WASHINGTON – Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian, has also been a businessman who published provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, according to three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.
The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.
But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.
“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. … He would proof it,” said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.
After the Washington Post story was published online Friday, Paul flatly denied that he read the articles or was deeply involved in his company. According to The Associated Press, Paul told CNN that Hathway “made that story up.”
The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.
How involved?
Jesse Benton, a presidential campaign spokesman, said that the accounts of Paul’s involvement were untrue and that Paul was practicing medicine full time when “the offensive material appeared under his name.”
Paul “abhors it, rejects it and has taken responsibility for it as he should have better policed the work being done under his masthead,” Benton said.
Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul “was a busy man” at the time.
“He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country,” Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul’s campaign. “I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff.”
The articles included racial, anti-Semitic and anti-gay content. They claimed, for example, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys,” and they ridiculed black activists by suggesting that New York be named “Zooville” or “Lazyopolis.”
Business acumen
It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters, but during the years he was publishing them, he reduced his debts and substantially increased his net worth, according to his congressional and presidential disclosure reports. In 1984, he reported debt of up to $765,000, most of which was gone by 1995, when he reported a net worth of up to $3.3 million. Last year, he reported a net worth up to $5.2 million.
In 1984, just before losing a Senate bid and leaving Congress, Paul formed Ron Paul & Associates. He soon began publishing the Ron Paul Investment Letter.
The investment letter became the Ron Paul Survival Report. It cost subscribers about $100 a year.
The July 15, 1994, issue of Survival Report exemplified how the newsletters merged material about race with a pitch for business. It criticized the rate of black-on-white crime when “blacks are only 12 percent of the population.” That was accompanied by two pages of ads from Ron Paul Precious Metals & Rare Coins, a business Paul used to sell gold and silver coins.
