WITH FRIENDS LIKE DEES . . .

“We must do all we can to help prevent more bombings and loss of life,” he wrote in his pitch from headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama. “These are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary commitment. Send the most generous renewal gift possible.” Donors, Dees suggested, should send at least $ 150 — “or more if you can.”

Oklahoma City may have been the worst act of domestic terrorism in recent memory, but for Morris Dees it has been a marketing bonanza. In the year since the bombing, Dees has parlayed his opinions on militias and extremist groups into countless speeches and appearances on radio and television. Last month, HarperCollins released Dees’s latest offering on the subject, a book called Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. In its pages, Dees argues that, far from an aberration, Oklahoma City was the logical result of the growth of conservative politics in America. His proof?. As he recently explained to public-radio host Diane Rehm, the issues that excite right-wing Republicans are the same issues that motivated alleged mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh: “Fear of immigrants; fear that the government has grown too large, over-regulates, over-taxes, is insensitive to people; fear of the English language not being the mother language of the country — in other words, multiculturalism; fear of giving gay people more rights; fear of the laws that allow abortions.” According to Dees, politicians and pundits who whip up public fury over these issues — and here he points to George Bush, Jesse Helms, and Rush Limbaugh — share at least part of the blame when like-minded lunatics blow up public buildings.

The connections Dees appears to draw between Timothy McVeigh and a good portion of the Republican party may seem tenuous, even fantastic. But, artfully written, they can make a brilliant fund-raising pitch. And Dees, the man whom a former co-worker once described as “the civil rights movement’s televangelist,” loves nothing more than good ad copy. He’s been writing it for years.

Dees began his career as a direct-mail solicitor while still in law school, selling birthday cakes to the parents of classmates. The business was an instant success, and Dees kept at it after graduation, branching out into product lines as varied as tractor cushions, holly wreaths, cookbooks, and rat poison. In 1969, while still in his early 30s, Dees sold his mail-order company to the Times Mirror media conglomerate for $ 6 million and retired to a sprawling estate he’d built outside of Montgomery called Rolling Hills Ranch. Three years later, however, Dees was back in direct mail, this time for George McGovern, who was then running for president.

As McGovern’s finance director, Dees became famous for his emotionally written fund-raising letters. He eventually raised more than $ 8 million for the campaign, most of it from small donors. (In later years, Dees also acted as finance director for presidential candidates Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, and Edward Kennedy.) When the campaign ended, Dees went back to Montgomery to run the Southern Poverty Law Center. In addition to his political experience, Dees returned with the McGovern campaign’s list of 700,000 financial contributors, whose names he promptly used to establish his own donor base.

Founded by Dees and a partner in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center spent many of its early years filing lawsuits on behalf of criminals facing the death penalty. Racially charged though the cases were — many of them involved black prisoners who had murdered whites — Dees does not seem to have harbored many illusions about his clients. “Ninety-five percent of them are guilty as hell, no way around it,” he told Newsweek in 1977. Nor was Dees himself free from controversy. In 1975, he was charged by a judge with felony witness-tampering and thrown off a case. Though the charges against him were later dropped without explanation, rumors of unscrupulous behavior continued to swirl around the young lawyer. Still, the Center grew quickly, thanks largely to a sophisticated and continuous direct-mail campaign that Dees directed.

In the early 1980s, finding it increasingly difficult to raise money for his anti-death-penalty work, Dees created Klanwatch, an organization dedicated to exposing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations. Over the next decade, Dees made headlines by using a previously obscure legal principle called “vicarious liability” to bankrupt white-supremacist groups around the country. In a typical action brought in 1989, Dees and Klanwatch won a $ 12.5 million wrongful death suit in civil court against a race agitator and sometime television repairman from California named Tom Metzger. Dees claimed that Metzger and his group, White Aryan Resistance (WAR), were responsible for the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant beaten to death by skinheads in Oregon.

No evidence was ever produced that tied Metzger directly to the crime. Yet, using the same line of reasoning he would later employ to connect mainstream conservatives to the Oklahoma City bombing, Dees was able to convince a jury that Seraw’s murder was “undertaken pursuant to the custom and practice of the defendant [Metzget and WAR] of pursuing its racist goals through violent means.” Metzger was liable, in other words, because his destructive ideas had inspired others to commit destructive acts.

