Frederick: Yep. That's exactly right.
Now, as long as we're talking Viguerie as a theme to follow through with,
understand that Viguerie had a lot of Moon entities as clients over the years,
including The Washington Times, selling
subscriptions and the like. So, the direct mail business involves an awful lot
of cash and checks. It's a very fluid business. So, you can accomplish a lot
politically that way. A lot of mailings are not even intended to make money so
much as to have political impact and do education, as they say in the business.
But at one point in the 80s, maybe the early
90s--it was the 80s, Viguerie's business fell on hard times. I'm not sure why;
and he was about to go out, and somehow or other, [the] Moon Organization came
in and bought his office building in Northern Virginia for above [the] market
rate of $10 million. So suddenly he had enough cash, but he certainly owed the
Moon organization big time for saving him.
Rob: So, literally Viguerie was one of the
most powerful promoters of Conservatism for decades, literally. He was, because
of his helping Conservative causes with direct mail, a major--right now you've
got Citizen's United and billionaires putting up money, but back then that
couldn't happen. It wasn't allowed. It was illegal. So, back then you had to
use direct mail to get small donors to come forward and get lots and lots of
donations. And Viguerie was one of the primary people who, by providing his
direct mail resources--enabled that to happen.
Frederick: That's right. In addition to
the money, it was also a grassroots development thing. He could reach beyond
the media, or the more establishment Conservative magazines, and reach into
places that you wouldn't ordinarily get to if you happen to be a Conservative
activist trying to put out a message and bring people into a movement, to help
him launch whole new organizations and introduce whole new ideas.
Rob: And he was able to do that because of
these massive computerized mailing lists that he had.
Frederick: Well, that's exactly right.
So as they grew to millions...
Rob: I want to take it back to Moon and the
Koreans--Reverend Moon. What Viguerie was basically doing then was getting
funded ÃŒ ¶ÃŒ ¶ÃŒ ¶ he was going to go out under
without Moon and he got his start with Moon, a Korean who hated democracy, who
was basically using his resources to influence American politics and the
American media.
Frederick: Well, yeah that's exactly
right. Just to stay with the history of this a little bit, you'll remember,
Rob, but a lot of listeners might not, the Korea Gate scandal of the 1970s,
which came quickly on the heels of Watergate, and it revealed this enormous
Korean government and intelligence agency in political influence buying
scandal. It involved rice deals for the Koreans. It involved bribery of members
of Congress, efforts to bribe and influence White House aids. There were covert
operations aimed at the speaker of the House and the Pentagon, it was just
unbelievable! There were KCIA agents, many of who were Moonies, on the staff of
members of Congress, including the Senate majority leader at the time--both
Democrats and Republicans. As far as I know there's never been anything quite
like it. Most of, if not all, nobody's quite documented the whole thing, but
Moon's top echelon were all former, if not current KCIA military intelligence
officers. And all of this was going on, and Richard Viguerie was right in the
middle of it.
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