

"I was asked the other day, 'Well, don't you trust Ashcroft?' And I said, "Frankly, no, I don't trust anybody that's in power, because once they get in power they tend to use it unscrupulously.'"

While Attorney General John Ashcroft "is certainly better than most, he's not going to know a tenth of the cases that are being prosecuted by his minions," continued Weyrich, a judiciary reform advocate and a leading player in getting Senate confirmation for non-activist judges.

Weyrich also differs with the administration on whether there was a religious motivation behind the September terrorist attacks. If the Bush administration is exonerating Islam for propaganda purposes, that's one thing, he said. "If they actually believe it, then I have a real problem."

Muslims are killing Christians by the thousands in Sudan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan, and the West ignores it, Weyrich said. Moreover, if the United States continues to emulate the lax immigration policies of Western Europe - where Muslim communities are growing in France, Germany and Great Britain - soon the security of the United States will be at considerable risk, he added.

"They're going to, at some point or another, attack us. It's like having a giant fifth column in your own country."

Weyrich, one of two proto deacons at his Melkite Greek Catholic Church in Washington, is also not convinced that Islam requires its followers to be up-front with their intentions. "In fact, they're told to deceive, which makes it very difficult."

These views bring him into conflict with the Bush administration. "If you were Jewish in Weimar Germany, this is the kind of thing you might have heard," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic relations, in response to Weyrich's remarks.

Weyrich doesn't seek to sugarcoat his point of view: "I am not politically correct. Yes, some people have jumped to what we say, but so what? If I'm not here to tell the truth, there's no point in my being in existence."

This outspokenness is vintage Weyrich, according to those who know him. "He's an easy guy to demonize because of his views and because he has a very strong moral stance," said Ellen Ratner, White House bureau chief for the Talk Radio News Service, and a frequent debater of Weyrich's. "But he is who he is and I respect how he is because he's not a person who does one thing and says another. You would say he walks the walk."

From Journalism to Activism

Growing up in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1950s, Weyrich learned to talk the talk from his father, a German immigrant and Taft Republican who had a passionate interest in politics. By the time the young Weyrich was an eighth-grader, he shocked a neighboring family by talking politics at their dinner table. The mother called Weyrich's parents to tell them she found their son's behavior "totally inappropriate."

Weyrich shrugged: "Well, that's all we talked about at home. I didn't know anything else."

It wasn't long before Weyrich was getting paid to talk. In 1963, he became the youngest program director of a commercial radio station in the country, in Kenosha, at age 19. He also worked as a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel, and as a weekend anchor for the CBS TV affiliate in Milwaukee.

A turning point came when he was reporting for a local radio station in Denver, Colo. An assignment to cover candidates for the 1966 elections brought him in contact with Republican Sen. Gordon Allott, who became Weyrich's mentor. Allott was impressed with Weyrich's knowledge of politics, and as soon as he was re-elected, he called the young reporter and offered him a job as press secretary in Washington. Weyrich accepted.

A career in journalism and new responsibilities as a husband had forced Weyrich to give up night classes, and he came to Capitol Hill as one of the few senior aides to an elected official without a college degree.

Weyrich was never made to feel at a disadvantage because of his academic shortcoming, however. The senator gave him as many prestigious, and menial, assignments as anyone else on his staff. "I don't see where a degree would have made a dime's worth of difference," Weyrich said.

But in many other ways, Washington took some getting used to. "Up to that point, I had been on the other side of things ... Now, I was in a position where I had to answer the questions. It really was a sea change."

Weyrich's reputation as a hard-nosed reporter - he had been instrumental in getting a city clerk removed from office in a suburb of Milwaukee and had testified at the trial of a Milwaukee alderman later removed from office for corruption - didn't endear him to some political elements in his home state.

By contrast, everyone in Washington told him what a wonderful guy he was. "It really shook me until I realized that they weren't after me, they were after my senator. Once I understood that, things were back to normal."

With the Vietnam War at its peak, Washington in the late 1960s was a city besieged by civil rights and anti-war protesters. On Capitol Hill, legislators voted the interests of the independent groups that wielded the greatest political power. Labor unions that wanted to enact liberal "Great Society" programs seemed to Weyrich to be the most powerful groups.

There wasn't much difference philosophically between new right figures Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips and Weyrich and their predecessors, such as William Buckley, Tom Winter and Stanton Evans. The difference was in the commitment to win, Weyrich said.

Weyrich tried to get the conservative movement to focus on at most, three or four issues, and he helped develop themes around these issues that could be stressed. In addition, Weyrich encouraged candidates to do an audit of potential allies in their districts.

Some audits produced a potential of more than 900 groups in a single congressional district. Marc Nuttle, who was chief strategist for the Right to Work referendum in Oklahoma, along with Paul Ogle in Colorado, refined this technique, Weyrich said.

"The old right really was an intellectual movement," Weyrich said. "They would argue endlessly about things that to me had very little relevance, but they would get together at these meetings and have these very heated intellectual discussions. In fact, I was accused by some of their leaders as being anti-intellectual because I didn't appropriately appreciate these arguments."

