“Do we have anything on Hume?” Haldeman inquired. “I thought there was some taint on him.”
“We’re doing a check on him,” Colson replied. “We don’t have it yet.”
“It would be great if we could get him on a homosexual thing,” Haldeman suggested.
“Is he married?” Nixon asked.
They should check to be sure Hume was gay, Colson said. “He sure looks it.”
“He sure does,” Haldeman agreed.
“He just has the appearance of it,” Colson continued.
He’s pretty,” Haldeman pointed out, “and he’s—”
“—and the way he handled his demeanor is curious,” Colson said.
“He acts funny,” Haldeman added.
The President concurred: “Anderson, I remember from years ago: he’s got a strange, strange habit out of—I think Pearson was [homosexual], too. I think he and Anderson [both were.]”
In fact, Anderson, Hume, and Pearson were all heterosexual and shared the antigay prejudices of their day. But such distinctions were lost on the Nixon White House, for whom all adversaries were automatically suspect—sexually as well as politically.
Meanwhile, administration anxiety over ITT deepened. “The President’s men regarded Anderson’s revelations as the most serious threat yet to Nixon’s re-election,” one author observed, and they “responded with all the single-minded determination that they had brought to such threats in the past.” A special high-level task force was created to plot damage control, led by Charles Colson, the unabashedly ruthless and increasingly powerful forty-year-old presidential advisor who described himself as “a flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic.” One of Colson’s first goals, White House counsel Dean said, was to “nail Anderson” by planting “a few hundred” hostile questions for the columnist during his upcoming Senate testimony. Republican members of Congress were supplied with written talking points to interrogate Anderson under oath about how he “stole” the Beard memo, used “devious reasoning,” and waged “a campaign of smear and innuendo” with “half truths and fourth-removed hearsay evidence.” The President’s advisors wanted to make Anderson, rather than ITT, the focus of the hearings.
On March 9, the investigative reporter testified before the Senate committee. Despite Eastland’s plan to try to bury Anderson’s appearance, public interest had only grown during the delay of the previous week as the hearings generated increasing attention in Washington and around the nation. Even the columnist’s presence while waiting in the front row of the caucus room to testify generated press notice; journalist Mary McGrory wrote that Anderson looked eager to “finish Kleindienst off.” Indeed, the muckraker’s strategy was deliberately provocative. “What the hearings needed now,” Anderson decided, “was a troublemaker, someone to stir things up and sharpen the issues. If the tactic of the other side was in part to put the spectators to sleep with obfuscation, ours must be to wake them up with accusations . . . What was needed was a disrupting influence, someone to contradict the smooth, coordinated alibis; someone to shout ‘Liar’ ” and “bait pro-ITT senators . . . to foul up the whitewash machinery.”
Anderson did not disappoint. After introducing his “Merry-Go-Round” columns into the record, he went on the attack. “The public record on this episode is blotted with falsehood,” he declared, shaking his finger. “The aura of scandal hangs over the whole matter.” He laid out the contradictions in the testimony of administration and ITT officials, especially by Kleindienst. “This country needs as its top law enforcement officer a man who understands the law and respects the truth,” Anderson proclaimed. “Richard Kleindienst is not such a man. He is unfit to be attorney general.” The commotion in response led Eastland to bang his gavel and demand order. “The sedate hearing room of the Senate Judiciary Committee had rarely rung with such harsh language,” Time reported.
Because the facts seemed so powerfully on Anderson’s side, Republicans instead challenged the columnist’s credentials. “Are you a lawyer, Mr. Anderson?” asked Senator Roman Hruska. “No, but I understand the English language,” Anderson retorted. “Now, let us make no mistake about it. The contribution of $400,000 by a corporation to support a political convention is a crime. It directly and clearly violates the Corrupt Practices Act.” Hruska, a dim-witted conservative who had unintentionally helped defeat Nixon’s Supreme Court nominee two years earlier by arguing that “mediocre” people deserved a place on the nation’s highest court, was equal to the occasion once again. “Conventions all over America are bought all the time by business communities,” the Nebraska Republican argued. The hearing exploded with incredulous laughter, including that of other senators. “I subscribe to that,” Anderson agreed. Hruska, not knowing when to stop, added stubbornly that “everyone in this room knows it.”
