Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Jack’s father developed a stubborn austerity excessive even by Depression-era standards. While the rest of the family took the train to visit relatives in California, Orlando saved money by riding his bicycle there from Utah, through seven hundred miles of rough desert terrain. Jack’s father bought a large Tudor house on four wooded acres in a prosperous neighborhood overlooking Mount Olympus—but then rented it out to make extra money, forcing his family to live in the cellar, without indoor plumbing. Jack had to bathe in a laundry tub, which was heated by a nearby coal stove. “We would take craps in the outhouse,” he recalled with distaste. Orlando insisted on keeping the temperature in Jack’s bedroom cold because “it is better for my health” and “saves on the heat,” he wrote in a school essay. “I plunge into the icy room, scramble into my clothes, and dash for the nearest stove . . . with my teeth chattering.” Jack was convinced that his family didn’t need to make such sacrifices but that his father had a “martyr complex” that made him “glory in his poverty.”

  Orlando Anderson also possessed a violent temper. “A smoldering volcano,” Jack called him. “He was shouting all the time . . . He somehow felt that any dictums that he issued would be more effective if he ran up the volume.” Decades later, Jack’s boyhood friend, Darwin Knudsen, still shook his head recalling Orlando’s harsh punishment of Jack’s noisy five-year-old brother: “His father opened his fingers and pinched his nose till the tears just streamed down his face.” Periodically, Orlando’s eruptions became so explosive that he would abandon his family for weeks at a time, heading off suddenly to Alaska or other parts unknown. Unlike young Richard Nixon, who mostly placated or maneuvered around his hot-tempered father, Jack was openly defiant: he simply refused to do the never-ending set of household chores assigned to him. “If I did everything my father yelled at me to do,” Jack later explained, “he would have me spinning . . . the whole day long.”

  Like Frank Nixon, Orlando Anderson tried to build his son’s character by imposing outdoor manual labor, though instead of picking beans, twelve-year-old Jack was forced to thin beets in the scorching summer sun. “Atop the rock-hard Utah soil, on hands and knees, I swatted at beet greens with a sawed-off hoe,” Jack later wrote. After two weeks, his knees raw with scars and “cooked” from the desert heat, “I abruptly quit, pedaled my bike over to the nearest newspaper, the Murray Eagle, and talked my way into a reporting job.” It was a pivotal decision in Anderson’s life, both personally and professionally. “Jack psychologically escaped from his father when he took that job,” said his friend Knudsen. “And I think one of the driving forces in Jack’s behavior was to escape from this rigid discipline.” The driving force to escape—and to triumph over arbitrary authority—would last the rest of his life.

  Jack proved a natural reporter and his new job earned seven dollars a week, a sizable sum for a twelve-year-old. He used the money to buy a typewriter, then took typing lessons and learned shorthand. “Jack rode his bicycle to every fire and every accident he could pedal his way to,” a classmate recalled. His first exposé, about a dangerously narrow bridge where a local paperboy had broken his jaw in an accident, led authorities to widen the overpass—and gave the cub reporter his first real taste of the power of the press. Jack’s world began opening up. He visited Utah’s lone left-wing bookstore and overheard the local Communist Party leader discuss overthrowing the U.S. government. No news story resulted, but Jack contacted the FBI, which created the first of what would become more than fifty files on Anderson, whom the agency initially assigned the moniker “Informant 42.” In a back alley of Salt Lake City, Jack also tracked down an opium den and a bordello. “A big black madam came to the door and brought us in,” remembered a friend of Jack’s who tagged along. “She brought us three girls to choose from. Jack took one look at the girls and said, ‘Is that the best you got?’ The madam chased us out of the apartment.”

