Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Hoover then pronounced himself satisfied with the denials of the President’s staff and passed word to Anderson that he had been “misinformed” about the gay sex ring. At the time, White House aides felt “appreciation” and “gratitude.” But they ultimately realized that they had been had. “Mitchell’s conclusion was that this was an attempt by Hoover to lay a threat across our path,” Haldeman said later, “to keep us in line, remind us of his potential.” Ehrlichman, too, “came to think that Hoover did this to show his claws or ingratiate himself to Nixon—probably both. It was my early introduction to the way the game was played.” None of the White House advisors were savvy enough to realize that it was the devious Chotiner who had instigated the furor in the first place as payback for freezing out the old-time Nixon stalwart.

  Anderson never wrote about the trumped-up scandal in his column, but his complicity in spreading word about it to the FBI was crucial to Chotiner’s designs. It is doubtful that Chotiner confided his true intentions to Anderson, but the seasoned newsman may well have deciphered Chotiner’s underlying motives and chosen to become an accomplice anyway to pave the way for more legitimate leaks in the future. Indeed, Anderson later said he “didn’t believe for a minute that the [homosexuality] reports were true,” but “bounced the rumor off” the FBI “hoping to shake loose” another story, “something less scandalous and more newsworthy.” But of course that was not what the bluffing muckraker told the FBI, according to its report: “Anderson stated that this story would of course be quite a bombshell if it appeared in his and Pearson’s column. He stated that Pearson wanted to print it; however, he, Anderson, was against printing the story until he had further evidence.”

  Hoover was not fooled by the columnists’ familiar Good Cop/Bad Cop technique, “which is the way they work,” he noted disdainfully. The FBI director reminded Nixon’s men that Pearson and Anderson “were the first ones who spotted” homosexuality on the staff of Governor Reagan nineteen months earlier and asserted that the journalistic duo were masters of using “innuendo . . . in such a way that it is not libel, but near it.” Hoover tried to conceal his veiled blackmail by feigning indignation: “My reaction was of such outrage and disgust that I did not want to dignify it,” he told the White House. “This thing is so absurd and typical of Pearson and this fellow Anderson to spread that kind of stuff, but they say it of everybody they don’t like.” Of course, the same was no less true of Hoover himself.

  Only decades later, when he obtained his FBI file, did Anderson learn that his casual bluff had “stirred up a minor panic in the White House and the FBI.” While Anderson’s deliberate disinformation campaign may have helped his source Chotiner by impugning Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the more lasting effect was to strengthen the clout of Hoover, to whom Nixon now felt indebted for derailing a potentially damaging sex scandal. Perhaps it was poetic justice that Anderson himself would become the victim of an equally ludicrous homosexual smear campaign initiated by the President himself. But that would not take place for another two and a half years, only when Nixon began turning to more nefarious means to silence his critics. In the meantime, the episode further fueled White House fear and loathing of its journalistic bête noire.

  Anderson understood the source of the President’s paranoia: “Other presidents looked out the windows of the White House and saw the world. Richard Nixon looked out those windows and saw his own troubled reflection staring back at him.” It did not seem to occur to the muckraker that he was at least partly responsible for the President’s siege mentality.

  Jack Anderson’s offer to wipe Nixon’s slate clean and start anew may have been a temporary ploy, but it wasn’t an outright lie. In the weeks after his inauguration, most “Merry-Go-Round” references to the new president were positive or neutral; and of the few negative stories, almost all were mild editorial comments, not hard-hitting exposés. “During the first months of the Nixon Administration, the column was uncharacteristically observant of the honeymoon tradition,” Anderson wrote. “At the six-month mark, Drew called his staff together to discuss whether or not the time had come to call off the truce and go on the attack. Most of us favored opening up. But Drew decided to give President Nixon more time to reveal his direction. ‘Nixon was working for his ambition until he became president,’ he said. ‘Now he is working for the history books.’ ”

  It was the last staff meeting Pearson ever held. In September 1969, the seventy-one-year-old columnist had a heart attack and died. As “a descendant of the tradition made feared and famous by such earlier practitioners as Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair,” The New York Times editorialized, Pearson “adapted the untiring and often merciless skill of investigative political reporting . . . to the modern idiom of the insider’s gossip.” He “had the conscience of a Quaker and the touch of a stevedore,” The Washington Post eulogized, “robust, free-swinging, sometimes very wild.” One thousand people attended a memorial service at the Washington Cathedral, where Pearson was extolled by the capital’s liberal elite. His ashes were buried on his farm along the Potomac.

