Why won’t Con­gress and the tele­vi­sion news media inves­ti­gate the rela­tion­ship between the Bush fam­ily and Sun Myung Moon?

by Carla Bin­ion
Online Journal/February 22, 2001

The fol­low­ing essay explains why the story is news­wor­thy. While TV talk­ing heads ham­mer the pub­lic hour after hour with rep­e­ti­tious chat­ter about Clinton’s par­dons and gos­sipy alle­ga­tions of “theft” of White House goods, the far more seri­ous Bush/Moon story remains invis­i­ble to TV audiences.

In order to unravel the mys­tery, let’s look at Moon’s his­tory and stated agenda and explore the Bush family’s activ­i­ties related to Moon. First, here is evi­dence that Moon is openly anti-American and anti-democratic, with an agenda that includes under­min­ing Amer­i­can democ­racy and indi­vid­u­al­ism. These are only some of the rea­sons why a deeper inves­ti­ga­tion into the Moon/Bush alliance is worthwhile:

(1) Fred­er­ick Clark­son (Eter­nal Hos­til­ity, Com­mon Courage Press, 1997) reports that Moon has stated his goal is the “sub­ju­ga­tion of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and pop­u­la­tion.” (Clarkson’s source: John Judis, “Rev. Moon’s Ris­ing Polit­i­cal Influ­ence: His Empire Is Spend­ing Big Money To Try To Win Favor With Con­ser­v­a­tives,” U. S. News and World Report, March 27, 1989.)

(2) Accord­ing to the same U. S. News arti­cle, Moon also said, “His­tory will make the posi­tion of Rev. Moon clear,” and that “his ene­mies, the Amer­i­can peo­ple and gov­ern­ment will bow down before him.”

(3) Clark­son reports that Moon has also said, “The entire world is our goal . . . Absolute obe­di­ence to the Father [Moon]-that one thing will bring cer­tain vic­tory . . . Peo­ple here in Amer­ica have to rec­og­nize the abil­ity and power of Rev­erend Moon.” (Excerpt from New Hope News, Novem­ber 25, 1974, Reprinted in Fred­er­ick Miller’s “Con­fu­sion at the Fronts, Part three,” True Light Edu­ca­tional Min­istry, 1996.)

(4) On May 1, 1997, Moon told a group of fol­low­ers that “the coun­try that rep­re­sents Satan’s har­vest is Amer­ica.” (Uni­fi­ca­tion News, June 1997.)

(5) In the 1970s, Moon was inves­ti­gated by a con­gres­sional com­mit­tee headed by then-U. S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Don­ald Fraser (D-MN). Robert Boettcher was staff direc­tor of the Fraser com­mit­tee. Boettcher’s inter­views with for­mer Moonies revealed that Moon was “appalled” by Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism and con­sid­ered mov­ing to Ger­many “where peo­ple were trained in total­ism.” (Robert Boettcher, “Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tong­sun Park and the Korean Scan­dal,” Holt, Rine­hart and Win­ston, 1980)

(6) Boettcher writes that accord­ing to for­mer Uni­fi­ca­tion church mem­bers, Moon’s pro­gram to “instill dis­ci­pline” included show­ing “Nazi films on orga­niz­ing Hitler Youth.”

Moon’s anti-American, anti-democratic rant­i­ngs might seem harm­less if expressed by an indi­vid­ual with no polit­i­cal clout. How­ever, the wealthy, influ­en­tial Moon has worked suc­cess­fully to gain a power base among con­ser­v­a­tive Republicans.

In an effort to gain polit­i­cal influ­ence, Moon has worked his ten­ta­cles into the news media. Fred­er­ick Clark­son writes that since its found­ing the news­pa­per the Wash­ing­ton Times “has been owned, con­trolled and bankrolled” by Moon.

For­mer Wash­ing­ton Times edi­to­r­ial page edi­tor William Cheshire resigned because of alleged edi­to­r­ial inter­fer­ence from Moon’s officials.

