Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  By Election Day, historian David Greenberg wrote, the column’s “once powerful cannonades faded into background noise” and “no hard proof of corruption emerged to tarnish Nixon irreparably.” Yet despite his political victory, “an air of venality [now] hovered around him, casting suspicion on his every move thereafter.” The new vice president blamed the media in general, and the “Merry-Go-Round” in particular, for serving up a menu of “half-truth” and “smear” against him. This “character assassination,” Nixon later wrote, “permanently and powerfully affected my attitude toward the press” and left “a deep scar which was never to heal completely.”

  Still, while Anderson and Pearson relentlessly hectored Nixon, their reports were frequently censored or watered down by their newspaper outlets. More important, the rest of the media gave only modest attention to their charges and endorsed Nixon’s candidacy by a margin of eight to one. But that didn’t mollify the future president. In spite of his “largely admiring press,” one author noted, Nixon “nonetheless nursed his disillusionment,” developing a “smoldering presumption that the ‘press’ was now largely, almost naturally and inevitably against him.”

  Throughout the 1950s, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson continued to stoke Richard Nixon’s paranoia about the press. Barely a month after the Vice President’s election, before he could even take the oath of office, the newsmen reported that “Washington is buzzing” about a potentially devastating corruption scandal involving Nixon “and the oil industry.” The journalists neglected to mention that they themselves were the primary cause of the buzz and had begun lobbying allies on Capitol Hill to begin a formal investigation. “We have dug up some pretty depressing information on our next Vice President,” Anderson wrote to his parents. The evidence included a damaging letter from the Union Oil Company acknowledging that it paid Nixon “more than $52,000 in the course of this year”—the contemporary equivalent of nearly $500,000—so that the senator would be “serving our whole industry” by providing “anything [we] need in Washington.” The correspondence seemed proof that Nixon was receiving payoffs from powerful oil conglomerates.

  To keep from being sued, Anderson and Pearson avoided specific details in their report: they did not mention Union Oil by name, let alone openly accuse Nixon of bribery. Still, the vice president–elect pronounced the story a “libel” and “forgery” leaked by Democrats “to malign my character and integrity.” That was “highly unlikely,” Anderson believed, but he began “double-checking on the remote possibility that the letter could be a phony.” Pearson circulated a copy of the document to Democrats on Capitol Hill in an effort to foment congressional hearings, which would then allow the “Merry-Go-Round” to report the charges more fully while lessening the risk of a lawsuit from Nixon.

  But the vice president–elect insisted he was innocent and endorsed the idea of an official Senate probe. Staff investigators questioned witnesses and gathered more than five hundred pages of evidence, including testimony from the oil industry executive to whom the incriminating correspondence was addressed, who swore that he never received “that purported letter.” In February 1953, a bipartisan Senate subcommittee unanimously concluded that the Pearson-Anderson document was indeed forged and that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Nixon. The panel traced the fake letter to the Democratic National Committee, which passed it on to the “Merry-Go-Round.” Nixon was vindicated not only in his claim that the story was a hoax but also that it had been disseminated by his enemies to besmirch his reputation. The Vice President’s sense of grievance, already acute, intensified.

  Apparently chastened by their embarrassing mistake, Anderson and Pearson took only minor potshots at Nixon for the next two years. Instead, they focused their firepower on his ally, Joe McCarthy. Ashamed of his earlier collaboration with the senator, Anderson helped attack McCarthy in more than four hundred “Merry-Go-Round” columns and innumerable radio broadcasts. Their friendship came to an abrupt end. When Anderson ran into McCarthy in the halls of Congress, the senator refused to let the reporter near him: “You wait for the next elevator, Jack. I don’t want you stinking up this one.” The insult was tame compared to McCarthy’s retaliation against Pearson, whom he literally beat up at a Washington dinner party. It was Nixon who broke up the fight. “There was Joe McCarthy with his big, thick hands around Pearson’s neck,” Nixon recalled. “Pearson was struggling wildly to getsome air. When McCarthy spotted me, he drew his arm back and slapped Pearson so hard that his head snapped back. ‘That one was for you, Dick,’ he said.” Three days later, McCarthy took advantage of the Constitution’s protection of congressional speech by using the libel-proof Senate floor to denounce Anderson’s boss as a “Moscow-directed character assassin” and “diabolically clever voice of international communism.”

