In his first foray into national politics, in 1964, Mr. Scaife backed Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, who lost his presidential bid in a landslide. In 1972, Mr. Scaife gave $1 million to the re-election war chest of President Richard M. Nixon, including $45,000 to a secret fund linked to the Watergate scandal. And in the 1980s, Mr. Scaife ardently supported Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
But, disillusioned by Watergate and Nixon, he switched his focus from officeholders to ideologies, and his influence in the rise of neoconservatism stemmed primarily from his contributions to think tanks, lobbyists and publications that promoted free-market economics, lower taxes, smaller government and cuts in social welfare programs. Beneficiaries included the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and Judicial Watch.
In another approach, in the 1990s, he poured millions into what critics called a moral crusade against Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, financing investigations by publications, notably the conservative American Spectator and his own Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that were aimed at discrediting the Clintons.
They accused the Clintons of fraud in the Whitewater case, a failed real estate venture in the 1970s and ’80s, when Mr. Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and Mr. Clinton of sexual misconduct in liaisons with Paula Jones in Little Rock and Monica Lewinsky in the White House. They also charged that Vincent W. Foster Jr., a White House counsel and former law partner of Mrs. Clinton, had been murdered in 1993 in a Whitewater cover-up. Several investigations found that Mr. Foster had committed suicide.
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