  In addition to journalism, Jack starred in school plays, was elected student body president, and became an Eagle Scout. Unlike the young Nixon, Anderson was a popular boy. He pored over his school yearbook looking for pictures of the prettiest girls to ask out on dates. “I used to get on at the bus stop and there would be a group of cute girls crowded around him,” a classmate remembered. His father disliked all of it. Jack was “uppity-up,” Orlando recalled resentfully decades later. “He was very much for himself. I thought he should have been more common. He wanted to be in the limelight.” Orlando feared that Jack’s success might make his two younger brothers feel inadequate, so he boycotted Jack’s high school graduation ceremony, where his son was valedictorian. “He, in his inappropriate and foolish way, was trying to say, ‘Jack’s getting too many honors, so I won’t go,’ ” Anderson explained.

  Jack’s brother Warren believed that their father’s disapproval had a simple cause: jealousy. Jack’s aspirations were a reminder of the dreams Orlando once held but had not achieved. Worse, beginning even in childhood, Jack was succeeding where his father had failed. “All these high ambitions he’s got,” Orlando snorted angrily as his son left home after high school. “He’ll be slapped back, because he’s not that smart.” But his father’s efforts to put Jack in his place only seemed to have the opposite effect. “In trying to restrain his son’s ambition,” a fellow journalist later wrote, “Orlando unleashed it a hundredfold.”

  Jack began reporting for the Salt Lake Tribune while he was still in high school. It was the leading newspaper in the state, and he continued working there full-time while also taking classes at the University of Utah. But the lure of the library was no match for the excitement of the city desk; within a year, he dropped out of college because “it seemed like a waste of time.”

  He decided to expose a secret polygamous Mormon sect by going undercover to infiltrate it. Without telling his father, Jack borrowed Orlando’s 1936 Plymouth to attend polygamy meetings, pretending that he wanted to join. Soon, the car was spotted in suspicious locations, and church elders summoned Orlando and demanded an explanation. Jack’s father came home “in a towering rage” to relate the “unspeakable” accusation that had been lodged against him. Jack fessed up, he remembered with a chuckle, but his father responded with “steam, fire, brimstone! I don’t think he ever forgave me.” The subconscious hostility of his act never seemed to occur to Jack, whose only real lament was that his cover was blown on the story.

  The Mormon church was no more amused than Orlando. Suddenly, nineteen-year-old Jack was told that it was time for him to begin his required two-year religious proselytizing “mission” even though he had not yet reached the customary age of twenty-one. “They wanted me out of that story,” Jack recalled. The young reporter was not happy to interrupt his up-and-coming journalistic career but knew it would “break my parents’ heart if I didn’t go.” After all, to forsake his mission would be tantamount to renouncing Mormonism. Jack’s mother began driving a taxicab to finance his journey. He was assigned to win converts in the rural South. In late 1941, at the Salt Lake City train station, a throng of admiring girls from his church turned out to say goodbye.

  It proved to be quite an adventure. As a lay minister, Jack crisscrossed the country in an old jalopy, journeying to the courthouse squares of small towns in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, literally standing on a wooden soapbox to preach the gospel of the Book of Mormon at street meetings designed to drum up converts among unbelievers. Sometimes his only audience was the town drunk. Jack would start by singing a religious hymn, then offer a prayer, before launching into his sermon. He learned to think quickly on his feet and make his voice heard above the din and indifference of the crowd. Jack developed an old-fashioned evangelist’s pitch that had been used successfully for generations in revivalist tent meetings throughout the South. “He had a tendency to grab an audience by the throat and never relax his grip until he sat down,” a missionary who served with Jack recalled. “The colorful anecdotes he used and the dramatic gyrations he employed would
remain with a listener long after the talk ended.” To keep his audience keyed up, Jack would alter his orations from a scolding shout to a breathless whisper to a righteous roar, a technique he would later repeat on the lecture circuit when he became famous. Jack also went door-to-door knocking on homes in what he called “the moss-covered woods . . . working with the country folk,” dressed in the proselytizer’s classic uniform: white shirt with black suit, shoes, and tie. “It was an assignment that taught pluck, faith, persistence, and the value of a thick skin to ward off the rebuffs of your fellow man,” one observer noted.

