Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Jack’s journalism was strongly influenced by secular concerns as well. Anderson’s childhood deprivations led to an unabashed populist style that reflexively championed the little guy. His later ostracism from Washington’s elite circles further fueled his iconoclastic reporting and his imperviousness to outside hostility. “On numerous occasions I have thanked my pragmatic parents, who taught me not to put too much stock in the accolades of men,” Anderson wrote in his memoirs. “I would have folded fifty years ago had I worried about winning popularity contests.”

  Perhaps most of all, Jack’s open defiance of his father’s iron will hardened his own drive and antipathy to abuse of power by those in authority. “Over the years, he came to see his work as a heroic candle lit against the darkness of political corruption, greed and arrogance,” one journalist wrote. “About this he is undeniably sincere. But deep inside Jack Anderson—in the intimate, painful place where boundless ambition must reside—a little machine also runs constantly, always has, propelling him ahead in private rebellion and indignation.” As Anderson would soon discover, politics in the nation’s capital would sharpen his well-honed sense of righteousness.

  When he was thirteen, Richard Nixon hung a portrait of Abraham Lincoln over his bed, along with an inscription from the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

  Lives of great men all remind us

  We can make our lives sublime,

  And, departing, leave behind us

  Footprints on the sands of time . . .

  Jack Anderson hung no such inspirational lyrics over his bed when he was a boy. For him, what was sublime was not leaving behind footprints but humbling those who presumed to foist their imprint on others in the first place.

  And so Nixon and Anderson were both unmistakably shaped by their parallel backgrounds even as they reacted in strikingly different ways to them. While Nixon mollified his despotic father, Anderson defied his; while Nixon was a dutiful conformist, Anderson became a rebellious contrarian; while Nixon learned to seek power, Anderson chose to subvert it. Partly, of course, it was the nature of their temperaments: Nixon, the withdrawn loner, anxious and insecure; Anderson, the gregarious leader, stubbornly impish and outrageous. By whatever combination of genetics and environment, the two became polar opposites: On the outside, Nixon was a modest, pious Quaker; on the inside, he was grasping and self-aggrandizing. On the outside, Anderson was righteous and evangelical; on the inside, he was an irreverent rascal. But each was immeasurably driven to prove himself, and each would learn to use merciless means to achieve his ends.

  In the aftermath of World War II, the politician and the journalist would find a wider canvas for their ambitions in the nation’s capital. And in the years ahead, their conflict would come to symbolize a larger clash between the institutions they represented: politics and the press.

  PART II

  RISE TO POWER

  2

  WASHINGTON WHIRL

  When Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson moved to Washington after World War II, the nation’s capital—like the two young men themselves—faced extraordinary change. For more than a century, Washington had been a sleepy Southern town, and reporters there adopted the attitudes—political, social, sartorial—of its leaders. Officials “wore white linen suits in the summer, with Panama hats and black-and-white wing-tip shoes,” commentator David Brinkley recalled, and journalists were “still affecting spats, canes, pince-nez glasses and Homburg hats. To the younger newsmen they looked like European foreign secretaries on their way to an international conference to sell out some innocent and unsuspecting country.” But by the mid-1940s, Washington was a metropolis on the move. The Great Depression and the world war that followed had greatly expanded the government, and the city had trouble keeping up. Trolley cars could hold only a fraction of federal employees commuting to work; rooms to rent were so scarce that civil servants streaming into the capital crowded around newspaper pressrooms to grab first editions and get a jump on housing ads. While Europe struggled to rebuild itself from the devastation of the most destructive war in history, Washington emerged unscathed, the booming capital of the world’s only atomic superpower.

  In November 1946, the Republican Party gained fifty-six seats in the House and thirteen in the Senate, the GOP’s first victory since Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition had taken over Washington fourteen years earlier. The newly elected Eightieth Congress was the most conservative in decades, determined to roll back the liberal social and foreign policies of the New Deal. Freshman congressman Richard Nixon would join and eventually help lead the feisty Republican chorus.