Accord­ing to Clark­son, Cheshire also said he believes the Wash­ing­ton Times is oper­at­ing in vio­la­tion of the For­eign Agents Reg­is­tra­tion Act. Passed in the 1930s, the For­eign Agents Reg­is­tra­tion Act “requires enti­ties whose activ­i­ties are con­trolled by for­eign gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions to make finan­cial and other forms of dis­clo­sure to the Jus­tice Department.”

Clark­son says the Act was orig­i­nally passed “to expose covert Nazi fund­ing of German-American newspapers.”

George H. W. Bush is one of the most polit­i­cally pow­er­ful defend­ers of Moon and the Wash­ing­ton Times. Bush was CIA direc­tor when the Fraser com­mit­tee inves­ti­gated Moon, and he is well aware of Moon’s stated agenda and modus operandi. At the time of the con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tion, Bush han­dled sen­si­tive mat­ters on U. S. rela­tions with Korea and the polit­i­cal fig­ures involved.

Accord­ing to a Reuters report, (“Bush Praises Moon as ‘Man of Vision,’” Novem­ber 25, 1996) when Moon held a ban­quet in Buenos Aires cel­e­brat­ing his new “Spanish-language news­pa­per for the whole of Latin Amer­ica,” his guest at the event, George H. W. Bush, praised Moon’s “respect for edi­to­r­ial independence.”

Bush’s speech “was full of praise” for Moon’s Wash­ing­ton Times, accord­ing to Reuters. The report also says Bush described Moon as “the man with the vision.” Reuters said Bush later trav­eled with Moon to neigh­bor­ing Uruguay “to help him inau­gu­rate a sem­i­nary in the cap­i­tal, Mon­te­v­ideo. to train 4,200 young Japan­ese women to spread the word of his Church of Uni­fi­ca­tion across Latin America.”

“I want to salute Rev­erend Moon who is the founder of the Wash­ing­ton Times and of the new paper here,” Bush said. Accord­ing to Reuters, the Wash­ing­ton Post reported that Bush was paid $100,000 for his Buenos Aires appearance.

Jour­nal­ist Robert Parry reported in Con­sor­tium News (“Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buy­ing the Right”) that part of Moon’s strat­egy for gain­ing polit­i­cal influ­ence is to approach con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers when they need money. “Moon qui­etly infuses money and gains the leader’s grat­i­tude,” writes Parry.

For exam­ple, when con­ser­v­a­tive direct mail entre­pre­neur Richard Viguerie was hav­ing finan­cial trou­ble in the late 1980s, “Moon directed more busi­ness his way and had a cor­po­ra­tion run by Moon’s lieu­tenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s prop­er­ties for $10 mil­lion,” accord­ing to Parry. (Orange County Reg­is­ter, Dec. 21, 1987; Wash­ing­ton Post, Oct. 15, 1989.)

Viguerie, who helped raise money for the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s, sur­vived finan­cially thanks to Moon. Parry writes that when Oliver North ran for the Sen­ate in Vir­ginia in 1994, “his prin­ci­pal direct-mail con­trac­tor was Viguerie’s com­pany, accord­ing to Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion records.”

Mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans have com­plained about the Republican-Moon alliance. For exam­ple, accord­ing to Parry, in 1983, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Leach of Iowa said the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church has “infil­trated the New Right and the party it [the New Right] wants to con­trol, the Repub­li­can Party, and infil­trated the media as well.”

Leach, then-chairman of the GOP’s mod­er­ate Ripon Soci­ety, said the New Right had entered “an alliance of expe­di­ency” with Moon’s church. Parry reports that Leach “released a study which alleged that the Col­lege Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee ‘solicited and received’ money from Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church in 1981.”

In order to gain power, Moon has also aligned him­self with orga­ni­za­tions fur­ther to the right than the New Right Repub­li­cans, among them the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL, accord­ing to Fred­er­ick Clark­son, is “an inter­na­tional alliance of con­ser­v­a­tive, fas­cist and Nazi groups, gov­ern­ments and individuals.”

