Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  In May, as the presidential primaries approached their climax, the “Merry-Go-Round” revealed Kennedy’s previously secret role in spying on King, whose assassination the previous month was still a fresh, deep wound in the African American community. Anderson and Pearson cited classified documents to explain how Kennedy’s decision gave the FBI license to snoop on the sex life of the civil rights leader. King “has been having an illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist in Los Angeles since 1962,” the columnists quoted FBI memos as saying. “King calls this woman every Wednesday and meets her in various cities throughout the country.” Because RFK denied any role in spying on King, Pearson and Anderson declared, the FBI documents were “very important in gauging Kennedy’s qualifications to be President and whether he is telling the truth” since “the public has a right to know all of his record before voting.”

  The columns created a furor, making public for the first time both King’s adultery and the FBI spying that unearthed it. As Kennedy barnstormed the country invoking King’s mantle as a defender of the poor and the powerless, the candidate suddenly stood exposed as a hypocritical conspirator in one of the sleaziest governmental abuses of power of the 1960s. The disclosure threatened to destroy Kennedy’s support among black and liberal white voters as he was trying to shed his image as a ruthless backroom operator by championing the plight of minorities and the underprivileged.

  In the wake of the muckrakers’ revelations, RFK was defeated in Oregon’s presidential primary, the first time a member of the golden Kennedy clan had ever lost an election. Worse still, California’s pivotal contest, with its huge block of minority voters, was just one week away. RFK’s campaign feared that the “Merry-Go-Round” columns would be passed out to voters in black neighborhoods. Kennedy told his staff that he wanted to duck televised debates because he might be asked about the embarrassing facts; after changing his mind, he carefully rehearsed his answer with aides so he could be prepared for the inevitable questions.

  Once again, the “Merry-Go-Round” columns were political hits designed to inflict maximum damage. “Of course it was timed,” Anderson later admitted. “Drew got it from [President] Lyndon” Johnson, RFK’s bitter enemy, and then “got me to confirm it with the FBI.” White House logs corroborate that LBJ personally met with Pearson six days before his bugging revelations were published. Attorney General Ramsey Clark also suspected that the President was responsible for the leak and wrote Hoover that he was “deeply troubled by the Drew Pearson–Jack Anderson column,” which “must come from secret documents . . . known to only a very few people” in the government. Clark authorized the FBI director to conduct “whatever investigation you deem feasible to determine how . . . such sensitive information . . . [was] disseminated outside of these offices” in “such a breach of integrity.” But Hoover had only to look in the mirror to spot the culprit because he himself had dispatched his trusted deputy Deke DeLoach to leak the key documentary evidence in the first place. It was Anderson who arranged a lunch with DeLoach at Pearson’s Georgetown mansion, where Hoover’s messenger gave the columnists a copy of RFK’s secret order to bug King, complete with Kennedy’s incriminating signature. DeLoach not only cleared his actions ahead of time with Hoover but spoke directly with President Johnson the day before the “Merry-Go-Round” revelations were published.

  It was a surprising leak in one sense because Hoover disliked Pearson and Anderson almost as much as he hated King and Kennedy. The FBI director had previously called Pearson a “rat” and “a mental case” and termed Anderson “a flea-ridden dog” who was “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.” But Hoover’s loathing of King and Kennedy bordered on the pathological and trumped his distaste for the “Merry-Go-Round” columnists. Besides, by divulging RFK’s role in spying on King’s sex life, Hoover was simultaneously able to wound Kennedy’s presidential campaign and besmirch the martyred civil rights leader’s moral character.