  Jack Anderson’s concerns were considerably more modest. After finally satisfying his draft board, the twenty-four-year-old journalist headed to Washington to land a job because the nation’s capital was clearly “the news center of the world” and as such “the best place for [me] to get established,” Jack wrote his family. “The best newspapermen in the world are here, and I want to ease into their society.” First, Jack needed a place to live. At three dollars a night, his hotel was too expensive to stay in for long, yet the city’s postwar housing shortage left little alternative. (It did not help that local banks refused to cash Jack’s out-of-state checks.) Eventually, with the help of a local Mormon church, he found a small attic room in a pink stucco house near the Washington zoo, furnished with “a narrow hospital trundle bed which fits me as far as the ankles . . . I hang my clothes on a sawed-off broomstick, suspended from the ceiling by string . . . The most attractive feature,” Jack told his parents, “is the price: only $15 per month.”

  Finding work as a reporter proved more difficult, so Anderson enrolled as a part-time student in the evening program at Georgetown University. “It is a fusty, old-fogey Catholic university,” he wrote his family, “straggled with ivy on the outside and mental cobwebs on the inside. The lectures are dry, dull, profound. The books are thick, involved, wearisome.” After covering war and revolution abroad, Jack longed to be back in the action. He soon abandoned his studies. Anderson considered writing a book about his adventures as a foreign correspondent but feared his ordinary-sounding name was a handicap. There are “a million other Jack Andersons,” he complained; he needed a “distinctive, unusual name.” Since he had already begun using Northman, his middle name, as his byline in Asia—ostensibly to avoid getting in trouble with the military when he filed dispatches for the Associated Press—he decided to adopt it as his permanent nom de plume. His father was furious. Jack had renounced the Anderson side of the family, Orlando believed, and was clearly ashamed of him; obviously, he had failed as a father. Jack replied in letters home that he meant “nothing personal” by the name change; it “was a simple expedient” made “for cold professional reasons only.” Jack seemed blind to the hurt he caused and scolded Orlando for “indulging in self pity far beyond what is good for you.” He told his father: “Quell your explosive disposition, swallow some of your intolerance and crawl out of the pit of worry and pity that you have dug for yourself.” But in the end, Jack decided to revert to the Anderson name after all.

  In May 1947, Jack got the break that would launch his career. He was hired as a researcher by syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. It would prove to be the single most important event in Jack’s professional life; all that he would become in the next half century grew out of his apprenticeship under the tutelage of the most controversial investigative reporter of his era. “The name Drew Pearson evoked the image of the ubiquitous, hyperactive news hawk,” Anderson recalled, “with open collar, clipped mustache, the inevitable reporter’s hat set back on his head, fast-talking into a mike.” Time magazine called Pearson “the most intensely feared and hated man in Washington” thanks to his “ruthless, theatrical, crusading, high-voltage, hypodermic journalism.” Pearson’s syndicated column ran in more newspapers than any other in the country, with an audience of forty million; another twenty million listened to him religiously on his weekly radio news broadcast. “In a career span
ning nine presidents,” one writer observed, “his millions of words reached more Americans regularly than those of any other journalist, novelist, entertainer, preacher or politician.”

  Pearson was an unabashed liberal, a combative Quaker who used journalism to crusade for global peace—and smite those who got in his way. He started his column, the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” in 1932, as an antidote what he called the “trivial, reactionary and subservient” newspapers of the day, which were overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. Pearson wrote in a folksy colloquial style, sprinkling his column with such stock subheads as “Washington Whispers” and “Washington Whirl,” literally awarding favored politicians a brass ring “good for one free ride on the ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round.’ ” It was a kind of cross between the reformist muckraking of Lincoln Steffens and the broadcast tattletale of Walter Winchell, an unusual hybrid that Jack Anderson would imitate and extend into the early twenty-first century.