The head of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church in Japan was a mem­ber of the WACL board of direc­tors. Clark­son says “the Japan­ese sec­tion of WACL, Shokyo Rengo, was founded in 1968 as an alliance between top Uni­fi­ca­tion Church offi­cials and lead­ers of the Yakuza (Japan­ese orga­nized crime), notably Yoshio Kodama.”

Clark­son writes that “under the lead­er­ship of retired U. S. Army Gen­eral John K. Singlaub,” WACL helped pro­vide money and weapons to the Nicaraguan Con­tras “par­tic­u­larly after Con­gress cut off CIA-channeled fund­ing to the Con­tras in 1984.” Moon’s front group CAUSA was one of the first groups to give the Con­tras “human­i­tar­ian aid.” (Clarkson’s source: Jon Lee Ander­son and Scott Ander­son, “Inside the League: The Shock­ing Expose of How Ter­ror­ists, Nazis and Latin Amer­i­can Death Squads have Infil­trated the World Anti-Communist League,” Dodd, Mead and Com­pany, 1986.)
>
Clark­son says that in a Novem­ber 15, 1979, press state­ment, for­mer WACL youth leader Allen Tate Wood said that before the scan­dal inves­ti­gated by the Fraser com­mit­tee broke, Moon ordered him to “win the power cen­ters” of the U. S. for him, start­ing with academia.

In the press state­ment, Wood also said Moon told him “part of our strat­egy in the U. S. must be to make friends in the FBI, the CIA and police forces, the mil­i­tary and busi­ness com­mu­nity . . . as a means of enter­ing the polit­i­cal arena, influ­enc­ing for­eign pol­icy, and ulti­mately estab­lish­ing absolute domin­ion over the Amer­i­can people.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Don­ald Fraser said that when mem­bers of Moon’s orga­ni­za­tion objected to his polit­i­cal aims, “They were told it was Master’s expressed desire to begin polit­i­cal work in the United States. There­after a member’s objec­tion to polit­i­cal activ­i­ties was con­sid­ered infi­delity to Mas­ter and was like being dis­obe­di­ent to God.” (Fraser Report, p. 320.)

Fraser com­mit­tee staff direc­tor Robert Boettcher writes about Moon’s his­tory. In his early climb to power, says Boettcher, Moon wanted to have loyal cultists inside the Korean gov­ern­ment, where “they could sway pow­er­ful per­sons and become influ­en­tial them­selves.” Moon wanted his fol­low­ers to por­tray the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church as a “use­ful polit­i­cal tool for the gov­ern­ment” while hid­ing Moon’s power goals.

Moon’s early fol­low­ers included army offi­cers close to Kim Jon Pil, the found­ing direc­tor of the Korean CIA. Kim Jong Pil knew that Moon had ambi­tions to build influ­ence in Korea and in other coun­tries. He gave Moon slack, because he decided Moon might be of use to the Korean government.

One early Moon fol­lower, Bo Hi Pak, was assigned to the Embassy in Wash­ing­ton in 1961. Boettcher says Pak’s home on North Utah Street in Arling­ton, Vir­ginia, was a Moonie recruit­ing cen­ter. Pak estab­lished the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church in Vir­ginia in 1963.

Pak cul­ti­vated the friend­ship of an air­line pilot, Robert Roland, and his wife, but did not tell them of his asso­ci­a­tion with Moon. Boettcher learned that when Roland asked about Pak’s duties as assis­tant mil­i­tary attache, Pak said he “was respon­si­ble for liai­son between South Kore­ans and Amer­i­can intel­li­gence agen­cies, which often required his vis­it­ing the super-secret National Secu­rity Agency (NSA) located at Fort Meade, Maryland.”

Roland said that after din­ner one evening, Pak revealed “step by step how the des­tiny of mankind was in the hands of a Korean named Moon.” When Roland asked what his aim was in Wash­ing­ton, Pak said, “I must lay a firm foun­da­tion for Mas­ter by mak­ing influ­en­tial polit­i­cal and social contacts.”