Odious as Metzger was, Dees’s tactics didn’t sit well with some civil libertarians. “Supremacy Verdict Hurts Civil Liberties,” blared an editorial in the leftist magazine In These Times. But the Metzger case did win Dees fame. In 1991, NBC honored him with a television movie called Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story. And of course, the publicity did nothing but good for Dees’s fund-raising efforts back in Montgomery. By 1994, the Center was pulling in an average of $ 41,602 a day from donors, making it one of the most amply funded charities in the country. Today, Dees’s organization has reserves that total close to $ 70 million, many times larger than those of better-known nonprofits like the Sierra Club, the ACLU, the NAACP, and Planned Parenthood.

If the Southern Poverty Law Center under Dees was growing rich, however, its clients — the impoverished black victims of racism featured in its mailings — were not. According to a series of articles published by the Montgomery Advertiser, although Dees and his organizations raised $ 62 million in contributions between 1984 and 1993, only about $ 21 million of those funds was spent on public programs. The rest went into investments, six- figure executive salaries, and the upkeep of the Center’s lavish glass headquarters in downtown Montgomery. Meanwhile, Dees continued to send out fund-raising pitches, largely aimed at donors in distant northern cities, that described the Center as financially desperate.

In one particularly damning example of misleading advertising, Advertiser reporter Dan Morse found that Dees had been featuring a 1987 court case brought by the Center against the Klan in his mailings. To donors, Dees had implied that his client in the case, the mother of a murdered black man named Michael Donald, had received a $ 7 million judgment from the Klan thanks to the Center’s efforts. As it turned out, however, the Klan had been nearly broke when it lost the case. Michael Donald’s mother received less than $ 52,000.

Dees, on the other hand, reaped considerably larger benefits from the lawsuit. Long before the jury had even reached its verdict, Dees began sending out fund-raising letters that included graphic photos of Michael Donald’s corpse. As in the McGovern campaign, emotional pleas met with impressive success. Between 1985 and 1987, the Center raised $ 9.7 million, partly on the strength of the Donald case. In the seven years following the case, the Center referred to the lawsuit in at least 11 different fund- raising pitches, over which time Dees and his associates raised nearly $ 48 million.

During the same period that Dees and his group were taking in millions for their work on behalf of oppressed minority groups, a number of black employees at the Southern Poverty Law Center were complaining about racial bias — including anti-black slurs — in their own office. Of the 13 black former staff members contacted by the Advertiser, 12 reported seeing or experiencing racism at the Center, often from Dees himself. Moreover, for an organization ostensibly dedicated to affrmative action in its strictest manifestations, the Center’s upper management turned out to be surprisingly pale. In 1994, only one of the organization’s eight department heads was black. She ran the mail room.

By the late-1980s, it was becoming clear that, as anything other than a nasty historical curiosity, the Ku Klux Klan was rapidly ceasing to exist. As early as 1986, Dees acknowledged this fact by announcing that the Center planned to change its focus from white- supremacist groups to other causes, particularly lawsuits against anti-abortion activists. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Dees had investments in at least one Montgomery abortion clinic, which was being run by his then-wife, Mary Farmer.) “We’ll be out of this Klan stuff sooner or later,” he told a reporter.

Much later, it turned out. Although Dees publicly admitted more than once that the Ku Klux Klan “doesn’t really exist much” anymore, the Center in 1994 was still sending out fundraising letters claiming “Your help is especially needed now” because of threats from the Klan. Accurate or not, such letters were among the Center’s most reliable sources of income. As one of Dees’s former staff attorneys explained to a reporter, “The market is still wide open for the product, which is black pain and white guilt.”

It’s not clear what Dees would have done for a living had the militia movement not appeared when it did. As it was, the clusters of armed paramilitary organizations that seemed to be popping up all over rural America provided Dees with a perfect threat with which to inflame the generosity of his donors. Before long, with his newly formed Militia Task Force, Dees became a national authority on the loosely bound collection of groups he called the “Patriot movement.” In October 1994, Dees wrote Attorney General Janet Reno to warn her of the threat of militias. After the explosion in Oklahoma City, which he seemed to take as a sign of his own prophetic abilities, Dees took to soapboxes around the country to offer his diagnosis. ” The Patriot movement,” he wrote in materials sent to Reno, “is a potpourri of the American right, from members of the Christian Coalition to the Ku Klux Klan — people united by their hatred of the federal government.”

