Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Instead, Anderson decided to change tactics by sharpening his written attacks to make them “more sensational” and using extensive verbatim quotes from the top-secret records. “It will probably bore the Kansas City milkman,” Anderson’s legman Brit Hume predicted, “but it might stir some interest from Jack’s colleagues.” The result would be a “baptism by fire” for his source, Anderson realized, but it would be the only effective way to expose the President’s foreign policy deceit.

  On December 16, Anderson reported that although the “Nixon administration has rung down the censorship curtain” on its actions, “secret White House minutes” from “behind the guarded doors of the White House Situation Room” proved “Nixon’s duplicity” in the India-Pakistan War. In a series of escalating attacks, Anderson charged that the President and his advisors “lied” by claiming that the United States was neutral. “The president does not want to be even handed,” the newsman quoted Kissinger as saying. “I am getting hell every half hour from the president that we are not being tough enough on India . . . He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.” Anderson also revealed that the White House privately plotted to smuggle arms to Pakistan in violation of the congressional embargo.

  Anderson followed up on his revelations of White House mendacity by exposing its even more serious military recklessness. By rushing the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, the columnist wrote, the administration risked bringing the superpowers to the brink of armed confrontation. The escalating crisis was rapidly becoming as perilous as it was volatile. According to “secret diplomatic dispatches” that Anderson had obtained, Russia reassured India that a “Soviet fleet is now [nearby] in the Indian Ocean” and promised that the Russian navy “will not allow the [U.S.] Seventh Fleet to intervene.” The muckraker even quoted classified cables stating that the Soviets promised to provoke “a diversionary action” against China if necessary. The “world stood on the edge of another world war,” Anderson declared, “and the American people were never told about it.”

  Indeed, the Soviet Union had actually dispatched two naval convoys to the Indian Ocean, each armed with cruise missiles. “What do we do if the Soviets move against [China]?” Nixon wondered. “Start lobbing nuclear weapons in?” “If the Soviets move against them . . . and succeed,” Kissinger replied, “that will be the final showdown . . . We will be finished. We’ll be through.”

  Alone among the Washington press corps, Anderson recognized the danger. Now, instead of obscuring the sensitive nature of the government papers that he had obtained, the newsman began flaunting his access to these highly classified documents: “The papers bear a variety of stamps: ‘Secret Sensitive,’ ‘Eyes Only’ . . . and other classifications even more exotic,” Anderson wrote in his column. “Yet astonishingly, the documents contain almost no information that could possibly jeopardize the national security. On the contrary, the security labels are used to hide the activities—and often the blunders—of our leaders.” The muckraker compared his documents to the Pentagon Papers, which he said also “exposed, all too late, the miscalculations and misrepresentations that entangled the U.S. in a jungle war in faraway Vietnam.”

  This time, Anderson’s strategy worked. On December 30, he received a call from The New York Times asking him to comment on Kissinger’s claim that he had been quoted out of context in the “Merry-Go-Round.” Anderson believed that Kissinger felt free to deny the story because he assumed “that I couldn’t possibly have [actual hard copies of] the secret minutes.” So the columnist “impulsively” decided to prove Kissinger wrong. “I’ll show you the context,” Anderson told the Times reporter. “Come on over and read the documents for yourself.” The muckraker then gave the Times some of his classified papers, after first having his staff retype them “lest my copy might in some note or doodle betray my source.”

  The next day, beginning on page one, the Times published extensive excerpts from Anderson’s documents. “Officials in the Administration conceded that Mr. Anderson’s information appeared genuine,” the newspaper of record reported. “Several said privately that they learned more about top-level intra-governmental policy discussions from the column than they would normally learn in the course of their official duties.” One unnamed government official admitted that “we come in every morning just wondering what’s going to hit us next. [Anderson has] got onto something and no one seems to know how to stop him.” The Times imprimatur legitimized Anderson’s exposé with the rest of the establishment media, which now began picking up the story. ANDERSON STRIKES AGAIN, the Washington Star headlined.

  On January 3, on a flight to Nixon’s vacation home in San Clemente, California, Kissinger repeated to a pool of traveling reporters his claim that Anderson had distorted his remarks by taking them out of context. That gave the columnist just the excuse he was looking for to release additional copies of the classified documents to other news outlets, beginning with The Washington Post, which gave the story prominent front-page coverage and filled more than a page of text inside the newspaper with verbatim excerpts. “Every major news organization in town now wanted its own set of papers,” Hume remembered, and “the office was in a virtual state of siege . . . The phones rang continuously.”

  Anderson was delighted to oblige other journalists. “I don’t think the public should have to take either my word or Dr. Kissinger’s,” the newsman declared. “I invite reporters to compare Dr. Kissinger’s statements at the secret strategy sessions” with the public record. Television networks extensively interviewed Anderson, who “held up several of the documents and the camera moved in for titillating close-ups that showed the black security markings they bore,” Hume said. Anderson explained his strategy to his young reporter: “You’ve got to stay on the attack. If they get you on the defensive, then you look bad. I’m going to keep pounding away.”