In 1964, Bo Hi Pak came up with an idea to cre­ate a Moon American-based foun­da­tion. Accord­ing to Boettcher, Pak wanted the foun­da­tion to hide its iden­ti­fca­tion with the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, while encour­ag­ing Amer­i­cans to con­tribute money.

“Unknow­ingly they would be serv­ing Moon,” says Boettcher, “but in the long run [accord­ing to Pak’s plan] they would be rewarded by Moon’s estab­lish­ing the King­dom of Heaven on earth.” The foun­da­tion con­ceived by Pak was given the name the Korean Cul­tural and Free­dom Foun­da­tion (KCFF).

The KCFF hid its affil­i­a­tion with Moon, as planned. The money the foun­da­tion raised helped increase Moon’s power in Amer­ica. Bo Hi Pak, through a friend, per­suaded retired Admi­ral Arleigh Burke to become pres­i­dent of the KCFF.

In order to cre­ate the illu­sion of respectabil­ity for the KCFF, Pak included Burke’s name on the foundation’s let­ter­head. The KCFF let­ter­head included other impres­sive names, such as for­mer Pres­i­dents Tru­man and Eisen­hower as hon­orary pres­i­dents; and as “direc­tors and advis­ers”: Richard Nixon, George Meany, Perle Mesta, Sen­a­tor Hugh Scott, Sen­a­tor Homer Cape­hart, Gen­eral Matthew Ridg­way, and Con­gress­man Clement Zablocki.

Burke resigned his KCFF posi­tion in 1965, after Robert Roland sent him infor­ma­tion about Moon’s rela­tion­ship with Pak. Burke also dis­trusted Pak’s sto­ries about where the KCFF’s money was going, but Pak con­tin­ued to use Burke’s name in lob­by­ing for the foundation.

Moon founded a front group, the Lit­tle Angels, in 1962. The Lit­tle Angels were a troupe of young girls who opened polit­i­cal doors by trav­el­ing as ambas­sadors of good will for Moon, per­form­ing tra­di­tional Korean songs and dances.

Moon seized every chance to be pho­tographed with influ­en­tial peo­ple. In 1965, Bo Hi Pak arranged for him to meet Dwight D. Eisen­hower at a Get­tys­burg photo-op. Boettcher says Moon com­mented that the meet­ing with Eisen­hower opened doors “to fur­ther recog­ni­tion by national and inter­na­tional leaders.”

Moon brought the Lit­tle Angels along to “charm the Eisen­how­ers.” On other occa­sions, the girls’ troupe also per­formed for Queen Eliz­a­beth, and at a United Nations per­for­mance attended by New York Gov­er­nor Nel­son Rock­e­feller and Sec­re­tary Gen­eral Kurt Waldheim.

Moon’s decades of court­ing influ­en­tial Amer­i­can lead­ers in order to gain polit­i­cal power in this coun­try have been fruit­ful. Reporter Joe Cona­son said that at a Wash­ing­ton gath­er­ing cel­e­brat­ing the George W. Bush inau­gu­ra­tion, at a “prayer lun­cheon” held in the Hyatt hotel ball­room on Capi­tol Hill on 1/19/01, Moon received an award for his “work in sup­port of tra­di­tional fam­ily val­ues.” The fea­tured speaker was John Ashcroft. (Cona­son, The New York Observer, Feb­ru­ary 12, 2001.)

Tues­day (2/20/01), a C-Span mod­er­a­tor said Rev. Moon plans to pro­mote his absti­nence pro­gram in schools with the help of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Ini­tia­tive pro­gram. How might that work? Fred­er­ick Clark­son points out that Moon has been try­ing to get his ten­ta­cles into U. S. schools to pro­mote his rightwing views for many years.

The World Med­ical Health Foun­da­tion (WMHF) is Moon Front group. WMHF chief, Dr. William Bergman, once-director of Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion church, pro­duced a slide pro­gram for schools called “The Pri­vate Plague: AIDS, Sex­u­ally Trans­mit­ted Dis­eases & a Strat­egy for our Youth at Risk.” Bergman’s pro­gram teaches that these dis­eases have roots in the “civil rights move­ment” which allegedly led to “moral rel­a­tivism.” (Clarkson’s source: The Pri­vate Plague slide pro­gram man­ual, p. 23.)

