Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  In an unpublished manuscript, Anderson later acknowledged that his collusion with the Nixon White House would have troubled him “back in the early mists of my career, when I would have regarded such plottings as evidence of a deplorable cynicism.” But after more than two decades in Washington, Anderson recognized that “Chotiner and I were both big boys who knew that our association, like a treaty between governments, would last only so long as it did not conflict with our larger interests.” Anderson preserved his integrity in his own way by adhering to an unconventional ethos: “I had come to believe that the ordinary-life virtues of loyalty, compassion, gratitude and unambiguousness should have a distinctly subordinate place in relations between a muckraker and an official. Each knows what the other is about, or ought to. Often the very basis of their association is the potential it offers for using one another. My duty was to see to it that I was not the one used, except when being used served the larger ends of exposure.” Thus as long as Anderson’s alliances were temporary, not permanent—as long as the greater good of the public ultimately received higher priority than the protection of nefarious sources—Anderson’s conscience remained clean.

  Sure enough, in the aftermath of the Wallace exposés, the columnist once again began writing stories that were critical of President Nixon. Anderson received a “plaintive” call from Chotiner: “Jeez, we did this great favor for you, and you’re writing stories like that?” Nixon’s advisor accused the newsman of violating their arrangement. “What arrangement?” Anderson asked. “I made no agreement. I thought you guys just wanted to be helpful.” In response, the White House “olive branch was abruptly withdrawn.” Unburdened by any lingering loyalty to the White House, Anderson revealed how Nixon’s men “use[d] our column” to leak Wallace’s confidential file, bringing “pressure on him through a tax investigation” to “eliminate” the “threat to President Nixon’s re-election.” Having already availed himself of the illegal White House leak, Anderson effectively outed his own source—but only once the flow of information had dried up for good.

  None of it troubled the seasoned reporter. Informants who provided inside information often harbored an “unspoken hope of gaining personal immunity,” Anderson recognized, but this “neither deterred me or bound me. I was usually willing to trade up for a better story, and was often unwilling to alienate a good source over a minor crime, but I was careful to avoid making overt suggestions of general immunity.” Thus “the double game of seeking a man’s help today in pursuing one crime while planning secretly to expose him tomorrow for another” was tolerable “until it reached a certain level of treachery.” In the case of the Nixon White House, Anderson wrote in his unpublished manuscript, there

  was the question of whether it was unacceptably deceitful to seek White House help during a tactical truce knowing that the day would come when I’d be dumping on my collaborators. The operative word here was “unacceptably.” Sure it was deceitful, on both sides. Deceitful for them to offer scoops with the unspoken but obvious intention of silencing an oft-damaging critic. Deceitful for me [to] accept the offer, all the while plotting to soon enough bite the hand that was feeding me news. But deceit is a constant companion in the quest for secret information about high officials, whether that questing is done by intelligence operatives to inform governments or by newspapermen to inform the public.

  That, of course, was not how the White House viewed it. Instead, Nixon’s men saw Anderson’s longtime animosity now compounded by betrayal. It was bad enough for the newsman to be an implacable if predictable adversary, but to worm his way into the bosom of the White House by posing as an ally and then bite the breast that nursed him was a perfidy made more dangerous by Anderson’s new, intimate knowledge of presidential crimes—and the muckraker’s potential for blackmailing the powerful sources that once succored him. Clearly, Jack Anderson would have to be dealt with. So, for that matter, would the rest of the news media.

  6

  REVENGE

  “Truth will become the hallmark of the Nixon administration,” White House communications director Herb Klein announced at the start of the President’s term. But Richard Nixon had other ideas. “The press is the enemy,” the Chief Executive repeatedly told his staff, not once but dozens if not hundreds of times. When Nixon used the word enemy, his speechwriter William Safire said, he “was saying exactly what he meant,” that the news media should be “hated and beaten.” Safire later admitted that White House aides engaged in a “conspiracy” to “discredit and malign the press” and “defame and intimidate” journalists. This “anti-media campaign” was “encouraged, directed and urged on by the president himself,” Safire wrote, “and in that vein of vengeance . . . lay Nixon’s greatest personal and political weakness and the cause of his downfall.”

  As president, Nixon began each day by reading a lengthy summary of the news coverage he received during the previous twenty-four hours, followed by presidential instructions to his staff on how to respond. “Nixon spent hours, every day, studying the press, manipulating the press, warning his associates about the press, threatening the press,” one biographer noted. “Nixon’s war with the press went back to the Hiss case, but it was in his Presidency, from the first day, that it reached levels of vengeance and vindictiveness previously unimagined, and stayed there right on through to his last day in the White House.”

  A telling sign of the President’s contempt for the Washington press corps was his choice of White House spokesman: a twenty-nine-year-old adman and former Disneyland tour guide named Ronald Ziegler. “Nixon was able to program Ziegler,” a coworker said. “He would go out and say exactly what Nixon said, with exactly the tone Nixon wanted . . . like Charlie McCarthy,” the wooden ventriloquist’s dummy of 1940s showbiz fame. Guided by polling data and the President’s personal input, Nixon’s advisors met at 9:15 every morning to manufacture their “line-of-the-day,” the first-ever White House propaganda effort orchestrated solely to shape the news media’s daily message.