Conservatives also needed to be kept informed. While working on supersonic transport legislation, Weyrich was inspired by a comprehensive briefing book he found on the SST, produced by the American Enterprise Institute. If legislators had had access to this document, Weyrich argued, they might have kept the project alive.

Soon afterward, Weyrich founded Analysis and Research Associates, which he believed would be used as a resource to produce accurate materials for legislators. In 1973, with financial help from Joseph Coors of the brewing empire, this became the Heritage Foundation, and Weyrich its first president.

Weyrich Starts Free Congress Foundation

Not long after establishing Heritage, Weyrich and the trustees, including Joe Coors and former Congressman Ben Blackburn, clashed on the "issues pie." Weyrich favored tackling what he saw as the destruction of the American family while the trustees wanted to stick with economic and defense issues.

Weyrich also wanted to get more involved in the federal judicial appointment process - wins at the ballot box and in the legislature, he thought, too often were overturned by liberal judges in the courts - and in training people in how to win elections.

To this end, he started the Free Congress PAC in 1974, which helped sweep into Congress a new breed of populist conservatives in 1978. The most notable among them, it turned out, was Newt Gingrich, a conservative from Georgia whom Weyrich had trained years earlier at a campaign seminar in Milwaukee. In 1977, Weyrich founded the Free Congress Foundation.

Weyrich's help to political allies wasn't without strings. Gary Bauer, a Republican presidential candidate in 2000 who headed the White House Office of Policy Development under Ronald Reagan, said Weyrich was a valuable ally. But he was "also a guy that could burn up the telephone lines pretty quick if he saw evidence that the Reagan administration was heading in the wrong direction, or going away from its conservative roots," Bauer said.

When Bauer went before Ted Kennedy and other liberal senators for confirmation as under secretary for education under William Bennett in the mid-1980s, Weyrich rallied his constituents' support. "But he was also regularly calling us and urging Bennett and I to stay tough on educational choice and school prayer," Bauer noted.

Weyrich had also begun to build coalitions outside Washington. During a strategy meeting in 1979 with Jerry Falwell, a young evangelist eager to start a political group for conservative Christians, Weyrich coined the phrase "moral majority."

At the meeting, Weyrich commented, "Out there, there is a moral majority, but it has been separated by denominational and historical differences,'" Weyrich recalled.

"Falwell said, 'Stop, what did you say was out there?' It hadn't even registered with me. 'You said that out there, there is something?' and I said, 'Oh, yeah, a moral majority.' He turned to his people and he said, 'That's it. That's the name of the group.' And so it was."

Weyrich has since reassessed his estimate of the number of Americans who would qualify for the moral majority. At the height of the sex scandal involving President Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky, he declared the moral majority was dead. If it existed, he said, Clinton would have been removed from office.

"The fact of the matter is we don't have a moral majority anymore. We have a 'moral minority,' and this moral minority is dwindling as more and more outrages are pushed on the society," he said.

Weyrich's new organization also gave him the opportunity to train people outside the United States in the political process. In 1988, he visited the Soviet Union with Robert Krieble, an industrialist who had established contacts with a nascent democracy movement in Russia led by Boris Yeltsin.

After the Berlin Wall came down, Weyrich and Krieble taught business and politics in the former Soviet Union. Between them, they trained more that 20,000 people between 1989 and 1996 in how to transition to democracy.

"One side would teach how to win elections and how to form a political lobby, and the other would teach how to form a small business without requiring loans from the Deutsche Bundesbank," Weyrich said. After Krieble died in 1998, the project was discontinued for lack of funds.

National Empowerment Television

Some of Weyrich's toughest challenges were still to come. In 1993, with a budget of about $10 million, Weyrich launched National Empowerment Television, a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week channel that featured family-friendly viewing and offered lots of interactive talk shows.

Weyrich's own program, called "Direct Line," competed with PBS' MacNeill-Lehrer NewsHour, Weyrich said, and generated more calls than the think tank could handle. NET never had enough affiliates to get a national rating, but in some local communities, it was competitive with ABC's "Good Morning America," Weyrich said.

The new venture proved costly, however, and Weyrich had to transfer funds from Free Congress to keep it afloat. In 1995 alone, he transferred $2 million in assets to the project. But the foundation could not get financial support on a continuing basis, so the board set up NET as a private business and sought private funds.

By the spring of 1997, $20 million had been raised and NET was re-launched as a for-profit TV channel. To run the project, now called "America's Voice," the board hired Robert Sutton, a broadcast executive who had been vice president of NBC and ABC, and had launched the "Golf Channel." It was Sutton's job to get the shows onto cable channels.

Weyrich was glad to hand over responsibility for sales and marketing to Sutton in exchange for maintaining the final say in programming. But according to Weyrich, no sooner had the board made Sutton the CEO than Sutton made a play for control of the programming as well. Weyrich resisted, fearing a watering down of his conservative message.

"I said, 'it'll be changed over my dead body. That's what we're here for,'" Weyrich told Sutton.

