The media are full of praise for the late Tony Snow. My experience was different. When Tony Snow was appointed White House Press Secretary in April 2006, I wrote about my encounter with him back in 1987:
Fox News personality Tony Snow just was appointed to be President Bush’s spokesperson. I had an encounter with Snow 19 years ago. First, some background.
In January 1986, I began writing editorials for The Washington Times. Before I agreed to do so, I was apprehensive about working for a newspaper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. But the church had given the conservatives who edited it a solemn guarantee that the church would only provide the money, while the Times’s content, including editorials, would be totally independent of the Unification Church and uninfluenced by it in any way. I talked to many people in the conservative movement, all of whom assured me that the church was keeping its non-interference pledge. These conservatives also had the utmost respect for the veteran journalist I would work for, Editorial Page Editor Bill Cheshire. In my first 14 months at the Times, the church did not interfere, as far as I could see. Then church leaders blatantly did interfere. Cheshire and four others on the editorial page resigned in protest on April 14, 1987. Besides me, the others were Deputy Editorial Page Editor Michael Bonafield, David Shiflett and Beth Belton. The Washington Post’s story of April 15 reported:
Washington Times editorial page editor William P. Cheshire and four of his staff members resigned April 14, charging that Times editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave had allowed an executive of the Unification Church to dictate editorial policy. The Times is owned by News World Communications, Inc., a corporation affiliated with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s church.
“It is no longer possible, in my judgment, for the Times to maintain independence from the Unification Church under the editorship of Mr. de Borchgrave, if it is indeed at all,” said Cheshire.
Cheshire said during a meeting that included de Borchgrave, the staff agreed on the substance of an editorial on the recent upheavals in South Korea. Cheshire’s deputy, Michael Bonafield, said the editorial board planned to write that South Korean president Chun had “overplayed his hand and was acting in an autocratic manner” toward the opposition in his country.
After the conference, Cheshire said, de Borchgrave met privately with Sang Kook Han, a Korean who is a high official in the UC and a top executive of the newspaper. After that meeting, Cheshire said, de Borchgrave changed his mind about the editorial and told Bonafield that “we were to support the president [Chun], that the opposition were flakes…”
“My senior staff and I did not consider his performance in keeping with our agreement on ‘church-state’ separation,” Cheshire said. “We all agreed it represented an unambiguous and clear-cut intrusion of the church, at Mr. de Borchgrave’s invitation, into the editorial direction of the newspaper.”
De Borchgrave called Cheshire’s charge that the U.C. was meddling in the paper’s editorial policy “absolute nonsense.” He insisted that Mr. Han “would never dare make an editorial suggestion to me” and that he had “never received a single editorial suggestion” from U.C. members.Except that de Borchgrave, on April 16, 1987, actually published an editorial — the one we refused to write — backing the crackdown on freedom in South Korea…. In referring to a crackdown by Chun, the Washington Times editorial took a strict Unification Church line:
Mr. Chun’s decision to postpone further democratization of the Republican of Korea and to place on the shelf constitutional changes for direct election of his successor play into the hands of that pack [of liberated theologians, Korean and American]….While Mr. Chun’s government has its problems, his opponents have not conducted themselves in a fashion that reassures about their capacity to govern….
Given Mr. Chun’s goals of a stable and broadly based transition, the prospect of pursuing further major changes in the face of such divisions seemed unwise….
South Korea has not enjoyed a pleasant history, has little experience of democratic procedures, and is governmed from a city a few miles from the world’s most bizarre tyranny. Had the capital of the United States been occupied by a Communist army, which then withdrew to a boundary marked by Dulles airport, Americans might appreciate a bit more the Damoclean sword under which South Koreans habitually live and the caution with which their leaders are proceeding.
Before coming out here to the Register to write editorials, something I’ve enjoyed for 19 years, in May 1987 I went home to visit my family in Michigan. I met with Tony Snow, then an editorial writer with the News. Snow, I had heard, was being considered to be the Washington Times’ editorial page editor.
Cheshire is sending around the Internet an description of what happened next. (By the time I got to the Times, Whelan and Hempstone had departed, replaced by de Borchgrave.) Cheshire:
I went to work for the Washington Times as editor of the editorial pages only after being assured by publisher Jim Whelan and associate editor Smith Hempstone that the owners — Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — would make no attempt to determine editorial policy or to influence the paper’s news coverage. I struggled for more than three years — I won’t bore you with the gruesome details — to hold the Moonies to the bargain. It was a losing battle. Nineteen years ago this month they ordered me to produce an editorial defending political repression in South Korea. I refused and, along with my four top editorial writers, walked off the job that day.
