from Bad Moon Rising
An excerpt from John Gorenfeld's 2008 book on cult leader Sun Myung Moon and the Washington politicians who welcome his billions.
George H.W. Bush and the Desperate Widows
I have come to understand Rev. Sun Myung Moon's idea of peace by participating in a Divine Principle seminar. After coming to know the true identity of Satan, I fell into a deep rage. How could this fact remain hidden as a secret throughout history?
—Warren G. Harding, 29th president of the
United
States
(according
to
the Reverend Moon)
“Heaven is saying two million yen”
All the world's a stage, and every country has its role to play, in the scripture of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. His system of thought casts Korea in the part of the "Father Nation," points out that it resembles a man's loins, dangling out from the Asian mainland in the direction of Japan, the "Mother Nation," a chain of islands arching away from Korea like a shy lover.
The United States he designates as the "Elder Son Nation." For our younger country owes its life, he preaches, to the Father who has bequeathed to it a conservative newspaper, moral guidance, and a river of cash to the Religious Right. Some of that money may flow from the church's investments in Latin America, its sushi empire in the U.S., or the $1,200-a-head stadium weddings in Korea that can bring in a tidy $24 million per event. But much of it unmistakably originates in Japan, which the church has long acknowledged as a cash cow. "Japan is mother and wife," church spokesman Masuo Oe said in 1996. "So Japan has the mission to support her husband and raise her children."
So let us detour briefly from Capitol Hill to a scene in Japan in April 1988, during George H. W. Bush's run for president. We are in Fukuoka, a southern metropolis where a bereaved mother is attending a seance. A seer, the Great Teacher Nagayoshi, is concentrating before a statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha, and with great strain, he says, the father of her child is coming into focus.
"Your husband is descending," the Great Teacher says. "I can see your husband's body suffering in Hell. I cannot stop myself from shaking," the teacher says, now really racked with emotion. "Your husband is saying he wants you to donate five million yen."
When her husband had died of a heart attack in the fall, the housewife could not have guessed that half a year later, he would return from the Beyond to ask for the equivalent of $40,000. That winter, she and her daughter were alone and distraught. Then one day a visitor knocked on her door. The woman, a stranger, extended the deepest of sympathies and persuaded the lonely widow it would be best for her morale to get out of the house and go across town together to see an art exhibit.
So the new friends strolled the gallery. Then the friend asked the widow, Why not spoil yourself and buy a painting? "That one would look perfect in your child's room," she told the widow. The widow hesitated at the price tag—about $1,600—but felt it would be rude not to play along. So she agreed, the friend beckoned the sales staff, and the widow wired the cash to a mysterious company—Miyabi Co., Ltd.—whose name was Japanese for refined, courtly elegance, the qualities found in those with a discriminating eye for color.
A friendship developed, in which they watched movies together, popular films with an afterlife theme, and the widow fretted about whether her own husband would migrate into heaven or hell.
In spring, cherry blossoms bloom in Japan, and thoughts turn to the fragility of life. It was then that the widow (Plaintiff A, as she would be known for privacy) learned through the friend of a rare chance to meet a supposedly revered Buddhist sage, Nagayoshi, who could ease her fears about her husband's fate. When she obtained an audience, however, she hesitated to pay the five million yen to the Great Teacher Nagayoshi, and the guru left the room, troubled.
"Hang in there," her new friends told her after she offended the Great Teacher Nagayoshi. "Just believe."
She did. But when she returned home, doubts nagged, so she phoned up and refused to pay the money, until they convinced her that the screams of the damned would flll her sleep.
She relented. So now they helped her violate banking rules by claiming the huge withdrawal was for an insurance policy. Soon after, she laid the cash at the feet of the Maitreya statue.