  Pearson and Anderson fought back with escalating attacks in their column, eventually unleashing their ultimate weapon of destruction: the homosexual smear. The muckrakers compiled an extensive dossier filled with unsubstantiated allegations that McCarthy engaged in sexual liaisons with men and leaked the information to Democrats on Capitol Hill and to other newsmen. But homosexuality was so taboo in the 1950s that virtually no politician or journalist dared speak its name in public. So Anderson persuaded a friendly attorney to bring up the sordid rumors in a Nevada court trial, creating legal protection for the charges, thus allowing the “Merry-Go-Round” to safely quote the accusation that McCarthy was “a disreputable pervert.” Anderson and Pearson followed up with innuendo-laced columns on McCarthy’s gay but closeted chief counsel, Roy Cohn, whom they noted was “unusually preoccupied with investigating alleged homosexuals.” The “supposedly fearless McCarthy is deathly afraid of pint-sized” Cohn, the reporters wrote suggestively, because “Cohn knew all the secrets” about the senator, including “extraordinary allegations” involving McCarthy’s “personal life which cannot be repeated here.” By 1954, the rest of the media that had for so long abetted McCarthy by giving him stenographic coverage finally turned on him. So did the Senate itself, which formally condemned McCarthy, ending his four-year rampage.

  Vindicated at last, Anderson and Pearson resumed their attacks on McCarthy’s old collaborator Richard Nixon. As the 1956 election approached, the muckrakers promoted a “Dump Nixon” movement to get President Eisenhower to pick a different running mate in his reelection bid. The “Merry-Go-Round” reported that Nixon’s renomination would create an “almost certain” rift in GOP ranks because opponents would “wage their entire campaign against the vulnerable Californian.”

  Actually, that was already the strategy of Democrats, who had begun targeting Nixon’s hard-nosed operative Murray Chotiner as a way to sully the Vice President. Loud, fat, and rumpled, Chotiner was a notorious wheeler-dealer whose reputation was as oily as his dark, wavy hair. A onetime lawyer for California gangsters, Chotiner had coached Nixon through his slush fund scandal and Red-baiting election campaigns, and was known to brag about his closeness to the Vice President. He was the perfect foil for the ambitious and crusading thirty-one-year-old Senate counsel Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the Democratic senator who was positioning himself to become Nixon’s presidential opponent four years later. Kennedy subpoenaed Chotiner’s financial and legal records and cross-examined him under oath in an unsuccessful effort to tarnish Nixon. RFK also leaked to Anderson and Pearson, who in turn assailed Chotiner as an influence-peddler and mastermind of Nixon’s “communist smear and guilt by association.”

  In the spring of 1956, the newsmen escalated their attacks on the Vice President, reporting that Chotiner was Nixon’s “contact man” with the Mafia and had used a Los Angeles gangster named Mickey Cohen to “collect campaign money” for Nixon “from the underworld.” Unlike the muckrakers’ other recent salvos, this latest accusation was potentially ruinous: no politician with national ambitions could survive if the public discovered he was subsidized by organized crime. A short, moon-faced mobster who got his start in Chicago
with Al Capone, Cohen was notorious for controlling the Mob’s narcotics and gambling operations in California; he had been arrested more than thirty times, including for murder. “I’ve killed no one that in the first place didn’t deserve killing,” the husky-voiced hoodlum declared. It was not a philosophy that Richard Nixon wanted to defend on the campaign trail.

  Cohen would later admit that he raised more than $25,000—the contemporary equivalent of nearly a quarter million dollars—for Nixon from Mafia associates, which he funneled through Chotiner. But at the time, Nixon’s consigliere was able to cover it all up. Chotiner mounted a furious counterattack against the Pearson-Anderson exposé, sending letters to more than a hundred news outlets demanding a correction and apology for their “slanderous” report. In response, the newsmen lobbied Robert Kennedy to launch a new Senate probe and helpfully provided a four-page list of barbed questions to ask Chotiner under oath. But “Bob Kennedy flatly refused to discuss the Chotiner case with me,” Anderson lamented to his boss, and Republicans were able to “bulldoze” further investigation, most likely because congressional Democrats had their own links to the Mob as well. Although Pearson and Anderson refused to retract their story, their damning allegations were widely dismissed in the mistaken belief that they were once again crying wolf.

