Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  By the end of March, the White House was forced to give up all further efforts to discredit Anderson’s memo. Pollster Louis Harris found that more Americans believed the columnist than the Nixon administration.

  The President’s men moved to put the scandal behind them. In June, the Senate finally confirmed Richard Kleindienst as attorney general, but not before he and a host of Justice Department and ITT officials committed perjury trying to cover up their misconduct. Their “bald deceptions and outright falsehoods” in Senate testimony “registered a new low,” a prosecution spokesman later said.

  Kleindienst’s lies were the most flagrant and shameless of all. “I was not interfered with by anybody at the White House” about ITT, he swore under oath. “I was not importuned; I was not pressured; I was not directed. I did not have conferences with respect to what I should or should not do . . . I would have had a vivid recollection if someone at the White House had called me up and said, ‘Look, Kleindienst, this is the way we are going to handle that case.’ ” In fact, however, Kleindienst had had exactly that conversation, with the President himself, as White House tapes later revealed. “The IT & T thing—stay the hell out of it!” Nixon barked at Kleindienst. “Is that clear? That’s an order . . . leave the goddamned thing alone.” When Kleindienst explained that such a sudden reversal might prove awkward, the President exploded: “You son of a bitch, don’t you understand the English language? . . . Drop the goddamn thing. Is that clear?”

  It was Nixon himself, in other words, who rigged the ITT settlement in the first place—and then concealed the perjury of his top law enforcement officer when he tried to cover it all up. Additional evidence revealed other incriminating evidence that, in Colson’s words, would “lay this case on the president’s doorstep” and “directly involve” him in the scandal. Two years later, Kleindienst became the first attorney general in American history to plead guilty to breaking the federal laws he was sworn to enforce. Prosecutors wanted to file indictments against others for what they called the “extraordinarily numerous” crimes in the case, including bribery, perjury, and obstruction of justice; but no additional charges were ever brought. ITT effectively bought off Dita Beard by continuing to pay her salary and purchasing a ten-acre farm to which she retired in West Virginia. Despite her well-publicized medical woes, Jack Anderson wrote a year later, “our sources reported seeing her in Las Vegas. She was whooping it up just like she used to do in the backrooms of Washington. She looked quite healthy, the sources said, and she appeared to have overcome her delicate heart condition.”

  In the end, FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt realized, the White House cover-up of ITT proved to be “a prelude to Watergate.” Both scandals included the same players: Liddy, Hunt, Dean, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Nixon. And both involved similar crimes: perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice. The President would repeatedly compare the two scandals in private, minimizing both because “nobody stole anything.” Nixon firmly believed that each was just the result of partisan politics and that the White House should simply “cut our losses and get out of this damn thing.”

  But Jack Anderson’s assessment was more accurate. “The Watergate crimes and their prolonged cover-up were but an elaboration of the basic approach used during the ITT preliminaries,” the columnist wrote. “By the time of the Watergate cover-up the techniques of conspiracy, fraud and perjury had been systematized into an automatic Administration response . . . In dozens of particulars, large and small, the tactics used by the Nixon men to wriggle out of Watergate were imitations, albeit refined by practice, of those used in ITT.”

  Jack Anderson now expanded his anti-Nixon crusade beyond his “Merry-Go-Round” column. In interviews with other journalists, the muckraker attacked the President as “a Dogpatch-style politician who always aims his knee at the groin, who scratches the eyes of his opponents and karate chops them in the neck.” Anderson was equally scathing during a nationwide lecture tour. “What contempt they have for the public!” he shouted to his audiences. “To preach law and order while they violate the law!” The columnist “bellowed” his sermons, The New York Times Magazine reported, “arms flailing, fingers pointing, eyes rolling, in a menacing hellfire-and-brimstone tone.” He “did more pacing, finger jabbing and eye rolling than Oral Roberts in full cry,” Newsweek observed, “his rich baritone voice” booming like an evangelist’s as he reached “new heights of righteous outrage” and “climaxed his pyrotechnics with a ringing call to action.”