Soon Plaintiff A met a second "great teacher," this one offering her a special deal on a "holy trinity" of religious items for just twelve million yen, including a Maitreya statue she could call her own and two sets of Catholic rosary beads. She was also persuaded to enroll in classes in the Divine Principle of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, newly revealed to be the guiding light behind her spiritual journey. Soon the Moon disciples told her that the dead husband wanted yet another flfty million yen from beyond the grave but would settle for thirty million—the payout on his life insurance policy.
An argument broke out. They weren't making this up, a Moon priestess named Endo insisted emotionally. Endo whipped out a chart demonstrating, as plain as day, that the "the karma of sexual lust" had fouled the family legacy and that in her stinginess she was willing to watch as her husband's family name, built for generations, went up in smoke. "Your daughter's life, too, will be taken," the Moonists said.
And now the widow hesitated. "I will do it," she finally said, and they cried in thanks but suggested to keep quiet about the money, or else "Satan would close in."
Soon, at a shopping center parking lot, outside a retail shop called Goody, she approached a parked car and handed over the cash. But later, as Plaintiff A considered her free gift—a photo of the Washington Times publisher and his wife in a pose of beatiflc matrimony—she felt ripples of doubt. Would her husband have wanted his life insurance payout given to Moon? In 1989, she hired an attorney and learned that her case was one of tens of thousands like it, sometimes with an element of physical coercion.
No fewer than three hundred lawyers from across Japan had banded together to prosecute the cases the press was calling the "Spiritual Sales" and the attorneys were calling an ambitious, well-orchestrated swindle. Right here in Fukuoka, another widow, sickly and solitary, had been informed by fast-talking fortune-tellers that she had only until midnight to save her family by stripping herself of the corrupting influence of money: "Heaven is saying two million yen," a soothsayer named Gondo revealed.
The scam juiced the vulnerable to feed the sect's hunger for cash. May 27, 1994, a judge in Fukuoka District Court ruled that Plaintiff A was a victim of fraud and ordered the Japanese arm of the church to return thirty-six million yen.
Moon's church in Japan claims that voluntary "donations" make up the bulk of its Japanese annual proflts, which have reached as much as $400 million a year. Between 1987 and 2006, the lawyers say, the victims who've come to them may have lost far more than that. In a country where the people are traditionally less eager than Americans to take disputes to court, the lawyers have registered 13,898 complaints, with tens of thousands more reaching Japan's consumer affairs bureau.
The Japanese Supreme Court held the Moon church liable for fraud in several other cases, as well. But Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer, says lawsuits haven't slowed the missionaries. "They are probably making about thirty to forty billion yen a year," he claims. The church denies wrongdoing, and a Tokyo spokesman told the Washington Post that the lawyers were compromised by the "existence of satans standing behind the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations."
In the fall of 1995, King Moon's lucrative Japanese empire risked unraveling. Two years earlier, The Tragedy of the Six Marys, a sordid tell-all from a Korean War–era comrade of the reverend, had arrived on bookshelves bringing a scandalous claim: that the Unification Church started as a sex cult in which a man could be reborn as "Perfect Adam" by sleeping with six women. The aged author retracted his story under pressure from the church, yet had left lasting damage.
However, it would be the events of March 20, 1995—Japan's version of the Jonestown Massacre—that stoked national rage against Moon and his followers. Aum Supreme Truth, an unrelated sect whose guru was similarly obsessed with the migration of souls, had poisoned Tokyo commuters with nerve gas, poisoning five thousand and killing twelve. "Our Japanese movement has undergone the most incredible persecution because of the Aum Truth Church," said Col. Bo Hi Pak, Moon's bespectacled flrst offlcer.
In 1995, to ensure that the pipeline of bills across the Paciflc flowed on, the Moons scheduled a series of high-proflle rallies at the Tokyo Dome and other arenas, and hired an impressive spokesman.
The three hundred lawyers begged George H. W. Bush not to keep his date with Mrs. Moon on September 14, 1995, at the "big egg," as the Japanese call the translucent, futuristic baseball park. Their protests went unheeded. The litigators were "angry," says Yamaguchi, "but not surprised considering the relationship between Bush and [the] Washington Times."