  None of these attacks inflicted any immediate damage on the Vice President, who was overwhelmingly reelected in November. Still, the secret of Nixon’s Mafia money would hang over his future like a toxic cloud, threatening to destroy everything he had worked for. Nursing his sense of victimization, he would not forget or forgive the reporters who were stalking him.

  In January 1957, forty-four-year-old Richard Nixon became the youngest vice president in history to be sworn in for a second term. Just ten years after arriving in Washington, he was now his party’s heir apparent, the uncontested front-runner for the next Republican presidential nomination.

  Jack Anderson also celebrated his tenth anniversary in the nation’s capital that year. His professional success was nowhere near as meteoric as Nixon’s, but at the age of thirty-five he had solidified his position as the top reporter for Washington’s top columnist and had begun raising a family. Jack met his future wife, an FBI clerk named Olivia “Libby” Farley, in their local Mormon church. “When I saw her, I was immediately struck,” he recalled. “She was a very pretty girl with big dark eyes and dark hair.” Ever the investigative reporter, Jack decided first to do a background check and took one of her relatives to lunch to pump for information. “It was a dirty trick,” he later admitted, “but when you’re in this job you pick up bad habits.” Libby passed Jack’s screening test, but then he had to pass hers. At first he tried to impress her by taking her to fancy restaurants and dropping important Washington names, but soon gave up after realizing it didn’t work. A coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia, she had little patience for pretense. “After he stopped trying to be debonair,” Libby decided, “he was all right.”

  Six months later, Jack introduced his girlfriend to his mother, who was visiting Washington. Libby survived the inspection. As his mom traveled back to Utah, Jack mailed his dad money he owed him and a short note: “The only news is that I have at last decided to get married. I am engaged to a lovely girl, whom Mother met . . . She’s a member of the Church, of course . . . Mother seemed to like her.” Jack and Libby wed in a Mormon temple two hundred miles north of Salt Lake City. Jack’s mother attended the ceremony; his father, as always on chilly terms with his son, did not. Afterward, Libby returned to her job at the FBI, where her supervisors now kept a close watch to make sure she didn’t leak any sensitive information to her new husband.

  Two years later, Libby became pregnant and quit her job to stay home raising children. Five boys and four girls would be born over the next sixteen years. “We have had children by every conceivable means of birth control,” Jack laughed. On his meager $130-a-week salary, finances were tight. “We wore mostly hand-me-downs,” daughter Laurie remembered. “Mom mowed the lawn herself.” Drew Pearson gave out hundred-dollar bonuses to employees who had babies but stopped after the second Anderson child was born; the boss’s generosity was limited by his belief in family planning. Pearson seemed to take pride in his parsimony. He liked to point out that his employees’ office wing was once the slave quarters of the old Georgetown mansion in which his family lived.

  Unfortunately, Pearson was as stingy with praise as he was with money. Although Anderson broke many of the column’s biggest scoops, Pearson “wouldn’t say anything,” Jack complained. “He would just go on to the next story. It was what he expected me to do. It would have been gracious if he had said a nice word. But he never did.” It reminded Jack of his disapproving father, who was born the same year as Pearson. It wasn’t just age that separated the columnist from his underling; it was also class. “Jack was very unsophisticated,” Pearson’s stepson Tyler Abell remembered. “He wore the most God-awful neckties I think I had ever seen . . . Drew certainly didn’t regard him as a member of the family.”

  In 1954, the underpaid legmen who toiled for Pearson in anonymity staged a revolt. Despite his resentments, Jack did not join them—until the dissidents brandished paperwork filched from Pearson’s desk showing that their employer was secretly grooming another reporter as heir to the column. Jack confronted his boss, who admitted the uncomfortable truth. Anderson quit on the spot. He was soon hired as the Washington bureau chief for Parade magazine, a widely read and lucrative if noninvestigative supplement to Sunday newspapers. But within days, Pearson had a change of heart and offered to make Anderson his successor after all. Instead of a raise, Pearson gave Anderson permission to double-dip on the side at Parade. The new arrangement more than tripled Jack’s salary, although it required him to juggle two jobs at once. But the work at Parade was much less time-consuming and its extra money enabled Jack to hire a staff of his own to do legwork for him. He left Pearson’s “slave quarters” and rented an office closer to the action in downtown Washington. Anderson was literally moving away from Pearson’s turf and coming into his own.