  News outlets around the world now followed Anderson’s lead and published lengthy excerpts from his documents. “Mocking headlines flashed ‘Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!’ like an old-fashioned pinball machine,” one journalist wrote. Another said that Anderson “turned Washington upside down” and “sent shock waves throughout the Administration and Capitol Hill.” PRESIDENT’S ADVISERS LIED DURING CRISES, proclaimed “one of the starker head[line]s” that caught the White House’s attention. The Washington Post called Anderson’s release of the classified documents “a major challenge to the secrecy surrounding U.S. policy in the Indo-Pakistani war.” Anderson was “an unguided journalistic missile with multiple warheads likely to strike anywhere,” presidential chronicler Theodore H. White wrote. “The Anderson columns stripped bare the essential privacy of national-security planners as never before.”

  White House advisors tied up phone lines in the middle of the night, warning each other about what Anderson would reveal in the morning’s newspapers. Unfortunately, one administration aide reported, Anderson’s column “was again completely accurate.” CIA director Richard Helms acknowledged that he was “jolted” by the “dramatic” release of “the detailed notes” in “the Jack Anderson papers . . . He obviously got hold of the documents themselves and we were all somewhat awed.”

  Anderson and his staff worried how the President would react. After all, just six months earlier, government attorneys fought all the way to the Supreme Court to try to censor the Pentagon Papers. “If the Administration would [try] to suppress years-old material which did not even cover its own activities, what might it do to prevent publication of highly damaging material that was only a few days old and contained proof of the baldest sort of duplicity?” Hume wondered. “Anderson seemed to be in the midst of what might become a major new battle in the war over secrecy. If he handled it well, he might swing public opinion a long way toward the view that secrecy is dangerous. If he handled it poorly, the public might become persuaded that the news media posed the greater danger.”

  Sure enough, the White House changed its position from claiming that Anderson had distorted the documents to asserting
that he endangered national security by publishing them. Kissinger now blamed the messenger, asserting that the “very serious leaks to Jack Anderson”—rather than the administration’s secret tilt to Pakistan—“adversely affected our relations with India” and therefore “constituted a serious security risk to our government.” The President went even further, charging that the Anderson revelations were “one of the most serious incidents” of the entire India-Pakistan War. “The leak came as a shock,” Nixon said, because the classified documents were available “only [to] the highest-ranking members of the military intelligence organizations and the State Department . . . From a diplomatic point of view, the leak was embarrassing; from the point of view of national security, it was intolerable.”

  But that wasn’t the view of career professionals in the Defense Department. Admiral Zumwalt thought that the only real effect of the leak was that Jack Anderson had “fun” with “Kissinger’s increasing irritability, not to say fury” over “his failures” in policymaking. Although the Anderson papers “are even more vivid” than the Pentagon Papers and “record the crisis managers in action barely one month after the fact,” The New York Times reported, “senior Pentagon sources said the disclosures primarily affected diplomatic sensitivity rather than military security.” Indeed, according to The Chicago Daily News, “officials concede that a court challenge to publication would be futile because they are deprived of the danger-to-national-security argument.”

  In a public relations offensive, Anderson repeatedly argued that public safety was not the issue. “There’s no security in these papers,” the muckraker thundered. “It’s job security and censorship for the bureaucrats, not national security that’s involved.” To underscore his patriotism—and perhaps warn the administration to back off lest he cause further trouble—Anderson opened up his briefcase to show journalists that he possessed dozens of other, more sensitive documents that he had decided not to publish out of concern for America’s defense. He also pointed out that he had been careful to conceal routing numbers and other information in the classified files “just in case they would be useful to cryptographers” from foreign countries.

  Like the Mormon missionary he once was, Anderson preached that the purpose of national security was to safeguard liberty and not the other way around: “If this nation were ever to decide that the government should have the power to silence the press in the name of national security, we will have defeated the very purpose of national security. For the reason we have a national defense and a foreign policy is so that no other nation may gain control of our government and trample upon our freedoms.” Again and again, Anderson compared his documents to the Pentagon Papers: “If we had this type of information leaking out challenging the official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1965, we might have saved some of the 50,000 lives and $80 billion we’ve sunk into the thankless war there.” The columnist invited Congress to examine his documents as part of an official investigation of the India-Pakistan War and the government’s “massive” overclassification of secrets.

  Anderson’s crusade against the Nixon administration was soon echoed by other journalists. New York Times bureau chief James Reston, dean of Washington’s media establishment, compared “the Anderson Papers” to the Pentagon Papers: both tell a “story of damaging decisions arrived at in secret; of subjective presidential orders imposed on the objective analysis of the president’s own principal advisers; of official explanations which mislead the Congress and the American people.” CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid said Anderson’s disclosures revealed an administration credibility gap “approaching the size of the San Andreas fault.” Columnist Tom Wicker praised Anderson’s “remarkable series” as “a public service of the first order” that “demonstrates that publication is one of the few remaining checks on the foreign policy powers of the imperial presidency.” The New York Times editorialized that “one of the striking revelations of the Anderson transcripts” was the President’s disdain for career professionals working for him, a deliberate “isolation from the first-hand advice and argument of the Government’s own experts . . . discouraging doubting questions even about minor tactics. A Chief Executive who fails to expose himself to the fullest information, free debate and the challenges of others to his prejudices can hardly be protected from blunders.” And The Washington Post decried the administration’s “cynicism” and concluded that “we can all be grateful to Jack Anderson, who has brought to the public’s attention material essential to the public’s understanding” and “right to know.”

