Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  But Nixon and his advisors soon crossed the line from spin control to criminal conspiracy. They deliberately obstructed the FBI’s investigation of the break-in and pressured prosecutors to limit their probe. They also paid hush money to the burglars and lied under oath to hide their complicity. White House tapes captured the President’s crimes in explicit orders to his staff: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else if it’ll save it, save this plan. That’s the whole point.”

  Nixon believed that the Watergate break-in was a “chicken shit thing,” no worse than misconduct by the President’s political and journalistic enemies. “Somebody should say the arrested men were just trying to win a Pulitzer” like Jack Anderson, the President told aides. “I mean, they won Pulitzer Prizes for [what they got from] the thieves who took the stuff out of Kissinger’s office . . . Now what the hell is the difference?” After all, “they praised Jack Anderson and made him a national hero” for similar behavior. Nixon could not bring himself to admit wrongdoing in Watergate, Ehrlichman said, because he was “emotionally and constitutionally unable to deliver himself to his enemies to any degree. He will fight, bleed and die before he will admit to Jack Anderson that he’s wrong or that he’s made a mistake.”

  Anderson had a similar inability to acknowledge error, and he now began making plenty of them. His first column on Watergate, right after the break-in, tried to link the burglary to “President Nixon’s favorite Cuban, Bebe Rebozo” by stating that “Rebozo has been associated . . . with the Cuban bugging crew” from Watergate. In fact, the President’s best friend had nothing to do with the crime and even The Washington Post, which was aggressively reporting on Watergate, spiked Anderson’s ethnic guilt by association. “Jack Anderson said Rebozo was involved in it with the Cubans,” Nixon fumed to his staff. Rebozo has “been so abused” by that “son of a bitch” columnist: “Goddammit, he can sue . . . because he knows goddamn well he’s not involved with it. See what I mean? Jack Anderson, what they would like to do is they’d like to tie him in order to tie us into it.”

  So the White House tried to retaliate—and advance its cover-up—by blaming Anderson for the Watergate break-in. “We started a rumor yesterday morning” on Capitol Hill, Haldeman told the President, “that this whole thing is a Jack Anderson thing, that Jack Anderson did it . . . That Jack Anderson has put all of this together, he was bugging the Democratic offices.” It was not completely far-fetched. In addition to Anderson’s known history of bugging Washington hotel rooms, Haldeman explained, the muckraker was also “tied” to some of the Watergate burglars through his friendship with Frank Sturgis. “The great thing about this,” Haldeman added, is that the burglary “is so totally fucked up and so badly done that nobody believes”—Nixon interrupted—“that we could have done it.”

  Nevertheless, the President’s cover-up was already beginning to fray. Law enforcement authorities quickly linked Hunt and Liddy to the break-in and traced the burglars’ cash to the Nixon reelection campaign—and then revealed these incriminating facts to The Washington Post and The New York Times. Democrats filed a lawsuit against CREEP and called upon Congress to investigate. The White House watched with growing alarm. “The problem that you’ve got,” Nixon complained to his staff, “is that some lower echelon shit-ass at the Justice Department or the FBI will try to leak out stuff about this.” But the President was being targeted not only by low-level law enforcement agents but also by a top FBI official who would eventually become known to the world as “Deep Throat.”

  Six weeks before the Watergate break-in, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died unexpectedly at the age of seventy-seven. Some FBI agents blamed their boss’s death on Jack Anderson. The day before, the columnist had begun a series of exposés about how Hoover—who “appears to have a hangup [about] sex”—had ordered his agents to “snoop into the sex habits” of famous Americans who “aren’t even remotely involved in illegal activity.” Anderson quoted “titillating tidbits” from the FBI’s secret files. Hollywood actor Rock Hudson “was suspected of having homosexual tendencies,” the FBI reported. Novelist James Baldwin “was evicted by [his] landlord for having homosexual parties.” Football quarterback Joe Namath was “intoxicated on several occasions and also reportedly had an affair with an airline stewardess” that led to an abortion. Boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis, actors Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, physician Benjamin Spock, entertainer Harry Belafonte—all were victims of the FBI’s “incorrigible gossips,” Anderson reported. The same day, Anderson testified to Congress that Hoover’s “sex reports” showed an “intense interest in who is sleeping with whom in Washington.”