  Jack hired Opal Ginn, a secretary in Pearson’s office, to manage his new office. It proved to be a pivotal decision that would shape much of Anderson’s career for the next three decades. A busty, raw-boned redhead from rural Georgia, Opal was a party animal who served as Jack’s eyes and ears on the Washington social circuit, which the teetotaling Mormon avoided. Ferociously devoted to her boss, she hosted secret meetings in her apartment with confidential informants and reportedly donned a disguise to pose as a cleaning lady on Capitol Hill to swipe incriminating documents from a corrupt senator. Often, Opal’s lovers doubled as sources, from high-level elected officials and military officers to prominent newsmen and lobbyists, both married and single. But her heart belonged elsewhere. “It was obvious to everyone that she was in love with Jack,” Anderson’s legman Marc Smolonsky observed. “She just worshipped him.” Opal viewed Anderson as a surrogate husband, her sister remembered, and confided that she turned down a suitor’s marriage proposal because of Jack’s objections. But although “she was madly in love with my dad,” his daughter Laurie said, “Opal respected him too much to ever let him know. He was oblivious to it.”

  But not Jack’s wife. It didn’t help that Opal deliberately scheduled Jack for out-of-town trips on Libby’s birthday and the couple’s wedding anniversary, or that Opal cooked Jack elaborate lunches and babysat his children. “I used to think that Opal was Jack’s Mormon polygamous ‘other’ wife,” Anderson’s reporter James Grady recalled, but like the rest of the “Merry-Go-Round” staff, he eventually became convinced otherwise: “Despite all those kids, sex was never something Jack cared about or was comfortable with and such a liaison would have undercut Jack’s power over Opal and made him vulnerable to her.” The domestic book-ends in Jack’s life, Opal and Libby shared more than just their love of the same man. Both were country girls who fled their limited upbringings to come to the nation’s ca
pital during World War II to work for the federal government. They were part of an unsung legion of women–pre-feminist, post-suffragette—who supported their much-heralded “Greatest Generation” of men.

  Richard Nixon also hired as his secretary a redheaded “government girl” who came to Washington during World War II. Like Opal Ginn, Rose Mary Woods was fiercely dedicated to her boss and would work for him for decades. Neither woman ever married. “These thick-ankled babes were called secretaries but were a lot more than that,” observed Nixon operative Lucianne Goldberg, who knew them both. “They were office wives in every way except sexually, they knew where the bodies were buried, and their loyalty was unquestioning.” In an era when the term career girl was a virtual oxymoron if not an epithet, Woods and Ginn considered themselves married to their jobs. Although each dated important men, none were as powerful as their employers; and the invisible influence these two women wielded behind their desks was enormous. Nixon and Anderson were among the most hated men of their era, and yet their secretaries loved them with an intensity that became the subject of gossip. Both women were so protective, they would take their bosses’ secrets with them to the grave.

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  BUGGING AND BURGLARY

  Richard Nixon’s long climb to the White House began with an attempt to soften his polarizing image. His handlers began promoting what they touted as “the New Nixon.” Most of the press accepted this reinvented persona at face value. Not Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson. Although the publisher of The Washington Post began playing golf with the Vice President and “seems to think he is getting more human,” Pearson noted in his diary, the columnist wasn’t persuaded; he went out of his way to duck social events with Nixon and dispatched Anderson to dig up more dirt on him. The newsmen tried to discover how the Vice President had acquired the money to buy a fancy new nine-thousand-square-foot English Tudor house in Washington, complete with eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, a library, a butler’s pantry, and a solarium. Nixon reportedly confided to a friend that he could not have made the down payment on his new house without his controversial slush fund, but Anderson could find no financial records to prove it—although it was not for want of looking.