  Meanwhile, under the banner “Jack Anderson, Supersnoop,” Time put the columnist’s scowling visage on its cover. “The Square Scourge of Washington,” the newsweekly stated, had become a “household name” and achieved “a reporter’s daydream: his revelations rock the nation, and he shifts from merely writing news to making it. Newspapers front-page his exposés, he stars at televised hearings and on talk shows, fellow newsmen want to interview him, and the reigning powers that he assaults seem powerless before him.”

  In the White House, the President and his aides expressed disgust at the celebrity of their old enemy.

  “Anderson’s got the cover on Time and [he’s in] Newsweek,” Colson marveled. “It’s incredible how they’re building that son of a bitch up, just incredible.”

  “Building him up on stuff, none of which has yet been proved,” the President interrupted. True, there were “the Anderson Papers” on Nixon’s secret arms deal with Pakistan, the President conceded: “Of course he’s got that leak, those are proven more or less, but as far as this [ITT] stuff is concerned, not a goddamn thing has been proven, [not] one stinking goddamn thing.”

  The President continued to brood about Anderson’s positive publicity. “Have somebody attack Time for having him on the cover,” Nixon ordered his staff the next day. “Let Agnew do that” by denouncing the magazine for being “taken in by Anderson.”

  Two days later, the CBS News correspondent Morley Safer broadcast a glowing profile of Anderson on the prime-time television program 60 Minutes. “You can hardly pass a Washington landmark these days without recalling a reputation that Jack Anderson destroyed, a scandal exposed, a revelation of the big lie in high places,” Safer reported. Anderson then popped up in front of a variety of Washington backdrops: at the Pentagon, the columnist bragged that the “security boys are investigating us here all the time.” Outside FBI headquarters, Anderson declared, “We got evidence from inside the FBI that J. Edgar Hoover’s been using FBI employees to write his book.” And in front of the Executive Office Building, Anderson boasted, “We’ve gotten quite a few secrets out of the White House . . . that prove that President Nixon and his foreign policy czar Henry Kissinger were lying about the India-Pakistan crisis.” Safer described Anderson as

  The nosiest man in Washington . . . [with] an extraordinary record of news beats. Always on the attack . . . He prints all the news that most Government agencies regard as unfit to print . . . No other reporter prods quite so regularly at Washington’s soft underbelly as Jack Anderson. No other reporter gets his hands on secret documents quite so often . . . He’s become a Washington fixture—loved and feared and hated.

  “It’s very important to have a needle and stuff it in some of these windbags and let the hot air out,” Anderson told 60 Minutes. Informants who turned to Anderson, his legman Les Whitten added, did so to get “the hardest, toughest, meanest, most ornery” reporting possible: “When the story comes out, they want to see it hit hard and get right down to the absolute bone of the story. They don’t want to see a minuet dance around it, they want to see some hot rock ’n’ roll.”

  The President was outraged. “60 Minutes, the news magazines,” he exclaimed. It’s “absolute madness, glorifying” Anderson like this.

  “It’s gone to his head, too,” Haldeman agreed. “He looks like a madman. Wild eyes.”

  Even so, the President realized, when it came to public relations, “we’ve been buried” by him.

  Meanwhile, satirists aimed
their humor at Nixon’s nemesis. “Jack Anderson is a big know-ITT all,” one cartoonist punned. Another sketched a Washington desk with a stack of three document-filled trays: “In,” “Out,” and “To be leaked to Jack Anderson.” “I don’t want to criticize the way he gets his news,” Bob Hope told crowds, “but putting on a blond wig and a miniskirt and sitting on Kissinger’s lap” was going too far.

