Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  The scorching memo came to Anderson anonymously through the mail, which was opened by his secretary Opal Ginn, who in turn passed it on to twenty-eight-year-old Hume to investigate. “Holy shit!” Hume exclaimed when he read the document. “It was just unbelievable! I showed it to Jack and he said, ‘Wow!’ ” Still, because Anderson did not know who had supplied the memo, he could not be certain that it was genuine; perhaps it was a forgery, a dirty trick designed to ensnare and discredit him. There seemed to be only one way to authenticate the document: by getting its author to admit that she wrote it. But Dita Beard, at age fifty-three, was a crusty and suspicious Washington insider whom Anderson feared would never let her guard down around the notoriously dangerous muckraker. However, young Hume’s “unlined, guileless face” and “transparently idealistic and sympathetic nature,” Anderson believed, might “disarm Dita’s fears, arouse her motherly instincts, and encourage the sly old tro[u]per to believe that here was a callow youth she could con.” Hume was given the delicate task of getting Beard to verify that the memo was genuine and flush out additional details of the story.

  Hume carefully planned his approach to the ITT lobbyist. “I ruled out asking her directly if the memo were real,” the legman later wrote. “This would make it clear that I didn’t know. I also decided against saying I knew it was real, because this might seem an obvious bluff. After all, if I knew it was real, I would have no reason to say so. I didn’t want to raise the question of authenticity at all. I knew that if the memo was a fake, she would immediately say so, no matter what I said, and that would probably be the end of it.”

  Hume met Beard in a conference room at ITT’s office in downtown Washington. She was surrounded by public relations officials who were wary of anything having to do with Jack Anderson. Hume reached into the inside of his coat pocket, unfolded his copy of Beard’s memo, and slid it to her across the table. She was flabbergasted to see it. Beard didn’t deny writing it but stalled for time and excused herself. She went to her office and opened a cabinet, searching for a pink carbon copy of her memo. She returned empty-handed. “My files are a mess,” she told Hume. “I can’t find anything.” Her face filled with apprehension, Beard nonetheless plunged ahead. “All right,” she sighed, “what do you want to know about it?” Hume tried to reassure the lobbyist by minimizing the memo’s significance, suggesting that he was merely making a routine inquiry and only wanted guidance about the memo’s “proper context” so that he didn’t write a “misleading” story. The legman went over the document line by line with Beard while she attempted to put it all in the best light possible. But she acknowledged that the handwritten initial at the top of the memo was “my own little ‘D.’ ” “I had to resist the temptation to dance a jig on the table,” Hume recalled, “because they had now authenticated the document.” Hume made sympathetic noises suggesting that Anderson might not find the story worthy of publication and then departed, trying to hide his elation.

  The next day, Beard phoned Hume. “I want to tell you the truth about all this,” she said emotionally, and invited him to visit her that evening at home. Hume raced over to her red-brick house in suburban Washington. In an extraordinary two-hour interview filled with alcohol and tobacco smoke, Beard tearfully played “the poor girl role,” as she later called it, and begged Hume for mercy. She said that ITT had “ordered” her to either leave town or claim that she “made up” the incriminating passages in her memo. But Beard realized there was no point trying to fool Hume about the authenticity of the document. “I wrote it,” she told him once again. “Of course I wrote it.” The lobbyist unpersuasively claimed that despite her written words, there was no linkage between ITT’s donation and its antitrust settlement. But she admitted that soon after pledging to underwrite the Republican convention, Attorney General Mitchell told her that the corporation could go ahead with its Hartford takeover—and that President Nixon personally ordered his prosecutors to “lay off” ITT.

