The institute's president, Leonard S. Theberge, also was a founder of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, the umbrella group for six conservative legal groups funded by Scaife. Institute board members have included Herbert Schmertz, vice president, public affairs, of Mobil, and S. Robert Fluor, chairman of Fluor Corporation. To this end, the institute has published, for example, a study of television news that concludes that the networks have increased the public's fear of nuclear power. It also runs lunch seminars for journalists and puts out a newsletter. The institute's newest project is the Economic Communications Center, which began operating last October.
Journalists often complain that they have no one to go to outside of government.
He says he is unsure how much of that, if any, was pledged by Scaife. The most prestigious of the periodicals with which Scaife has been associated is Daedalus , the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Three years ago, Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian who is now a member of the National Security Council staff, approached Daedalus with a proposal for a special issue on U.S. defense policy, with himself as guest editor. The B-team conclusions, delivered in late 1976, included an estimate of Soviet defense spending that was twice as high as previous government estimates and an assertion that the Russians were bent on nuclear superiority. The conclusions, which were widely accepted as official, played a major role in shaping the current defense debate.