  Not all the attention Anderson received was laudatory. A writer from The New Yorker mocked Anderson’s polyester cinnamon-and-mustard suits, purchased at a factory warehouse, and the orange and green colors of his family’s living room: “There is no combination of words in the English language that Jack Anderson regards as a cliché—not ‘boon companion,’ not ‘wine-dark seas,’ not ‘the story can now be told’ . . . There is no lead paragraph Anderson considers too melodramatic.” At the same time, many of the hundreds of letters Anderson received in his office each week were filled with vituperative denunciations. One envelope contained two pieces of paper separated by a slab of manure. Another was addressed only to “Jack Anderson, liar, louse, ring-tailed rat and yellow-bellied skunk.” The U.S. Postal Service somehow figured out which of America’s fourteen thousand Jack Andersons was the intended recipient.

  In May, Anderson received the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his exposé of the Nixon administration’s secret tilt to Pakistan. “The Anderson Papers brought to light facts that would not have been available through any other channels,” the judges declared. “It is this kind of exposure to the sunlight of public opinion that contributes to the integrity and ultimate success of the democratic process.”

  “Horrible,” the President grumbled. Anderson and his sources were nothing less than “thieves who took the stuff out of Kissinger’s office.”

  Colson agreed, though he had to admit that Anderson had “achieved what Drew Pearson never achieved” and “become a kind of public personality.” Indeed, less than three years after Pearson’s death, Anderson had added another three hundred newspapers to his client base, an increase of nearly 50 percent.

  Nixon allies were appalled by it all. “When they begin giving the Pulitzer Prize to Jack Anderson,” Senator Barry Goldwater said, “it is time to call it the Benedict Arnold Award.” Indeed, “it’s encouraging to every damn crook in the country” to honor a “columnist who’s a fence.” In a televised interview, White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan condemned Anderson’s award as “atrocious” and “appalling . . . if you can get ahold of some secret documents, if you can seduce some miserable government employee to give you a National Security Council memorandum and then you run it in your column, you can get a Pulitzer Prize.”

  The President’s men were not alone. Trustees of Columbia University, which awarded the Pulitzer, publicly voiced “deep reservations” about the “suitability” of giving the honor to Anderson. “If you crib documents and then put them in the paper,” one said, “that’s just not good journalism. If someone steals or robs, you can’t throw holy water on it by claiming it was done in the public interest.”

  Anderson replied by blasting “those who believe in the Kremlin system of government control over information” and called the award “recognition of the public’s right to get behind the phony security stands of government.” In private, he admitted feeling “contemptuous” of the prize. “We had earned it many times over” in the past without receiving it, he said, so “when I finally got it, I was awfully tempted to throw it back in their face.” But the columnist controlled his tongue and accepted the thorny laurel with outward modesty.

  In truth, most Washington journalists recognized that Anderson had long deserved the accolade. “My friends are not always in accord with Jack’s techniques,” one Beltway pundit wrote, “but most do give him credit for at least two things: his enterprise in digging out facts that others are trying to hide, and his courage in printing stories that will make powerful men and organizations his implacable enemies.” According to Life magazine, despite his “pristinely ascetic personal life,” the muckraker had become an “improbable new folk hero of the young . . . an unlikely Pied Piper.”

  For the first time in his career, Anderson received widespread acclaim—and a sudden rash of social invitations—from the capital insiders who had so often ignored or ridiculed him in the past. He was feted for lunch at columnist Joseph Alsop’s Georgetown mansion. Publisher Katharine Graham hosted him in her Washington Post office, where she “fawned all over him,” urging him to join her newspaper’s board of directors and allow his column to be moved from its exile alongside the comics to the more prestigious op-ed page. But Anderson turned her down. “He always stayed outside the doors of power,” a journalist who knew him explained. “He was always the Mormon boy looking in.”

  Just like the Quaker president with whom he battled, Anderson could not bring himself to make peace with the Washington establishment that had scorned him for so long. “It was much more important to Jack to be respected in his church than in elite media circles,” Anderson’s longtime reporter, Les Whitten, realized. “So that clannishness kept him insulated from those gutless trained seals of the Washington press corps.”