This last point — that hating the federal government is, if not technically a criminal act, then dangerously close — forms the core of Dees’s new philosophy. In a strange reversal, Dees, like much of the Left in the 1990s, now finds himself squarely on the side of the official establishment: the federal government, law-enforcement agencies, even the military. Dees’s remarks at the National Press Club last month, for example, could have been cribbed directly from a law-and-order address by Spiro Agnew. As Dees explained it, “It’s speakers who put our government down — whether it’s on television, whether it’s on radio talk shows, or whether it’s a member of Congress or candidates who bash our government on a regular basis — that give these paranoid individuals who make up the dangerous element of the militia movement in America a belief that, well, these important people are saying this, it must be true. And it certainly gives them encouragement.”

To combat this danger, Dees advocates the same kind of federal action — more FBI surveillance, fewer civil rights for political extremists — that liberals have spent much of the past 30 years worrying about. And Dees doesn’t just advocate it; he lives it.

For an old-line liberal, Dees seems remarkably enamored of cloak-and-dagger affectations. According to a 1991 People magazine profile, Dees “has so many credit cards with fake names, he sometimes forgets who he is when checking into hotels or making airplane reservations.” The long-time gun- control advocate also frequently carries a pistol in his waistband, protection, he says, from the racists who have tried on many occasions to kill him.

Perhaps more significantly, since the 1970s, the Southern Poverty Law Center has employed informants — “agents,” as Dees calls them — to spy on rightwing organizations. At times, Klanwatch has even run its own witness- protection program. Dees won’t elaborate on the specifics of his intelligence operation. “That’s something we don’t give out,” he says cryptically. But he does allow that “we have a network of people. Some are our people, some are other people’s people that are undercover. We’ve been doing it for 18 years, it’s nothing new.” According to Dees, many informants are recruited when marriages among white supremacists break up. “A girlfriend or wife falls out with her husband and we get this detailed letter about some plot to bomb something. Spouses fall out a lot, you know. There’s nothing worse than a woman scorned,” says Dees, who is currently on his fourth wife.

With all these secret agents, it is strange that Dees seems to have missed a good deal of the antigovernment extremism that has taken place in America over the past two decades — namely, terrorist acts committed by the Left. In fact, Dees can’t name a single one, or the group that committed it. “Since the Weathermen back in the Vietnam War days blew up a building at the Wisconsin University science building, that’s the last such group I knew about,” he says.

Clearly, he hasn’t looked very hard. For during the 1980s — the same period, Dees says, when the government first began cracking down on the racist Right — federal agents were also engaged in a continuing battle with the militant Left, with groups whose plan of action was, if anything, more ambitious and more antigovernment than anything the Klan ever attempted.

In 1987, for instance, the Justice Department charged a Marxist group called the United Freedom Front with “seditious conspiracy,” a charge rarely invoked since the Civil War. According to the indictment, the group bombed at least two chemical plants, three oil-company buildings, two IBM offces, several military installations, and a courthouse, among a number of other targets. In addition, two members of the group, self-described “anti- imperialist revolutionary freedom fighters,” murdered a New Jersey state trooper and fired on various other law-enforcement officers.

Nor was the United Freedom Front the only leftist group to target the government during the 1980s. Throughout the decade, in fact, it was organizations with names like Armed Resistance Unit, the Revolutionary Fighting Group, and the Puerto Rican nationalists of FALN that kept the FBI busiest on the domestic-terrorism front. On a single night in 1982, for example, leftist groups exploded bombs at four different government targets in New York City alone — police headquarters, the federal building, a city jail, and the U.S. district court in the Bronx. A year later, it was not the Christian Coalition but an outfit called Red Guerrilla Resistance Unit that bombed the U.S. Capitol building, blowing the doors off Sen. Robert Byrd’s office in the process.

The prevalence of violence-prone groups on the Left, of course, doesn’t make the Klan or racist militias any less menacing. But it does put some of what Morris Dees says into clearer perspective. Hating government and blowing up buildings is hardly the exclusive dominion of the Right, or of any other political element, though perhaps Dees can be forgiven for ignoring subtleties that might confuse potential donors. As Dees himself admits, “Fund- raising is hard work.”

By Tucker Carlson