Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The Ahmansons today bristle at questions about their past alliance with Rushdoony: "It's like, 'Have you now or ever been?'" remarked Mrs. Ahmanson, comparing journalistic inquiries about her husband's links to Rushdoony to McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics. Yet it is only by understanding this little-known cleric that one can grasp the philosphy behind Ahmanson's politics. "I discovered his works at a time when I had no clear vision for Christian philanthropy and no model that I liked," Ahmanson told me of Rushdoony. "Here was someone responding to questions that in the late '70s no one was even asking."
Rushdoony descended from six generations of Armenian priests, aristocracy in the world's oldest Christian country. His parents narrowly escaped the Armenian genocide, in which over 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by Turks attempting to "Ottomanize" the country. As a young boy growing up in New York, Rushdoony was haunted by tales of the slaughter that persisted despite impassioned pleas from the Armenian clergy for foreign intervention. As Rushdoony made his way through seminary and religious study during the 1940s and '50s, he was gripped by a bitter cynicism about the betrayal that became his driving force.
"His whole life's work was aimed at finding a philosophy that would stand against the kind of tyranny his parents had to flee," Ahmanson explained.
Rushdoony spelled out his philosophy in painstaking detail in his 1973 magnum opus, "Institutes of Biblical Law," which he self-consciously named after John Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion." In the 800-page tome, Rushdoony presents his vision for a new America in which the church subsumes the federal government and society is administered according to biblical law, or at least his interpretation of it. According to biblical law, he writes, segregation is a "basic principle," and slavery is permitted "because some people are by nature slaves and will always be so." Those who don't comply with Rushdoony's rules -- disobedient children, "pagans," adulterers, women who get abortions, repeat criminal offenders and, of course, homosexuals -- would be executed. Mrs. Ahmanson, who described Rushdoony as "quirky in some ways," qualified his extremism: "To impose the death penalty you need two witnesses. So the number of executions goes down pretty quickly."
Though Ahmanson has read "Institutes of Biblical Law," he told me he prefers books by Rushdoony that deal more explicitly with ethical and moral issues. One such book is "The Politics of Guilt and Pity," a polemical suite of caustic riffs on the pathology of liberals. In this book, Rushdoony writes: "The guilty rich will indulge in philanthropy, and the guilty white men will show 'love' and 'concern' for Negroes and other such persons who are in actuality repulsive and intolerable to them ... The Negroes demand more aid, i.e., more slavery and slave-care, and dwell on their sufferings."
There is no indication that Ahmanson shares Rushdoony's bellicose racism, but Rushdoony's scathing critique of "the guilty rich" resonated with the young man constantly beset upon by human parasites seeking a chunk of his money. In possibly his only published piece of work, a 1997 essay for the Acton Institute, a conservative religious think tank, Ahmanson parroted Rushdoony's harsh style and viewpoint: "The argument that we ought not do any particular thing because the poor exist is the argument of Judas, and if you hear it made, know that thieves are about who want to get their piece of the action."
As an avid reader, Ahmanson often explores literature beyond the Bible for insight on his struggle to harness his inheritance. As Mrs. Ahmanson told me, her family is captivated by J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- by her count, her husband has read "The Hobbit" six times. "Howard kind of identifies with Frodo," she said, referring to the heroic Hobbit who must destroy a magical ring to save the world.
In my latest conversation with Mrs. Ahmanson, in which she spoke by cellphone while strolling through an Orange County shopping mall on a search for socks and underwear for her teenage son, David, we negotiated my request for an interview with her husband. As she rattled off a litany of engagements he had to make before leaving the following week for a three-month tour of New Zealand, Japan and Australia, I heard a man's voice in the background and realized Ahmanson was there all along. "He'd talk on the phone but he doesn't want to. It just doesn't work well," she explained regretfully, hinting at her husband's Tourette's.
Though Ahmanson himself declined to sit down for a face-to-face interview, Roberta Ahmanson's interviews for this story were her first since a two-part L.A. Times story in 1992 on her husband's role in the Allied Business PAC. "They burned me so badly," she said of the Times. "The reporter didn't know anything and wasn't going to be taught." Her suspicion of the media was often apparent. While the premise for my interview was to discuss her and her husband's involvement in the Episcopal Church split, she bristled at the notion that they are involved in any way other than granting money. "They [Anglican Council officials] don't call us up and say, 'What do you want us to do?'" she insisted.
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