Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Anderson’s new staff learned to imitate the master’s folksy style. “In the ‘Merry-Go-Round,’ people rarely paid for anything, they ‘footed the bill,’ ” Hume explained. “No big shot ever had just an apartment, he had a ‘plush’ apartment.” Leaked transcripts of secret congressional hearings “were the stuff of many ‘ready-made’ ” columns because “they could usually be written from the documents themselves with little other reporting,” except for embellishing with “imaginary descriptions of how the congressmen ‘stormed’ or ‘demanded’ or ‘snorted,’ while the witness ‘squirmed,’ ‘admitted sheepishly’ and ‘insisted angrily.’ ” Anderson advised Hume that to get such transcripts from congressmen, “you’ve got to con them a little. Pretend you know all about whatever they’re doing, even if you don’t . . . If you just get them talking, they’ll sometimes mention things that are of great significance without realizing it.”

  Anderson’s approach began paying off. Six months after he took over the column, thirty-two additional newspapers signed on as clients, almost as many as canceled immediately after Pearson’s death. The Aberdeen, South Dakota, American News was typical: its readers urged the paper to keep publishing the “Merry-Go-Round” by a margin of fifty-nine to one. “Just what other columnist enlightens the public as much as Mr. Anderson regarding the activities of our congressmen?” one reader asked. Another wrote, “We need and want Jack Anderson. We, the public, want the truth about our elected and appointed officials.”

  For Anderson, the worst was now over. An additional three hundred newspapers would syndicate his work over the next decade, giving him more readers than any other columnist in the nation. With adjustments that reflected the personality of its new leader, the “Merry-Go-Round” continued whirling into the future.

  President Nixon took note of the column’s transformation, especially its aggressive new pursuit of Democratic politicians. “I had no intention of selling out to the new Nixon administration,” Anderson said, but he didn’t mind conveying the opposite impression if it would provide access to White House intelligence. His strategy seemed to work. Six weeks after Pearson’s death, the President expressed agreement with an aide that Anderson had begun to take the column “out of the pacifist, leftist” orbit it once occupied and thus “might be well worth working with, despite unpleasant relations in the past.” Unaware that Murray Chotiner had already established a secret back channel to Anderson, Nixon suggested that his advisor John Ehrlichman “be the first one to try” normalizing relations with the muckraker, but the White House aide was afraid to do so.

  Anderson reinforced administration suspicions when he published a false story that targeted thirty-seven-year-old Donald Rumsfeld, the future defense secretary then working as a White House staffer. As Nixon’s “anti-poverty czar,” Anderson wrote, Rumsfeld “has wielded an economic ax on programs for the poor” even while he “used some of the savings to give his own executive suite a more luxurious look, thus reducing the poverty in his immediate surroundings.” The columnist charged that Rumsfeld added a bedroom and private bathroom to his office, along with “expensive lamps [to] give a soft, restful glow to the walls.” As another journalist put it, Anderson had exposed the “head of the poverty program living in sybaritic luxury even as millions of America’s teeming poor did without food and shelter.” The only problem was that the story was not true: Anderson had not even bothered to visit the premises before publishing his column. Rumsfeld invited the newsman to his office to see for himself. Accompanied by his twenty-eight-year-old assistant Dick Cheney, the future vice president, Rumsfeld gave Anderson a tour and the columnist apologized for his error. But no retraction was ever published in the “Merry-Go-Round.”

  Anderson’s mistake gave him only momentary pause. In an odd way, his checkered reputation could even be a tactical asset. “You call up some guy and he thinks, It’s that crazy Jack Anderson, he’ll print anything, so I better explain,” Brit Hume said. “The guy thinks he’s explaining, but as far as we’re concerned he’s confessing.” Anderson’s staff was reckless “in the best sense of the word,” legman Les Whitten maintained. “We did the story and then we worried about it later . . . If it wasn’t true, we’d apologize for it” afterward and hope to get out of trouble. It was not the way reporting was taught in journalism schools, but the fear it generated could be surprisingly useful. On Capitol Hill, “congressional leaders would greet Jack like he was the Pope,” Anderson’s reporter Marc Smolonsky recalled. “They slapped his back and treated him as if he was their best friend.” Even senators who loathed the columnist reached out to him, passing on dirt about their enemies and trying to curry favor in the hope of gaining immunity in case Anderson later discovered their own misdeeds. Such “fear kept them honest,” Whitten said, and “made them think that if they did anything wrong, Jack would find out.”