  The President’s spin doctors called themselves the “attack group,” and they lived up to their name. Just months after taking office, Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a public assault on what he called the “small and unelected elite” of the national news media, which Agnew declared held a “concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history.” The Vice President’s speech was written by White House aide Patrick Buchanan and approved word-for-word by the President himself. “This really flicks the scab off, doesn’t it?” Nixon enthused. A week later, Agnew launched another broadside against the press. “The day when the network commentators and even gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a form of diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism of what they said—that day is over,” Agnew proclaimed. Six weeks later, a business partner of Nixon’s best friend filed paperwork with the Federal Communications Commission challenging the license renewal of a television station owned by the liberal Washington Post.

  White House operatives did not try to conceal their attempts to harass the news media. On the contrary, they publicized them in the belief that their hardball tactics would be more effective that way. Echoing the lesson he learned from his angry “last” news conference seven years earlier, Nixon advised his aides that it “is good politics for us to kick the press around.” The President invited top broadcasting executives to the White House and informed them that “your reporters just can’t stand the fact that I am in this office. They have opposed me for twenty-five years [and] they’ll continue to oppose me.” Nixon’s staff was even more explicit. Press Secretary Ziegler declared that all of the television networks were “anti-Nixon” and would “have to pay for that, sooner or later, one way or another.” Presidential advisor Charles Colson told the head of CBS News that the White House would “bring you to your knees” as punishment for refusing to “play ball . . . We’ll break your network.”

  The threats were not idle ones. The otherwise pro-business Nixon Justice Depart
ment filed antitrust charges against the three networks, accusing them of monopolistic practices. Federal prosecutors also drafted legislation to make it a felony for journalists to receive unauthorized leaks. “Almost every president of the United States has fought [the press] in his own way,” one scholar wrote. But the “administration of Richard Nixon differed in the speed with which it moved to attack the media at many levels and in the intensity and scope of its well-orchestrated activities. From the Nixon White House there emanated, for the first time, attacks intended to damage the credibility not of a single journalist but of whole classes of them; to intimidate publishers and broadcast ownerships; and, almost unthinkably, to establish in American jurisprudence the legality of censorship.”

  While his administration denounced the media in public, the President also worked in private to undermine reporters. Nixon instructed J. Edgar Hoover to compile “a run down on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps.” The President also sent his staff “urgent” requests to use “nut cutters” in a “brutal” assault on journalists who were “out to get us.” Nixon told aides to “pick the twenty most vicious Washington reporters” and leak derogatory information about them: “Just kill the sons of bitches.” Jack Anderson’s name was first on an official White House enemies list that eventually swelled to more than two hundred foes; these adversaries, presidential counsel John Dean declared, would be targeted for retaliation by tax audits, government lawsuits, and criminal prosecution as part of a strategy to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

  Most ominous of all, the President approved illegal wiretaps, without court-ordered warrants, on newsmen who criticized the administration. Unfriendly reporters even experienced mysterious burglaries in their homes in which no valuables were stolen but reporters’ notes were rifled. Only later, after the Watergate break-in, would they suspect a connection to Nixon’s men. And only later would the full extent of the President’s war on the news media come to light. Those “who had hoped that his ascension to the highest office in the land would ease his insecurities, would give him confidence and temper his anger, were bound to be disappointed,” journalist David Halberstam wrote. “It did not lessen his anger, he seemed if anything to demand more vengeance than ever against his old opponents . . . His grievances were a source of inner strength to him. The people who had belittled him and snubbed him made him, in some terrible dark way, more resilient.” Fueled by his hatred, the President would eventually draw up special forms of revenge for his most enduring press enemy, Jack Anderson.

  Anderson’s willingness to bite the hand that leaked to him angered not only President Nixon and his wizard of the dark arts, Murray Chotiner, but also another sometime White House source, Vice President Spiro Agnew. Before his high-decibel attacks on the press made him the public face of Nixon’s war on the media, Agnew had tried to cultivate the muckraker by providing small news tips and limited access to the new administration. The Vice President’s press secretary encouraged the strategy in the belief that “the words ‘Jack Anderson calling’ were among the most dreaded in official Washington.” But soon enough, the columnist wrote a story that criticized Agnew. The Vice President “let me know through a mutual friend that he felt I betrayed our friendship,” Anderson said. Agnew failed “to grasp Anderson’s cardinal rule,” another journalist explained: “Friends and sources are only protected when the information they provide is much juicier than their own transgressions.” Indeed, by letting Anderson know that he would not receive any further leaks, the Vice President gave the newsman little reason to hold back from going after Agnew in future columns.

  In September 1970, Anderson returned to his homophobic leitmotif after a tip that the Vice President’s twenty-four-year-old son, Randy, was, as Brit Hume put it, “a fag.” Anderson assigned his legman to investigate. “Agnew’s been lecturing the nation about child-rearing,” the columnist told Hume, “and that makes [the subject] legitimate.” Indeed, the Vice President had publicly denounced “permissive” parents who “threw discipline out the window” and held up his own marriage and children as examples of proper family values. The long-haired Hume tracked Randy Agnew down and persuaded him to give an interview, deliberately concealing the fact that he worked for Anderson. Hume made up a “lurid” tale claiming he had been told that the Vice President’s son was living in “a hippie crash pad with lots of wild parties going on and drugs being used.” The bluff worked. Although Randy denied any impropriety, he provided enough information for Anderson to put together a “Merry-Go-Round” column.