  Pearson was best known for his lacerating attacks on public officials, which earned him the nickname “the Scorpion on the Potomac.” During World War II, he exposed General George Patton for hitting a shivering soldier who had been hospitalized for shell shock. Pearson also helped turn public opinion against Father Charles Coughlin, the right-wing radio priest, by revealing that the man of the cloth had paid $68,000 as compensation for “alienating the affections” of a physician’s wife. Douglas MacArthur, another bellicose general attacked by Pearson, filed a libel lawsuit against the newsman—only to back down after Pearson threatened to make public embarrassing love letters the middle-aged general had written his teenage mistress. Tangling with Pearson could literally be fatal. After reading a “Merry-Go-Round” account of how he used his office to profit from a secret investment in cotton futures, one U.S. senator dropped dead from a stroke. And President Truman’s defense secretary, James Forrestal, committed suicide after the columnist let loose a series of attacks that were widely blamed for his death.

  On the surface, Pearson seemed an unlikely character assassin. “The polecat in his lair was disarmingly mild,” Anderson remembered. “He had an impressive, high forehead under thinning light-brown hair, and a general look of learnedness that made him seem too dignified and elegant for the rough-and-tumble he in fact relished.” But underneath Pearson’s aristocratic demeanor was a Machiavellian toughness that did not shrink at using blackmail and bribery to further his goals. He put eavesdropping waiters and chauffeurs on his payroll, bribed a navy clerk to leak classified data, and ordered an assistant to break into the desk of a prominent Washington attorney to search for incriminating financial records. He stymied World War II censors, foiled government eavesdroppers, and outwitted federal agents who tailed him—although on at least one occasion agents managed to penetrate his office and “extract” documents from his locked files. All of this foreshadowed the White House attacks that Richard Nixon would one day unleash on Pearson’s successor, Jack Anderson.

  In all, Anderson’s mentor was a man of fierce contradictions: gentle in private but ferocious in public; a pacifist who waged unconditional war on his enemies; a wealthy elitist who championed the common man; an intellectual who wrote with down-to-earth simplicity. Pearson used cynical tricks for idealistic purposes, told lies to uncover truth, and employed unsavory means to advance noble ends. He was, Anderson concluded, “a man of great principle in spite of some of the unprincipled things he did.” The same could one day be said of Anderson himself, for no one would do more to shape the cub reporter’s world-view and professional future.

  Ironically, it was Anderson’s future adversary, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who launched the young journalist on his national career. In the spring of 1947, Hoover phoned to warn Pearson that one of his staff members had been a member of the Communist Party. Pearson’s liberalism notwithstanding, he couldn’t afford to be considered sympathetic to communism. “That’s not compatible with my beliefs,” the columnist informed his left-wing reporter. “You’ll have to leave.” Soon after, Anderson had the good fortune to walk through Pearson’s door looking for work. He “was overly impressed with the fact that I was a war correspondent,” Anderson remembered, “which I advertised by wearing my uniform” to the job interview. Jack offered to work for Pearson on a trial basis for free. A few days later, Pearson theatrically sent a telegram across town to announce his decision: Anderson was hired. His new title: “legman,” an anachronistic newspaper term for an assistant who gathered information on foot. Anderson’s salary was fifty dollars a week. He reported for duty, one chronicler wrote, “a fresh-faced youth in baggy clothes, his hair parted just off center and pomaded, like a small-town salesman.”

  Anderson’s office was housed in Pearson’s mansion, a yellow-brick Federal-style home with polished brass, located on a quiet tree-lined street in Georgetown. A residential wing housed the master’s family and servants; an office wing contained four secretaries and four legmen, including a onetime undercover government sleuth from Prohibition days. It was “a combination newsroom and spy cell,” Anderson recalled, noisy “from the clacking of a news ticker, the clattering of typewriters turning out copy, the continual ringing of ten telephones through the day and far into the night.” Above all, there was the “atmosphere of the clandestine: anonymous phone callers; the mumbo-jumbo of an elementary code we often used because of our assumption that our phones were tapped; the thirty-odd file cabinets that protected our derogatory treasures, standing against the walls locked and portentous.”