  Murray Chotiner knew better. After two decades of combat with Anderson, Nixon’s counselor realized that the newsman was only as good as his sources and that leaking to him might be a more effective way to control him than attacking him. Despite the reservations of others in the White House, Chotiner’s clandestine negotiations with Anderson soon produced dividends for both the new President and the new columnist—and led to felonies that would eventually result in a proposed article of impeachment against the Chief Executive.

  George Wallace, the short, oily-haired Alabama governor whose feisty way of jutting out his jaw and curling his lip led writers to compare him to a bantam rooster, had nearly cost Richard Nixon the presidency. An unabashedly racist demagogue who in the early 1960s physically blocked two young black students from integrating the University of Alabama, Wallace had defiantly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In 1968, his independent presidential bid received nearly 14 percent of the vote, mostly from working-class Southern whites who otherwise would have supported Nixon. Because the President’s margin of victory had been less than one percent, he justifiably viewed Wallace as his single greatest threat to reelection four years later. After Nixon’s inauguration, Wallace further fueled White House fears by planning another presidential bid and warning that Republicans “cannot win without the South in the next election.” In response, the President and his aides engineered a secret plan to neutralize Wallace that they dubbed the “Alabama Project.”

  The White House plot to derail Wallace used both bribery and blackmail—as well as Jack Anderson—in one of the Nixon administration’s earliest use of the dirty tricks that would come to full flowering during the Watergate scandal three years later. At the President’s direction, his personal lawyer secretly delivered $400,000 in cash—bundled in stacks of hundred-dollar bills and stuffed into manila envelopes—to bankroll the campaign of Wallace’s gubernatorial rival in Alabama’s Democratic primary. Nixon hoped that embarrassing Wallace in his backyard would limit his ability to drain away conservative votes in the next presidential race.

  At the same time, the administration targeted Wallace for criminal prosecution based on evidence of corruption that Anderson had uncovered sixteen months earlier. The reporter alleged that Wallace received “kickbacks under the table” from state-licensed liquor distributors and “misused state funds for his own political purposes.” In addition, Anderson reported that the law firm Wallace shared with his brother Gerald—“a weasel-like, underweight man with sunken cheeks and cadaverous complexion” widely known as the governor’s “bagman”—had been “raking in large fees from clients interested in influence with the state.” Anderson’s assertions were backed up by “a bundle of cancelled checks, a wad of bank statements and a sheaf of brokerage bills and correspondence.” Lest there be any doubt, the muckraker proclaimed, “We will be happy to assist [authorities] by furnishing documents or testimony.” For good measure, Anderson contacted Internal Revenue Service commissioner Sheldon Cohen, a Democrat appointed to office by President Johnson. “I laid before him everything I could prove, and everything I had
information on but could not prove,” the columnist wrote in an unpublished manuscript. “Cohen took it all in, seemed impressed, and assured me that the IRS would certainly look into these matters.”

  By early 1970, the leads Anderson provided to the government had grown into a full-blown criminal investigation of the Wallace brothers. But details of the sensitive inquiry were tightly held by Nixon’s new command in the IRS, which no longer included Anderson’s old source, Commissioner Cohen. As a result, Anderson complained, “I would not be given squatters’ rights and cut in on” the probe. “Which meant I would have to go higher” in the administration to learn what was happening. After months of currying favor with Murray Chotiner, Anderson decided “the time had come to put the Chotiner connection to the acid test” and “twisted his arm to get me a report on what the IRS had found out” about Wallace. “This won’t be easy, Jack,” Chotiner replied, “but will do.”