  That night, Hoover suffered a fatal heart attack. Two days later, the President named Hoover’s successor: L. Patrick Gray, a staunch Nixon loyalist who first befriended the young Congressman in the 1940s, served as an advisor for Vice President Nixon, and worked in his 1960 presidential campaign. More recently, as assistant attorney general, Gray participated in the White House cover-up of the ITT scandal while his wife worked for Nixon’s reelection campaign. In short, Nixon chose a man he believed would execute his directives without question. Hoover’s men were outraged. W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s second-in-command, believed he had earned the top job for himself and was angered by the White House move to politicize the Bureau. To retaliate, Felt began leaking about Watergate to two journalists: Sandy Smith of Time and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, who referred to his anonymous source as “Deep Throat.” The liberal Post was bolder and more aggressive following Felt’s leads than the cautiously conservative weekly magazine. Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein were also younger and hungrier than Smith, and knocked on numerous doors to cultivate low-level sources in Nixon’s campaign as well. The Post reporters dominated early coverage of Watergate, piecing together the story bit by bit, one new fact at a time.

  By October, the identity of Woodward’s secret FBI source was slipped to the White House. Time’s Smith confided the information to his magazine’s general counsel, who informed Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell. Felt “vehemently denied” leaking about Watergate, but the President wasn’t fooled. According to acting FBI director Gray, Nixon went on a “rampage,” his face “flushed” and “wild,” stuttering “almost beyond coherence,” a “rush of words [leaving] flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth.” The President told Hoover’s replacement that the FBI was “crawling” with “at best, unloyal people and at worst treasonable people. We have to get them, break them.” The Chief Executive ordered Gray to “tail” Felt and polygraph him. But Felt outmaneuvered the White House by putting himself in charge of the FBI’s leak investigation and taking care to meet Woodward only at night in an out-of-the-way parking garage.

  The Watergate leaks continued. But not to Jack Anderson. “Failing like almost everyone else to recognize the true significance of the break-in,” one author wrote, “Anderson lost interest” in the story. As the columnist later admitted, he “couldn’t foresee how big Watergate was going to become.” Paradoxically, despite its legendary status, Watergate was not a story that lent itself to original investigative reporting. Because the political figures implicated in the scandal faced significant legal jeopardy, the evidence of wrongdoing they possessed was generally too dangerous to entrust to reporters and could be confided safely only to their own attorneys or law enforcement officials. In the end, all mythmaking to the contrary, Watergate journalism was largely derivative, reporting on investigations by authorities that were already under way before news outlets began covering them. “Television and newspapers publicized the story and, perhaps, even encouraged more diligent investigation,” historian Stanley Kutler wrote; but “carefully timed leaks, not media investigations, provided the first news of Watergate.”

  Anderson was now at a particular disadvantage. Larger, establishment news outlets that o
nce shunned investigative reporting were jumping on the Watergate story, taking advantage of resources and respectability that the columnist could only envy. In addition, The Washington Post and The New York Times had far more space to report in-depth while Anderson was limited to a 750-word newshole. Most of all, in an era before the fax machine or the Internet, the “Merry-Go-Round” was hobbled by a four-day delay sending out its stories to client newspapers by postal mail in the midst of a fast-breaking scandal where scoops rarely held for long. To try to stay on top of events, Anderson waited until the last minute to file his occasional exclusives, but his syndicate warned that continuing to push the deadline would “kill the column.” So instead the column effectively killed Anderson’s scoops.

  Ultimately, Watergate destroyed Anderson’s muckraking monopoly in Washington. The irony was palpable: Anderson had hunted Nixon for two decades and risen to the top of his enemies list; he’d been targeted for surveillance, sexual smears, and even an aborted assassination plot. But other, younger reporters—not Anderson—would reap the glory for harpooning the presidential whale. Nixon’s dramatic fall “should have belonged to Jack and made him a revered American icon” for decades, his legman James Grady believed. “If your heroism is measured by the anger of your enemies, remember, the Plumbers never tried to harm Woodward and Bernstein but they were primed and dispatched to kill Jack.”