Posters went up proclaiming that at the Dome, "Love Will Save the Earth." The fliers didn't mention Moon's church but advertised the event under the banner of the Women's Federation for World Peace (WFWP), an unheard-of group summoned into existence by the Reverend and Mrs. Moon. The theme: protecting children. Fifty thousand ticket holders flled into the Tokyo Dome, having paid between $80 and $196, meaning over$5 million rolled in with the Bushes' help, minus expenses.
The Japanese weren't the only ones to issue what the lawyers had called an "urgent plea for nonattendance." Bush also defled a coalition of American mothers, led by California music teacher Cynthia Lilley of MOM (Mothers Opposed to Moon), whose family had been traumatized when her daughter Cathrynran away with the Moonies. "They use the fllms" of politicians and Moon together, she said, "to reassure parents that it's okay that their children are on the streets selling flowers 18 hours a day."
During the American leg of the tour, anchor Barbara Walters had canceled her own scheduled appearance. "[W]hen I found out it was associated with the Rev. Moon," she said, "I turned down the appearance . . . and will no longer appear at their events." (The rallies had also featured actor Christopher Reeve and Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, Coretta Scott King.)
Walters's example was not followed by George H. W. Bush. When reporters for major newspapers presented him with evidence he was helping Moon, his Houston spokesperson, Jim McGrath, would hear none of it. "The sense the Bushes have," McGrath said, "is that these are about family and about building bridges of friendship between the Japanese and the American people." Bush, he said, "strongly believes in the mission" of the group." And Bush himself told the New York Times, "Until I see something about the Women's Federation that troubles me, I will continue to encourage them." When that day came, the reverend's roulette wheel of names for his traveling show would have spun, allowing President Bush to accept an innocent-sounding invitation from Moon's "Family Federation for World Peace."
At the Tokyo Dome, Bush stood to applause and gave a canned speech. High time, he said, for U.S.-Japan "bashing" to stop. Minutes after the president walked off the stage, the wig came off the event. "I sincerely encourage you to seriously study my husband's teachings," Mrs. Moon told the throngs of the Dome, explaining that God had permitted the Returning Lord to "stand on top of the world."
The Dome kicked off a series of six Bush-Moon stops in Japan, including one on Kyushu, the island where Plaintiff A had been bilked. In the summer of 1996, after the group swapped its old name for a new one, the forty-flrst president cheerfully attended, along with ex-president Gerald Ford and the top-billed Reverend Moon himself. Reuters also reported that Bush surfaced with Moon in Argentina, where he was filmed praising Moon for publishing a paper that "brings sanity to Washington."
The sight of the American president subordinate to a Korean religious leader won over the Japanese, in the view of Moon's sworn sidekick, Colonel Pak. "The people of Kyushu were flabbergasted at Father and Mother's power to tell a U.S. president what to do and plan his schedule," he said from behind a pulpit in New York on January 2, 1996. The Japanese, Pak explained, had a national inferiority complex and could be bowled over by "anybody with a big nose and blue eyes who speaks perfect English," so that the visit "completely changed the attitude of the Japanese government and media towards the Unification community."
Until he was replaced in his capacities by rival Chung Hwan Kwak, Pak, in his trademark horn-rimmed glasses, was second to no one but Moon in directing church operations around the globe. Having pledged body and soul to Moon, it was Pak who defended Moon before a hostile panel of U.S. congressmen in the 1970s, bursting into tears with conviction and grief. Those who have encountered Pak have called him a tiger, a gentleman, zealous, magnetic, stern, theatrical, sincere, capable, and manipulative, with an uncanny ability, one journalist recalled, to make you feel as if you have committed a discourtesy.