  Instead of following Attorney General Clark’s instructions to investigate the leak, Hoover engaged in a skillful cover-up to conceal his own culpability. With the help of his underling DeLoach, the veteran Washington bureaucrats created a paper trail that pointed blame elsewhere. “Jack Anderson called and stated he wanted to speak in confidence” about the King wiretaps, DeLoach wrote in one memo. “I told him if it concerned an official matter I could not agree with this stipulation.” DeLoach conveniently omitted the fact that he had already given secret documents to Anderson at their recent lunch. Hoover, who had personally approved the leak, jokingly asked DeLoach, “How did Jack Anderson get that information?” DeLoach laughed as he recounted his reply: Anderson is “an excellent investigative reporter as far as I know.” But Hoover’s carefully concocted paper trail allowed him to falsely assure Attorney General Clark that the information given to Anderson and Pearson “did not originate from representatives of this Bureau.” Indeed, Hoover added that “it is inconceivable that any FBI employee having access to such data would volunteer information of this nature to these columnists” given “the unjustified criticism that has been leveled at the FBI over the years by Messrs. Pearson and Anderson.” The choice of the dreaded muckrakers as recipients of Hoover’s broadside was now used to shore up FBI deniability.

  Grateful for their scoop, Pearson and Anderson uncritically parroted the FBI’s false claim that Kennedy, not Hoover, was the driving force behind the King spying. Eventually, Anderson concluded that the leak was a “deliberate bum steer” by the FBI to derail RFK’s presidential campaign and involve King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.” The columnist would eventually correct the record, but only years later, after Hoover was safely dead, long after Anderson had allowed himself to be used to further the FBI director’s slanderous ends.

  Despite it all, Robert Kennedy won the California presidential primary on June 4. That night, after finishing his victory speech, he was gunned down by an assassin and died twenty-five hours later. Yet another roadblock between Richard Nixon and the White House disappeared.

  In August 1968, Democrats chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey to oppose Nixon in the November election. But the party’s Chicago convention was overshadowed by student protests and police violence. In the bloody aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations, the country seemed under siege. Meanwhile, Nixon vowed to restore law and order to America’s streets. He campaigned against permissiveness and harked back to the more tranquil Eisenhower era, pledging to end the war in Vietnam through “peace with honor.” To counter his slippery public image, Nixon initiated a strategy called Operation Candor and began sprinkling his conversation with phrases designed to suggest frankness, such as “Let me make myself perfectly clear.”

  Nixon was determined to avoid the mistakes of his last presidential campaign. He ducked television appearances with opponents and instead hired PR professionals who put together carefully controlled infomercials in which he answered puffball questions served up by preselected supporters. Roger Ailes, the campaign’s twenty-eight-year-old TV producer, was blunt about his approach. “Let’s face it,” the future founder of the right-wing Fox News Channel explained, “a lot of people think Nixon . . . is a bore. They look at him as the kind of kid who [would] always have his homework done and he’d never let you copy. Now you put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away. He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be President.’ I mean, this is how he strikes some people. That’s why these shows are important. To make them forget all that.” The commercials Ailes designed for Nixon were the first widespread adaptation of Madison Avenue advertising techniques to presidential politics. Their success would forever change election campaigns and force Nixon’s successors to imitate the same manipulative tactics.

  Nixon also played hardball, using attack ads and a “Souther
n strategy” that played to racist sentiments though code words while carefully giving the candidate deniability. For example, Ailes deliberately cast a “good, mean” bigoted cabdriver in a TV commercial to give angry working-class white voters someone to identify with; the cabbie’s role was to use semiveiled language to ask Nixon, as Ailes put it, “Awright, mac, what about these niggers?” Meantime, the candidate assiduously avoided reporters. Convinced that his previous criticism of the news media had created “a guilt complex” that made the press “more respectful,” Nixon’s underlying contempt for journalists continued unabated. “They had responded with much kinder treatment than in the old days,” campaign strategist H. R. Haldeman said. “But this never fooled Nixon. He knew they were still the enemy and they could not be trusted.”

  Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson were appalled by Nixon’s resurgence. “For eight years following the Kennedy-Nixon election,” Anderson wrote, Pearson “took satisfaction from the notion that, whichever of his objectives in life had gone awry, he had at least had a hand in keeping down Richard Nixon. But suddenly there he was again, revived, rehabilitated and leading Hubert Humphrey in the polls.” The “Merry-Go-Round” column’s response was predictable. “We upheld Humphrey, of course,” Anderson recalled, “and smote Nixon with standard fare about how the special interests represented by his New York law firm would be in the saddle if the Republican won.” The newsmen recycled their old and familiar Nixon skeletons: his history of Red-baiting, his senatorial slush fund, and the Hughes loan. If elected president, the columnists added, Nixon would “revert to type,” create “dossiers on all potential rivals,” “purge innocent[s],” and command “personal goons” to carry out his orders. The claim seemed grotesquely exaggerated at the time but in fact would prove disturbingly prescient.

  As the campaign moved into its fall finale, Anderson and Pearson tried one last time to persuade gangster Mickey Cohen, now in prison for his various crimes, to link Nixon publicly to the Mafia. Pearson even promised the mobster that Democrats would give him a medical parole if he would help defeat the Republican nominee. This time, with nothing to lose, Cohen agreed to cooperate. He gave the muckrakers a signed statement detailing how he had raised Mob money for Nixon’s 1950 Senate campaign. “I invited approximately two-hundred fifty persons who were working with me in the gambling fraternity” to a fund-raiser at Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel, Cohen said, naming specific hoodlums who were present: “It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money, there wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.” After Nixon delivered a short speech, Cohen recalled, the Mafia men collected more than $17,000 in cash “but this did not meet the quota set by Nixon and [his aide Murray] Chotiner and the group was informed they would stay until the quota was met.” Cohen’s thugs barred the doors to prevent any escape until a total of $26,000—“a considerable piece of money for those days,” worth a quarter of a million dollars today—was handed over.

  Less than a week before the election, Pearson and Anderson unleashed their story, reporting for the first time that they had now “secured a statement from Mickey Cohen” detailing how the gangster had collected cash for Nixon from organized crime. “Nixon and Chotiner were putting the squeeze on the leading gamblers of Southern California,” the newsmen wrote. “Obviously the gamblers had a right to expect something in return.” Not surprisingly, the Republican nominee denounced the charges, thus enabling Anderson and Pearson to produce a follow-up story the next day. “Nixon’s press secretary got into a great dither and sent about 400 telegrams to newspapers all over the United States denying everything,” Pearson said happily. Still, the mobster’s belated confession was viewed with suspicion, not only because of his criminal background, but also because it was promoted by the ardently anti-Nixon “Merry-Go-Round.” The column was largely dismissed by the rest of the media and lost amid the end-of-the-campaign hoopla.

  In the final days of the race, Humphrey came from behind to pull nearly even with Nixon in the polls, thanks in part to the independent presidential candidacy of segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama, who was draining votes from Nixon’s right-wing flank. With Humphrey now in striking distance of victory, Pearson and Anderson made one last, desperate attempt to defeat Nixon by unleashing yet another election-eve exposé, this time questioning his mental stability.

  Richard Nixon had always been tightly wound, anxious, brooding, and socially awkward. He was “a very odd man, an unpleasant man,” his advisor Henry Kissinger later said. “He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.” Despite his undeniable tenacity and cunning, Nixon was otherwise ill suited to the rough-and-tumble of public life. Nixon “never really healed” from the slashing attacks that he generated and inspired in turn, his aide Len Garment believed. “Each layer of scar tissue formed over the last” as Nixon “entered, exited, and re-entered” the national arena, fueled by “a boundless, almost inhuman determination to even the score.” Jack Anderson believed that Nixon suffered from a kind of split personality: shy and thin-skinned in private, harsh and aggressive in public. Nixon referred to his political persona “in the third person as if he were a separate being,” Anderson observed. “It was always that other Nixon, the politician in the spotlight, who did the attacking. But it was the sensitive, private Nixon who was battered by the answering bombardments.”

  During the 1950s, to try to cope with this stress, then-senator Nixon sought out Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a German-trained internist who ran a psychotherapy practice in New York City. From Washington, Nixon made numerous visits to see Hutschnecker in his Manhattan office and stayed in touch with the doctor in the years that followed. Nixon particularly leaned on Hutschnecker during his greatest political crises but eventually stopped visiting him out of fear that the stigma of psychotherapy would produce a scandal. “It is safer for a politician to go to a whorehouse than to see a psychiatrist,” Hutschnecker later explained.