  Five days later, newspapers around the country published Anderson’s report that “Vice President Spiro Agnew is deeply troubled about his son Randy, who has broken up with his wife and has been living for the past month with a male hairdresser.” The story did not explicitly state that Randy Agnew was gay but, as Anderson later acknowledged, was deliberately “weighty with double entendre” and “euphemisms . . . of implied homosexuality.” Randy was described as “a weightlifting instructor” who “came to the door, barefoot, in white slacks and [an] open neck, striped shirt.” The column referred to Agnew’s male roommate as “a pleasant, dark-haired man of 27 with a moustache and goatee” who operated a “beauty parlor” with his mother. The Vice President’s son publicly denied Anderson’s homosexual “implications” and numerous newspapers spiked the column. Hume discovered that many Washington journalists were “surprised and disappointed we had published it. They considered it a cheap shot, unworthy of serious reporters.” Hume decided that these critics were right: “We had no idea whether . . . the kid was gay [or whether] gayness had anything to do with the rift with his family.” Ultimately, Anderson came to the same point of view. “I jumped into the Randy Agnew story encumbered by the prejudices of the day and driven by my enthusiasm for a scoop,” the columnist later admitted. “We went after the kid to expose the father. It was not fair.”

  Surprisingly, Anderson missed the one truly significant story about the Vice President: his financial corruption, which would force his resignation in disgrace in 1973. Two years earlier, some state contractors admitted to Anderson that they had funneled kickbacks to Agnew while he was the governor of Maryland. But these witnesses had no corroboration for their allegations and the Vice President denied the charges when Anderson asked about them. Because it was “difficult to define precisely” when a gift or campaign contribution “becomes a bribe,” Anderson explained later, he didn’t pursue the story further. As a result, he never discovered that Agnew continued to receive payoffs as Vice President, using the money to fund extramarital affairs, including gifts of expensive jewelry and a foreign sports car that he lavished on a “well-endowed” brunette on his staff who was “the age of one of Agnew’s daughters.”

  After the Vice President resigned, he defended his graft in part by saying he was no worse than Jack Anderson. Why? Because both men regularly received “freebies” of meat and produce from the same large grocery chain. “The media had a field day” reporting Agnew’s “greediness and venality” in accepting “gifts of hams and turkeys [as] ‘CARE packages,’ ” the ex–vice president complained, but “every time” the supermarket truck stopped “to drop off a food gift for the Agnews, the next scheduled stop for another CARE package was the home of columnist Jack Anderson . . . The Anderson gifts continued long after I left office. So much for sanctimony.”

  Agnew accused Anderson of financial hypocrisy just as Anderson accused Agnew of sexual hypocrisy. Neither man seemed to realize that they were both right.

  Although most of Jack Anderson’s earliest scoops about the Nixon administration were minor, he relished taunting the White House about them. In early 1971, the newsman appeared on the popular Dick Cavett TV talk show and bragged that he regularly received copies of the President’s private memos and confidential minutes. “I can assure you that if the President knew who was leaking,” Anderson declared, “he would be fired tomorrow.” It
was a challenge calculated to inflame the White House, and it worked. “I believe him,” Nixon said of Anderson’s boast. “What are we going to do about it?”

  At the President’s direction, his staff analyzed nearly one hundred recent “Merry-Go-Round” columns. “Anderson does, indeed, have access to intelligence digests,” a federal investigator concluded, “and he proves it on a daily basis . . . An overt firing of a person directly connected with a leak would go a long way towards making the ability of the Andersons of the world to gain White House information both difficult and hazardous.” A week later, the muckraker responded in his column by poking fun at the President’s attempt “to intimidate our sources who, unhappily for White House security, have continued to smuggle out newsworthy memos.” Just to drive the point home, Anderson then published another secret document. Eight days later, he again ridiculed the President’s men by quoting more “confidential comments at the White House,” this time about how Republican leaders did not like to be “quoted in this column.” One senator “was miffed,” Anderson wrote, “when we reported what he had said at a secret White House leadership meeting.” The newsman stated that another congressman complained that “if everything that goes on at these meetings is going to wind up in Jack Anderson’s column, there’s no use holding any more meetings.” Still failing to see the humor, a presidential advisor warned about “the latest in a long series of Jack Anderson columns” filled with details of sensitive White House deliberations. Anderson’s “stories are always accurate,” the aide wrote, and “this matter has been brought up several times without resolution . . . I hope you will alert the President once again to be on guard . . . Do you have any suggestions as to how we can uncover the culprit??? Are you satisfied the room is not bugged???” (A dozen years after being caught in the act, Anderson’s reputation for eavesdropping continued to worry Nixon’s men—even though it was the President himself who was secretly bugging the Oval Office.)