His admirers include, of all people, Gen. Alexander Haig, Reagan's flrst secretary of state, who calls Pak a "long-time friend," "noble," and committed to "a better world for all mankind" in the foreword Haig wrote to Pak's volume of collected speeches, Truth Is My Sword, its book jacket the color of blood. Former disciple and Times reporter Glenn Emery calls him "one of the sweetest people I have ever met." Yet one journalist remembers Pak as "kind of a creepy guy"; during a long investigation, the journalist and a colleague would phone one another up, taking turns pretending to be Pak. Meanwhile, according to reports in major newspapers, Pak has been tortured by mysterious South Korean kidnappers in 1984, beaten bloody by a church psychic in 1987, and sent to prison, between 2004 and 2006, over a real estate deal gone bad. He has also been called the brains behind the rise of the Unification Church from a shanty in war-torn Pusan, Korea, to a modern Paciflc Rim conglomerate.
The church maintains different faces in America, where the power is, and Japan, where the money is. Stateside, having learned hard lessons about public relations, the Moonies have lowered the intensity of their recruitment drives, averting such debacles as the 1993 Today Show piece "Cathryn's Story," in which an NBC TV crew fllmed heartbroken mom Cynthia Lilley, forbidden to see her daughter at a Moon dorm (see chapter 3). But if American headlines no longer tell of American youth whipped into fervor as money-raising dervishes shouting "Smash Satan," Asian reports continue to describe a pressure-cooker environment in which sales teams meet astonishing quotas with a frenzied dedication. "Crazy for God," one churchman calls Moon's fever pitch.
In Japan, the Unification Church has also founded a counterpart to the Washington Times: the Sekai Nippo. Just as the Washington Times's editors were nostalgic for segregation (see chapter 3), the Nippo's apparently pine for the invasion of Manchuria. With ties to Japan's own far right, the paper has advanced such slogans as "exporting weapons is moral." Editor Seojima Yoshikazu, an ex-Moonie, resigned and wrote a 1984 tell-all article, "This Is the Secret of the Unification Church," only to be wounded by an unknown man with a knife. According to Seojima, the church explicitly pressured the Japanese to raise money for the Washington Times, a newspaper he called "the top priority of the entire Unification Church worldwide" for its access to American politicians. Back then, he said, $2.5 million a month in Japanese income was so earmarked.
The 1995-1996 Bush-Moon tour also found the odd couple taking their show to Washington, as Asian disciples paid as much as $11,260 for the privilege of tagging along. During the tour, George and Barbara Bush were photographed presiding casually over a birthday cake with red, white, and pink candles that was being sliced for the True Mother. Looking on was Colonel Pak, smiling. Barb, according to the church's enthusiastic reports, went so far as to join a "Bridge of Peace" ceremony in which she hugged a Japanese lady, one Mrs. Sugiyama, to heal scars of World War II. The church claims to have made "sisters" of twenty thousand women in this fashion, encouraging "sincere repentance for wrongs in the past . . . centered on heart," in the clunky jargon of Moon. Bush, as if remembering his time on the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto, "had tears in his eyes," asserted longtime member Betsy Jones in a 1996, account.
In Illinois, the estranged mother of a Unification Church recruit wrote to Jack Kemp, Bob Dole's running mate that year, pleading with him to stop attending Moon events. "I just wanted to let you know that I agree with you," Kemp replied, and promising to break off his affair with the True Father. Then he took $52,000 to speak at three more Moon events, anyway. His conservative policy group Empower America, formed with Reagan education secretary Bill Bennett, was shortly thereafter headed by Josette Sheeran, a longtime church VIP recently tapped by the George W. Bush administration to direct the UN World Food Program.
Just who is taking advantage of whom in the ongoing relationship between America's once-favorite Republican family and the Moon clan? If the elder Bush has put one over on the True Father with his many gestures of support, it would be in keeping with the treatment of evangelical Christians seen at work by David Kuo, the younger Bush's disgruntled former faith-based czar. His recent book Tempting Faith accuses Karl Rove of seducing religious folk for cash and support, while privately disdaining them as "the nuts."