  In fact, deliberately leaking classified tax records was a felony under federal law. But doing so in the Wallace case would undermine the President’s key adversary and was in Nixon’s interest as well as Anderson’s, as the reporter fully understood before he made the request. Chotiner scurried to the White House to pass on Anderson’s proposal. The initial reaction was not one of horror at breaking the law but amazement that Chotiner had befriended Nixon’s journalistic nemesis. “You went to Jack Anderson?” White House chief of staff Haldeman asked incredulously. “I did,” Chotiner replied. “You must have the balls of a brass monkey!” Haldeman exclaimed.

  The irony of using an old enemy to vanquish another could not have been lost on the President. “I remembered the IRS leaks of my tax returns to Drew Pearson in the 1952 campaign,” Nixon later wrote in his memoirs. “We at least owed it to ourselves in self-defense to initiate some investigations” of Democrats. Chotiner put together a list of White House adversaries to be targeted for tax audits and demanded a copy of the government’s confidential tax file on Wallace. White House aide Clark Mollenhoff, a gruff former newsman who thought Chotiner a “scoundrel,” balked at this blatantly political maneuver. But Chief of Staff Haldeman overruled Mollenhoff and ordered the classified records delivered to Chotiner “at the request of the President” himself.

  A few days later, Chotiner invited Anderson to stop by his suite in the Watergate apartments. “There, spread out on a table, was the full report from the IRS to President Nixon on the Wallace case,” Anderson marveled. According to the columnist’s unpublished manuscript, Chotiner “directed me to the chair” in front of the table on which the Wallace file was propped open:

  He said he’d rejoin me in about forty-five minutes. The unspoken ground-rules were that I could look and copy but was on my honor not to lift anything from the file. There was a reason for this. With so little time to go through so much complicated data, a reporter could hope only to assimilate the highlights and scribble down a quote here and a fact there. He would miss things, misconstrue things, the quotes would be a little off. All of which was good for the leaker because . . . [the resulting story] would not look like it necessarily was based on possession of a classified document; if it had been it would have been more exact, more complete . . . This uncertainty provided the necessary bit of fog that official leakers needed to veil their movements.

  In April 1970, Anderson went public with the sensitive tax data provided by the Nixon White House. SWARM OF AGENTS INVESTIGATE WALLACE, Anderson headlined. Citing “confidential findings” from the IRS and “confidential field reports, made available to this column,” Anderson reported the exact amount of taxable income of Gerald Wallace, who “has fallen into sudden wealth since his famous brother became governor” and now “lives the life of a rich country squire” on a new “lush, 315-acre cattle farm” with “a private swimming pool, scenic lake and wooden dock with an elegant, many-sided gazebo” and “special quarters for his hunting dogs and their attendant.” The White House file also corroborated the corruption allegations that Anderson had first disclosed a year and a half earlier, including kickbacks funneled through the Wallace law firm that were allegedly used to fund the governor’s presidential campaign.

  Anderson’s exposé created a political firestorm. Gerald Wallace issued a statement accusing the muckraker of “trying to convict me by implications, misleading statements and without a trial.” Attorney General Mitchell privately gloated that Wallace was now in a “peck of trouble.” “Boy, that’s good news,” presidential aide Charles Colson replied, “because that’ll get him out of the way for 1972.” With Alabama’s Democratic primary less than a month away, reprints of the “Merry-Go-Round” column blanketed the state. “Suddenly Wallace, who had regarded the gubernatorial race as a push-over on his way to the big race for the Presidency two years hence” was “on the edge of political extinction,” Anderson wrote. The Wallace campaign realized that Nixon’s men were behind the columns. “Why did they wait until three weeks before the election to publish them?” Gerald Wallace asked. “The reason is obvious—politics of the dirtiest sort.” The Alabama governor responded in kind. UNLESS WHITES VOTE, a Wallace ad declared, BLACKS WILL CONTROL THE STATE. On Election Day, the governor brazenly told voters, “Now don’t let them niggers beat us, you hear?” Despite the best efforts of both the White House and Jack Anderson, Wallace was reelected and once again positioned with a public platform to challenge Nixon for the presidency.

