Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Throughout his life, Nixon continually returned to the Hiss case as a seminal event, one that provided enduring lessons for his many crises to follow. In particular, Nixon fixated on one of the more bizarre sidebars of the affair: homosexuality. Real or imagined, there was no more virulent accusation that could be hurled at an opponent in the homophobic era of postwar America. It was the ultimate in smears, a kind of sexual nuclear weapon used as a last (usually fatal) resort. Over the next generation, it would become a recurring if veiled leitmotif for both Nixon and Anderson in their wars against their enemies, including each other.

  In the Hiss case, it turned out that Nixon’s key witness, a former Communist named Whittaker Chambers, was, in the indelicate words of J. Edgar Hoover, “an admitted pervert.” Hiss claimed that Chambers framed him as a spy because he was a “spurned homosexual” who formed “some obscure kind of love attachment” to Hiss and sought revenge “out of jealousy and resentment” after his advances were rebuffed. That Chambers was gay is not disputed, but whether he implicated Hiss as sexual retribution is pure speculation. Nixon, however, became convinced that Chambers and Hiss had been lovers and that this was the Rosetta stone that explained their covert alliance. Decades later, as president, the homophobic Nixon would often draw parallels to the Hiss case and assert, without any evidence, that Vietnam-era figures who made classified documents public—including Jack Anderson—must also have done so because of homosexuality. Anderson shared Nixon’s homophobia and would level the same libel at his own targets of opportunity, including Nixon’s White House aides. Ultimately, both Nixon and Anderson were products of the same sexual paranoia and promulgators of its slander.

  In a strange twist of fate, Richard Nixon’s rapid rise was helped immeasurably by an accidental ally: Jack Anderson. As the congressional probe of Alger Hiss heated up, Anderson exposed Nixon’s chief competitor on the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chairman J. Parnell Thomas. Anderson discovered that Congressman Thomas—bald, heavy and pink-fleshed—was an improbable lothario who not only cheated on his wife but was two-timing his longtime secretary with a younger female receptionist who also worked in his Capitol Hill office. The scorned secretary decided to get revenge and turned over paperwork to Anderson showing that Thomas collected illegal kickbacks by putting phantom employees on his congressional payroll—including his daughter-in-law, his wife’s elderly aunt, and his secretary’s maid. “The man at the head of a committee [that is] supposed to be an example of good Americanism practices cheap, tawdry and illegal Americanism,” Anderson and Pearson wrote in the “Merry-Go-Round.” They scoffed at Thomas’s “amazing capabilities for brazenly feeding at the public trough” and—to satisfy Anderson’s source, the jilted secretary—mentioned that “Congressman Thomas usually lunches in his private office with a bottle of premixed martinis” while accompanied by the nubile rival who had replaced the secretary in the chairman’s affections.

  Anderson not only exposed the corruption of Nixon’s rival, the newsman also maneuvered behind the scenes to force prosecutors to file criminal charges against Thomas. When top Justice Department officials claimed they could not indict the congressman because of a supposed lack of proof, Anderson hand-delivered the hard evidence, including photostats of canceled checks and names of eyewitnesses. Pearson “believed that to get the job done he must intrude during all phases of the battle,” his legman explained. “Not only would he expose the abuse, he would hound the tribunal until it investigated, instruct witnesses on their testimony, propagandize the galleries, help draft the remedial legislation, and write a popular history of the affair.” The strategy meant being more than just a reporter covering events; he was also a “maximum politico—part intelligence sleuth, part commentator, part lobbyist, part propagandist, part conspirator, part caucus-master.” Thomas served nine months in prison.

  Meanwhile, Nixon took advantage of the chairman’s absence to grab for himself the whirlwind of publicity from the Hiss case. If not for Anderson’s timely exposé, history might have unfolded very differently. Indeed, without this unintentional assistance from his future enemy Jack Anderson, Richard Nixon might never have come to national attention in the first place.

