Introduction
The most appropriate way to introduce The Longest Con is by paying homage where it is owed. The inspiration for this book’s title—and much of what you will find in its pages—was a magazine article written more than a decade ago by Rick Perlstein, the historian of modern conservatism whose skill, integrity, and commitment have been widely celebrated across our nation’s political divide.
“The Long Con” appeared in the November 2012 issue of The Baffler, a bimonthly journal of culture and politics that melds a left-leaning perspective with a surly temperament and a deft style. Published on the eve of a national election that pitted President Barack Obama against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Perlstein’s essay amusingly dissected the Republican nominee’s prevarications as an object lesson in right-wing chicanery. But then, as any serious historian is called to do, he delved far deeper.
Peering through the scrim of Romney’s falsehoods and beyond his deceptive campaign, Perlstein described a highly developed, very profitable system that marketed lies in many forms to millions of gullible American conservatives—and had mined that vein for a long time. He recalled subscribing some years earlier to several right-wing periodicals online, a decision that soon filled his email inbox to overflowing with fervent pitches for miracle “cures,” get-rich-quick “investments,” and assorted additional examples of “important information” from what an earlier generation would have called snake-oil salesmen. Their messages promised to cure heart disease, reverse arthritis, end diabetes, ensure a secure retirement, provide thousands of dollars a month for little or no effort, and more—all endorsed by the trusted celebrities and outlets whose pronouncements are conservative gospel.
Meanwhile, a kindred horde of entrepreneurs had built dozens of political-action and issue-oriented committees, raising millions of dollars that would supposedly result in an end to abortion, a shutdown of the United Nations, a clampdown on labor unions, and an apocalyptic rout of liberals everywhere. What they didn’t mention, at least not in any legible typeface, was that only tiny fractions of the funds donated would be deployed for any campaign, cause, or candidacy; in fact, the proceeds were almost entirely destined for “overhead” or “prospecting.” Which meant in practice that nearly all the remainder swelled the accounts of those who had solicited the money.
It was not a coincidence, in Perlstein’s view, that direct-mail and online swindlers overlapped so heavily with right-wing con artists and often were identical with them. To an expert who has devoted his professional life to exploring and exposing modern conservatism, those motley scams suddenly seemed less a comic distraction than a central feature. Partisan chroniclers who look away from such lowbrow phenomena in recounting conservatism’s heroic narratives are hiding from a fundamental truth.
His verdict was unequivocal in warning that “this stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological struggles that make up its official history—if not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”
That harsh judgment has been confirmed repeatedly since the rise of Donald Trump and the unabashed grifting that he embodies. But the evidence, which could fill the pages of many books, was piling up and spilling over well before Trump even showed up. As the author of Before the Storm, the definitive history of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Perlstein detected the “infrastructural” roots of the grift in that movement. He was not wrong, as this book’s retracing and elaboration of those connections will show. (Nor was he wrong about Romney, although the retiring senator from Utah has improved his image considerably since that ill-fated presidential race.)
With Trump as the new paradigm, however, there is a powerful reason to trace the story back still further, to the days when Roy Cohn made his scandalous national debut as an assistant to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The brazen young attorney—who would become Trump’s mentor in mendacity—demonstrated how a conspiracy theory could be used not only to advance a far-right agenda but to glom unearned benefits for himself and a male companion.
The premise of Cohn’s rip-off, recalled in chapter 1, was a bogus threat to national security from supposedly leftish books in United States Information Service libraries across postwar Europe. Vowing to stamp out this alleged literary subversion, he and his strapping pal David Schine indulged themselves in a tour of five-star hotels from London and Paris to Rome and Berlin. Compared with the multimillion-dollar depredations of Trump and his ilk, that junket now looks quaint and faintly comical, but it was a ruthless exercise in self-promotion that harmed the reputations of innocent individuals and damaged American prestige overseas.
Subsequent chapters outline the template for right-wing grift that followed in McCarthy’s wake, when various charlatans prospered by exploiting amplified anxiety over the “Red Menace” among middle-class Americans. While some overlaid the message with fundamentalist religion and others emphasized partisan political themes, all of them aimed to trigger irrational fear and popularize the myth of an impending communist takeover.