  In utterly different ways and for utterly different reasons, Watergate would prove catastrophic for both Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson. In the end, their most lethal enemy proved to be not each other but themselves.

  Four weeks after the Watergate arrests, the Democratic Party nominated its candidate to oppose President Nixon in November: South Dakota senator George McGovern, a former preacher and prairie populist running on a staunch antiwar platform. Although McGovern trailed in public opinion polls, Republicans nevertheless unleashed a vicious sabotage squad against him. Nixon operatives plotted to bug McGovern’s Washington headquarters and use prostitutes to compromise his top advisors. The President’s men also planted undercover spies to work alongside McGovern’s staff. One mole, Lucianne Goldberg—who later achieved fame for her role in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment—reported that Nixon “loved” reading her memos about “who was sleeping with who” on the campaign trail. At the same time, the White House had Secret Service bodyguards spy on McGovern and leaked rumors to the press that he was having an adulterous affair.

  On July 14, McGovern chose his vice presidential running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. Three days later, a nervous caller phoned the Knight newspaper chain to report that Eagleton had a history of mental illness that included hospitalizations for electric shock therapy. The anonymous informant, who evidently had access to Eagleton’s psychiatric records, supplied specific locations and dates where Eagleton had been treated and a devastating medical diagnosis: “severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies.” Reporter Clark Hoyt tracked down one of the physicians involved in Eagleton’s shock treatment. “I can’t talk to you about that,” the doctor exclaimed, turning pale and slamming the door in the journalist’s face. Hoyt viewed the panicked response as confirmation of his story and confronted the McGovern campaign about it. The candidate’s press secretary stalled for time to respond; because Hoyt lacked sufficient evidence to prove the allegation, he agreed to delay publication in an effort to get corroboration—or at least comment—from the Democrats. In fact, it turned out that Eagleton had concealed his psychiatric past not only from the press and public but also from McGovern, who now learned for the first time that his running mate had suffered three nervous breakdowns, two requiring electric shock therapy. McGovern quickly called a news conference to disclose Eagleton’s medical condition, hoping to give the appearance of forthrightness and minimize the damage.

  President Nixon moved immediately to exploit the scandal and ordered his staff to “destroy” Eagleton. Soon after, a Republican spokesman, cloaked in anonymity, told the press that “people simply aren’t going to want to put a mental patient in charge of the nuclear arsenal.” At the same time, Nixon called an unexpected news conference and declared, “I have given the strictest instructions that there are to be no comments” about Eagleton from his administration. “I am not going to interject myself into that problem.” The President then went on to do just that, boasting that he had “never missed an appointment because of health. Considering what I have been through, some fairly stern crises and rather extensive travel, I don’t think anybody would question the state of my health.”

  Democrats tried to fight back by reviving Jack Anderson’s story about Nixon’s own psychotherapy treatments with Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, but that effort went nowhere. Meanwhile, Eagleton’s desperate efforts to salvage his vice presidential nomination resembled nothing so much as Nixon’s struggle two decades earlier to do the same. The embattled candidate considered giving a “Checkers”-like speech on prime-time television but decided instead to make his case through the many reporters who now swarmed to his beleaguered campaign. Instead of invoking his pet dog, Eagleton mawkishly told voters about his thirteen-year-old son: “Terry is an impressionable boy at an impressionable age. And other kids can be terribly cruel about this kind of thing. I never, never would do anything to hurt or embarrass my boy . . . I’ve got to win. I’ve got to do it for Terry.”

  Jack Anderson watched all of this from the sidelines, frustrated at his own irrelevance. A scandal involving the mental health of a prominent politician was exactly the kind of story that had been the muckraker’s trademark for a quarter century, but he was conspicuously absent from the current coverage. The Washington Post was scooping him on Watergate, and now even the humble Knight newspaper chain was beating him on another scandal of national import. Anderson resolved to find a way to get back in the game.