  In Washington, tax officials were enraged by the Anderson leak. An assistant IRS commissioner began “screaming” that Anderson’s column “carried information which exactly paralleled” a confidential memo to the President about the Wallace audit; another assistant commissioner stated flatly that Nixon’s “memorandum was clearly the source of the Jack Anderson column.” The muckraker’s story led to a “furious and noisy” meeting of presidential advisors, White House aide Mollenhoff said, which “disintegrated into sheer bedlam” filled with “snarling” attempts to assign blame. Nixon’s advisors could not escape the unpleasant fact that, as one put it, Murray Chotiner was the “Number One suspect” in the illegal leak—and that he was undoubtedly acting on behalf of the President. The IRS now launched a criminal investigation focusing on top White House officials. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman acknowledged that they were aware of the Jack Anderson column,” an IRS counsel reported, “but they did not acknowledge that they had ever seen the memo with the tax information” that Anderson published. Instead, Nixon’s “Berlin Wall” disingenuously offered to “look into the matter” and “prepare a memo for the staff cautioning them not to leak information.” But of course they had no desire to uncover the culprits because doing so risked directly implicating the Chief Executive himself in the crime.

  No criminal charges were ever filed over the leak to Anderson. But four years later, Nixon’s role in the scandal became the focus of Watergate prosecutors and led to a proposed article of impeachment against the President. Investigators obtained testimony from top administration officials that the breach of privacy “constituted a criminal act” that “occurred at the highest White House level.” Whether Nixon personally gave Wallace’s classified file to his alter ego Chotiner or the President instructed his obedient aide Haldeman to do so for him, Nixon clearly must have known about and authorized the illegal disclosure.

  Although Anderson had allowed himself to be used by the Nixon White House, his exclusive reporting on Wallace’s corruption was an uncontested journalistic coup. More remarkable still, the newsman had turned his longtime foe, now the President of the United States, into a secret informant willing to commit a federal crime to slip him classified information. Anderson returned the favor by rising to Nixon’s defense when the White House was first accused of leaking the Wallace tax file. “We owe it to the president to set the record straight,” Anderson announced. “He didn’t start the investigation into Wallace’s tax records. We did.” The columnist pointed out that the Wallace probe began before Nixon was in the White House and that he “merely inheri
ted” the case: “To the president’s credit, he refused to kill the investigation despite the political embarrassment it could cause him.” Anderson was disingenuous at best. While it was technically true that the Wallace inquiry began two months before Nixon was inaugurated, it did not become a serious, full-fledged investigation until after he took office. The journalist’s false assertion that the President had bravely taken a political risk was a misleading attempt to both conceal and reward Nixon’s role as Anderson’s source. The reality in the Wallace case, as the muckraker knew better than anyone, was that far from setting aside politics to follow the law, Nixon broke the law to advance his political interests.

  Throughout 1971, a federal grand jury gathered additional evidence of corruption by Wallace’s men and prepared to indict the governor’s brother and more than a dozen co-conspirators. But in January 1972, the Nixon Justice Department unexpectedly issued a statement announcing that it was dropping the probe. The very next day, Governor Wallace held a press conference to declare that he would run for president as a Democrat rather than an independent, thus dividing the Democratic Party and immeasurably strengthening Nixon’s chances for reelection. The timing seemed more than mere coincidence: by one account, the President and the governor reached a quid pro quo deal during a lunch on the presidential jet Air Force One. “Whether an explicit agreement was made or not,” a biographer observed, “Wallace’s decision to abandon his third-party affiliation was an act of extraordinary importance for the Nixon re-election campaign strategy. No longer would they have to worry about responding to Wallace; he was the Democrats’ problem.” As one White House aide correctly predicted, Wallace would now “move through the Democratic primaries like a pyromaniac in the middle of a fireworks factory, leaving the party in shambles.” Thanks to Jack Anderson, Richard Nixon’s first major dirty trick of the 1972 campaign was off to a smashing start.