The Republican senator’s animus was understandable: he had nearly been defeated for reelection two years earlier when Anderson exposed his ownership in a chain of movie theaters that played pornographic films. (For that matter, ten of the fifteen senators on the committee had at one time been skewered by the “Merry-Go-Round.”) In any case, Anderson and Hruska now descended into a shouting match over ITT. The senator accused the columnist of engaging in a “political diatribe.” Anderson in turn lectured Hruska that “one of the biggest merger cases in all history was being settled . . . at the same time that discussions were going on involving a contribution to the Republican Convention. Now, if there are people in the Senate who cannot see that this is wrong, there is something wrong with their eyesight.”
Other GOP senators were equally unsuccessful challenging Anderson. Kentucky’s Marlow Cook questioned the “irresponsible” journalist about previous inaccuracies in his column, including his false report of lavish spending by Nixon aide Donald Rumsfeld, but the reporter defused the issue by taking “full responsibility” for what he admitted was “the most glaring error the column has ever made.” Another Republican, Senator Edward Gurney of Florida, tried to force the columnist to reveal who leaked him the ITT memo.
“What is the name of [your] inside source?” Gurney asked.
“I can’t divulge it,” Anderson replied.
“I am requesting that you do give the name,” the senator pressed.
“I am refusing to give it,” the newsman responded.
“Did you receive it from an employee of ITT?”
“It came from an inside source and, Senator, with all due respect, I am not going to identify [anyone] further than that.”
“Inside ITT?”
“I am not going to identify beyond that.”
Even Chairman Eastland sided with Anderson on this issue: “He has a right not to divulge it.”
Of course, the fact that Anderson had been leaked the memo anonymously was lost on the Senate panel. “Jack said he couldn’t reveal his source,” Hume laughed. “Well, that was literally true—because he didn’t know who the source was!” It was more than professional pride that kept the newsman from reporting this fact at the time: he did not want to give his critics any opening to challenge the authenticity of the Beard memo and preferred to have his enemies fear that his informant might still be lurking near them. Indeed, to scare his adversaries further, Anderson falsely announced that he “remained in contact” with his inside source, who might leak additional incriminating documents in the future.
Meanwhile, Republicans tried their best to implicate Anderson in impropriety.
“Did you pay for this document?” Senator Gurney asked.
“No,” Anderson answered.
“It was given to you freely?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever paid for any sources of information?”
“Never,” Anderson fudged. “When they ask for money I sen[d] them on to some other reporter. I am also a tightwad, Senator.” When the laughter subsided, the newsman’s interrogator was forced to conclude that however he did it, “you have one of the best mean
s of acquiring information in Washington.”
Anderson’s testimony “drew sharp rebukes and bitter denunciations from Republican members of the committee,” The Washington Post reported, but the attacks bounced harmlessly off the columnist’s thick hide. “It’s only in retrospect that you can appreciate how immense the foe was,” Anderson’s legman Joe Spear recalled. “Jack was scared of nobody. Somehow, with his bravado, he marched up there and shouted down the Senate.”
White House aides carefully tracked Anderson’s testimony and media appearances.
“Was Anderson an effective witness?” the President asked his chief of staff.
“Yes, he was,” Haldeman had to admit. In fact, the Democrats “want to keep Anderson’s testimony going” longer because it was so badly damaging Republicans.
The evening after Anderson’s first day at the witness table, Kleindienst called Haldeman at home to bemoan the muckraker’s “wild charges” and urge a “massive W[hite] H[ouse] effort using [government] facilities to respond.” The hearings started out as a “lovefest,” the embattled nominee complained, but “then [Anderson’s] columns came out.”
The next day, Colson proposed to the President that Kleindienst issue a statement denouncing the hearings as “an outrageous witch-hunt reminiscent of the McCarthy years [instigated by] one of the most discredited and irresponsible reporters in Washington, a reporter known for his unsubstantiated sensationalism and innuendo.” Nixon liked the idea and suggested that Kleindienst also attack Anderson and Hume for “character assassination of the most despicable sort—assassination of the character of the President of the United States.” But Kleindienst evidently didn’t want to provoke Anderson further and never issued the inflammatory statement that Colson drafted.