  The first hours after Pearson’s death left Anderson in a dreamlike blur. Stunned and upset by his mentor’s death, Anderson paid tribute to his fallen partner in the “Merry-Go-Round” and in a series of interviews with television crews that descended on his home. “I was overwhelmed with grief and suffocated by the challenge of carrying on without him,” Anderson recalled. But his anguish was also tempered by long-simmering resentment over his subordinate role as Pearson’s underpaid workhorse and uncertainty about his future and that of the column. The aristocratic Pearson had always viewed the middlebrow Anderson not as a social equal but as a hired hand, like his cook and butler. “Jack really resented it,” Anderson’s legman Joe Trento recalled. “Jack railed about how Drew mistreated him, how he had nine children to support and Drew never gave him enough money.” At the time of his death, Pearson paid Anderson just $255 a week. Now, even that modest salary was in doubt.

  Could the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” survive the demise of its legendary founder? Most syndicated columns were idiosyncratic one-man operations that inevitably died with their authors. Although Pearson had been the most prominent columnist in America, carried by nearly twice as many newspapers as any other, thirty-six papers abruptly canceled the column in the wake of his death, including the important Los Angeles Times. If the “Merry-Go-Round” managed to survive, would it ever again wield the muckraking might that had made it the scourge of Washington officialdom?

  Even the simple issue of who was in charge was ambiguous. Anderson insisted that Pearson had promised that he would inherit the column but he had nothing in writing to prove it, and Pearson’s stepson, Tyler Abell, “served notice on me that he was taking over the column himself,” Anderson said. Abell’s qualifications were dubious—he was a lawyer, not a reporter, who later frankly acknowledged he lacked the requisite ability to run such a demanding venture—but Anderson was still vulnerable. “Jack was in an absolute panic,” a friend recalled, “incoherent with confusion.” The undeniable reality was that he remained as unknown as Pearson had been famous, despite the fact that the junior partner’s byline had been added to the column four years earlier as a reward for the tireless digging that had produced many of Washington’s most important scoops over the past two decades. Compared to his flamboyant mentor, Anderson seemed, as one journalist put it, “sort of a pastel character” incapable of generating the requisite charisma and controversy essential for captivating a nationwide audience.

  Fortunately for Anderson, the Bell-McClure Syndicate, which distributed the “Merry-Go-Round” column, felt equally vulnerable and rushed to lock him in as Pearson’s successor. Anderson was so eager to seal the deal—and eliminate any possible competition—that he signed the syndicate’s legal contract without even reading it. Pearson’s stepson denounced the arrangement as “inappropriate” and “totally without authorization” but was powerless to stop it. Pearson’s widow was
more accepting and agreed to Anderson’s offer of a thousand dollars a month for use of the “Merry-Go-Round” name. At the age of forty-six, Jack Anderson, the onetime apprentice, was now in charge of the top newspaper column in the nation.

  It was a long way from Cottonwood, Utah. The young Mormon hayseed who headed East after World War II had grown from a callow fact-checker who merely chased Pearson’s leads to the most aggressive and enterprising investigative reporter in Washington. He had supplied the factual firepower that allowed his boss to carry on his high-profile journalistic crusades and then outmaneuvered his rivals to take over the column for himself. After years of subordinating his ego, he was now positioned to make his own mark as he saw fit.