Snow was working as an editorial writer on the Detroit News and, after I quit the Times, was looked at as my replacement. One of the writers who left the Times with me, John Seiler, was visiting his father, a district judge in Detroit, and went by the News to warn Tony, whom we all knew, not to take the job. Seiler explained that management at the Times, including the editor and managing editor, had sold out to Moon and that, whatever misrepresentations they might make, the Moonies now ran the paper without serious opposition. Tony listened, Seiler told me afterward, and smiled. He then took the job.
Yes, I know Tony Snow. It will be interesting to see how he handles the White House press corps.
[Seiler:] Yes, and it will be interesting to see how the press corps handles Tony Snow. I hope the press corps checks out what exactly happened at the Times after the five of us rebels left and the Unification Church, breaking its solemn promise, took editorial control of the paper and backed tyranny and dictatorship in South Korea. The press corps also could check out where, exactly, the Unification Church gets the money for the huge subsidies to the paper, something that remains a mystery. And the press corps could check out the Bush family’s own ties to the Rev. Moon and the Unification Church, which is covered extensively on the Internet, such in this Common Dreams News Center report.
Seiler’s July 2008 reflections:
Alas, the media in general never looked very far into the Moon-money connection. But an excellent recent book, “Bad Moon Rising,” by John Gorenfeld, wrote about the Moonie influence over American politics. Gorenfeld just blogged on the Daily Kos:
R.I.P., Tony Snow. Here’s how he got his job at the Rev. Moon’s Washington Times, from my book.
* * *
On April 14, 1987, opinion editor Bill Cheshire walked into the office of [editor and acid-tongued Washington man of mystery] Arnaud de Borchgrave, with a secretary and three editorialists, each carrying letters that read, “I hereby resign . . . because of the breach of certain agreements of which you are well-aware.”
Managing editor Josette Sheeran, a high-ranking member of the Moon sect and the paper’s liaison to the True Father and publisher, turned pale. When the first editor and CEO, Jim Whelan, had quit in 1984, it was easy to explain as a personality clash. But five people leaving? “They thought we would be dutiful little conservatives and do what we were told,” says editorialist John Seiler, the last to hand in his badge. “Good riddance,” he remembers de Borchgrave shouting after him.
Essayist Sam Francis had asked them to reconsider. “I figured all along the Moonies were running the show,” Seiler recalls his saying, but why not play along, since the church was paying for everything?
Cheshire, for one, had tired of the game. The last straw: After they wrote a piece denouncing the dictator of South Korea (resented in Korea for a 1980 crackdown that had killed 207 democracy protesters) the count [de Borchgrave is the child of Dutch nobility] said, “Let me check this out upstairs.” He dropped in on San Kook Han, a Moonist officer and former South Korean government man, then returned downstairs convinced they had to spin the op-ed 180 degrees, pro-dictator, in line with the Unfication Church’s ties to the Korean Right. (De Borchgrave denies this account of events.)
Editor Wesley Pruden called the reasons for the exodus “fanciful” and ran a replacement op-ed, taking sides against the reformers, who would be redeemed the next year with Seoul’s move to democracy (and 1996 death penalty for the dictator in question, Chun Doo-hwan, who received clemency in the name of national healing). The Washington Times, however, justified the crackdown by asking Americans to imagine that the United States had been invaded by Communists. If so, “Americans might appreciate more the Damoclean sword under which South Koreans habitually live.”
Later Cheshire said of his old workplace, the Times, “No one appears to care very much that American political institutions have been subverted by foreign interests.” After he left the paper, a journalist named Tony Snow, thirty-two, considered taking the job. One of the departed writers, John Seiler, warned Snow the newsroom was under the influence of the Reverend Moon. Reportedly, Snow listened, smiled, and became opinion page editor between 1987 and 1990. He later became George W. Bush’s press secretary.
Seiler again:
Snow’s sycophantic career, toady to the Bushs and Moon, tells you all you need to know about the decomposition of conservatism the past 21 years.
Snow’s punishment for sycophancy was terminal dullness, in print and on TV. If he ever had an original thought, he suppressed it.
Whenever Snow appeared on TV, I insisted that friends or relatives change the channel.
Clarification, July 21, 2008: Several writers have posted comments asking about where Snow “lied” to me. Reading through my post, I can see I should have added that Snow, back in May 1987, promised to me that he would talk to Cheshire about what the Moonies were doing at the Times. Snow never talked to Cheshire. That was the lie. — John Seiler
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