Anderson relished the furor. After two days of contentious testimony, he had landed some powerful blows against his foes but was himself unscathed. We were “just skunking them,” the columnist recalled happily.
The White House was forced to agree. “That fellow’s slick,” Colson told the President. Still, Colson thought Anderson might have lied under oath by denying that he ever paid any of his sources for information: “He got right up to the line, just very, very close . . . We’ve got to go back and study the transcript and see if indeed we can nail him on perjury.”
Haldeman was skeptical: “He’s damn smart, the way he plays it. We’re gonna have a tough time. He knows exactly how to [say] what he wants to say without being [legally] actionable.”
“He’s been at this for years,” Nixon pointed out.
“And he leaves the committee room at just the time when he wants to go out and say something to the reporters,” Colson echoed. “Compared to the way he operates and our guys, it’s just pitiful.”
Most news outlets reached a similar verdict. Anderson and Hume “proved to be strong witnesses,” The Wall Street Journal reported, the architects of “a major political headache for the Nixon administration” in an election year. CBS News concluded that “whatever reputations are saved or lost” by the scandal, “one man’s will remain intact: Jack Anderson, the crusading investigative reporter who has an extraordinary knack for obtaining other people’s secret documents.”
To be sure, Anderson was not the only vocal Nixon critic during the ITT scandal. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Democratic Party chairman Lawrence O’Brien also assailed the White House while several Democratic senators, led by Edward Kennedy, aggressively questioned witnesses from ITT. But Anderson and Hume carefully briefed these administration opponents, sharing their confidential reporters’ notes, focusing the direction of questioning, and explaining the intricacies of the complicated affair. One cartoonist drew Anderson as a sniffing hound dog straining at his leash to pull Kennedy, who was wearing a deerstalker cap like Sherlock Holmes.
Predictably, the President focused on Anderson’s connection with Kennedy. The last surviving Kennedy brother continued to be mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, and Nixon was unable to overlook how the Kennedys had planted the Hughes loan story with Anderson on the eve of the 1960 election. Now, a dozen years later, with ITT, “Kennedy and Anderson are preparing the leaks,” the President noted. “They’re all working together.” Nixon’s men echoed their boss: “Kennedy and Anderson had been conspiring,” Colson agreed. It was “clearly . . . a Kennedy-Anderson conspiracy,” Haldeman affirmed.
Even while complaining about a Democratic conspiracy, however, the President engineered a Republican one in response. Aides summoned Senator Marlow Cook to the White House and the GOP senator then dutifully attacked Anderson and Kennedy for engaging in a “political conspiracy.” Nixon’s advisors and the Republican National Committee also drafted speeches attacking Anderson to be delivered by other GOP congressmen. Senator Paul Fannin denounced Anderson’s “yellow journalism”; Senator Barry Goldwater charged that the “gossip-monger” and his “irresponsible muckraking” were “producing a national crisis.” The daily barrage began to trouble the columnist. “Coming from the Senate, a quarter not implicated in my recent run of exposés, they had the surface appearance of coming from detached statesmen who had no personal axe to grind,” Anderson worried.
In fact, it was the President himself who was shaping his surrogates’ message: “You got to use the word smear, I tell you, every day . . . This is a smear-a-day Congress rather than a law-a-day Congress, see?” “A smear-a-day Congress, that’s a great phrase,” Colson enthused. “We’ll start using that one.” Two days later, the pliable Senator Hruska publicly labeled the ITT hearings a “smear-a-day campaign masquerading as a Senate confirmation hearing.”