  On February 29, 1972, in what one author called “another Jack Anderson special,” the columnist began a four-part series exposing the ITT scandal. Beard’s “highly incriminating memo,” Anderson wrote, “not only indicates that the antitrust case had been fixed but that the fix was a payoff” for the company’s donation. The next day, the muckraker publicly charged Richard Kleindienst, the Nixon administration’s nominee to replace John Mitchell as attorney general, with telling “an outright lie” about his role in the case. Kleindienst claimed he had nothing to do with the settlement, which he maintained was “handled and negotiated exclusively” by his underlings in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. But Anderson reported that the attorney general–designate personally held “a half dozen secret meetings” with ITT officials before the litigation was “abruptly settled” on terms “highly favorable to ITT.”

  A day later, Anderson accused Mitchell himself of “trying to lie [his] way out” of the scandal. Nixon’s longtime counselor, who had just resigned as attorney general to run the President’s reelection campaign, claimed that he had not known of ITT’s contribution while his Justice Department negotiated the antitrust settlement. But the “Merry-Go-Round” quoted two Republican officials who contradicted Mitchell’s claim. “Anderson and Hume were aiming their blows at the very heart of the Nixon administration,” an author noted, “attacking the integrity of two attorney generals. Both Mitchell and Kleindienst were head-strong political animals: Mitchell, from Nixon’s old law firm, had been Nixon’s campaign manager” four years earlier as well, while Kleindienst also was “a key organizer for Nixon in 1968.”

  Kleindienst was horrified by the Anderson columns. “I’ve got to see Mitchell right now!” he shouted. The older Mitchell was unperturbed. “Nobody is going to believe a bunch of trash like that from Anderson,” he said reassuringly. “Forget it.” Kleindienst was unmoved and warned that “it’s going to develop into the biggest headline scandal you ever heard of—mark my words!”

  It was a prophetic forecast. Anderson “lobbed” one ITT “bombshell” after another that “exploded in the Administration’s face,” White House counsel John Dean recalled. The heart of the problem, presidential aide Charles Colson realized, was the Beard memo, “because it was obviously very damaging on its face.” As one writer observed, “Anderson’s cluster bomb” not only unleashed “a major public relations disaster” but also exposed “the special treatment government afforded rich, powerful corporations.” As a result, said White House communications director Herb Klein, “the news herd was now dashing everywhere.”

  The journalistic pack was enthusiastically led by Anderson, who helpfully made himself available for media interviews and handed out copies of his astonishing document, which newspapers around the country now published in full. The memo sent “shock waves through the Nixon White House,” wrote Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, and cast “suspicion over the entire Administration,” in the words of Hugh Sidey of Life magazine. Newsweek declared that Nixon’s journalistic “nemesis” had unleashed a controversy that “ballooned into the most far-flung investigatory extravaganza of recent years,” with both the White House and ITT “hip-deep together in a bog of political embarrassment.” More than one commentator compared it to the Sherman Adams bribery scandal that Anderson had uncovered fourteen years earlier. The “blustery syndicated columnist” who uncovered “skulduggery in high places,” New York Times reporter Fred Graham wrote, “has had so many big news breaks lately that he has become a newsmaker himself.” Indeed, Time noted, journalism’s “well-known dealer in secret memos” had once again “set Washington buzzing with rumor and speculation,” while the “Nixon administration found itself laboring under the shadow of what could be a major image-damaging scandal,” leaving Republican officials with “red-faced outrage.”

  Most outraged of all was attorney general–designate Kleindienst, who believed Anderson had portrayed him as a “liar” and conspirator “in a bribery scheme.” Although the Senate Judiciary C
ommittee had just unanimously approved Kleindienst’s nomination, he publicly demanded that the committee reopen its hearings. Kleindienst explained privately that “if the record isn’t made straight at once, this matter will make the Tea Pot Dome scandal look like a tea party by comparison!” Because he considered himself “very close” to the conservative chairman of the panel, Senator James Eastland, Kleindienst believed his nomination would once again quickly sail through. He “had full confidence that [Eastland] would pat him on the head and say he’d been a good boy, and it’s been terrible what these nasty people say about you,” Anderson recalled. The Mississippi senator tried to persuade Kleindienst to leave well enough alone, but as Colson put it, Kleindienst “charged off after his honor like Sir Galahad.”