  For both Jack Anderson and Richard Nixon, 1969 would prove to be a watershed year. Twenty-two years after moving to the nation’s capital, both had ascended to the very top of their professions. Despite their change in status, the underlying adversarial nature of their relationship continued as before, dominated by animosity, punctuated by short-lived periods of rapprochement. What was different this time was the clout each man now had at his disposal, and with this greater influence came an escalation of their conflict. As their power increased, so did the stakes of their battles; and what began as little more than a game of “gotcha,” of winning and losing, would eventually involve matters of life and death, war and peace.

  In the fall of 1969, Jack Anderson’s first priority was stabilizing his new business. Some of Drew Pearson’s dozen-person staff quit rather than work for their new, younger boss; others were so burned out that Anderson eased them out the door. Besides the “Merry-Go-Round,” Anderson inherited Pearson’s outstanding bills and unfulfilled lecture and broadcasting commitments, which the overworked new columnist now raced to fulfill. He also needed to find some new reporters to replace the ones who had left, especially a strong second-in-command. Lobbyist Irv Davidson tried to persuade Anderson to hire a newsman named Seymour Freidin, who was secretly moonlighting on the side as a paid operative of both the CIA and President Nixon and undoubtedly would have spied on Anderson as well; the muckraker did not know about this espionage but decided not to bring Freidin aboard anyway. Instead, Anderson chose forty-one-year-old Les Whitten, a veteran of The Washington Post and the Hearst newspaper chain, described by one magazine as “a man of boyish movie star good looks” whose Renaissance-man erudition concealed a tough and hard-bitten contempt for authority. Whitten admired Anderson as a fellow “swashbuckler” who wouldn’t back down in a fight. The new hire became the chief legman for the “Merry-Go-Round,” Anderson’s Anderson.

  The next task was breaking some big stories. “Jack was afraid he’d lose as much as a third of the papers after Drew died,” Whitten remembered. The new columnist “was fighting for his journalistic life,” one magazine reported. “By his own admission Anderson called every friend he had in town . . . to beg and borrow enough stories to stay afloat.” His new team quickly got to work. Their first victims turned out to be top Democratic politicians: in part because they were the most immediate targets of opportunity, in part because Anderson wanted to distinguish himself from Pearson by demonstrating his political independence, and in part because of covert help he received from his new Nixon White House ally, Murray Chotiner.

  In October 1969, Anderson began a series of columns exposing corruption in the office of House Speaker John McCormack, a Democrat from Massachusetts. By planting an undercover intern in the congressman’s Capitol Hill office, Anderson learned that the Speaker’s closest advisor regularly fixed cases on behalf of reputed Mafia figures by impersonating his boss’s distinctive Boston accent in telephone calls to federal agencies. The aide’s “mimicry” of McCormack’s voice, Anderson reported, was “almost perfect” and once “even fooled” President Lyndon Johnson. After Anderson’s columns were published, the Speaker announced that he would retire from Congress and his advisor was sentenced to three years in prison for influence-peddling.

  With the help of Republican sources, Anderson also took aim at Senator Edward Kennedy, the last surviving brother and heir to the political dynasty whose ambitions threatened the President’s reelection. Nixon “wanted to be rid of the Kennedys, once and for all,” one biographer wrote, a wish that essentially came true in July 1969, when the senator drove off a bridge on the Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick, drowning his passenger, twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. The crash became an instant scandal not only because of suspicion that the married Kennedy had been frolicking with the unmarried younger secretary but, more important, because he failed to call in rescuers who might have saved her life in what appeared to be an attempt to shirk responsibility for the tragedy. “It marks the end of Teddy,” the President predicted, and he instructed his staff to “check it out and get it properly exploited.” The White House dispatched its own private eye to the scene. “It’ll be hard to hush this one up,” Nixon enthused. “Too many reporters want to win a Pulitzer Prize.”

  Jack Anderson was particularly hungry to prove himself and soon began publishing sealed deposition transcripts of the secret inquest into the crash. The columnist got these leaks not only from anti-Kennedy Republicans but also by bribing another reporter to filch Time magazine’s in-house memos about the accident. Anderson gathered additional intelligence by provoking Kennedy intimates with deliberately outrageous assertions, playing them off against one another and taking advantage of internal divisions that deepened as the senator’s handlers tried to cope with the disaster. (“One of the perversities of the informant is that he is generally more willing to give you information if he thinks you already have it,” Anderson later explained. “If the word is already out, he is less responsible and identifiable as a source, and besides, if Anderson already knows, what’s the harm in a little elaboration?”)

