Lobbyist for the Lost Cause (Page 2)

In 1997 Hines and his pal Carter Wrenn formed RTH Consulting Inc., swiftly procuring a gaggle of clients few others would touch. Hines's first major contract was a $550,000 deal with the group ruling Cambodia, the Cambodian People's Party, which included former Khmer Rouge extremists. The Washington Times published a pro-government editorial in 2000 by Hines, in which he denounced "foreign critics" pushing for an international trial of ex-Khmer Rouge leaders for the genocide of as many as 2 million of their countrymen. Hines now represents the regime of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh to the tune of $300,000, having replaced the late von Kloberg as his American spokesman. Hines's contract "guaranteed" he could "gain the support of the conservative Republican leadership in the United States Congress for the government of Gambia and President Jammeh, and thereby weaken opposition in Washington, DC." Hines has also reeled in lucrative government contracts for another client, the weapons manufacturing firm Ashbury International. In 2003 the Defense Department purchased $27.5 million in equipment from Ashbury, which was the sole bidder. The following year Hines used his contacts in the Bush Administration to help procure a five-year, $155.8 million contract for his client with the Army.

Even with such rewarding work on his platter, Hines still finds time to defend Southern heritage, or at least his version of it. In 1996, standing beside members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Jefferson Davis Camp 305, Hines unfurled a Confederate battle flag in downtown Richmond, Virginia, to protest the dedication of a monument to black tennis great Arthur Ashe. He called the Ashe statue "a sharp stick in the eye of those who honor the Confederate heritage."

Hines's protest reflected the brand of resentment found on the pages of America's major neo-secessionist publication, Southern Partisan, of which Hines was managing editor for nearly two decades. Southern Partisan served partly as a forum for historical revisionism that cast Lincoln as a villain; in 1984 Hines himself penned a paean to Preston Brooks, the secessionist South Carolina congressman who caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1854 for his speeches against slavery. The magazine also acted as Hines's instrument for connecting sympathetic political movers and shakers to the neo-Confederate base. Hines arranged a 1993 Partisan interview with Washington Times senior editor Wes Pruden, whose father, Wes Pruden Sr., as the chaplain of the Little Rock White Citizens Council, led resistance to the integration of Central High School in 1957 with the cry: "That's what we've gotta fight, niggers, Communists and cops." In 1997 Hines interviewed Senator Trent Lott, who as a young congressman convinced Reagan to initiate his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Klansmen had murdered three young civil rights workers in 1964. In 1998 Hines chatted with Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, who praised Hines and the Partisan for "setting the record straight," a comment that nearly doomed his nomination as Attorney General when it was dredged up during his confirmation hearings in 2001. In the year before Bush's election, Southern Partisan advertised the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with a Confederate flag shaped like a Republican Party elephant beside the phrase "Lincoln's Worst Nightmare!"

By 2000 Hines was positioned to help rescue George W. Bush's flagging presidential candidacy from the jaws of defeat with an inspired dirty-tricks campaign. When Bush arrived in South Carolina in May, he was licking his wounds from a stunning defeat in New Hampshire to John McCain. For Bush, who needed to win the South to gain the nomination, the South Carolina primary was do or die.

Hines's link to the Bush campaign was Bush's South Carolina spokesman Tucker Eskew, a local protégé of the legendary dirty-tricks master from the Palmetto State, Lee Atwater. Eskew was in constant contact with another former Atwater protégé, Karl Rove. Hines turned an unregistered political action committee called "Keep It Flying," which he created to fight the NAACP's attempts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, into a vehicle for the Bush cause. He sent out 250,000 fliers that he signed with his own name accusing McCain of "changing his tune" on the Confederate flag and describing Bush as "the [only] major candidate who refused to call the Confederate flag a racist symbol." In fact, in a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain had called the flag "a symbol of heritage" and an issue "to be settled without interference from presidential candidates." Regardless, the tactic succeeded brilliantly. In the wake of the mailing Bush surged ahead of McCain and defeated him in the primary. Bush finally returned his debt of gratitude late last year, when he appointed Hines's wife, Patricia, to the National Committee on Libraries and Information Science.

Hines's direct-mail campaign might not have been so timely were it not for the political atmospherics that his close allies in South Carolina had generated. In January 2000, immediately after the NAACP announced a tourist boycott of South Carolina, Hines's college buddy Roger McCredie marshaled groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens at the state Capitol in Columbia to rally around the flag. Six thousand people showed up, many waving Confederate battle flags and dressed in Civil War-era battle uniforms. Compared with the 50,000 who marched through Columbia earlier that month for the flag's removal, it was a paltry turnout. Yet the rally demonstrated a residual level of vitriol toward Confederate flag opponents. State Senator Arthur Ravenel drew gales of applause when he blasted the NAACP as "the National Association of Retarded People."