  Three weeks after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, Senator Joseph McCarthy waved a sheet of paper in the air at a gathering of the Republican faithful and claimed that it contained a list of 205 American diplomats who were members of the Communist Party. McCarthy’s incendiary remarks were partly plagiarized from an address Congressman Nixon had recently delivered on the House floor but mostly were invented in an impulsive burst of bombast. “Here I was making this speech,” McCarthy sheepishly confided to J. Edgar Hoover. “I was getting a lot of applause and I got carried away. So I reached into my pocket and I pulled out a laundry slip” and “made it appear like I was really reading from the laundry slip” even though “there was nothing on it. I don’t have any such names.” Nevertheless, the fiercely anti-Communist Hoover leaked classified documents to McCarthy anyway to try to help him back up his manufactured charges.

  So did a youthful news reporter whom McCarthy had befriended, Jack Anderson. At the time, McCarthy “was a pal of mine,” Anderson remembered, “irresponsible to be sure, but a fellow bachelor of vast amiability and an excellent source of inside dope on the Hill.” The freshman senator confessed to Anderson that he was in a jam: “I don’t have a thing. I shot off my mouth. Now I gotta back it up . . . Can you help me? Do you have any facts?” But instead of exposing McCarthy for his demagoguery, Anderson, too, dug into his files to try to find evidence to support the senator’s unverified accusations. “For one thing, I owed him” for all his previous leaks and hoped to get more, the legman later explained; besides, Anderson shared McCarthy’s hostility to communism, which the patriotic Mormon viewed as “an across-the-board onslaught on all the basic beliefs I had been raised in.”

  McCarthy also contacted Congressman Nixon and asked if he had any “ammunition” in his files. By chance, Anderson happened to be in McCarthy’s office when Nixon returned the senator’s call: “For ten minutes, he worked on Congressman Nixon. Repeatedly, McCarthy pressed the theme that he was on the spot, the cause was on the spot, and he needed all the help as he could get. As nearly as I could judge from the McCarthy end of the conversation, Nixon became a backroom collaborator.” Congressman Nixon shared not only his own confidential files but also a hard-won lesson from the Alger Hiss case—to use only vague generalities when accusing the administration of harboring Reds: “You will be in an untenable position if you claim that there are umpteen, or however many, card-carrying Communists in the State Department because you cannot prove that.”

  So Nixon and Anderson were in on the Big Lie from the very beginning, and each did what he could to prop it up. If either man had done otherwise and publicly revealed McCarthy’s deliberate falsehoods, his witch-hunting might have been stopped at the outset. Instead, Nixon and Anderson both expediently put their own short-term advantage above the truth, helping poison American politics for years to come.

  Meanwhile, buoyed by his fame from the Hiss affair, Nixon launched a campaign for the Senate against Democratic congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. The contest drew national notice for its viciousness as Nixon publicly accused Douglas of being “pink down to her underwear” and reinforced his smear by publishing a flyer on pink paper attacking her supposedly subversive voting record. “Don’t vote the Red ticket,” Nixon ads proclaimed, “vote the Red, White, and Blue ticket. Be an American, vote for Nixon.”

  The acrimonious race brought the first glimmers of Nixon’s dark side to the fore. After hearing “somewhat unflattering” comments about him by Congresswoman Douglas, Nixon vowed to an aide, “I’ll castrate her.” In the stress of the campaign, Nixon was even nastier to his wife. In a five-minute obscenity-filled tirade, Nixon lashed out in fury at Pat Nixon, calling his wife a “lousy cunt” and “fucking stupid bitch”—before realizing, to his horror, that a reporter f
or Time magazine was within earshot. The incident was hushed up but those closest to the Republican politician were discovering what the rest of the country would learn a generation later: that behind Nixon’s straitlaced and sanctimonious façade lurked a foul-mouthed rage that could explode under pressure. Nonetheless, in November 1950, at the age of thirty-seven, he was elected with more votes than any other Senate candidate in the nation.