In the middle of the squabble, in October 1997, The New Republic magazine published a lengthy article by David Grann attacking Weyrich. Entitled "Robespierre of the Right," it depicted Weyrich as someone who had devoted his life to building a movement and now was profiting from its destruction.

If Weyrich's enemies didn't have enough ammunition to throw at him already, the New Republic article gave them plenty. It described Weyrich as volatile and tyrannical.

"By 1981, while his friends were still basking in their newfound power, Weyrich began to experience sudden bouts of pessimism and paranoia - early symptoms of the nervous breakdown that afflicts conservatives today," Grann wrote. After taking power in 1994, conservatives "acted as nutty as Weyrich," the article claimed.

Weyrich said the publication's staff gained his confidence while all the time planning to stab him in the back. "They seemed to be taking the approach that 'oh, you've always stood for reform and so on,' so I was very forthcoming with them. They took stuff totally out of context. They brought up things that they never questioned me about and printed it. It was just a first-class hatchet job."

Weyrich sued The New Republic for defamation of character. A lower court dismissed the complaint and Weyrich appealed. The case currently is in the discovery stage as both sides prepare for trial this year, said Larry Klayman, Weyrich's lawyer.

"They were trying to assassinate conservatives, and Paul Weyrich was the conservative that had the most powerful voice, which was NET television at the time," Klayman said.

The article had serious repercussions for Weyrich. In Weyrich's version of events, Sutton used it to convince the board that Weyrich was a laughing stock in the industry and that as long as he was associated with the network, it wouldn't go anywhere. The board sided with Sutton and forced out Weyrich.

However, Sutton said the disagreement at America's Voice was essentially a debate over the difference between political activism and journalism, and Weyrich's departure had little to do with publication of The New Republic article. Sutton wanted America's Voice to look more like Fox News and MSNBC - news channels that gave both sides of the story - and Weyrich was opposed to that.

"That didn't particularly settle well with Paul. He didn't really believe in both sides," Sutton said in an interview from his home in Tampa. For example, Weyrich protested when the network brought on porn publisher Larry Flynt to debate Jerry Falwell on free speech issues.

"It happened to be a very good exchange, and Larry Flynt happens to be a friend of Jerry Falwell's," said Sutton, who described himself as conservative, but "probably not as arch-conservative as Paul is."

"I always found that if you're a conservative and you believe in what you believe in, if you have the other side on, you kind of make them look foolish. But Paul didn't want to have the other side on," Sutton said. Most cable networks he talked to considered Weyrich to be "extreme right wing," he said.

Weyrich's temper and perceived prudishness also became an issue in the struggle. He had regular blow-ups with associates and staff, but portrayals of him as a paranoid person who imposed ideological litmus tests on subordinates were not true, say people who worked with him at NET.

"He trained me well in the sense there's no one in Washington I'm now scared of," said Genevieve Wood, a vice president at the Family Research Council who worked as a producer for Weyrich from 1993 to 1998.

Weyrich was also able to apologize if he was in the wrong, Wood said. "Paul was usually right and if he was wrong, he'd come back and admit it and apologize," she said.

What was behind Weyrich's flare-ups was not a need for gratification but a deep commitment to principles, a commitment he also expected from his subordinates, associates said.

"That doesn't mean he doesn't make mistakes," said Michael Schwartz, vice president of government relations with Concerned Women for America.

"He had in his younger day a great failing in this terrible temper. He'd go off like Vesuvius. He did it to me a few times, and he has brought that under control recently and it's a real testament to his character that he's able to identify these flaws and improve on them," added Schwartz, who was fired by Weyrich in 1994 during one of many personnel shakeups at NET.

Schwartz added: "There are very few people in the conservative movement who have contributed as much as Paul Weyrich has and there are even fewer who have the character of Paul Weyrich." Schwartz returned to Free Congress in 1995 and stayed until 1998.

Weyrich admitted he made a lot of mistakes in the way he handled himself during the NET transition. But when he left, the network had between six and seven million in the bank and all the bills were paid, he said. Some Free Congress programming remained on America's Voice, but now Weyrich had to pay the network "outrageous sums" to carry shows he had created in the first place.

The network continued to lose affiliates, and early in 2000, it declared bankruptcy with a $23 million debt, leaving more than a dozen producers and hosts unemployed.

"Having to witness that was one of the saddest things I'll ever see," Weyrich said.

Weyrich still makes regular TV appearances. Free Congress has its own TV shows on satellite and cable stations in 37 states, and Weyrich appears on the weekly "Endangered Liberties" with host Lisa Dean, which looks at issues such as medical privacy, gun control and states' rights. "Legal Notebook," hosted by legal expert Tom Jipping, deals with Congress, the courts and the Constitution.

Despite physical limitations that are the result of painful back injuries, Weyrich also plans to expand Free Congress this year. The war on terrorism and immigration reform continue to head his list of concerns. Another topic that's receiving Weyrich's scrutiny is "fourth generation warfare," a phrase coined by William S. Lind, Weyrich's military and national security expert, to describe the battle between states and terrorists.

Some European and Mideast countries are aware of the nature of the terrorist threat, but in Weyrich's view, the United States still has some catching up to do.