Robert Scheer: Worldview and Career Highlights

By Lowell Ponte
Discover The Networks
2006

Robert Scheer is a former Contributing Editor and columnist at the Los Angeles Times and now a Contributing Editor at The Nation Magazine.

In 1964 Scheer was hired as Managing Editor at Ramparts, founded as a liberal Catholic journal but soon to become a leading publication of the anti-Vietnam War, anti-American New Left. In 1970 Scheer traveled to Communist North Korea in a delegation with his comrade Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Scheer returned singing praises for North Korean totalitarian dictator Kim Il Sung. Scheer signed this delegation's declaration, which in part read: "Since the peoples of the world have a common enemy, we must begin to think of revolution as an international struggle against U.S. imperialism. Our struggle in the U.S. is a genuine part of the total revolutionary assault on this enemy."

In 1970 Scheer was also a left commentator on a political panel show broadcast by Los Angeles television station KCET, the West Coast Production Center of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Fellow commentator on the show, journalist Lowell Ponte, has recounted how during breaks in the taping Scheer would regale the others with how Communist China's dictator Mao Tse-tung was the greatest leader in the world.

Scheer and fellow radical Tom Hayden had by then founded Berkeley's Red Family, described as "a commune of urban guerrillas, which trained its members in the use of explosives and firearms and called for the creation of 'liberated zones' in the United States -- a liberation to be accomplished by force of arms. Dedicated to Maoist principles, Red Family leaders adorned the walls of their headquarters with portraits of such Communist heroes as Ho Chi Minh and North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and Black Panther thug, Huey Newton."

Scheer's wife Anne Weills, mother of his then-three-year-old son Christopher, was also a co-founder of Red Family. She would later become a board member and attorney with the Communist front group the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). As she became distanced from Scheer and close to Hayden, Scheer orchestrated a communal "kangaroo court" to eject Hayden on grounds that his relationship with Anne was "bourgeois privatism." (Thrown out of Red Family, Hayden moved to Los Angeles, where he met and married actress and pro-Communist Vietnam War activist Jane Fonda, later a special friend of Scheer's.)

Scheer and Weills divorced, but he soon found another mate who opened the door for Scheer to have the best of two worlds - the self-righteous moral cant of Marxist ideology, and the wealth, comfort and caviar of the most successful of capitalists. He would become, and remains, as critics call him, a "Gucci Marxist."

For the next few years, Scheer lived through academic fellowships and worked as West Coast editor for fashionably-leftwing New Times Magazine (1975-76). In 1976 he conducted the famous Playboy Magazine interview with candidate Jimmy Carter in which the soon-to-be president acknowledged that he "lusted in his heart" after women.

Robert Scheer married Narda Catharine Zacchino, then one of the most powerful editors at the Los Angeles Times. Apparently as part of his dowry, she helped catapult smalltime radical writer Scheer to the prestigious, highly-paid title "National Correspondent" at the Times, a position he would retain for 17 years.

Scheer was launched into a new lifestyle, partying with Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty, even playing a small part in Beatty's 1998 political movie Bulworth. Scheer had a yacht and dined at the most exclusive gourmet restaurants in Beverly Hills.

In his writing, however, Scheer was an outspokenly anti-capitalist leftist. While other journalists at the Los Angeles Times had to conform to standards of care and accuracy, Scheer's powerful wife accorded him a free hand to write off-the-cuff allegations against Republicans and in favor of Democrats. He was immune from critics who pointed to his sloppiness, mistakes, fabrications, ideology and unethical journalism. Scheer was, as one editor confided to a critic, "anointed."

Scheer's pro-Democrat partisanship has paid dividends. He was appointed as visiting professor on the faculty of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles by its dean, a former official in President Bill Clinton's Administration. At USC Scheer continues to teach a class in the ethics of journalism.