Lurking in the shadow of the grandstand throughout the rally was a scraggly man oddly wearing a top hat--one of Hines's most important political allies. Kirk Lyons earned far-right celebrity status in 1988 for successfully defending white supremacist Louis Beam against a sedition charge of plotting to overthrow the government by force in order to set up an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest. Lyons's ubiquity as a legal counsel to white supremacists and a speaker at neo-Nazi events prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify him in 1991 as one of the top ten "Leaders in Today's White Supremacy Movement." Lyons dreamed of resurrecting the white supremacist movement as a more sophisticated incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. "I have great respect for the Klan historically, but, sadly the Klan today is ineffective and sometimes even destructive," Lyons told a German neo-Nazi magazine in 1992. "It would be good if the Klan followed the advice of former Klansman Robert Miles: 'Become invisible. Hang the robes and hoods in the cupboard and become an underground organization.'" When Lyons discovered the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he realized he didn't have to go underground after all.

For more than a hundred years, the SCV thrived as an apolitical organization of direct descendants of Confederate soldiers. Its members maintained Confederate cemeteries and monuments, studied Civil War history and organized battle re-enactments. And they assiduously tried to avoid any hint of extremism, passing a resolution in 1990 condemning hate groups. Then came the takeover. During the group's 2002 elections, a Kirk Lyons-backed radical named Ron Wilson was installed as SCV commander in chief. Wilson began a purge of moderate elements in the group and appointed Lyons, McCredie and other racists to leadership positions. Today the takeover appears to be nearly complete, and many SCV moderates have broken off in disgust to form an ad hoc group called Save the SCV. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, the takeover may have dangerous political implications: "The SCV has some 30,000 members, about $5 million in reserves and a number of very prominent members. It has real political pull in some places, a fact that makes it a tempting prize for racists."

One of the leading figures in the SCV takeover, Larry Salley, has laid out grandiose plans for the movement. In a September 7, 2003, e-mail to Save the SCV, provided to me by a source close to Save the SCV, Salley articulated the goals of the neo-Confederate extremists: "We have legislators in the Senate and the House. We have members who have been elected to Constitutional offices within South Carolina. We are the mainstream." Salley continued: "I have a dream, and that dream is to decentralise political power to the extent that no central politician has the power to tell me, or my son, when or where he can pray, or what firearm he can own, or whether we can ban abortion. Your government's ban on the Ten Commandments will eventually bring the wrath of God on your nation."

"To them [the neo-Confederates], the flag really symbolizes the South as a white, patriarchal, Christian society," Ed Sebesta, an independent researcher of the neo-Confederate movement, based in Dallas, Texas, told me. "They want the federal government out of their way because locally, they wouldn't mind having a little regime of their own based on race and a state religion." Sebesta added, "They believe in what they call 'ordered liberty.' As far I can tell, ordered liberty means they're going to order you around, and they'll be at liberty to do so because there'll be no central authority."

The Southern Legal Resource Center in Black Mountain, North Carolina, has emerged as the spearhead of the SCV radicals' political agenda. Founded by Lyons to combat "the ethnic cleansing of Dixie," the firm employs Salley, McCredie and Ron Wilson's daughter. Richard Hines is among its key fundraisers and donors. The SLRC has filed nearly 400 lawsuits alleging discrimination against "traditional Southerners" by corporations, local and state governments, and menacing minorities. Its most prominent client is Jacqueline Duty, a high school student barred from her senior prom in 2003 for wearing a Confederate flag-inspired sequin dress. Profiled in countless newspapers and publicized through an appearance on the Fox News Network's Hannity and Colmes in December 2004, Duty's lawsuit against her school district has become the cause célèbre of the neo-Confederates. According to McCredie, Duty's case was underwritten with a donation of about $1,000 from Hines, whom he calls "a substantial contributor" to the SLRC. Hines donated another $1,000 to the SLRC's general fund in early August, according to McCredie, supplementing a $10,000 contribution from the SCV earlier this year.

"It's not about a flag," McCredie explained, "it's about everything that coalesces within this piece of cloth. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any moral ground to stand on.... It's the basis of what we do every time we take up the cudgel and go to court, or we write another book, or we write another newsletter, or make another speech. It's a David and Goliath thing. But at this point in time, the great revolutionary spark, the thing that sends people to the barricades, is largely lacking."

On Memorial Day, 2001, George W. Bush resurrected a tradition his father discontinued during his presidency: laying a wreath at the base of the Confederate monument at the Arlington National Cemetery. The White House has claimed that the practice continued from the Bush Sr. Administration through the Clinton years, yet according to Hurley, "not a single person in the Confederate community ever saw the wreath back at the Confederate memorial until Geoge W. Bush came into office." Hurley says Bush merely changed the day of the wreath's delivery, from Confederate Memorial Day--Jefferson Davis's birthday--to the US Memorial Day. Last Confederate Memorial Day, Hurley witnessed Hines at the memorial leading a gathering of Washington-based conservatives, including members of the Jefferson Davis Camp 305 that met at the Mary Surratt site. Now Bush Administration officials joined the commemoration, most prominently Robert Wilkie, the former foreign policy adviser to Senator Lott who was appointed last October by Condoleezza Rice as the National Security Council's senior legislative director. Attired in all-white plantation garb and white top hat, Hines fired an artillery cannon he had carted along for the occasion. Then he and the ceremony's attendees solemnly saluted the Confederate flag.

In Richard Hines's Washington, the sparks may be symbolic, but the revolution is well under way.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.