Even so, a mold is broken by the gracious lengths to which George H. W. Bush has been willing to go for Moon, all the while being at the butt of the reverend's humiliating insults. Southern Baptists repay their debts to the GOP by selling Faith in the White House DVDs and urging that a Prayer Shield hallow the younger Bush. But the Times publisher has a different style. On February 21, 1991, in the last week of the Gulf War, Moon went to the New Yorker Hotel, his dingy landmark in midtown Manhattan.
He rhymed: "Push Bush!"
He continued. "Father always said from the beginning that [George H. W.] Bush doesn't have a trunk, so he has no guts. So somebody has to push Bush," he said. "Who can tell Bush what to do? . . . The only one who will say 'Bush, do this' is Reverend Moon." Months later the Times owner was claiming to have received a plaque from Bush on the occasion of the Gulf War victory, "giving thanks to God," in what Moon decided was a gesture of gratitude for his advice.
Moon's checkbook had produced tidy sums over the years, mostly not directly to politicians but to the political scaffolding behind them. During the 1988 campaign, he gave $5 million to help found a $15 million conservative coalition, the American Freedom Coalition, which sent out thirty million political mailings in 1988 and staged marches in support of the flrst Iraq war. On the board sat Richard Viguerie, the "founding funder" of the Reagan revolution.
The financial power behind the Republican newspaper continues to innovate. A 2006 Japanese TV report revealed that Moon clerics were snagging Japanese tourists at Inchon International Airport in Korea, then taking them on two-hour trips into the mountains, to Cheongpyeong Lake, east of Seoul, where Moon has built his final palace. The buildings here are the domain of his priestess, Hyo Nam Kim, and her Heaven and Earth Training Center.
The center opened around 2006 in a shower of confetti and a royal procession of limousines, women marching in pink, courtiers in tall hats, King and Queen Moon waving loftily in their crowns, as shown on a Korean Web site. Above, a mountain road wound to a domed building, the so-called Original Palace, built (it is said) to the exact specifications of God's palace in heaven. There is something familiar about it, so that at first glance it leaves a peculiar impression on the eye. In a land of pagodas, it is neoclassical.
Then you realize it looks like the the bastard child of the White House and the U.S. Capitol Dome, like a Las Vegas replica of another city's landmark. Go up Moon's faux Capitol Steps, and you stand beneath a rotunda that spirals away in magnificent frescoes of the True Parents.
The Japan News Network reported on June 11, 2006, that women lured to the site were screened the Hollywood afterlife fantasy What Dreams Will Come—to encourage them to consider whether their families might suffer in hell, like Robin Williams's dead wife in the film. They were repeatedly told their uterine health problems resulted from the spirits of Korean women raped under Imperial Japan. But they could be cured with cash payments (which reached $260,000 in one case) and arm-flapping exorcism ceremonies. An "Ancestors Liberation Blessing Form" provided by the center offers a complex payment scheme per ancestor freed from hell.
The heavenly cash continues to bless the Bushes. One million dollars from church interests flowed in 2003 into the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, doubling the $1 million or more that the forty-first president took while visiting Japan, the United States, Argentina, and Uruguay with Moon in that Clinton-era speaking tour. Other Moon funds have gone to a business owned by presidential brother Neil Bush (see chapter 9) and to Bush family charities. In 2005, $1 million was donated for Hurricane Katrina relief via Moon's group, the IIFWP, through Bush's Points of Light Foundation. During the 2005-2006 fiscal year, the church gave another $100,000 to a Barbara Bush reading charity.
The New York Times's conservative columnist David Brooks, who began writing for Moon's Washington Times in 1984 at the age of twenty-three, has called it a "bizarre assertion" that Moon "has been close to the Bush family." That contention is made in two recent books by former GOP insider Kevin Phillips, whom Brooks called an exemplar of the "paranoid style in American politics" for saying such things.
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