Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  The overreaction of the administration to Anderson’s minor scoops was telling, for it reflected the petty and controlling anxieties of the President himself. At the White House, Nixon’s men issued a stream of directives in an effort to deconstruct the columnist’s sources on even his least important stories. Anderson learned of the President’s attempts to stop the leaks and made sport of it: “Anyone who was caught should have his or her head hoisted on a spike, as a warning to others who talked out of school.”

  Nixon would have been better off if he had followed the press strategy of his defense secretary, Melvin Laird. Anderson attacked the Pentagon chief as “the most chauffeured man in Washington . . . who not only keeps a gleaming Cadillac at the ready but also demands another rented limousine as a backup car.” Anderson added that Laird used his “fabulously expensive, 24-hour chauffeur service for . . . delivering packages of Christmas cheese to friends and associates of the big cheese himself.” But instead of getting angry, the defense secretary won Anderson over with humor. “Laird got the best-looking marine babe he could find, with big boobs, and told her to open up her shirt so the cleavage would show,” a friend remembered. “She got in a big limousine and took a box of cheese over for Jack Anderson.” The attractive marine handed Anderson a gift-wrapped box of cheddar, showed him her fancy Pentagon auto, and delivered a handwritten note from Laird:

  Dear Jack,

  I’m sorry I left you off the list this year.

  The Big Cheese

  Anderson roared with laughter at Laird’s practical joke. After that, an administration official observed, the crusading columnist “rarely wrote anything about [Laird] again that was negative.”

  Meanwhile, the President held another needlessly secret meeting that Anderson would reveal. Four days before Christmas, while visiting Washington, rock-and-roll legend Elvis Presley sent Nixon a barely legible handwritten note to offer his assistance in the administration’s war on drugs. “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse,” the pill-popping singer wrote, “and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good.” Nixon’s taciturn chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, had a four-word response: “You must be kidding.” But even Haldeman realized that a private jam session with the popular entertainer could produce political dividends. The “opportunity for the President to have a shot at reaching young people through a certifiable rock star” was impossible to pass up, thirty-one-year-old White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh pointed out, especially if it produced “a rock musical with a ‘Get High on Life’ theme.” Advisors hurriedly cleared Nixon’s schedule so he could meet with Presley in the Oval Office that very afternoon.

  The result was one of the most bizarre encounters in the history of presidential summitry. Nixon, ill at ease as usual, was dressed in a conservative gray suit and white shirt with an American flag pin on his lapel. Elvis was “wearing tight-fitting dark velvet pants, a white silky shirt with very high collars and open to below his chest, a dark purple velvet cape, a gold medallion, and heavy silver-plated amber-tinted designer sunglasses with ‘EP’ built into the nose bridge,” Krogh wrote. “Around his waist was a belt with a huge four-inch by six-inch gold belt buckle with a complex design . . . His hair was almost brittle from hair spray.”

  “It’s very good to meet you, Mr. Presley,” the President said awkwardly. “I appreciate your offer to help us on the drug problem.” Elvis took the opening to attack his musical competition: “The Beatles, I think, are kind of anti-American,” he told Nixon. The pop idol pulled up his sleeves to show the President his cuff links. Nixon feigned interest in Elvis’s jewelry but that was not enough to sustain the conversation, which continued haltingly, filled with clumsy silences. Finally, the Chief Executive fell back on an old standby: White House trinkets with the presidential seal. “Here are some tie clasps,” Nixon said, thrusting them at the glassy-eyed performer.

  The two men posed for what would become an iconic photo, the most-requested National Archives picture in U.S. history. It was, a chronicler noted, a “deliciously bizarre image” of “hilarious incongruity: the epitome of Republican squareness forcing a smile with a bloated, over-the-hill, and quite possibly stoned rock star who was petitioning the president to join the war on drugs.” Presley left Washington with an official badge from the U.S. Department of Justice certifying that “ELVIS PRESLEY, whose signature and photograph appear below, is duly appointed as SPECIAL ASSISTANT in THE BUREAU OF NARCOTICS AND DANGEROUS DRUGS and is authorized by the Bureau to perform such duties consistent with his special advisory position.”

