Did the CIA Blow the Call?

Shortly after Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, the nation's capital got a second morning newspaper. Eventually, Dr. Ronald Goodwin, formerly the Rev. Jerry Falwell's lieutenant at the Moral Majority, became its publisher. The owner was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, the true Messiah devoted to uniting both Eastern and Western civilizations under his South Korea-based Unification Church. Moon was eager to underwrite a conservative newspaper to advance his cause and raise his profile; American neoconservatives needed a vehicle to promote their rigid ideological orthodoxy. Neocons already controlled several magazines and right-wing foundations, but they needed a daily newspaper to help them set the agenda on Capitol Hill.

From the start, it was apparent that the Washington Times would be an unusual paper, a more sophisticated version of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, where I lived as a young man and so could not avoid reading it. The editorial preferences were similar: fierce anticommunism, tax-cutting, unionbusting, deregulation, dismantling of social welfare programs and particularly strident advocacy of bigger military budgets. Neither allowed dissenting views in its opinion pages. Both specialized in the half-fact and the semi-story.

The Union Leader was primarily a business--a profitable one at that--and its editorial extravaganzas were the work of its archconservative publisher, William Loeb. Loeb was said to relish the national attention accorded him every four years in response to his frequently vicious and wholly unjustified attacks on liberal Democrats and Republicans running in the state's first-in-the-nation presidential primaries.

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