Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Nixon’s conciliatory comments and increased visibility produced results. Without actively campaigning, he received more than fifteen thousand write-in votes during New Hampshire’s presidential primary. But in the end, the Republican Party nominated conservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Nixon introduced Goldwater to thunderous applause at the GOP convention, then piled up a raft of political IOUs by making more than 150 campaign appearances for Republican candidates in thirty-six states. After President Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater in the November election, Nixon carefully positioned himself as one of his party’s future presidential possibilities.

  Two years later, during the 1966 midterm elections, Nixon repeated and enhanced his performance. This time, he spoke before more than four hundred Republican groups in forty states, raising money and helping revive the party’s base after the Goldwater debacle. Once again, journalists began writing about a “New Nixon,” whom columnist Walter Lippmann now called “a maturer, mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top” and had “outgrown the ruthless politics of his early days.” According to Nixon aide Len Garment, “The press, lulled by the idea that Nixon had been defanged, cooperated in sounding the theme of his transformation.” When Republicans made significant gains in the midterm election, Nixon received credit for his party’s resurgence.

  The GOP’s success also ushered in a new presidential competitor: California governor-elect Ronald Reagan, a smooth and handsome Hollywood actor beloved by the party’s hard-core activist base. According to The New York Times, “Without a day in public office, [Reagan] is already the favorite Presidential candidate of Republican conservatives.” But in a strange twist, Nixon’s fiercest journalistic antagonists inadvertently—but immeasurably—advanced Nixon’s comeback.

  In October 1967, Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson charged in their column that “a homosexual ring has been operating” on the staff of Governor Ronald Reagan, whose security detail “came up with a tape recording of a sex orgy” involving eight men at a Lake Tahoe cabin leased by gubernatorial aides. Furthermore, the newsmen reported, Reagan “did not move to clean up his office” by firing the advisors until six months after he first learned of the scandal: “It will be very interesting to note what effect the incident has on the Governor’s zooming chances to be president of the United States.”

  The lurid “Merry-Go-Round” account of a gay sex ring ultimately turned out to be exaggerated. “It wasn’t much of a ‘ring,’ ” Anderson later admitted. “Only two of the eight [men] had current ties to the Reagan gubernatorial administration.” But the essence of the report, that Reagan’s staff included gays, was accurate. Two months earlier, the governor had quietly replaced his chief of staff, “a natty dresser with dark good looks and a receding hairline,” and his younger scheduling assistant after being informed by other aides that the two men were “practicing homosexuals.” Reagan’s advisors Edwin Meese, William French Smith, William P. Clark, Stuart Spencer, and Lyn Nofziger, all of whom would later become powerful during Reagan’s presidency, provided their boss with explicit descriptions of sexual acts allegedly committed by the two gubernatorial advisors in various hotel rooms throughout California. In an internal investigation that Nofziger later acknowledged “made the Keystone Cops [sic] look good,” the governor’s loyal if incompetent homosexual-hunters tried—but failed—to tape record the “daisy chain” in flagrante delicto. “I wanted [Reagan] to be elected president,” Nofziger explained, “and I was certain it would hurt his chances if the voters, especially conservatives, who were his base, thought he had surrounded himself with ‘queers.’ Because he came out of the Hollywood scene, where homosexuality was almost the norm, I also feared that rumors would insinuate that he, too, was one.”

  Most newspapers in California, and many around the country, refused to publish the sexually charged “Merry-Go-Round” column, even though the muckrakers had carefully omitted the names of the gay gubernatorial aides. But the day after the article was released, Reagan unwittingly spread the story during an extraordinary news conference in which he baldly denied the allegations: “Rumors are rumors and . . . I just don’t know what you’re talking about, really.” Reporters pressed Reagan on specifics. “In your investigations, have you ever uncovered or discovered a homosexual?” a journalist asked. “No,” the governor falsely replied. Pearson and Anderson were simply “lying,” their report was “scurrilous . . . vicious and dishonest . . . I myself wonder how respectable newspapers can continue to carry the column.” Reagan added that the muckrakers “shouldn’t be using a typewriter and paper” but “a pencil on outbuilding walls.” According to Nofziger, Reagan “was determined not to give [the column] credibility, even if he had to lie. And lie he did.”