  Hume worried that Kleindienst might “have an ace up his sleeve” that would undercut the Beard memo and embarrass Anderson during public hearings. The more experienced columnist told his legman to relax. “This is the stupidest thing Kleindienst could have done,” Anderson laughed. “It’s the best thing that could have happened to us.” Indeed, President Nixon himself would later call Kleindienst’s decision a “tactical disaster.”

  That was an understatement. The ITT testimony would turn into what was then the most protracted confirmation hearing in the history of the Senate, twenty-four days of questioning spread out over two months. It would, for the first time, unmask the Nixon campaign’s fund-raising crimes and eventually lead to the criminal convictions of the President’s senior advisors. Far more than Anderson’s previous national security revelations, his exposure of political scandal threatened Nixon where he was most vulnerable. In the end, the columnist realized, the ITT scandal turned out to be “a dress rehearsal for Watergate—same cast, same tactics, same dirty tricks.”

  At first, Senator Eastland tried to help Kleindienst by stacking the hearings so that only the attorney general–designate and his allies would testify. But Anderson phoned Eastland and asked to be called as a witness as well. “I know you’ll want to be fair,” the newsman told the Senate chairman respectfully. “I know you don’t want to have a one-sided hearing. So I hope you’ll let us come and give our side.” Beneath his politeness, Anderson acknowledged, was a warning: “What this meant, in translation, was that I was threatening to create a public nuisance and holler ‘Foul’ if we were refused.” Eastland, equally courteous, thanked Anderson for his veiled threat: “Jack, now you understand that I want your testimony. I want you to tell the committee whatever you wish to tell them. Feel free and comfortable and at ease. We’re not going to try to block you. But, you understand, we have to follow protocol. We’re going to have to hear the government witnesses first.”

  Anderson “knew immediately” what that meant: Eastland would “save my testimony until the hearings had become back-page news” and the muckraker posed no danger to Kleindienst’s confirmation. “Measuring in his wise old way the disruption we could cause as witnesses against the righteous breast-beating we would do if excluded,” Anderson wrote, “Eastland decided to let us in the door while reserving the right to seat us at the least conspicuous place at the table and serve us last, after everyone had gone home.” Anderson responded to the courtly senator with “an equal dose of saccharine,” thanking him for his time and assuring him, “I know you’re a fair man.” After hanging up the phone, the columnist turned to Hume and pronounced the verdict: “They’re going to screw us! But we’ll screw them in return because it doesn’t matter what they say in the hearing room. What matters is what we say on television and to the reporters.”

  Anderson began lobbying other senators. Not only did the columnist want to make sure that Eastland kept his promise to allow Anderson’s testimony, he also wanted to deliver the same polite threat to Eastland’s colleagues to make sure that they would conduct a thorough investigation: “I told senators what I knew, offered assistance, assured them of the growing public indignation my mail revealed, and let them know I had other documents I would make public at the proper time. This was a friendly warning not to jump too quickly to the ITT-G.O.P. side lest they be burned by subsequent revelations.” Like his mentor Drew Pearson, Anderson now unabashedly injected himself as an advocate into the political fray.

  The hearings began with ringing denials of wrongdoing from both ITT and the Justice Department. But testimony soon revealed that immediately after Anderson’s inquiries, the conglomerate destroyed “many sacks” of internal documents in what an ITT manager later admitted was “a goddamn paper-shredding ceremony of monumental proportion[s].” One corporate executive justified the sudden purge of records because “there might have been a lot of others in there like that” Beard memo. Democrats were incredulous. Senator Sam Ervin called ITT’s testimony “the worst presentation I have ever heard” in nearly two decades in Congress. “It looks very suspicious and bad,” Senator John Tunney agreed. “Brit Hume comes in with an incriminating memo on one day . . . and the next day the documents are destroyed.”