  Anderson’s exposé also became fodder for late-night comedians. Because the government “has stolen our dollars, privacy and dignity,” 60 Minutes commentator Nicholas von Hoffman joked, it was now a “delightful switch” to have something stolen from the government. Cartoonist Pat Oliphant drew Nixon and Kissinger, knee-deep in water, unsuccessfully using their hands and feet to try to plug a dam named “Secrecy.” The leaks were labeled “Greetings—Jack Anderson,” “Hi! Jack Anderson,” “Jack Anderson—1972,” and “Anderson was here.”

  The columnist’s disclosures threatened to become an issue in the 1972 presidential campaign, which was already well under way. Within days, three different congressional committees followed up on Anderson’s suggestion and announced that they would hold hearings. The “move is part of a new Democratic strategy to use the alleged discrepancy in policy to try to erode the president’s credibility,” one newsman wrote. “This is where leading Democratic presidential candidates . . . believe the president is vulnerable.” White House chief of staff Haldeman discovered that Senator Edmund Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, was going “to make a major charge against the P[resident] regarding the Anderson papers.” Nixon worried about the political fallout. “Remember my good friend Joe McCarthy,” who achieved success by going on the attack, the President reminded his staff; if the Democrats did so now, Nixon feared, “that could be a fatal mistake for us, a fatal mistake.”

  At the same time, the bureaucratic blame game over the Anderson disclosures began. The New York Times quoted “reliable sources” saying that the White House was not at fault because it called in the FBI more than four months earlier to investigate other leaks of classified material to the news media. Meanwhile, “sources close to” the U.S. ambassador to India told journalists that he was “not unhappy” about the Anderson reports, which vindicated the diplomat’s opposition to the Pakistani tilt. In anonymous asides to the press, the State Department blamed the Pentagon, the Pentagon blamed the White House, and the White House pointed back to the State Department. Hobbled by its own bureaucratic divisions, the administration launched a response that was feeble at best. United Nations ambassador George H. W. Bush, the future forty-first president, publicly called on Anderson to reveal the identity of his source, but that was obviously a naïve nonstarter. Another Republican, Congressman John Ashbrook, demanded a House investigation of the “vandals” who leaked “state secrets” to Anderson, but that suggestion went nowhere either.

  In mid-January, more than a month after the columnist began publishing the classified documents, White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler belatedly stated that the Anderson leak is “a matter of great concern to the President,” who wants to “make sure it doesn’t happen again.” An investigation was now under way “at direct Presidential direction,” Ziegler said. According to The New York Times, this was “the first official acknowledgment of the President’s personal concern about the Anderson papers, as well as the first official acknowledgment that Mr. Nixon himself had ordered steps taken to insure tighter security.” The President privately counseled his spokesman to say no more on the subject because “I don’t want to heighten this story anymore.”

  But Anderson’s revelations could not be ignored. The very next day, a White House aide noted that “the ‘Anderson papers’ story is not dying, and there seems a disposition to keep it alive. Anderson was on the [Dick] Cavett show the other night, acting
like the Great Crusader.”

  The public official most directly damaged by the scandal was Henry Kissinger, whose “personal standing lessened with each Anderson revelation,” one author wrote. The President “decided that Kissinger’s inability to handle the press—one of Kissinger’s great successes up to now—was now responsible for his problems with Anderson and the India-Pakistan war.” The thin-skinned national security advisor was “devastated by [the] press attacks on his professional competence,” Nixon aide John Ehrlichman said, especially because Kissinger could not “change the fact” that the minutes of his embarrassing comments were in Anderson’s possession. To avoid such catastrophes in the future, a senior senator lectured Kissinger, “you ought to stop the meetings” from occurring in the first place “if you can’t keep it from leaking out.” Kissinger instructed his staff to tighten document security so that “nobody should worry what will happen to these minutes.” The Bavarian-born Kissinger joked darkly that “from now on the official minutes are going to be kept in German—with the verbs left out.” Kissinger deputies also put together a lengthy rebuttal of the Anderson columns, but of course the White House advisor’s incriminating comments—already transcribed in the government minutes that Anderson published—were undeniable. The most an aide could do was recommend that “it is best to avoid going into detail with a man like Anderson who has no concern for substance and is interested only in debater’s points.” Instead, Kissinger’s office drew up a statement filled with indignant generalities. “We have no intention of engaging in a public exchange,” the press release stated. “The record is clear for all who have a serious interest in reviewing it.”