Will Bush’s Faith-Based Ini­tia­tive pro­gram assist Moon in his efforts to teach your chil­dren that the civil rights move­ment led to moral rel­a­tivism, which then led to sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted diseases?

Some Repub­li­cans have accepted Moon as part of their “fam­ily val­ues” move­ment. For the Reli­gious Right, the fam­ily val­ues issue means sup­port for the tra­di­tional nuclear fam­ily. How­ever, Moon teaches recruits to aban­don their bio­log­i­cal fam­i­lies and to accept Moon and his wife as their “True Par­ents” and the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church as their “True Family.”

Clark­son writes that a 1994 con­gres­sional res­o­lu­tion spon­sored by Rep. Dan Bur­ton (R-IN), Sen­a­tor Trent Lott (R-MI), and Sen­a­tor Orrin Hatch (R-UT) sup­port­ing Par­ents Day turned out to be a Moon ini­ti­ated effort “in which the ‘True Par­ents; behind the res­o­lu­tion were qui­etly cel­e­brated,” a fact pos­si­bly hid­den from the con­gress­men. (Clarkson’s source: Lisa Gray, “Honor Thy Par­ents,” Wash­ing­ton City Paper, Sep­tem­ber, 1995; and Robert Boston, “Unholy Mat­ri­mony,” Church and State, Octo­ber, 1996.)

Moon claims, says Clark­son, that he and his wife “are the True Par­ents of all human­ity . . . we are the Sav­ior, the Lord of the Sec­ond Advent, the Mes­siah.” (Sun Myung Moon, “Lead­ers Build­ing World Peace,” Uni­fi­ca­tion News, Sep­tem­ber, 1992.)

Clark­son says Moon has often used George H. W. Bush and Bar­bara Bush as a “warm-up act” at his “fam­ily val­ues” ral­lies. When Bush gave a series of speeches at events spon­sored by Moon’s wife’s orga­ni­za­tion, the World Fed­er­a­tion for World Peace (WFWP), he claimed he did not know Moon was involved. Instead, Bush praised the WFWP for its “great empha­sis on family.”

Bush also said, “Until I see some­thing about the Women’s Fed­er­a­tion that trou­bles me, I will con­tin
ue to encour­age them.” (Clarkson’s sources: Peter McGill et al, “Ed Schreyer and the Moonies, Maclean’s, Octo­ber 23, 1995; Andrew Pol­lock, “Bush Host in Japan Tied to Rev. Moon,” The New York Times, Sep­tem­ber 4, 1995.)

Here are a few items that might dis­cour­age Bush from sup­port­ing Moon’s kind of fam­ily val­ues. Robert Boettcher’s inves­ti­ga­tion for the Fraser com­mit­tee revealed that Moon teaches recruits that Satan works through their bio­log­i­cal par­ents, and that they must accept their True Par­ents, Rev. Moon and his wife, and reject their “flesh” parents.

A cen­tral tenet taught to Moon recruits is “Heav­enly Decep­tion.” Recruits, says Botettcher, are told the “non-Moon world is evil. It must be lied to so it can help Moon take over. Then it can become good under Moon’s con­trol.” Accord­ing to Boettcher, “Moon teaches that lying is nec­es­sary when one is doing God’s work, whether sell­ing flow­ers in the street or tes­ti­fy­ing under oath.”

Boettcher reports that an aspect of another Moon tenet, the Divine Prin­ci­ple, is the idea that Jesus’ love was weak and that he failed as a leader, because he was unable to moti­vate his dis­ci­ples to kill for him or to die in his place. Moon claims he is tak­ing up where Jesus left off, and, says Boettcher, Moon “sees Chris­t­ian churches as fur­ther­ing Satan’s cause by reject­ing him [Moon].”