By creating such an atmosphere of utter dread—and then promising that they alone could prevent America’s doom—they induced thousands of suckers to hand over large wads of cash. Their mercenary antics and vacuous lectures enraged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had his own racket to protect. Even Hoover understood that insofar as communism posed a challenge to the West, those con men had no idea how to oppose it and could only discredit its adversaries.
Out of that environment of delusion and paranoia emerged the Goldwater movement and its leaders—and with them came direct-mail dynamo Richard Viguerie (who had served as an early fundraiser for Billy James Hargis and his Christian Crusade). The commercial and political success of Viguerie’s enterprises stimulated scores of imitators as the grift metastasized continuously into different forms—the New Right, the Moral Majority, the Tea Party movement, the prosperity gospel church, and today Trump’s MAGA movement, which encompasses a whole series of subsidiary swindles and scams, though none as potent as those overseen by Trump and his family.
What remained consistent in each succeeding variation was the reliance on exaggeration, deception, and fabrication, frequently permeated with racial apprehension and hostility, as well as a remorseless drive to squeeze every penny from the dupes. None of this appeared suddenly in 2015, and its impresarios have profited exorbitantly for a very long time.
Indeed, literature tells us that grifting was an abiding feature of human society for centuries before the advent of modern politics. The history of cons, scams, and rackets in America dates back to the dawn of the Republic and no doubt earlier; frauds of every flavor have proliferated over the past century or more, growing in scope, complexity, and damage. More than once, those cons have inflicted terrible consequences, whether in the financial crash of 2008 or in the anti-vaccine uproar that left so many unnecessary dead from the COVID pandemic.
There may or may not be something inherent in right-wing ideology that encourages dishonesty. Conservative philosophy demands civic virtue and moral rigor—and yet Americans who call themselves conservative are undeniably more susceptible to the multiplying varieties of politically tinged fakery, from phony charities and direct-mail boondoggles to cancer and COVID “cures,” watered penny stocks, overpriced gold, and useless dietary supplements.
While such con artists have come to play a dominant role among the Right—where rejection of government and science leave the gullible unprotected—it is only fair to acknowledge there are and always were crooks identified with the Left. The most notorious example in recent years was the national leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose sincere donors were dismayed to learn of the gross mismanagement of nearly $100 million since 2020, with vast sums squandered on luxury real estate, big payouts to the relatives of its officials, first-class travel, and other insider abuses.
A more complicated case is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most prominent voice of the anti-vax movement, with all its attendant sleaze and profiteering from human misery. Kennedy has always represented himself as a man of the Left, trading on his family’s illustrious liberalism, despite his now extensive and evidently warm connections with the extreme Right both in the United States and Europe. His rhetoric and name also drew in a cohort of disgruntled liberals and may well continue to attract them—along with many millions of dollars. Charlatans can work both sides of the aisle.
Still there are fundamental distinctions in outlook between Left and Right that make one side more vulnerable than the other. It doesn’t seem accidental that the principal Democratic campaign fundraising website, ActBlue, is a nonprofit organization that only takes money for credit card fees and operating costs, while WinRed, the main Republican fundraising site, is run for private profit—and announced in 2023 that it will be raising prices during the next presidential cycle. There have been a few scammy political action committees on the Democratic side, but there have been dozens that fleeced Republicans. If your ideology dictates that profit is the highest aspiration, you will probably try to wring surplus value from everything and everyone—and your moral character may well deteriorate in that process.
I will confess that my own political orientation has led me to grimace (and sometimes laugh) while writing this book. But it isn’t only liberals like Perlstein and me who have noticed rampant swindling on the Right. Prominent conservatives have issued the most damning indictments, a budding genre of essays that bemoan grifting as a spreading stain on their movement. In National Review, Jim Geraghty has written scathing, heavily documented columns about the abusive practices of right-wing “scam PACS” and kindred outfits. His colleague Kevin Williamson has denounced the “steady stream of surprisingly lucrative grifts of diverse and sundry kinds” in those pages. The same complaint has been voiced by Jonah Goldberg, Rod Dreher, Matt Lewis, and Erick Erickson, among many others.
The tone of those condemnations is often anguished and even bitter, particularly among those who have observed the sharp uptick of politicized larceny under Trump. When Geraghty first broached the subject in 2019, he wrote, “I’m just sick and tired of so many of our brethren averting their eyes from the big, glaring, worsening problem that rips off so many decent, hard-working folks.”