  But the governor’s move backfired and focused additional attention on the affair. REAGAN DENIES “HOMO” RUMOR, the San Francisco Examiner blared above its page-one masthead. As the scandal refused to recede, Reagan held another news conference and acknowledged that he might have developed a “credibility gap” but only because he refused to “destroy human beings” who had been caught up in the scandal. When reporters pressed the would-be president further, Reagan again exploded: “I just can’t believe that you fellows want to pursue this question. I told you a few days ago I’d made my last statement on this . . . [The] subject, as far as I’m concerned, is closed. Now do we want to have a press conference or do we want to just stand here with me refusing to talk?” Reagan’s public outburst—and his admission that he had not told the truth before—made clear that he was not yet ready for prime time. He “greatly diminished [his] credibility, a priceless political possession nearly impossible to regain once lost,” columnist Robert Novak wrote; it was “the first truly serious error of his political career with potentially deep national implications,” Novak predicted.

  Amazingly, the original source of the embarrassing publicity turned out to be Reagan’s press secretary Nofziger, who had previously blabbed to several reporters about the “aberrant sexual behavior” in the governor’s office. “I was talking too much in the naïve belief that no one would write the story,” Nofziger later admitted, but Pearson “did what I thought no reporter or columnist would do in those days, because nobody that I knew of had—he wrote about a homosexual scandal. A real ground-breaker for one of the great scandalmongers of our times.” Actually, the Reagan sex scandal was no ground-breaker for the muckrakers; fairly or unfairly, Anderson and Pearson had outed political figures before and would continue to do so again. For Pearson, the rationale was simple: all was fair in the heat of journalistic battle. For Anderson, however, the calculus was different: he viewed politicians’ bedroom behavior as a private matter unless it affected their public actions. “It could be argued that the public had a right to read this story,” Anderson later wrote, but he also understood that the column’s “harsh language was reserved for politicians Drew opposed.” Pearson viewed journalism “essentially as a tool for the advancement of higher causes,” Anderson realized, in which words were “weapons in a just war, with the truth as their only acknowledged restriction—and truth was often a subjective matter. I would raise misgivings with him about a particular tactic, but I was much too bound to him, too largely in agreement with him, to let these misgivings become a cause of personal division.”

  The politician who most benefited from the scandal that Anderson and Pearson exposed was their longtime enemy Richard Nixon, who now emerged as the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner. It was a quirk of fate that Nixon could not have missed as the enemy of his enemy now unintentionally became his friend. After all, each blast from the “Merry-Go-Round,” and each response from Reagan, further fueled the story, diverting attention as Reagan traveled around the country to raise money and test the waters for his presidential bid. Not even the Machiavellian Nixon could have devised a more insidious way to tarnish his rival than to embroil Reagan in a controversy involving homosexuality; but the former vice president made
sure to capitalize on it by personally drafting a statement that opportunistically fanned the scandal’s flames even while self-righteously pretending to do the opposite. “Mr. Nixon,” the press release said, “never dignifies a Pearson column with comment.”

  After tangling with Pearson and Anderson, Reagan’s undeclared presidential campaign came to an end. Pearson claimed that his “Reagan piece on homosexuals . . . pretty well knocked Reagan out of the box as a Republican candidate” and stopped “an attempt by the far right to take over the Republican Party—and the United States.” That, of course, proved to be wishful thinking: Reagan’s time would eventually come, but not for another dozen years, only when the embers from the “Merry-Go-Round” sexposé had finally cooled. For now, Republicans would return to Richard Nixon.