The Fraser Report of Octo­ber 31,1978, revealed that Moon had been involved in law­break­ing in addi­tion to express­ing anti-American sen­ti­ments and using ques­tion­able recruit­ing and indoc­tri­na­tion prac­tices. Boettcher writes that Fraser found Moon vio­lated laws on “bank­ing, immi­gra­tion, taxes, cur­rency con­trol, char­ity fraud, arms export con­trol, and for­eign agents reg­is­tra­tion.” How­ever, accord­ing to Boettcher, Moon thinks his reli­gious beliefs enti­tle him to break the law.

Fred­er­ick Clark­son points out that the Wash­ing­ton Post has reported that Moon has been the sub­ject of over 300 law­suits in Japan, rang­ing from for­mer Moonies claim­ing “they were brain­washed into slave-like devo­tion,” to mem­bers say­ing they were “duped into pay­ing exor­bi­tant prices for vases, prayer beads or other reli­gious objects.” (Kevin Sul­li­van and Mary Jor­dan, “Once-Generous Japan­ese Become Dis­en­chanted with Moon’s Church,” the Wash­ing­ton Post, August 4, 1996.)

News­pa­pers have done a rea­son­ably good job inves­ti­gat­ing Moon’s dark side, but tele­vi­sion news has blacked out the story. Because most Amer­i­cans get their news from tele­vi­sion, most peo­ple do not know the nature of Moon’s polit­i­cal work in the U. S. or the extent of his involve­ment with the Bush family.

On the rare occa­sion Moon is men­tioned on tele­vi­sion news pro­grams, the focus is on super­fi­cial­i­ties, such as Moon’s mass wed­dings. Fox Network’s Paula Zahn once inter­viewed a Moon sup­porter who said the mass wed­dings were not coerced. At the interview’s end, Zahn thanked the Moon apol­o­gist for “set­ting the record straight.”

The Moon story is about more than a mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal tyrant and his iso­lated fol­low­ers. It is also about the fact that since George W. Bush took power, Moon ben­e­fits from Bush’s Faith-Based Ini­tia­tives pro­gram. Moon also gains pres­tige and polit­i­cal influ­ence when he is hon­ored by Bush sup­port­ers, such as John Ashcroft and oth­ers who attended the Jan­u­ary 19 “prayer luncheon.”

Thanks to the Bush fam­ily and their imposed “dynasty,” today Moon has more power to under­mine Amer­i­can democ­racy and indi­vid­u­al­ism. He has more power to work to “sub­ju­gate the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and pop­u­la­tion.” He has more power to try to make “his ene­mies, the Amer­i­can peo­ple and gov­ern­ment bow down before him.”

Thanks to his asso­ci­a­tion with Bush, Moon now has more power to encour­age “peo­ple here in Amer­ica rec­og­nize the abil­ity and power of Rev­erend Moon.” He has more power to con­vince peo­ple that “the coun­try that rep­re­sents Satan’s har­vest is Amer­ica.” He has more power to lure recruits and have them “trained in total­ism” and to “instill dis­ci­pline” by show­ing his train­ers “Nazi films on orga­niz­ing Hitler Youth.”

Moon has been able to infil­trate and gain a power base in the U. S. pri­mar­ily because of one thing: secrecy. His his­tory includes hid­ing his real inten­tions behind front groups and decep­tive “adver­tis­ing,” whether hawk­ing for dona­tions, lur­ing unsus­pect­ing recruits or cur­ry­ing favor with politi­cians. The story of Moon and his sup­port by the Bush fam­ily would be com­mon knowl­edge among all Amer­i­cans if the TV news media would sim­ply report the facts.

If every­one read­ing this arti­cle would write and call TV net­works, news­pa­pers and mem­bers of Con­gress today, ask­ing for a probe into Moon and his influ­ence on the Bush fam­ily and cer­tain Repub­li­can Party mem­bers, maybe col­lec­tively we would touch a national nerve. Surely not every TV jour­nal­ist and mem­ber of Con­gress is too cow­ardly to touch this story.