  It was a spartan existence. Jack lived in a renovated chicken coop and rose before the sun at four a.m. His mattress had bedbugs, his diet was filled with lard, and he contracted hepatitis. Like all Mormon missionaries, Jack was prohibited from dating local girls. Yet sinful temptations were everywhere, and acting as a lay preacher among the heathen flock proved to be an eye-opening experience for the sheltered young Mormon. “Suddenly I am asked to advise couples, married couples who are having domestic problems of the sort that I didn’t think existed,” Jack marveled. “Oh, believe me, I learned a lot about human nature.” Jack’s own rebellious nature remained unchanged. In Florida, offended by the racial segregation of Jim Crow, he deliberately walked to the back of the bus to sit with African American passengers. Church elders, wary of insulting local authorities, “hauled me up front and gave me a stern lecture,” Jack recalled. He also clashed with his mission’s “hard-headed” president—he was “as bad as my father,” Jack complained—and retaliated by correcting his superior’s ungrammatical English.

  Above all, Jack’s mission showed him how to reach across the divides of race, class, and religion. It expanded the horizons of his constricted Utah upbringing, and trained him to win the trust of strangers with whom he otherwise had little in common. “My missionary experience had taught me that deep in the souls of most people lurks a compulsion to talk about themselves,” Anderson later wrote, “to confide in someone their darkest secrets, to spill what they know—against their own interests, even against their fears. It is as though by retelling their experiences to an appreciative listener, they are showing an otherwise indifferent world that they, too, have trod the earth, have coped, have counted.” It was a critical lesson for the budding muckraker, one he would use time and again in the future as he persuaded reluctant sources to divulge their most intimate secrets.

  After his stint as a missionary, Jack faced the World War II draft. A military physical showed that he was in excellent health; he stood five feet, ten inches tall and weighed 185 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a handsomely ruddy complexion. But Jack admitted that he “didn’t relish the thought of hand-to-hand combat with some Nazi in Germany.” He persuaded a friend from the Boy Scouts who was working for Utah’s influential senator Elbert Thomas to finagle an appointment for him to the navy’s merchant marine officers program. It was, Jack freely acknowledged, a “boondoggle” for the privileged, to try to shield them from combat. But it worked. Jack’s assignment kept him safe until the war was over.

  In the fall of 1944, Jack shipped out to sea in the South Pacific. His job was a modest one, to safeguard lifeboats and provisions. But Jack soon grew as weary of military routines as he once did of thinning beets—and with similar results. In the spring of 1945, as the war wound down, he defected from duty and simply walked away from his station. Jack once again got his friend on Senator Thomas’s staff to intervene, this time so that he could leave the navy and instead file dispatches from Asia as a journalist. “I can serve my country better . . . as a reporter than sailing as an ordinary seaman,” he argued in a letter home, because his news stories “carry a high morale value, both for the boys about whom they are written and their friends who read about them at home.” But Jack’s local draft board was not persuaded; it forwarded his name to the FBI for investigation. Jack’s father was similarly unconvinced and wrote a characteristically intemperate letter to Senator Thomas, accusing him of helping Jack avoid the draft. Jack’s friend denied any favoritism, but warned Orlando that because Jack had already jumped ship “the possibility of his [criminal] indictment seemed pretty serious.” Fortunately, the staffer said, Senator Thomas was able “to clear up an apparent misunderstanding so that he would not be prosecuted” for draft-dodging.

  Jack’s efforts to outwit his draft board would later be used against him by wounded targets of his political exposés. The incident also foreshadowed the reporter’s willingness to cut corners if it proved expedient, to ignore the rules applied to lesser mortals, to act first on instinct and ask questions later—if at all. Jack was a young man in a hurry. “My father worked really hard to get away from being raised poor and to show his dad,” Jack’s daughter Laurie said later. Although he did not quite cross the line into illegal draft-dodging, he demonstrated an early and telling ability to push the limits of what he could get away with and then wiggle his way out of trouble. This, too, would become a hallmark of Anderson’s later investigative career in Washington.