  Presley asked to keep the meeting quiet so he wouldn’t alienate left-leaning music fans, but Nixon’s aide Krogh feared that would be impossible “given the nature of the White House with reporters all over the place.” But as happened so often, the rest of the press corps missed the story and Jack Anderson ended up breaking it. “By presidential dictum,” Anderson reported, “Elvis Presley, the swivel-hipped singer, has been issued a federal narcotics badge. The emotional Presley was so overwhelmed at getting his own genuine, gold-plated badge that tears sprang from his eyes and he grabbed President Nixon in a Hollywood bear hug.” Until Anderson found out about it, Krogh said, the meeting between the King and the President “enjoyed more secrecy than most of the ‘Top Secret’ information floating around the White House those days.”

  Krogh was later assigned to spy on Anderson and went to prison for his Watergate crimes. Three years later, Presley died of a drug overdose at the age of forty-two.

  For decades, whispers about John Edgar Hoover’s sexuality filled Washington. In the early 1930s, a journalist noted the FBI director’s “mincing” walk and “fastidious” attire “with Eleanor blue as the favored color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks.” The lifelong bachelor who lived alone with his mother and was rarely seen in the company of women also had a voyeuristic fascination with sex and an unusual relationship with his top aide Clyde Tolson, an athletic younger FBI agent whom Hoover plucked out of obscurity and quickly promoted through the ranks to associate director. The two men became inseparable companions, driving to work together in the morning, sharing lunch in the afternoon and dinner in the evening, and vacationing together on their time off. “Johnny and Clyde,” as the pair were called behind their backs, had a relationship that one biographer labeled “spousal,” one that was, if not physically consummated, “so close, so enduring, and so affectionate that it took the place of marriage for both bachelors.”

  Jack Anderson was just one of many Washington journalists who ran across the ubiquitous rumor of Hoover’s homosexuality. A police inspector advised the columnist that waiters at Washington restaurants “would tell stories about Hoover and Tolson holding hands under the table . . . and rub[bing] knees.” Unlike most reporters of his era, Anderson was actually willing to report about homosexuality, as Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, and Joe McCarthy all learned the hard way. Anderson and Hoover had also tangled before; over the years, Hoover had labeled the newsman a “dog,” a “vulture,” a “stinking . . . skunk,” and “a rat of the worst type”—although the aesthetically minded law-man noted that Anderson “is a rather nice looking fellow.” Nonetheless, even Anderson dared not question Hoover’s sexuality during the height of his power. “So different were the times and so powerful was the mystique of the FBI chief, that it would have been considered almost an act of treason to expose him,” Anderson later wrote.

  But in January 1971, as the seventy-six-year-old director’s influence began to wane, Anderson decided to take on Hoover, declaring in his column that “it was time someone pried into his personal life in the FBI manner and reported the excess of the man behind the myth.” Anderson dispatched Les Whitten to tail Hoover and Tolson. The legman spied on the couple as they met at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel for the director’s daily lunch of grapefruit and cottage cheese, but the reporter saw no evidence of physical contact between the two men. Neither did other Anderson assis
tants who staked out Hoover’s home. “Everybody that we knew and talked to about the relationship said it was homosexual,” a frustrated Anderson recalled, “but we couldn’t get any evidence.” So the columnist fell back on his old tactic of hinting at it. “Edgar and Clyde . . . appear to take turns eating dinner at one another’s homes,” Anderson wrote. Hoover’s “closest confidant and constant companion” also traveled with him to the same hotel “each summer to attend the races” at a California horse track.