Erickson, a gun-loving religious rightist and hard-liner who rejected Trump in 2016, has often called out what he sees as grifting on both sides. He publicly quit the corrupt NRA and repeatedly trashed his movement for betraying its donors. In September 2023, he returned to the troubling topic that has preoccupied him for years—and nothing had changed for the better.
“I’ve seen senior members of the [conservative] movement decide it was time to cash in and grift out,” Erickson told his podcast listeners. “I’ve seen young hucksters wrap the label of conservatism around themselves and prey on retirees for cash, showing fabricated results in return. I’m so old, I remember when CPAC was a gathering of actual conservatives and not a grift operation with a gay cruising scene on the side,” referring acidly to a sexual harassment scandal that embroiled Matt Schlapp, the Conservative Political Action Conference chairman.
Does Erickson sound angry? For honest conservatives, that sense of disappointment and cynicism, tinged by fury, is now a routine state of being with no prospect of relief. In the pages that follow, we examine how American conservatism sank to such a degraded condition—and why that should matter to all of us.
1 The Role Model
On a Saturday morning in April 1953, a mismatched pair of political hustlers descended from an American military transport aircraft onto the tarmac of Orly Airport, just south of Paris. They wore expensive suits and carried fancy luggage.
An observer glancing in their direction might first notice David Schine, tall, handsome, and endowed with the smiling confidence of status and wealth. But his shorter companion, a dark figure with a pugnacious expression and a distinctive scar on the bridge of his nose, was in command of this expedition. He was Roy Marcus Cohn, counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s communist-hunting subcommittee back in Washington, DC.
Both men were in their midtwenties, but it was Roy Cohn who had already helped send the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. (A newly admitted lawyer, he had won the merciless decree through a series of secret and highly unethical conclaves with the sentencing judge.) Impressed by that grisly achievement, McCarthy had recruited Cohn only a few months earlier to assist him in cleansing the United States government of subversion of all kinds, from left-wing sympathizers to suspected homosexuals.
Not long after he was hired, Cohn had persuaded McCarthy to employ Schine. They had been introduced at a nightclub in New York by George Sokolsky, the right-wing Hearst newspaper columnist. Cohn presented the rich but intellectually underdeveloped Schine to his new boss as an “expert on communism,” which was a gross deception. Schine’s father, a hotel magnate, had somehow gotten him into Harvard University (much as real estate mogul Charles Kushner would do for his son Jared decades later). But when Schine arrived at Harvard Yard, he had immediately hired a secretary to attend his classes, which he too often failed anyway, while he swanned around town in a chauffeured black limousine.
Evidently, he didn’t learn much. The sole evidence supporting Schine’s expertise on the Red Menace was a six-page pamphlet titled Definition of Communism that he was said to have written for distribution in the family hotels, where it was placed in every room alongside the Gideon Bible. Even a glance at this brief opus betrayed his comical ignorance, for Schine had gotten the dates of the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Communist Party wrong, while badly confusing the identities of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, and Marx.
The whip-smart Cohn, a graduate of Columbia University and Law School, surely knew the Schine pamphlet was garbage (if he ever actually looked at it). How little Cohn or Schine cared about their ostensible mission was exposed years later by the anti-communist author Freda Utley, who dismissed him and Schine as “unscrupulous careerists.” As a McCarthy adviser and confidante, she had prepared his would-be investigators with a list of important anti-communist books that were “missing from the shelves” of United States Information Service (USIS) libraries. But as the outraged Utley later recounted, the careless duo had misconstrued her list as a compilation of “pro-communist” books.
Their fact-finding mission was merely a cynical boondoggle. McCarthy’s callow emissaries plainly understood that public service could present outstanding opportunities for what we would now recognize as scamming—and they took full advantage.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER HE and Schine landed in Paris, Cohn issued a peremptory command to US Information Service personnel in the French capital that he expected to meet with them in their offices the next morning—which happened to be Easter Sunday—at 8:00 a.m. sharp. No doubt resentful of this imposition on the holiday, which they had expected to celebrate with their families, the loyal American civil servants nevertheless arrived on time, just as Cohn had demanded. But neither he nor Schine showed up.