Nixon repeated his refrain a week later: “Just continue to hit smear, smear, smear, smear.” “Well,” Colson replied, “Hruska last week . . . got picked up in Time and Newsweek . . . [saying] that this is ‘a smear-a-day Congress.’ . . . And he keeps saying it.” “Get the word to a hundred congressmen and senators on the Republican side to start talking about smear a day, the President reiterated. “We write it in everything we send to them,” Colson assured Nixon. But the President was insistent: “Just get the [congressional] whips to pass the word out . . . ‘smear, smear, smear.’ ”
To plot their own smears, White House aides secretly huddled with ITT lawyers and CREEP operatives. Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, contacted a federal prosecutor he once supervised about “programming” a pro-ITT witness for “appearing on T.V.,” while a top Justice Department official “agreed that I.T.T. or Geneen should issue [a] press release” to combat the scandal. Meanwhile, the FBI “prepared a number of items for use by a friendly Senator to attack the credibility of Anderson.” The abuse of law enforcement authorities for such nakedly political purposes did not seem to bother government officials.
Democrats returned the fire. Senator Edmund Muskie, Nixon’s leading presidential competitor, made front-page headlines warning that the scandal had “shaken the confidence of Americans in the integrity of the political process.” Another White House rival, Democratic senator George McGovern, drew cheers along the campaign trail by declaring: “I want an America with such a passion for justice that not even $400,000 will buy special privileges for a big corporation!” California’s ambitious secretary of state, Jerry Brown, the future Democratic governor and presidential candidate, even filed a lawsuit to stop ITT’s underwriting of the Republican convention on the grounds that it was an “egregious” violation of federal corruption laws. White House aides condescendingly referred to thirty-three-year-old Brown, son of the California politician who had defeated Nixon for governor a decade earlier, as “little Pat Brown.” But that did not stop him from garnering national headlines by denouncing ITT’s “political payoff.”
The President and his advisors were appalled to find themselves embroiled in such a media circus. “Day after day, the White House staff raced around trying to minimize the political damage and keep any embarrassing material from the committee’s partisan clutches,” Nixon wrote
in his memoirs. The President even had to “cancel his press conference idea for tomorrow,” Haldeman noted in his diary, “because there’s no way he can adequately handle the ITT question.”
Nixon received conflicting advice about what to do. “Rumsfeld argued we should take our losses and get out,” Haldeman noted, but the President feared that withdrawing Kleindienst’s nomination would not stop the bloodletting. Treasury Secretary John Connally, a tough-talking Texan whom Nixon admired, urged the President to “hit ’em, hit ’em, hit ’em, that’s the only way you can do it.”
“Just go on the attack?” Nixon asked.
“Go on the attack,” Connally repeated. “You have to go on the attack.”
The President liked the advice. “Attack the goddamn media!” Nixon barked to his staff. “The press corps is anti-us” anyway, Nixon believed. “They were all for Hiss. Half of ’em were goddamn near Communists.”
But although the President wanted to “attack the attackers,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Nixon “was concerned that we don’t seem to have any dirt to throw back at the Democrats.” So, to try to besmirch the opposition, the White House compiled a list of Democratic politicians who had received campaign contributions from ITT.
In addition, the President suggested that “now is the time to surface [embarrassing classified documents] on Kennedy and Vietnam in a more vicious way, and get some of that going as we counter-fire, so we’re doing something on our own initiative instead of just reacting to the Democrats.” In any event, Nixon told his staff, “I should be one step removed now . . . from this whole goddamn controversy.”
Colson’s task force began holding what one presidential aide called “panic sessions” several times a day. “As we kicked ‘scenarios’ around the room,” White House lawyer Dean said, “a public-relations strategy emerged around two central themes: hide the facts and discredit the opposition.”
The first to be discredited was Dita Beard, whose incriminating memo had caused the scandal in the first place. A onetime Washington debutante who had worked for Nixon’s presidential campaign, Beard now endured withering attacks by her former allies, who suddenly discovered that she was an unstable alcoholic. A retired Republican governor publicly announced that he’d seen Beard get drunk at a party and pass out on the floor. Beard’s doctor, who had worked for an ITT subsidiary and faced possible indictment for Medicare fraud by Kleindienst’s Justice Department, overcame his objections to violating patient-client privilege and testified that Beard sometimes suffered from “distorted and irrational behavior” and therefore “could have written an inaccurate memo.” The physician even quoted his patient as supposedly saying, “I was mad and disturbed when I wrote it.” As for Kleindienst, he told reporters that Beard was “a poor soul, a rather sick person” and added that “it’s just a sad situation.”
Poisoning The Press Page 28