  Like many journalists, Anderson was aware of rumors that Eagleton had a problem with alcohol. Four years earlier, one of the newsman’s sources told him that Missouri police had arrested Eagleton on multiple occasions for drunk driving. But at the time, Eagleton was just an obscure state politician and Anderson hadn’t bothered to pursue the lead. Now that Eagleton was the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, Anderson decided to investigate further. The columnist contacted his original source, a Missouri Democrat named True Davis who had unsuccessfully run against Eagleton for the Senate in 1968. Davis told Anderson that he had seen paperwork showing that Eagleton had been arrested for drunk driving but that Eagleton somehow managed to cover up the charges. However, Davis had nothing to back up his rumor: no hard copies of tickets issued to Eagleton or names of any officers who allegedly arrested him. Davis himself refused to go public with the unproven accusation, not only because he had no concrete evidence but also because he had made peace with his former opponent and supported the McGovern-Eagleton ticket.

  Anderson and his reporters began making phone calls to try to verify the drunk-driving allegations, but they came up empty-handed. Many Missouri politicians and police had heard the rumors, too, but none had any proof to substantiate them. Still, Anderson decided to go ahead anyway. “When a guy like True Davis says he saw those photostats,” the muckraker told his staff, “there’s obviously something to it. Someone’s going to get this story, so I’m inclined to move ahead with something so we don’t lose it.” Legman Mike Kiernan helped draft a story that journalists were “streaming into St. Louis” to check out “rumors” that Eagleton had been “stopped for drunken driving” but had discovered only one arrest for speeding. Repeating this unverified gossip was arguably defensible in the heat of the campaign. But then Anderson crossed out the speeding-ticket line with his black felt-tipped pen and added a sentence that would haunt him for the rest of his career: “Eagleton has steadfastly denied any alcoholism in his past but we have now located photostats of half-a-dozen arrests for drunken and reckless driving.” It wasn’t true—Anderson possessed no paperwork whatsoever—but he felt “confident
that the documents existed and that I would soon lay my hands on them.” Because such an explosive scoop would not hold for his column’s four-day postal delay, Anderson aired the report that morning on his Mutual Broadcasting radio program.

  Before Anderson even had time to walk back from the nearby radio studio, journalists began besieging his office. “The phones were ringing off the hook,” Kiernan recalled. “Reporters were lined up in the halls to get copies of the Eagleton tickets—but we didn’t have any tickets!” In fact, Anderson didn’t even know for sure whether such drunk-driving citations even existed. So he issued a disingenuous clarification stating that while he had not personally seen Eagleton’s arrest records, he had “traced” them thanks to a “former high official from Missouri whose reliability is beyond question but who has asked us not to identify him.” According to Brit Hume, “Jack seemed to have no doubt that the story would be vindicated, even if he had exaggerated it originally.” Anderson held court with numerous print and broadcast journalists, Hume recalled, and “gave each interviewer the most ringing assurances of the reliability of his source.”

  But on the campaign trail, Eagleton called Anderson’s bluff. “He doesn’t have the documents,” the Missouri senator declared, because “they do not exist.” Eagleton categorically denied ever being arrested for drunken or reckless driving: “Anderson’s statement to that effect in blunt and direct English is a damnable lie.” Eagleton heatedly vowed that “Jack Anderson is not going to run me out of town or run me off this Democratic ticket.” In private, the vice presidential nominee confided that “the Anderson thing was the best thing that could have happened, a blessing in disguise.” Indeed, “the Anderson accusations gave Eagleton an opportunity to seize the offensive and capture the public’s sympathy . . . as an embattled candidate fighting for his political life against false and perhaps even malicious accusations,” McGovern later wrote. His campaign manager believed that “Anderson had changed the entire picture. While campaigning against the phony charges, Eagleton could somehow lump all the accusations together and present himself as the wronged man, the besieged man, the man against the system.”