That introductory debacle was recounted in a 1991 oral history interview with Julia Child, who had studied cooking in France when her husband, Paul, was among the American diplomatic employees there:
“Cohn and Schine had arrived in Paris and of course they went out to all the nightclubs and so forth, and it happened to be during Easter, and on Easter Sunday they had called a meeting that everyone was to go there at eight o’clock a.m. at the USIS office,” Child recalled acidly. “Of course, they didn’t appear. It turned out that when [USIS officials] finally got hold of them, they were sleeping off a night at Montmartre,” the city’s fabled cabaret district.
This inauspicious debut in no way daunted Cohn, whose sense of entitlement was matched only by his duplicity. Several days later in Frankfurt, he and Schine pulled an even more embarrassing stunt.
Having ordered public affairs staffers of the High Commission for Occupied Germany to appear for another 8:00 a.m. meeting, they arrived three hours late. Before the meeting could even begin, Schine “announced that he had put on the wrong trousers” and dispatched a driver to their hotel to pick up the right ones. Then he realized that he had also left behind his notebook and returned to the hotel with Cohn to retrieve it.
In the hotel lobby, according to a Frankfurt newspaper, Schine was observed “batting Mr. Cohn over the head with a rolled-up magazine.” Both men then “disappeared” into Schine’s room for several minutes. Later, the hotel maids reportedly found ashes and cigarette butts strewn around the room, amid the overturned furniture.
With all this peculiar behavior, it wasn’t surprising that hints of a homoerotic relationship between Cohn and Schine soon proliferated in the press—even as the two tough guys mocked the supposedly limp-wristed diplomats they were investigating. The Washington columnist Drew Pearson reported deadpan that “they seemed unusually preoccupied with investigating alleged homosexuals.” The nasty whispers enraged Cohn, who would spend a lifetime attempting to conceal his own promiscuous homosexuality beneath a veneer of overbearing masculinity. With McCarthy’s collaboration, he pioneered what would become a chronic syndrome on the American Right: the political victimization of gays by closeted “conservatives” like himself.
In the decades that followed, sexual hypocrisy became an indelible right-wing brand, from the moralizing politicians who hounded Bill Clinton while concealing their own adulterous affairs, to the “conservative” preachers and online activists who condemned homosexuality while molesting teenagers and even children. The more loudly they condemned pederasty, the more pedophiles seemed to pop up in their ranks. But Cohn had discovered the secret of diverting attention from his own conduct by stirring up paranoia and stoking hatred. He had learned that he and Schine could “own the libs” while enjoying a taxpayer-funded jaunt across Europe—and that with enough bluster, they could escape any real consequences.
* * *
OVER THE FOLLOWING weeks, Cohn and Schine brought their sinister vaudeville to Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade, Athens, and Rome, then back to Paris, and finally to London, spending little more than a day in any city. They conducted perfunctory interviews with the Americans they purported to investigate and then invariably hosted press conferences where they entertained reporters with arrogant and ill-informed denunciations of “subversive literature” in the USIS libraries. Following their appearance in Rome, the Manchester Guardian published a scathing review that mocked “their limited vocabulary, their self-complacency, and their paucity of ideas, coupled with the immense power they wield, [which] had the effect of drawing sympathy for all ranks of the United States diplomatic service who had to submit to this sort of thing.”
The US embassy press attaché in Paris, a future Washington Post editor named Ben Bradlee, set up a press conference for “the boy Commie hunters,” inviting all the resident British correspondents, “who were particularly outraged by the ‘little wankers’ thinking they were going to investigate the BBC,” and the fifty or sixty American journalists, making certain the event would be on a Sunday, ruining their time “lunching in some romantic moulin.” Bradlee stationed his pal Art Buchwald of the New York Herald Tribune in the front row and called on him to ask the first question. But it was the Reuters correspondent, “in a clipped British accent,” who inquired, “Mr. Cohn, Mr. Schine, are you happy in your work?” “And,” recalled Bradlee, “things went precipitously downhill from there.” He secured their itinerary and alerted the British press to greet them at Heathrow Airport in London, “and their visit crashed around their ears.”
In 1953 dollars, the estimated cost of the ten-day trip was $8,500, not counting military transportation—a price that would approach ten times that amount in current dollars. No report of its findings or results was ever released, nor was any information that they gleaned ever cited at a subcommittee hearing. Needless to say, perhaps, Cohn found no communists lurking in the US information offices abroad.
Copyright © 2024 by Joe Conason
Foreword © 2024 by George T. Conway III