  Still, rumors about “Nixon’s shrink” leaked out. Neighbors and other patients spotted the vice president in Hutschnecker’s Park Avenue office and the psychotherapist himself was less than discreet about his famous client. In 1960, operatives for the Kennedy campaign put together a dossier on Nixon’s mental treatment. Frank Sinatra, then a Kennedy intimate, reportedly peddled a private investigator’s report on Nixon and Hutschnecker to gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who published a snide though veiled reference to it. But JFK, whose own medical skeletons outnumbered Nixon’s, decided not to risk making Nixon’s psychiatric history a public issue in the 1960 race.

  Decades later, after Nixon’s death, more substantive evidence came out about his mental health difficulties. One intimate acknowledged secretly supplying antianxiety medication to his friend. Another, Len Garment, said that Nixon suffered from “pseudo-ulcers and pseudo-colon problems” that were “characteristic of people who have immense anxieties” and were caused “by stress, by aggressive feelings that have to be mastered and controlled.” Dr. Hutschnecker himself revealed that he had diagnosed Nixon’s “neurotic symptoms” and “deep-seated inhibitions” from his “emotionally deprived” childhood, which caused Nixon to regard “love and physical closeness as a diversion that would drain him, deplete him, make him less manly.” Nixon’s “deep depression,” Garment believed, “might have been quite different if he’d had access to antidepressant” drugs developed in later years, when the stigma for such treatment had diminished. Instead, the sad and poignant truth was that the politician felt forced to hide his debilitating condition and never really received proper treatment that might have alleviated it. Hutschnecker later said that Nixon insisted on secrecy out of fear that if voters learned about his counseling sessions, they would believe he “must be cuckoo.”

  In October 1968, in the final lap of the close presidential race, Anderson and Pearson learned about Nixon’s secret visits to his psychotherapist. One of Hutschnecker’s friends sent the muckrakers an “urgent & confidential” letter
stating that the doctor had “concern[s about] Nixon’s instability” and “may be willing to speak freely” about it “in view of the horrible prospect of a Nixon/Agnew victory.” On the morning of October 29, Pearson called Hutschnecker for comment. The columnist informed the physician that he knew about Hutsch-necker’s “psychiatric treatment” of Nixon and wondered whether his former patient was “the right man to have his finger on the nuclear trigger.” Surprised by the question, the doctor acknowledged that Nixon had been a patient but said it was a “delicate matter” that he was “reluctant to talk about.” Hutschnecker asked Pearson to call back later that afternoon after he had finished counseling his other patients.

  That was enough for Pearson, who immediately drafted a special column to send out that evening. “Reports that Richard Nixon has been under psychiatric care in the past have been confirmed by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, prominent New York psychiatrist,” the story announced. Voters are “entitled to a full report on the health of the presidential candidates” because a “presidential prospect’s mental health, even more than his physical fitness, is a matter of national concern” since the chief executive “must be one who at no time needs a psychiatric crutch.”

  Meanwhile, Anderson sought comment from the Nixon camp. Not surprisingly, the candidate denied the alarming allegation but braced for the inevitable eleventh-hour assault by the columnists. “Given the history of the Nixon-Pearson relationship” and the fact that Pearson and Anderson “had tangled with Nixon in almost every campaign since 1946,” Nixon advisor Herb Klein said, “we expected such a thing just before the election.” Klein and Murray Chotiner urgently contacted Hutschnecker, who claimed he had acknowledged only that Nixon had been a patient, not a psychiatric patient. Because the physician’s practice had once included internal medicine as well as psychotherapy, Nixon’s men suggested that Hutschnecker’s comments had been misconstrued. The doctor hurriedly called the “Merry-Go-Round” office to clarify that he had treated Nixon “only for problems involving internal medicine,” and then only “for a brief period” during the 1950s.