  Nixon began his comeback campaign in the state with the nation’s first presidential primary. “Gentlemen,” he announced in New Hampshire with a smile, “this is not my last press conference.” He won 79 percent of the state’s Republican vote and went on to other overwhelming victories in what proved to be a steady march to his party’s nomination. By the summer of 1968, when the GOP convention met in Miami Beach, Nixon had a commanding majority of delegates and was preparing for a regal coronation. His campaign paid top dollar to reserve the luxurious Hilton Hotel as its convention headquarters. “To prevent incursion by the press,” Nixon aide John Ehrlichman said, “we took stringent security measures, including fencing off the fire escapes” to guard the floors where Nixon and his advisors plotted strategy. But Ehrlichman encountered a nasty surprise when the hotel informed him at the last minute that it was “preempting our reservation” because two rooms had previously been promised to two journalists.

  “Who?” Ehrlichman demanded to know.

  “Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson.”

  “No!” Ehrlichman yelled. “Of all reporters in the world, not those two!”

  It turned out that the hotel was owned by the Teamsters Union, which wanted to curry favor with the investigative columnists by providing them choice accommodations. No doubt Anderson’s pal Irv Davidson, the Teamsters lobbyist who had given the newsmen free lodging at other political conventions, was behind the deal.

  Ehrlichman knew all too well that the “Merry-Go-Round” journalists were Nixon’s “deadliest foes.” Nixon had a particular “phobia about Anderson,” Ehrlichman recognized, and allowing the reporter—with his history of bugging targets in hotel rooms—into the bosom of the Nixon command center risked potential disaster. Even if nothing untoward occurred, Ehrlichman feared that when the high-strung Nixon discovered Anderson’s presence, the candidate “would have a stroke on the very eve of his nomination.” Eventually the Hilton backed down and surrendered the two rooms to the Nixon campaign, but Ehrlichman continued to worry about “the look on Nixon’s face if he had happened to run into Pearson and Anderson in the Hilton elevator one day.”

  Ultimately, Ehrlichman’s fear proved misplaced. In August 1968, the Republican Party once again nominated Richard Nixon for president. Maryland governor Spiro T. Agnew was selected to be his running mate. Richard Nixon’s political exile was over at last.

  Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only Nixon rival wounded by a sex scandal unearthed by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson during the 1968 campaign. So, too, was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, who was now running for president as well. The affair disclosed by the “Merry-Go-Round” did not involve RFK’s own love life or that of his late libertine brother. Rather, Anderson and Pearson revealed Robert Kennedy’s role snooping on the bedroom activities of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. In the end, the sordid spying by the government would nearly be matched by the tawdry tactics of the muckrakers who uncovered it.

  The origin of this scandal, like so many others, could be traced to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Washington’s obsessive collector of sexual gossip, who wielded his secret dossiers as a weapon to blackmail presidents and congressmen into political submission. A backroom bureaucratic brawler without parallel who had become an unchecked institution in the nation’s capital, Hoover was a rabid anti-Communist and right-wing racist who believed blacks genetically inferior to whites. Publicly puritanical and privately voyeuristic, Hoover was also known to harbor a perverse fetish about interracial sex.

  All of these compulsions—racial, sexual, political—converged in Hoover’s hatred of Martin Luther King, whom the FBI director targeted as his unofficial public enemy number one. Convinced that King was conspiring with Communist agitators, Hoover pushed for authority to bug the civil rights leader. Robert Kennedy, then attorney general, was reluctant to authorize wiretaps because he was skeptical that King posed a threat to national security and worried that such spying could create a public scandal. But Kennedy feared Hoover’s wrath even more because the FBI director had amassed a voluminous file on the sexual peccadilloes of his presidential brother. So RFK authorized Hoover to tap King even though the administration had no court order to do so. Federal agents, working with local police, conducted round-the-clock surveillance of the civil rights leader, taking surreptitious photos and planting listening devices in King’s home, office, and hotel rooms.

