How Bush Got a Golden Parachute From Rev. Moon

Last November, four months before his leap with a parachute, Bush traveled to South America -- where he provided a major boost for the launch of a newspaper that belongs to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Since leaving the White House, Bush has been quite helpful to Moon. However, the news media have lacked curiosity about Bush's ties to the shadowy power-broker who heads the Unification Church. Moon's global empire combines cult-like authority over "Moonies" with extensive media holdings.

"President Bush has no relationship with Rev. Moon or the Unification Church," Bush spokesman Jim McGrath assured me in a recent interview. But the facts tell a very different story.

"I want to salute Rev. Moon, who is the founder of The Washington Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo," Bush said. He praised the Washington newspaper for fostering "sanity" -- and added that Moon's new paper in Argentina "is going to do the same thing."

The 15-year-old Washington Times doesn't rank among the top 100 U.S. dailies in terms of circulation. Yet, financed by the Unification Church's deep pockets, it wields enormous influence in the nation's capital. Elevating innuendo into "news," the paper excels at smearing liberals and centrists.

During the last couple of years, Bush has spoken at high- profile Moon events on three continents. He went to Asia in September 1995, giving several speeches for a group led by Moon's wife, Hak Ja Han Moon. In Tokyo, Bush addressed a gathering of 50,000 Moon followers. Ten months later, in Washington, Bush spoke at a Moon-sponsored conference.

Instead of growing, press attention to the Bush-Moon links has gone from scant to almost non-existent. Bush's role in Buenos Aires last fall barely got reported in the United States.

But this month, former Newsweek correspondent Robert Parry will shine some light with an extensive report, "The Dark Side of Rev. Moon." It's about to appear in I.F. Magazine, a new periodical named in memory of the late journalists I.F. Stone and George Seldes (the editor of the muckraking newsletter In Fact).

A few samples of Parry's findings:

• Prior to the premiere of Tiempos del Mundo, much of the Latin American press was hostile to the newspaper project. But Bush's ringing endorsement allayed some concerns about Moon's ownership. In the words of a Unification Church bulletin, "Mr. Bush's presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige."

• Although Bush won't disclose how much money he has received from Moon-affiliated organizations, Parry reports that "estimates of Bush's fee for the Buenos Aires appearances alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000. Sources close to the Unification Church have put the total Bush-Moon package in the millions." According to one source, Bush's net could be as high as $10 million.

• Bush's lucrative courtship of Moon may help the ex- president to lay groundwork for his son George W. Bush, the current governor of Texas, who is expected to run for the next Republican presidential nomination.

• "A silent testimony to Moon's clout," Parry writes, "is the fact that his vast spending of billions of dollars in secretive Asian money to influence U.S. politics -- spanning nearly a quarter-century -- has gone virtually unmentioned amid the current controversy over Asian donations to U.S. politicians."

Here in the United States, it remains to be seen whether the national media will finally focus on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his tacit alliance with George Bush.

(If you'd like to read Robert Parry's full report on the subject, you can subscribe to I.F. Magazine by calling 1-800-738- 1812 or visiting the web site.)

An important question about American journalism hovers in the air: Who's afraid of the Rev. Moon?