  In a series of columns, Anderson charged that Kennedy “didn’t tell the whole truth” about how he “invited pretty, young Mary Jo to join him for a midnight swim” and then “set out on a nocturnal adventure.” After crashing his car, Anderson reported, Kennedy “conceived a preposterous, absurd idea” to have his cousin “take the rap” by pretending he had driven the auto. “Kennedy felt it was too late to save Mary Jo,” the newsman wrote, “but it might be possible to save his presidential dream” by “establish[ing] an alibi” for his whereabouts at the time of the accident. Kennedy publicly denied Anderson’s “innuendoes and falsehoods” but declined to discuss specifics. “I wouldn’t make any comment other than it’s untrue,” he told CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite. Other journalists, unable to verify Anderson’s scoops, dismissed them. “The Anderson reconstruction of the Chappaquiddick incident,” Time reported, “is regarded as largely fictional.” But in subsequent years, in-depth investigations by other news organizations corroborated much of the columnist’s reporting.

  The National Enquirer didn’t wait for history to render its verdict. The owner of the supermarket tabloid, an old friend of Drew Pearson, offered to buy Anderson’s secret transcripts of the Chappaquiddick inquest. “Drew’s death had left the office finances in limbo, and I had no money to make payroll,” Anderson recalled. “I paused only to draw a deep breath before I said, ‘How much?’ The offer was $12,500—a huge sum in those days—and I took it.”

  Thanks to the tabloid money, Anderson could afford to hire another legman: twenty-six-year-old Brit Hume, a lanky, long-haired reporter for United Press International who would later catapult to fame as the leading anchorman for the right-leaning Fox News Channel. At his job interview, Hume recalled, Anderson came across as “boastful,” with “a certain severity both in his voice and his expression.” His “hair, once parted near the middle, was now combed forward and across the front, apparently to conceal a receding hairline,” but he could not hide an “ample waistline and a certain over-all fleshiness.” Anderson “dressed like a man who never noticed the passing of the early 1950s,” Hume added, with “baggy, pleated pants that drooped over his shoe tops
, faded white shirts with narrow, non-descript neckties, and brightly colored socks.” This unpretentious bearing was a striking contrast to the patrician Pearson. Anderson “frequently padded around the office” without shoes “and sometimes he would remove his socks to rub his feet or pick at his toes,” Hume remembered. “He also occasionally picked his ear with a paper clip and would emerge from even the most elegant restaurants with a toothpick in his mouth.”

  All of this was more than just a matter of etiquette or pedigree; it also reflected Anderson’s more populist approach to journalism. “He would rather go to a movie than a state dinner, which was fortunate because he was never invited to any,” The New York Times observed. When Pearson’s widow hosted a dinner party with leading senators and Supreme Court justices to help give the new columnist a boost, Anderson was pleasant but never pursued the social entrée it offered. Hume, who attended the elegant gathering, remembers the witheringly sarcastic reaction from a doyen of Washington’s media establishment upon learning that he worked for Anderson: “Have you considered going into journalism?” Hume was stung by the putdown: “You have to remember, at that time being an investigative reporter was like being a janitor—it was necessary but you didn’t get much respect for doing it.”

  Anderson long ago grew accustomed to such snobbery and liked to say that he aimed his column at the average milkman in Kansas City, not the intelligentsia of the Ivy League. “The style is a trifle primitive,” one journalist said of Anderson’s writing, “gauche, aggressive, maudlin . . . it speaks in pungent slang [and] casts a jaundiced eye on the elite . . . Written for the proverbial ‘Kansas City milkman,’ the column has never lost its innocent vision of a nation run by scalawags and stuffed shirts whose gloss of sophistication cannot conceal the inherent probability that they are, in one way or another, inferior to the milkman.”