  •

  Less than two years later, in the summer of 1952, Senator Nixon became the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, the running mate of the popular military hero at the head of the ticket, General Dwight Eisenhower. But at the same time, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson discovered that Nixon was the beneficiary of a secret personal slush fund that supplemented his government salary with donations from wealthy California businessmen. The cash, Nixon backers privately acknowledged, was not for his campaign but for the senator himself. One donor said that the purpose was to “see that Dick was denied none of the things that a senator’s station in life required.” Another remembered being “appealed to on the ground that the Nixon family needed a larger home.” In all, Nixon collected more than $18,000—significantly more than his annual salary and the contemporary equivalent of more than $160,000—from real estate, finance, manufacturing, and oil interests, many with substantial federal contracts or pending regulatory issues before the government.

  Worse still, Nixon allegedly used his position in Congress to benefit his patrons. These facts could be devastating, Pearson and Anderson believed, because of Nixon’s self-righteous attacks on corruption in the Truman administration. Still, the slush fund revelation could easily be lost in the midst of the noisy presidential race. The reporters “needed time,” Anderson realized, “time for the campaign to be further evolved and Nixon to emerge an inextricable part of it, time to button down the story beyond wriggling out and to trace the favors received from government by the various contributors to the Nixon fund—for this was the half of the story that could change the fund from a civic enterprise to a criminal conspiracy.”

  As Anderson and Pearson began to dig further, Nixon learned of their investigation. “With considerable care, the vice presidential nominee chose the threat best calculated to deter Drew,” Anderson recalled, “and the ambassador best suited to deliver it.” Nixon’s messenger was his advisor William Rogers, Pearson’s onetime lawyer who would later become President Nixon’s secretary of state. “Dick tells me that Drew is working on [the slush fund] story,” Rogers warned Anderson. “This would be very damaging to him at this time and Dick wanted me to pass on the message that if he’s going to work on that story—it’s one thing for Joe McCarthy to call him a Communist, Joe McCarthy is discredited with a lot of people, but if Richard Nixon joins in on the campaign, it could be very damaging to Drew.” Anderson was taken aback: “Bill, are you sure you want me to deliver that message?” Rogers insisted that he did. “I’ll change my story on Nixon,” Pearson responded defiantly. “I’ll make it stronger.”

  But in September, while Anderson and Pearson were still working to nail down their facts, they were scooped by Nixon himself, whose aides leaked a sanitized and self-serving version of events in an effort to try to spin the forthcoming scandal. The candidate followed up with his infamously overwrought “Checkers” speech, in which he declared himself innocent of wrongdoing, engaged in selective financial disclosure, and vowed to keep the gift of a black-and-white cocker spaniel named Checkers that had been given to his daughters: “And you know the kids love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” Nixon’s prime-time performance, broadcast live to the largest audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech, solidified his hard-core conservative Republican base, securing his place on the ticket and his continuation in public life.

  For Pearson and Anderson, the injury of being scooped on their own story only added to the insult of Nixon’s threatened Communist smear. The reporters were determined to even the score. Anderson checked Nixon’s Senate record “from beginning to end,” the legman told his boss, but the results were disappointing: besides a few sanctimonious quotes about Truman administration corruption that could be embarrassingly juxtaposed against his slush fund scandal, “Nixon’s voting record was pretty much what you might expect, though not as extreme as some of the Republican reactionaries.” Nonetheless, during the remaining six weeks of the campaign, Anderson and Pearson churned out more than two dozen stinging attacks on Nixon. On ABC Radio and in the “Merry-Go-Round” column, the muckrakers “unearthed a slew of thinly substantiated reports about Nixon’s shady transactions,” one historian wrote, “which they fired at Nixon like grapeshot.” They charged that Nixon had illegally hired a Swedish maid; played up his supposed conflicts with the popular Eisenhower; quoted Democrats who made fun of Nixon; and rehashed details about his finances long after his “Checkers” speech had defused the issue with the rest of the press.

