Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  It is no exaggeration to say that Pearson and Anderson flawlessly executed a brilliant and chillingly ruthless political hit, flushing out Nixon’s secret financial transaction just days before the election in a manner calculated to inflict maximum damage in the closely fought race. Still, the muckrakers’ blockbuster exposé did not necessarily play the pivotal role its authors intended. Despite their best efforts, the majority of the news media failed to follow the column’s aggressive lead. “Because Pearson was a persistent critic of Nixon,” one reporter who covered the story wrote, “and because the story broke at the eleventh hour in the campaign, few newspapers picked it up. Those that did reported it in such a fragmentary and cautious manner that readers could make little sense of it.” Most publishers remained overwhelmingly Republican and backed Nixon on both their editorial and news pages, just as they had eight years earlier during his slush fund scandal.

  In the end, Nixon lost to Kennedy by less than one-tenth of one percent in what was then the closest presidential contest ever in American history. The impact of the Hughes exposé was impossible to calculate. It “came too late in the campaign, and the case was too complex, to have a major effect,” one historian concluded. Besides the more sweeping economic, political, and social currents that influenced voters, a host of other factors shaped the outcome as well: the televised debates between the candidates, Eisenhower’s tepid support for his vice president, vote fraud in Texas and Illinois, and Kennedy’s last-minute support for the jailed civil rights leader Martin Luther King, among others. In a race so close, defeat as well as victory had a thousand fathers.

  The day after Nixon conceded the contest, Donald Nixon approached his brother. “I hope I haven’t been responsible for your losing the election,” he said. The Vice President graciously reassured his sibling. But in the years to come, Nixon and his closest advisors privately confided that they believed the Hughes scandal had indeed cost them the White House. Robert Kennedy agreed, saying the “Merry-Go-Round” exposé was a “decisive factor” in Nixon’s defeat. Accurate or not, this perception would haunt Republicans for years.

  Richard Nixon always believed he was the true winner of the 1960 campaign. He blamed not only Anderson and Pearson for their election-eve “smear” but also the Kennedys, whom Nixon called “the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized” who “approached campaign dirty tricks with a roguish relish” that “overcame the critical faculties of many reporters.” Just as Anderson’s eavesdropping escapade helped shape the Vice President’s belief that electronic bugging was commonplace in Washington, so the break-in to recover his incriminating financial documents convinced him that burglary was standard practice in national politics. Nixon vowed that he would never be caught unprepared again, and he would ultimately establish his own corps of hard-nosed operatives to carry out such espionage and sabotage.

  In the end, of course, Nixon’s cutthroat tactics would become not his salvation but his ruin. “What lost Nixon [the 1960] election,” wrote one reporter who covered it, “was the same mind-set that did him in later in the Watergate scandal . . . His handling of Watergate paralleled his mishandling of the Hughes loan with such exactitude that it appeared that the loan fiasco was a rehearsal of his final disaster. In both instances there was the initial denial that anything was amiss . . . the same behind-the-scenes cover-up, the demeaning of the motives of his critics, the misuse of his own colleagues, the self-pitying portrayal of himself as victim, not offender . . . even a reemergence of covert money from Howard Hughes.”

  Once again, it would be exposed by Jack Anderson.

  4

  COMEBACK

  On the surface at least, Richard Nixon was all smiles as he stood on the Capitol’s inaugural platform in January 1961 and watched his rival John F. Kennedy sworn in as Chief Executive. Despite allegations of ballot box stuffing, Nixon had not publicly challenged the results. “What if I demanded a recount and it turned out that despite the vote fraud Kennedy had still won?” he later wrote. “Charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me throughout history and remove any possibility of a further career.” At the relatively young age of forty-seven, Nixon hoped that a magnanimous concession would keep his political prospects alive for the future.

  A few months later, the defeated politician moved with his family back to California and began planning a comeback by running for governor in his home state. Once again his staff promoted the notion of a “New Nixon” but this time fewer journalists were persuaded. His campaign tactics against Democratic governor Edmund Brown closely resembled those of the Old Nixon. “Is Brown Pink?” bumper stickers asked. Pamphlets denounced Nixon’s opponent as a “Red appeaser” and showed a doctored photo of Brown bowing to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

  But Nixon’s Red-baiting proved less effective in 1962 than it had a dozen years earlier. Voters wanted a governor who would fix potholes and improve schools, not make grand pronouncements on foreign policy. Nixon was widely viewed as wanting to be governor merely as a stepping-stone to the White House. This impression was bolstered when the former vice president denounced rural voters as “fucking local yokels” and refused to meet with regional reporters by saying he “wouldn’t give them the sweat off my balls”—although the comments were too crude for the press to report publicly.

  Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson had no intention of allowing Nixon to return to power. In the six months leading up to the gubernatorial election, they ran twenty-five negative columns on their longtime antagonist, rehashing their top anti-Nixon hits over the years. They also embarked on a campaign to persuade gangster Mickey Cohen to go public about funneling Mafia money to Nixon’s congressional campaigns. Pearson took the mobster and his wife to dinner, wrote letters of recommendation to help his nephew get into medical school, and marketed the racketeer to talent agencies as a motivational speaker. The “Merry-Go-Round” even championed the cause of Cohen’s mistress, urging a pardon for the prostitute-turned-porn-star who was jailed after police found drugs hidden in her brassiere. (“I’m inclined to get on my white steed and go charging off for various lost causes,” Pearson admitted in his diary, “but this is one which I don’t enthuse over.”) Still, despite the wooing, Cohen was not ready to accuse Nixon publicly. So the newsmen focused instead on “the dynamite-laden” Howard Hughes loan, the Nixons’ “family skeleton.” Although Pearson and Anderson uncovered no new information, they managed to turn their two-year-old exposé into one of the single biggest issues in the race. “I must have answered the question about the Hughes loan at least a hundred times,” Nixon complained. “The media loved the story and played it up big—both because it made such tantalizing copy and because it was so damaging to me.”

  On Election Day, Nixon lost the gubernatorial race by five percentage points. Afterward, he delivered his famously embittered attack on “all the members of the press [who] are so delighted that I have lost.” He thrust his clenched fist at reporters: “For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you’ve had a lot of fun—a lot of fun—that you’ve had an opportunity to attack me.” Scowling fiercely, lips tight, Nixon glared: “But as I leave you I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing.” An artificial smile: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

  Yet while Nixon blamed a biased media for his defeat, the reality once again was that, except for Anderson and Pearson, journalistic invective during campaign was actually quite tame. “The press mainly reported what was said by the two candidates—and, with [few] exception[s], little more,” Nixon’s top PR man acknowledged; “the election was not decided by press coverage.” The politician’s departing outburst was widely regarded as an act of professional suicide that forever tagged Nixon with the “sore loser” label he had so assiduously avoided by graciously congratulating Kennedy on his victory two years earlier. ABC News broadcast what it called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” James Rest
on of The New York Times concluded, “No public figure of our time has ever studied the reporters so much, or understood them so little.”

  Nixon was defiantly unapologetic. “I gave it to them right in the ass,” he told an aide. “It had to be said, goddammit.” Many Americans agreed. In fact, by whipping up right-wing fury at the mainstream media in his “last” news conference, Nixon launched not a final exit but the opening salvo of his political comeback, the foundation for the antipress attack machine he would one day command from the White House.

  For the previous decade, more than any other journalist in the nation, Jack Anderson had devoted himself to exposing Richard Nixon’s financial misconduct. Yet the investigative reporter himself also abused his own position for private gain. With nine young children to feed and a parsimonious boss, Anderson secretly began taking money from Washington news sources whom he covered. Anderson moonlighted for at least one senator by ghostwriting speeches for him, even as he penned positive articles about his congressional patron in the “Merry-Go-Round.” Anderson also accepted free stock from a wealthy entrepreneur and complimentary airplane travel while plugging these benefactors in his column. In addition, according to declassified FBI records, Anderson received thousands of dollars in “loans” from a prominent Washington attorney to whom Anderson referred clients. Although the unwritten rules of journalistic ethics were more lax in that era than today—other reporters also accepted money and gifts from those they wrote about—Anderson’s graft clearly undercut the moral high ground that he claimed for his muckraking mission.

  Anderson’s most notorious financial angel was a Washington fixer named Irv Davidson, a mobbed-up arms broker and lobbyist who peddled influence (and prostitutes) to his shady friends. Davidson’s clients included Mafia don Carlos Marcello, Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza. Dubbed the “Handy Andy of behind-the-scenes Washington,” Davidson looked the part, with gold cuff links, pinky rings, and perfectly manicured nails. “His wardrobe featured sleek, well-tailored suits and alligator shoes,” one of Anderson’s assistants remembered. “He always seemed to be carrying large sums of cash.” Davidson handed out tens of thousands of dollars to Anderson and his family, picking up the reporter’s expenses for office rental and hotels, giving him inside stock tips, even bribing an important news source so that Anderson could gain inside intelligence without technically compromising his integrity.

  Davidson’s largesse to Anderson was no more philanthropic than Howard Hughes’s was to Richard Nixon. “The only thing I ever tried to do was to get Jack to do good stories on my friends,” Davidson later said. “I wanted Jack to keep away from my friends, and he never did any bad articles on them.” Indeed, Anderson duly wrote a number of positive articles about the lobbyist’s notorious sponsors, which Davidson saved in a special file and proudly showed off to visitors. The Washington fixer believed he got his money’s worth because Anderson was “writing articles favorable to [my] clients.”

  How could Anderson justify such a blatant conflict of interest? After all, he relentlessly exposed the same kind of corruption when it involved Richard Nixon and other public officials. But somehow the righteous reporter managed to rationalize comparable behavior when it involved himself. In his eternal balancing of ends and means, the newsman simply believed it was worth the trade-off, that he gained more from the money and inside information that Davidson and other sources provided than he lost by the compromises he had to make in exchange. Certain of his own rectitude, the moralistic Mormon persuaded himself that he was too incorruptible to allow outside business deals with sources to taint the truth of his reporting. “Remember, God had redeemed Jack already, his place in Heaven was assured,” Anderson’s legman James Grady explained. “He could make mistakes but not do wrong because he was doing God’s work and therefore all was forgiven—indeed, ordained and perhaps mandated.”