  The source of the muckrakers’ power was not just their words but also the vehicle that delivered their message: the syndicated column, which made it impossible for any one newspaper to censor their exposés. While an individual paper might occasionally spike the “Merry-Go-Round,” or, like The Washington Post, relegate it to the comics page, hundreds of other outlets could be counted on to give prominent display to their articles. The syndicated column offered editorial independence and a nationwide platform unequaled by any mere newspaper reporter.

  In his first few months on the job, Anderson helped expose the secret Ku Klux Klan ties of a congressman and then testified before a Senate committee about what he had dug up. For the greenhorn reporter from Utah, it was heady—and intimidating. “I couldn’t ask for a better job, but it will keep me fluttering for some time,” Anderson wrote his parents. “Snooping for scoops isn’t easy.” Still, “I certainly am learning a great deal about inside Washington. Several of the Senators already call me by my first name.” After a dinner party at Pearson’s country estate, Anderson confided in a letter home, the “other guests were a bit out of my class [and] talked about fox hunts and topics [to which] I could hardly contribute much enlightened conversation.”

  Anderson’s unfamiliarity with foxhunts was the least of the obstacles that he encountered in Washington. “I was a laughably naïve Sherlock Holmes to be let loose on the nation’s capital,” he later wrote, “a Mormon in Gomorrah.” The young reporter discovered that Capitol Hill was filled with alcoholism, lechery, and financial corruption. “I did not know what to make of all this, confounding as it did my boyhood visions of heroic figures in marble halls,” Anderson remembered. “I had been brought up to regard the Constitution as a divinely inspired document, literally, and to look upon its protectors—as I assumed presidents and senators to be—with the same reverence that was due the Apostles of my Church.” But “shabbiness in things small and large was so widespread, so confidently strident, that the majority was resigned to it.”

  The political education of Jack Anderson was under way.

  •

  Richard Nixon was also new to Washington that year and was also embarking upon his own political education as a freshman member of the House of Representatives. By the end of his first term, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he catapulted to nationwide attention investigating allegations of Soviet espionage by former State Department official Alger Hiss. It was the formative experience of N
ixon’s career, a model of how to use the apparatus of government and the press to undermine political adversaries. The junior congressman performed brilliantly in the case, outmaneuvering his opponents while stoking anti-Communist hysteria for maximum publicity. “We won the Hiss case in the papers,” Nixon later said. “I had to leak stuff all over the place.” He was assisted by a coterie of seasoned FBI agents and congressional investigators assigned to his Capitol Hill office, one of whom would later be dispatched to spy upon Jack Anderson. “Nixon entered and employed, as few politicians ever do, a shadowy world of operators and fixers,” one writer observed, “as marginally but distinguishably apart from conventional politics as the seamy Los Angeles private eyes of the 1930s and 1940s stood apart from the upstairs, smoky, glass-doored law offices that sometimes employed them. He would strike the alliance and bargain from the beginning—and it was there, an underlying curse of Watergate, at the bitter end.”

  Nixon discovered that his quickest route to fame was by attacking—and creating—opponents. A small-town boy who wanted to be accepted by others, he accepted this Faustian pact, but it came at a heavy psychic cost. Nixon’s emotional wounds would never fully heal, no matter how much he tried to persuade himself that he would rather be respected than loved. Jack Anderson was also a small-town boy who achieved renown in Washington by assailing others. Anderson’s new status as a pariah took genuine adjustment; he had been accustomed since childhood to being well liked. But his more resilient personality made him happier to trade popularity for prominence. When a congressman physically attacked the legman soon after he arrived in Washington, Anderson laughed off the incident and enjoyed the publicity it brought him. Yet during the same time, Nixon brooded about even the modest criticism he received while sending Alger Hiss to prison.