The eccentric Illinois insurance executive, philanthropist and political financier W. Clement Stone, who has died aged 100, is reputed to have given some $275 million to charity. By that yardstick, his $4.8 million contribution to Richard Nixon's election campaigns was a drop in the bucket. However, the consequences of it reverberate to this day.
Stone's financial backing for the Republicans in the US presidential races of 1968 and 1972 helped swell the ocean of cash which the Nixon team used for its dirty tricks against senator George McGovern and other Democratic contenders. Not surprisingly, Stone's name figured large in the subsequent congressional debates on the Watergate scandal.
In 1974, US legislators reacted by creating the federal election commission to control political donations. Company funding of federal candidates had, in fact, been illegal since 1907, and that law had been reinforced in 1947. But Stone got round it by channelling his money through an independent trust, obliging the election commission to tackle the problem from the other end.
Its solution was to impose limits on the amount that any individual candidate could receive.
However, ingenuity is everything in US campaign funding, and the new rules simply generated an explosive growth of political action committees (PACs) to support a particular cause.
PAC donations were limited to $5,000 for any one candidate, but there was no limit to the number of PACs that could contribute. That ensured that an anti-abortionist smoker who argued that every home should have a machine-gun was never likely to want for cash.
Disillusioned US voters can reasonably blame Stone for the vast quantity of soft money which now pollutes US politics.
Stone, however, was unrepentant, and went to his grave unshaken in his admiration for Nixon and the use that the subsequently disgraced president had made of the cash.
He also convinced himself that Watergate and its aftermath had cleansed his country's political system by encouraging more prosecutions of corrupt public officials. Stone repeatedly claimed that his life was governed by two simple acronyms, PMA and OPM - positive mental attitude, and other people's money.
He apparently developed his belief in the first after his gambler father died in 1905, leaving the family penniless. At the age of six, Stone hawked the Chicago Examiner around the streets to help his mother pay the rent. By 13, he owned a busy newsstand and, by 16, had saved enough money to move to Detroit, where his mother was working as an insurance agent.
Largely uneducated, he joined her in selling cheap accident and life insurance policies door-to-door. He also became a devotee of the inspirational writings of Norman Vincent Peale.
In addition, Stone seemed to have inherited some of his father's gambling instinct. At 20, he borrowed $100, returned to Chicago and rented a city-centre office at $25 a month. His slender capital did not run out. Within days, he was earning at the rate of $100 a week, selling accident insurance on commission.
Eight years later, in spite of the Wall Street crash, Stone had established a national network of salesmen. His strategy was to find poorly educated people anxious to better themselves, drill a simple sales pitch into their memory, and fan them out across the country.
The deepening slump had generated a vast movement of people hoping to find jobs in other states, and Stone's Combined Insurance Company made a fortune by offering them six-month travel insurance for $3.
As other firms began to falter, Stone bought them up, often showing great ingenuity. He acquired one Pennsylvania insurance company with a loan from a bank in Baltimore: the bank seemed to have forgotten that it already owned the firm whose purchase it had funded.
As these consolidations continued and the money rolled in, Stone turned to preaching his philosophy of success to a wider world. He founded the monthly magazine Success Unlimited and published several inspirational books, with titles like Science Of Success. He also undertook lecture tours at which any sign of inattention would provoke him to yell "Bingo" at the offenders. His employees were also required to start their working day with the mantra, "I feel happy, I feel healthy, I feel ter-r-r-ific." This inexhaustible personal zeal was also harnessed to the evangelical Christianity which underlay much of Stone's charitable activity. He gave enormous sums to the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America, and to a range of national educational projects. He is survived by his wife Jessie, whom he married in 1923, and one of their three children.
William Clement Stone, entrepreneur and philanthropist, born May 4th, 1902; died September 3rd, 2002