  Meanwhile, Jack made his way to China and began freelancing as a reporter. His sojourn there as a war correspondent put him in greater danger than if he had stayed in the enclave of his navy officers program. For six weeks, Jack recalled, he was “the only white man” traveling with Chinese guerrillas as they battled for territory “along the Jap-controlled border.” In Chongqing, he met and befriended Communist leader Chou En-lai, who would later become China’s premier, in a dingy building whose windows were “covered with greased brown paper” and located in a “maze of slime-slick alleys that gave off an overpowering stench—a blend of odors rising from open gutters and wafting from a thousand Chinese cooking pots.” Jack’s journalistic connections to the guerrillas attracted the notice of American intelligence officers, who persuaded him to spy on his news sources for the U.S. government. He submitted unsigned reports on “Soviet activity in China” and “Communist influence & morale breakdowns” among GIs.

  Eventually, the Selective Service caught up with Jack and assigned him to serve out the rest of his term in the army. He managed to stay in China by wrangling an assignment in Shanghai, writing for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. “It is hardly like being in the army at all,” he wrote home happily, although he promised “to keep my eyes open for any loopholes that will let me out” altogether. Jack also began freelancing for the Associated Press, using the name “Jack Northman” as a byline. “I do that chiefly to avoid trouble from the army[,] which is fussy about the stuff which its enlisted men write,” he told his parents; “it is too much trouble to submit every little thing for censorship.”

  Jack loved being a foreign correspondent. “Working for Stars and Stripes is the next best thing to being a civilian,” he wrote a friend. His letters home described exotic sights, and he enjoyed shocking his family by telling them more than they needed to know about his treatment for sore feet at the Red Cross: “Our room adjoins the VD ward which is populated with colorful characters who describe their exploits in loud and picturesque language.” When General Dwight Eisenhower visited, Jack “chatted breezily with him, while an assembly of colonels and generals hung timidly in the background, watching eagerly for a smile or nod.” Best of all, Jack had “become a minor celebrity” in Shanghai as a news broadcaster for the best English-language radio station in town: “Wherever I go now, people inquire reverently: ‘Are you the Jack Anderson who broadcasts the news?’ ” he wrote his parents. “Once I got an anonymous phone call, sponsored by a number of girls who giggled at the other end. The spokesman admitted that she couldn’t love me until she met me, but she was willing to take a chance on my looks.”

  Jack was less popular with his military superiors. A colonel “who hates newsmen in general and Anderson in particular” tried to stop his journalistic road trips, Jack told his family. So he threatened his commanding officer: “I reminded him firmly that I was still an accredited correspondent and would cause trouble for him i
n Washington” if necessary. Six months later, Jack’s reporting led navy brass to try to get him suspended after General George Marshall “wired a terse message from Washington, wanting to know how [my] story got out,” he wrote his parents. But Stars and Stripes backed Anderson up and “I steadfastly refused to tell where I learned the story on the grounds that a newsman’s sources are a newsman’s secret. Admirals and Generals sputtered and sweated under their collars. But no order to shoot me at sunrise has yet been posted.”

  None was. In November 1946, Jack received an honorable discharge from the military. He soon headed home, and then on to Washington to begin his career as a muckraker.

  Jack Anderson’s successful clashes with military superiors reinforced his instinctive rebelliousness and his desire to use journalism to challenge authority. But his religion also influenced his crusading career, which he regarded as a “calling” from God. Mormon theology preaches that life is an eternal struggle between good and evil, and this black-and-white view of the world would be reflected in Anderson’s reporting, which often divided the world into villains and victims, saints and sinners. Anderson also shared the traditional Mormon suspicion of government, which had so often persecuted his ancestors; this, too, would become a critical theme of his exposés. Indeed, Anderson’s syndicated column would reflect the puritanical belief that power was inherently contaminated by a kind of original sin: political leaders especially were prone to corruption and needed to be vigilantly watched to ensure they did not abuse their position. Because the Mormon faith holds that God inspired the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment, Anderson sincerely believed that his muckraking furthered the Lord’s work.