  In search of more conclusive evidence, another Anderson legman, Chuck Elliott, literally went digging for dirt by picking through Hoover’s rubbish in garbage cans behind his home. “Chuck was relentless,” Anderson recalled, “going back day after day to lurk in the alley waiting for the household help to bring out the trash.” Finally, Hoover’s African American butler caught Anderson’s reporter in the act. “You can get arrested for that,” the servant warned. “He put his trash out to be collected and I’m collecting it,” Anderson’s assistant retorted, and then quickly drove away.

  The columnist pored through the debris culled from Hoover’s garbage but discovered nothing to suggest homosexuality. Instead, there were only empty bottles of liquor and Gelusil heartburn medicine. On FBI letterhead, in the director’s shaky handwriting, Anderson also found precise menu instructions for his cook: crab bisque soup, spaghetti and meatballs with asparagus, and peppermint stick ice cream topped with strawberries. “I can see why he needs the Gelusil,” the reporter laughed.

  In March 1971, under the headline HOOVER’S TRASH SHOWS HE’S HUMAN, Anderson made sport of the fearsome FBI director. “It’s unsettling to think of a living legend like the great Hoover having gas pains,” the columnist wrote. “But the evidence seems indisputable.” Such satire appears modest in hindsight, but at the time, it seemed practically subversive, a direct challenge to Hoover’s authority. Anderson defended his tactics by pointing out that FBI agents also perused the trash of their targets. “The only difference between the way we operated and the FBI operated was we did it in broad daylight,” the newsman argued.

  Over the next two months, Anderson broadened his assault on the FBI director, reporting that America’s “tireless guardian of the nation’s morals” pocketed royalties from books ghostwritten by FBI employees. “This is an offense, if it had been committed by some other government official, that the FBI might have been asked to investigate,” the muckraker taunted. “For the money rightfully should have gone to the taxpayers, who paid the salaries of the FBI researchers and writers.” Unaccustomed to criticism, Hoover denounced Anderson as “a venomous and vicious liar” and “jackal” who likes to “feed on carrion.” But Anderson refused to back down and continued to make veiled hints about Hoover’s sexuality. The FBI director and “his faithful companion Clyde Tolson, both bachelors . . . ran up a total tab of over $15,000” on vacation together, the columnist wrote, but they “never paid their bills, which were picked up” by a millionaire friend. In addition, there was “startling evidence” that Hoover “consulted” a “distinguished psychiatrist” named Dr. Marshall de G. Ruffin, “whose patients include some of Washington’s high and mighty.” Anderson did not explicitly state that Hoover was treated for homosexuality but many readers undoubtedly inferred it. (Nearly twenty years later, Dr. Ruffin’s widow reportedly confirmed that her husband had diagnosed Hoover as “very paranoid about anyone finding out he was a homosexual.”)

  By rifling through Hoover’s trash, questioning his masculinity, impugning his financial integrity, and mocking his flatulence, Anderson enraged the FBI director. Hoover “would explode every time Anderson mentioned him and the F.B.I. in a column,” the director’s gay friend Roy Cohn said. Hoover beefed up his contingent of bodyguards and ordered an FBI investigation, including surveillance, of Anderson and his staff. “I want to assure you,” Hoover told a television news crew, “that I do not have heartburn or gastric acidity—except when I read a certain man’s column.” In a speech to the American Newspaper Women’s Club, Hoover declared that Anderson was “not a reporter, he’s a scavenger. He’s the top scavenger among the columnists.” In another address a few weeks later, Hoover complained that one of his “more virulent critics—his name escapes me for the moment—has apparently fallen off his merry-go-round once too often [and] spent considerable time sifting through my garbage.” The result, Hoover declared, is that Anderson “is becoming increasingly confused between the trash he examines and the trash he writes.” To prevent future embarrassments, aides presented Hoover with a trash compactor at a party celebrating his forty-seventh year as FBI director. “Those of us who attended [the ceremony] tried to keep a straight face,” Deputy Director Deke DeLoach remembered, “but it was hard.” Anderson had reduced America’s top cop to a laughingstock even among his loyal staff.