  ITT’s cover-up seemed perfectly reasonable to the Nixon White House. “Hell,” Colson told the President, “anybody would go in and tear their files up . . . protecting against Jack Anderson or a leak in their office.” But that wasn’t how the mainstream media viewed it. “It is perhaps understandable for a company to be nervous at the prospect of having Jack Anderson rooting through its files,” Time observed, but the testimony by ITT’s administrators “left the impression of a beleaguered foreign embassy destroying secret papers on the eve of war.” Still, the magazine added, “security precautions in many offices are being tightened because no one knows where [Anderson] will strike next.” For his part, Anderson made a show of phoning ITT to offer his assistance. “I told [them] that if they had shredded all their copies of these documents, we’d be glad to let them look at ours,” the columnist announced grandly.

  To try to help the administration and minimize the impact of the scandal, Chairman Eastland banned television cameras from the proceedings. But this move also backfired. Anderson seized on the captive TV crews waiting outside in the hallway to give interviews filled with righteous indignation about the corrupt Nixon White House. Meanwhile, administration officials and ITT executives who were given an open forum by Senator Eastland brushed past the broadcast journalists. The predictable effect was television coverage as one-sided against the administration as the hearings were one-sided in its favor. “This was a political public relations contest in which Jack and I had no choice but to compete,” Hume understood. “Each side struggled to come out ahead in the daily tally provided by the morning headlines.”

  The Senate hallway was the “perfect stage for Brit of the honest face and innocent eyes,” Anderson later wrote of his young legman, whose performance was carefully coached ahead of time by his boss: “I wanted him to appear awed by the process of democracy at work, respectful of the statesmen on the committee, eager to put the truth on the public record. ‘Don’t give in to your natural temptation to snarl,’ I advised him. ‘I’ll do the snarling. I’m the columnist. You’re just a young reporter, concerned about the facts. Stop and reword your statements to find the most correct phrase. You should come across as someone who is so concerned about getting the story straight that you correct yourself as you go. You’re simply telling what you saw and heard.’ ”

  White House news summaries recorded the dismal results: on March 3, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite “said what could be the ‘biggest political scandal of an election year’ may be developing . . . Reporter added Anderson felt vindicated.” ABC described an “election year powder keg . . . Anderson got most of the film.” On March 6, a PBS commentator stated that “if the truth of Dita Beard’s memo is established, it would be a ‘fantastic scandal’—perhaps the worst in 100 years . . . If a link to Mitchell is proven, it will amount to a bribe.” On March 7, “All net[work]s led with ITT hearings.” The next day, “Anderson, on CBS, said again that Kleindienst lied” while “Kleindienst said Anderson’s charges aren’t fai
r.” Journalists “were playing us up more than they were playing the hearing up,” the columnist remembered gleefully, “which was exactly what I had hoped.”

  The White House followed the scandal with growing anxiety. “It’s an explosion,” Haldeman informed the President, one that was unlikely to go away anytime soon.

  Nixon wondered if he should return ITT’s donation, as suggested by California governor Ronald Reagan. “Giving it back doesn’t admit guilt,” Haldeman replied, and might end the current crisis. “But the problem is each time you lift up another one of these rocks, some other things are going to start squirting around.” There was simply “too much in the record to risk having it come out.”

  The President wanted prying reporters kept away from him: “I do not want to have to answer any questions on this thing.” Especially from Jack Anderson.

  “Goddammit,” Nixon fumed, “why do people read that shit-ass Anderson?”

  The more immediate difficulty, Haldeman informed the President, was that “Dita Beard had [a] three-hour interview with Jack Anderson’s man.”

  “Why the Christ did she do that?” Nixon asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know, but she did it,” Haldeman replied.

  The President decided that Hume must have “just harassed her until she finally broke down.” Nixon added, “I’d love to get him.”

  The President and his men returned to this theme—and their old, familiar refrain of homosexuality—days later in the Oval Office.