  The FBI wiretaps unearthed nothing that impugned King’s patriotism. Quite the opposite: instead of disclosing secret links with Communists, the eavesdropping documented his unwavering commitment to nonviolence in his crusade to end segregation. But the wiretaps also revealed King’s womanizing, which Hoover and his minions greeted with undisguised glee. More than a dozen large tape reels were rushed to the FBI laboratory to enhance the audio so that Hoover could personally listen to King’s ribald jokes and the sounds and sighs of group sex. “King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive degenerate sexual urges,” Hoover declared after one briefing on the minister’s love life. After another, Hoover said of the King tapes: “They will destroy the burrhead.”

  To “destroy the burrhead,” the FBI distributed documents quoting some of the most salacious portions of the King tapes throughout Washington, from the White House and federal bureaucracy to members of Congress and the press. As the FBI listened in, the civil rights leader was heard justifying his adultery based on his heavy travel schedule and stressful work. “Fucking is a form of anxiety reduction,” King explained. The minister reportedly described one of his lovers, a curvaceous young blond schoolteacher, as “a piece of tail who can go all night long.” Jack Anderson received a memo alleging that FBI bugs had recorded King “making it with a couple of white girls” while “physical surveillance picked up a picture of King entering a lodging place with a woman of ill repute (show girl or whore) . . . in Las Vegas.” Witnesses who listened to the FBI tapes even recalled hearing a sex orgy in which a voice that sounded like King’s proclaimed rapturously that “I’m fucking for God!” and “I am the best pussy-eater in the world.” The FBI also spread word that King “was loaded”—drunk—when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway and was seen “running naked through [his] Oslo hotel . . . after some babe.”

  The FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished, although exactly what the civil rights leader said and did while bugged is impossible to know for certain: in the mid-1970s, a federal judge ordered the evidence sealed for fifty years. In any case, despite Hoover’s best efforts to leak the dirty details all over town, the Washington press corps did not report King’s marital infidelity; in the mid-1960s, such sensational gossipmongering was still anathema to the mainstream media. Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than politicians did. (By one account, Hoover blocked a critical magazine story by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

  King’s assassination by a white supremacist in April 1968 didn’t stop Hoover’s vilification of the minister. Instead, the worldwide grief over King’s murder made Hoover more determined than ever to spread the s
alacious stories about the martyr’s sex life. The FBI director dispatched his deputy Deke DeLoach to meet with Jack Anderson, who had obsequiously tried to ingratiate himself with the FBI by making the preposterous claim that Hoover “would go down in history for the protection of civil rights.” As a reward, DeLoach told Anderson that the FBI believed that King may have been murdered by a jealous husband, an African American dentist from Los Angeles whose wife was allegedly one of King’s lovers. King may have even fathered the woman’s child, Anderson was informed. DeLoach “told me that I could have the story exclusively, he wasn’t going to pass it on to anybody else,” Anderson recalled, “so I caught the first plane to L.A.” Anderson was “afraid the dentist wouldn’t want to talk to newsmen. So my subterfuge when he answered the door was, ‘We’re from Washington.’ He thought we were from the FBI.” But the reporter quickly ascertained that the mild-mannered dentist played no role in King’s murder. Anderson returned home to Washington empty-handed.

  For the next month, Anderson debated what to do with the information the FBI had leaked about King’s affair. Despite his support for civil rights, Pearson wanted to find a way to publish the juicy story “to show that King was not superhuman.” On the other hand, exposing King’s infidelity was no more newsworthy at that point than when the FBI had first begun leaking details of King’s womanizing four years earlier. Indeed, if anything, King’s assassination made the tale even more squalid than before.

  But the resourceful columnists soon found a way to tell the story by centering it not on adultery by Martin Luther King—too sleazy—nor on the smear tactics of J. Edgar Hoover—too dangerous—but on the role of Robert F. Kennedy, who had approved the King wiretaps yet was now running for president on a strong civil rights platform. No matter that RFK had virtually been blackmailed by Hoover into authorizing the spying. The indisputable fact was that it was Kennedy himself who signed the paperwork permitting warrantless eavesdropping on King.