This op-ed originally provided by The Charleston Gazette

December 18, 2005

Paul J. Nyden

Witness to history: A reporter looks back at some of the most memorable moments in West Virginia politics

The colorful, often corrupt, history of West Virginia politics fills the pages this new book by reporter Tom Stafford.

“Afflicting the Comfortable” is a major addition to books about Mountain State history.

Stafford worked as a reporter and editor for the Raleigh Register in Beckley, beginning in 1936, then for The Charleston Gazette, beginning in 1954. Stafford personally knew most of the people he writes about, from governors to statehouse workers, from business owners to U.S. presidents.

“Afflicting the Comfortable” portrays seven governors from the early 1940s through the early 1990s: Matthew Neely, Clarence “Fats” Meadows, Okey Patteson, William Casey Marland, Cecil Underwood, W.W. “Wally” Barron, Hulett Smith, Arch Moore, Jay Rockefeller and Gaston Caperton.

Stafford writes about covering the 1960 Democratic Party primary, where John F. Kennedy assured his presidential nomination by beating Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia.

“West Virginia was never so remembered by Washington as it was during the next three years,” Stafford adds.

Kennedy also launched food stamps — which became a nationwide program — in McDowell, Logan and Mingo counties.

Stafford describes the frustrations plaguing Marland, who welcomed the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school integration decision and tried to enact a coal severance tax.

Marland failed to pass the tax. “With the Gazette as their chief spokesman, the business lobby was creating a furor and thrashing the governor and his programs with the help of their pet legislators,” Stafford writes.

Things changed when the late W.E. “Ned” Chilton became the Gazette’s publisher in 1961.

“I was fortunate both in Beckley and Charleston to have publishers who respected the First Amendment as the cornerstone of their profession,” Stafford wrote, referring to Charles Hodel in Beckley and Chilton.

“The threat of libel is often used to cool a newspaper’s ardor for factual reporting,” he adds.

Stafford dedicates his book to Chilton, for many years one of the nation’s most aggressive newsmen.

Stafford focuses on the administrations of Barron, Smith and Moore.

Probably the most important story of his reporting career exposed the “Invest Right” scandal under Wally Barron.

Barron and his top aides rigged bids for services and equipment. They drafted state contracts to favor specific companies.

Barron and a handful of top aides then funneled payoffs from state contractors to themselves through a complicated maze of bank accounts and 17 different companies from Florida to Ohio.

Ultimately, Barron and his colleagues took in nearly $25 million in bribes and payoffs, Stafford writes.

His first real insights into the scandal — which eventually put Barron and his colleagues in prison — came after an evening encounter at the old Charleston Press Club with then House Speaker Julius Singleton.

Before he went to prison, Barron and some of his allies backed Republican candidate Arch Moore for governor over state Democratic Party Chairman James Sprouse.

Moore’s victory was helped by a libelous story the Charleston Daily Mail printed about Sprouse just before the election. (Sprouse later won a $350,000 libel suit against the paper.)

Stafford writes about Moore’s questionable actions during his first two terms as governor between 1969 and 1977, during his third term between 1985 and 1989, and mentions his eventual trip to federal prison after pleading guilty in 1990 to extorting $573,000 from Beckley coal operator H. Paul Kizer.

Moore was also charged with accepting $62,500 in payoffs from Island Creek Coal and two other individuals.

By the time Moore was running against Caperton in 1988, Stafford “found him to be a different person from the man I had known in the past. The intensity and vitality that had been his hallmark were gone.... His missionary zeal has been muted.”

After Caperton, helped by his “political innocence,” won the election, he faced major budget deficits left by Moore, including a $9.4 million debt to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

That debt was for unpaid Army Corps clean-up costs after the Buffalo Hollow flood in February 1972.

Three days before leaving office in 1977, Moore accepted a $1 million settlement offer from Pittston Coal. The settlement deal absolved Pittston of any further debt to the state created by the collapse of its mine dams that left 125 people dead and 4,000 homeless.

The book also has a chapter on Sen. Robert C. Byrd, which notes, “In the 1990s, Bob Byrd became a one-man economic development authority for West Virginia, single-handedly bringing more new jobs to the state than the governor’s development office was able to do with a large workforce.”

Stafford describes his own life as a reporter, involving late-night hours and often frustrating when it took months to put together a complicated story.

He describes attempted payoffs and bribes, including cash payments from local numbers runners in Beckley, then an array of gifts including WVU football tickets, all-expense paid trips to resorts and weekends at The Greenbrier while he worked in Charleston.

“To try to avoid the numerous pitfalls,” Stafford wrote, “early on I adopted Harry Truman’s maxim. ‘Only what I can eat or drink in a day.’”

The book includes a touching story about his wife, Margaret, who agreed to chauffer their daughter Margo’s friend Carmen Fountaine to Brownie meetings in Kanawha City in the mid-1950s. Other mothers discouraged that. Carmen was black.

Youngsters, however, often show more wisdom than their elders. In her last year at Horace Mann Junior High School in Kanawha City, Carmen was overwhelmingly elected the most popular girl in her class and was later nominated to the Homecoming Queen’s Court at Charleston High.

Stafford left reporting in late 1966, as a result of increasing tensions that caused chronic hemorrhaging ulcers. He then worked 19 more years as chief clerk for U.S. District Judge Robert E. Maxwell in Elkins. He died in June 1993.

Stafford’s new work is a major contribution to preserving state history, along with books by historians such as John Alexander Williams, Otis K. Rice and Stephen W. Brown.

The book is part of an ongoing effort by West Virginia University Press to explore the state’s past. Previous volumes include Ken Fones-Wolf’s and Ronald L. Lewis’s “Transnational West Virginia” (about immigrants working for railroads, coal mines, steel mills and glass plants) and G.W. Gonzales’ “Pinnick Kinnick Hill” (about Spanish immigrants in zinc-smelting towns near Clarksburg).

Stafford ends his book stating: “The responsibility of the press to afflict the comfortable never ends. The press was intended by the Founding Fathers to serve as part of the established system of checks and balances that help to protect and preserve our form of government.”

Anyone interested in ordering “Afflicting the Comfortable” may visit the WVU Press Web site at www.wvupress.com or call toll-free (866) 988-7737.

To contact staff writer Paul J. Nyden, use e-mail or call 348-5164.