  In a frenzy to attack Nixon on the eve of the election, the newsmen falsely reported that the senator and his wife were so eager to save fifty dollars on property taxes that they lied about their assets in a “sworn statement” to California officials. In fact, it was a different couple, also named Richard and Pat Nixon, who signed the tax form in question. Nixon’s attorney demanded a retraction of the “false, fraudulent, unfounded . . . malicious, defamatory and libelous” column. Their own lawyer privately warned Pearson and Anderson that they did not stand “on very strong ground,” but they waited until nineteen days after the election to issue a correction. (Pearson hated to retract a story, Anderson later acknowledged, and “seldom gave targets the benefit of the doubt, ‘maximizing’ his material on the assumption that they were already covering up far worse shenanigans than he would ever get wind of.”)

  The muckrakers were more successful with other exposés. They reported that Nixon had successfully “interceded” with the federal government to try to help a millionaire Romanian exile named Nicolae Malaxa get a large tax break despite “considerable controversy as to whether he is pro-communist.” According to U.S. intelligence agencies, not only was Malaxa embraced by the Communist regime of Romania, he had also been a business partner of Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering’s brother and helped finance the Romanian equivalent of the SS. Yet, as Anderson and Pearson disclosed, after the disreputable Romanian hired Nixon’s old Whittier law firm to represent him, the senator personally wrote a letter to federal officials to try to get Malaxa “a tax reduction of sixty percent.” The story posed much graver risk to Nixon than a casual reader could have understood at the time. Pearson and Anderson received an anonymous tip that Nixon pocketed “$100,000 as a political campaign contribution from Malaxa,” a secret infusion of cash equivalent to nearly $900,000 today. The reporters could not confirm the allegation and did not publish it, but decades later, a retired CIA officer stated that the intelligence agency had indeed obtained a copy of a $100,000 check from Malaxa that was deposited in Nixon’s Whittier bank account as a payoff for Nixon’s support of the Romanian exile. Clearly, the potential threat even from the more limited “Merry-Go-Round” story about Malaxa must have generated alarm at the highest levels of the Nixon campaign.

  In the final days of the race, in repeated attacks on the air and in their column, Anderson and Pearson laid out the case that Nixon used his office to benefit donors to his slush fund and exploited it to enrich himself. Less than a week before Election Day, the muckrakers revealed that Nixon’s public statements about his finances contradicted his confidential tax forms, which the vice presidential nominee had refused to make public; this suggested that Nixon had lied about his fund to the public or to the government—potential fraud. More disturbing, as far as Nixon was concerned, was that the column, “characteristically teeming with innuendo and loose facts, included information from my tax returns. Partisans in the Bureau of Internal Revenue had obviously leaked them.” Twenty years later,
President Nixon would cite this leak in an attempt to excuse his own use of the IRS to target political enemies.

  On November 2, just two days before the election, Pearson and Anderson reminded their large broadcasting audience that Nixon “said that he had never pulled any wires on behalf of the men who contributed to his fund.” But in fact, the newsmen reported, the senator introduced a bill to help two of his donors “get the inside track” on a federal oil lease and lobbied on behalf of his slush fund’s lawyer. Nixon was enraged and fired off an angry telegram demanding IMMEDIATE RETRACTION of this LIBELOUS . . . MALICIOUS MISREPRESENTATION OF FACTS. When ABC Radio offered Nixon equal time to respond, the candidate brushed off the compromise and escalated his pressure: UNLESS A FORMAL RETRACTION IS MADE IN ACCORDANCE WITH MY REQUEST OF LAST NIGHT, ABC MUST ASSUME THE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES.

  Nixon never made good on his threat to sue. In fact, a lawsuit with its protracted legal discovery posed greater risk than benefit to the politician precisely because so many of the reporters’ allegations contained more truth than even they realized at the time. In the end, Anderson concluded, “it was a case of premature exposure, as Nixon’s classic escape quickly demonstrated. Had we been ready, as we soon were, with our stories about Nixon’s reciprocal services [to help his donors], I doubt that the vice presidential nominee would have been able to sell his Boy Scout version of the fund. But Richard Nixon had already won the battle of public opinion by the time we brought up our reserves.”