  President Nixon invited Hoover to breakfast and commiserated about the ridicule he had endured from Anderson and other critics. The FBI director acted unfazed: “The tougher the attacks get, the tougher I get,” Hoover asserted. But in fact the growing criticism made him more cautious and he began rejecting White House requests to conduct illegal break-ins, wiretaps, and infiltration that the FBI had routinely provided other presidents in the past. For the first time in decades, Hoover felt vulnerable.

  Not Jack Anderson. Emboldened by his growing success, he would now move from uncovering sexual peccadilloes to matters of war and peace, striking at the heart of the President’s most secret foreign policy operations.

  7

  VIETNAM

  The Vietnam War offered no peace, and certainly no honor, to the President who had been elected promising both. Richard Nixon’s pledge for ending American involvement in Vietnam proved to be an impossible contradiction in terms: achieving peace by admitting defeat and withdrawing more than half a million American troops did not fulfill Nixon’s definition of honor, and peace by military victory in a massive all-out offensive was no longer possible because of resistance by both Vietnamese fighters and U.S. public opinion. In the end, after five more years of bloodshed—including the slaughter of an additional twenty thousand American troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese—the administration would eventually be forced to pull out unilaterally anyway. The U.S.-backed regime in Saigon, too brutal and corrupt to inspire support from its populace, would collapse to Communist troops in a humiliating rout.

  Before the fall, however, Nixon searched for a nonexistent middle ground that he dubbed “Vietnamization,” in which local anti-Communist soldiers would take over from departing U.S. forces. Shaped by his experience as Eisenhower’s vice president during the Korean War, Nixon wrongly believed that Vietnam’s civil war could similarly be settled through diplomacy by permanently partitioning the country into a Communist north and non-Communist south, and he erroneously believed that he could negotiate such an agreement with Hanoi’s more powerful Communist allies, China and the Soviet Union. When this attempt at a face-saving compromise proved impossible, the frustrated President alternated erratically between his two true options: pulling out American troops on the one hand and expanding the war on the other. So, to mollify the war-weary American public, Nixon announced periodic U.S. troop withdrawals—even while intensifying aerial bombardments and greatly increasing civilian casualties. It was a strategy destined to fail under the weight of its own inconsistency. “There are at least two words no one can use to characterize the outcome of the two-faced policy,” Admiral Elmo Zumwalt conceded. “One is ‘peace.’ The other is ‘honor.’ ”

  The President’s attempt to hide his escalation did not fool anyone in Southeast Asia as they saw their villages burn and their countrymen perish. Only the American people remained unaware of the destruction unleashed in their name. But this public ignorance would not last long. Four months after Nixon’s inauguration, The New York Times exposed covert U.S. bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, a neutral neighbor of Vietnam. Not only had Nixon widened the war without the consent of Congress or the
electorate; he had also deliberately concealed the bombing from his own Cabinet, which opposed it. The President was enraged by what he called “this cock-sucking story” and instructed aides to “find out who leaked it, and fire him.” With the enthusiastic support of his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, Nixon ordered the FBI to wiretap journalists and administration officials suspected of revealing the secret bombing.

  The President followed up in the spring of 1970 by ordering U.S. ground troops to invade Cambodia. American B-52s dropped more than a hundred thousand tons of aerial explosives, destabilizing the Cambodian government and ultimately ushering in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which killed an additional two million people. In the end, while supposedly winding down the war, the Nixon administration unleashed more bombs, and killed more civilians, than the Johnson administration, which had so expanded the conflict in the first place. LBJ’s war had now become Nixon’s. “Peace with honor,” historian Garry Wills noted darkly, “meant, in context, peace with war.” Antiwar demonstrators took to the streets in massive protests around the country; college campuses were paralyzed with strikes; and six students were killed in clashes with law enforcement authorities at Kent State University and Jackson State College.