  Anderson’s financial ties to Davidson were never publicly disclosed during his lifetime. But they nearly destroyed the reporter’s career in 1963, when congressional investigators stumbled onto them as part of a wider probe of foreign lobbying in Washington. Senator J. William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee targeted several suspicious operatives, including Davidson, whose brazen influence-peddling on behalf of his disreputable clients was documented in embarrassing correspondence and bank records subpoenaed by Senate investigators. Fulbright’s staff, led by a young aide named Walter Pincus—who would one day become a leading investigative reporter for The Washington Post—discovered that Davidson not only lavished money and gifts on lawmakers but also on members of the press.

  The worst journalistic offender was Jack Anderson. Senate investigators uncovered six checks totaling the contemporary equivalent of $15,000 that Davidson issued to Anderson and his secretary from the bank account of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua; the subpoenaed paperwork also showed that the lobbyist paid the newsman’s out-of-town hotel expenses. This was just a tiny fraction of the money that Davidson bestowed upon Anderson over the years, but it was damning enough all by itself to threaten the reporter with exposure and ruin. Authorities also discovered that Davidson arranged to hire the son of an Anderson friend, a maneuver the lobbyist acknowledged was “expedient” but which let him “take advantage of this favor to get some good P.R.” from the newsman. According to a Senate aide, the “facts relating to the ‘loans’ between Anderson and Davidson and the ‘favors’ each did for the other, if released publicly, could seriously jeopardize the public ‘image’ of Anderson.” The muckraker reached a similar conclusion and told authorities that “there are a lot of people who are out to get him, and he was very fearful this material would leak.” The irony of an investigative reporter who specialized in leaks trying to squelch one in which he was personally implicated did not seem to occur to Anderson.

  In March 1963, Davidson was forced to testify under oath in a secret congressional hearing. Senators excoriated the lobbyist for being an “influence peddler” but targeted his wheeling-and-dealing with the government, not the news media. The only mention of Anderson was a brief reference to a Los Angeles hotel bill that Davidson paid for the reporter. Senators carefully avoided any discussion of subpoenaed bank records that documented numerous other business transactions between Anderson and the lobbyist. Why? The panel was not afraid to expose the newsman’s financial misconduct, an investigator later explained, but the focus was political, not journalistic, corruption. Once again, Anderson narrowly managed to escape professional destruction.

  Coincidentally, Richard Nixon was also put at risk by the Senate probe. Davidson confided to intimates that he personally delivered a $5,000 cash payoff to the then vice president on behalf of the Somoza dictatorship. Davidson told Anderson about it but the reporter had no way to corroborate the story, so he disguised the identities of the participants and published a cursory description of the transaction:

  Not long ago, two urbane, well-dressed men met briefly in a San Francisco hotel room. Their conversation was so guarded as to be meaningless to anyone else. Then one held out a roll of bills. The other took the money, grinned sheepishly and said: “My fingers are sticky.” This scene, described to me by the one with the wad of money, concluded [a] deal to influence U.S. policy. The money which changed hands was a $5,000 “campaign contribution” to a prominent, widely respected politician from an agent for a Latin American dictator.

  Davidson’s claim that he bribed Nixon was never proved and, except for Anderson’s veiled account, never reported publicly. But it is no wonder that the muckraker’s relentless stalking over the previous decade led the former vice president to despise the newsman with a fear that bordered on the obsessive.

  The irony was inescapable: Nixon and Anderson, two pillars of sanctimonious rectitude, were both purportedly on the take from the same influence peddler. Neither could expose the other without risking disclosure of his own impropriety. Each saw his ugliest reflection i
n his enemy’s likeness.

  In the aftermath of his defeat and humiliating “last” press conference, Nixon turned inward, withdrawing from public life, brooding with self-pity. In private, he lashed out at onetime friends and allies, denouncing former president Eisenhower as a “senile old bastard,” giving free rein to the dark side of his personality, which, at least in public, he had mostly managed to keep in check. Nixon was “a sad, depressed man, as pathetic a national figure as I had ever seen,” a witness recalled. “He was drinking heavily, and my heart went out to his family.” By one account, Nixon’s fury led him to hit his wife; another report claimed that Pat Nixon talked of divorcing her husband. “There was a sadness,” his daughter Tricia Nixon remembered, “and the sadness went on for years.”

  To try to end this despair, the Nixon family left California for New York City. The former vice president joined one of Manhattan’s leading law firms and for the first time began earning a substantial salary. Still, his heart was in politics, not law, and by 1964 he started making preliminary moves to position himself once again as a possible presidential candidate. Nixon began giving speeches around the country and traveling abroad, holding press conferences and making pronouncements on foreign and domestic policy. He also reached out to the news media he had so recently scorned: “My friends in the press—if I have any,” he joked at a stag dinner of the Washington press corps’ Gridiron Club. “If I haven’t any, maybe it is more my fault than theirs. I hope a man can lose his temper once in sixteen years and be forgiven for it.”