  Anderson himself put it more diplomatically. “Don’t worry,” he reassured his staff presciently, “sooner or later we’re bound to do something they think is outrageous” and then “they’ll be giving us hell again.”

  14

  “KILL HIM”

  Jack Anderson’s secretary was unfazed by the caller’s urgent tone. After all, hundreds of insistent strangers now contacted the columnist’s office each week to pass on story tips or seek help for personal problems. So, as usual, the phone call was transferred to one of Anderson’s unpaid college interns, whose lowly work included screening out the crackpots. But this time, in March 1972, Lehigh University undergraduate Jeff Brindle was surprised to find himself talking with a senior government official who possessed highly sensitive documents about a plot by the Nixon administration to overthrow a democratically elected government in South America.

  Less than an hour later, the anxious informant showed up at Anderson’s door and handed the long-haired intern a brown manila envelope filled with twenty-six internal memos—stamped “Personal & Confidential”—written on the letterhead of ITT, the politically powerful conglomerate at the heart of Senate hearings that Anderson had instigated earlier that month. “Holy shit,” Brindle remembers thinking, “there’s a lot of top secret stuff in here about the CIA!”

  The memos revealed a conspiracy between the CIA and ITT to overthrow Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile who would fall victim to a coup d’état a year later. “Approaches continue to be made to select members of the [Chilean] Armed Forces in an attempt to have them lead some sort of uprising” against Allende, one ITT memo stated. Other documents reported that the anti-Allende rebellion had “full material and financial assistance by the U.S. military establishment” and that Chile’s insurgents had received a “green light to move in the name of President Nixon.”

  The President’s motive to stop Allende was primarily ideological anticommunism. “Chile could end up being the worst failure in our administration—our Cuba,” White House national security advisor Henry Kissinger warned Nixon. ITT’s motive, on the other hand, was economic: the multinational company owned Chile’s telephone company and feared that Allende’s new socialist government would confiscate up to $200 million of its assets. Together, the Nixon administration and ITT shared similar goals and discussed them in unvarnished terms. CIA officials urged ITT to help destabilize Allende by “inducing economic collapse” in Chile. ITT executives agreed and promised to “assist financially in sums up to seven figures.” The secret memos, Anderson’s legman Brit Hume marveled, “painted an extraordinary picture of a corporation utterly convinced of its right to interfere in the affairs of a foreign state in whatever fashion it chose in order to advance its own interests.” They also portrayed U.S. foreign policy as a brutal tool of
the President’s corporate benefactors.

  Anderson and Hume quickly authenticated the documents and drafted two columns about the secret regime-change plot. They saved their final phone calls, seeking comment from the CIA and ITT, for a Friday, when the upcoming weekend could be counted on to distract other reporters who might get wind of the story—and make it more difficult for their targets to leak a sanitized version of events to a journalistic competitor. According to the flurry of CIA memos generated that day, Hume told the intelligence agency that he had obtained “Personal/Confidential material that ties [the CIA] with IT & T” in “stopping” Allende and warned “it would be better if the Agency were not stuffy” about answering his “urgent” questions.

  The “Merry-Go-Round” inquiries immediately set off alarms inside the Nixon administration and ITT. Dita Beard’s boss called “to warn us that Jack Anderson has some documents,” a CIA official wrote in a memo, although ITT “didn’t know what Anderson will write.” In turn, the CIA “discussed the problem with General [Alexander] Haig,” Kissinger’s deputy, to be sure that the White House was “advised about these developments.” Within two hours of Hume’s phone call to the CIA, its director crossed the Potomac River from his Virginia headquarters for an emergency lunch with Anderson in downtown Washington. Not surprisingly, Richard Helms failed to persuade the newsman to spike his scoop. That evening, a CIA administrator drove to the Washington home of a top ITT executive to get copies of the documents leaked to Anderson. “ITT is not going to have any comment on these memos,” the intelligence operative informed his superiors afterward. “They will neither confirm nor deny; no comment at all. ITT tried earlier to be gentlemen with Anderson and it didn’t work.”