Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Just as Richard Nixon had done during his “Checkers” speech, as the President himself realized better than anyone. Anderson’s “shockingly false story” reminded Nixon of “how Anderson’s mentor, Drew Pearson, had done a similar thing to me” twenty years earlier, Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “I could empathize with Eagleton’s frustration, and I admired his aplomb. He was as courageous as Anderson was contemptible.” However, the President’s sympathy for Eagleton didn’t temper his desire to exploit the obvious political opportunity that presented itself. Nixon wants to “make McGovern look bad out of this,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, and the President issued instructions to “hit him again while he’s down to keep him down.” Nixon also told Haldeman to have the White House take “a crack at Anderson” now that he was vulnerable: “I think hitting Anderson is very important, Bob, it’s very, very important to discredit” him.

  Anderson made it easier for his enemies by brushing off Eagleton’s protestations of innocence. The investigative reporter’s long and successful history of bluffing his way through controversy reinforced his “gut feeling” that his broadcast was accurate and that Eagleton’s denial was simply a lie. “Are you worried about this?” Hume asked his boss anxiously. “No problem,” the columnist replied with a smile. “Look, True Davis is a reliable guy. If he says he saw the photostats, then they existed. In a situation like this, the truth has a way of coming out . . . Besides, this shows we’re willing to go after liberal Democrats” as well as conservative Republicans.

  Still, Anderson now began a frantic effort to locate the evidence that he had already pretended to have. No such drunk-driving records ever turned up. Anderson tried to acquire a copy of Eagleton’s FBI file in the hope that it might document the allegations, but the senator’s dossier “already had been pulled and was in the hands of the Justice Department high command,” the muckraker discovered. Anderson even reached out to his old source Murray Chotiner, the longtime Nixon advisor who had leaked George Wallace’s sensitive tax returns two years earlier. But because of subsequent “Merry-Go-Round” attacks on the President, the columnist said, Chotiner replied with “the scorn due one who had not requited its love: ‘Why should we bail Anderson out?’ ”

  The newsman acknowledged to an interviewer that he “probably should have withheld” his report until obtaining paperwork to substantiate it. A page-one headline followed: ANDERSON BACKS OFF. The columnist hurriedly convened a meeting of his reporters to figure out how to handle the escalating crisis. Most of his staff urged him to admit that he had made a mistake and disavow his broadcast. “I just don’t want you to act like Drew [Pearson] used to,” Anderson’s secretary, Opal Ginn, argued. “He refused to ever apologize, even if he was wrong.” But Les Whitten believed a retraction was unnecessary. “Why do you have to make any statement at all?” Anderson’s chief legman asked: “Just sit tight” and ride out the controversy.

  As his reporters heatedly debated what to do, it became clear that Anderson was looking for support, not criticism. “Jack didn’t want to back off when he thought the story might be vindicated at any moment,” Hume recalled. “After an extraordinary streak of major stories, Jack didn’t want the humiliation of announcing he had blundered when events might still bail him out.” So instead, he issued a second “clarification” that only made matters worse. “In retrospect,” Anderson announced, “I believe I broadcast the story prematurely and should have waited until I could authenticate the citations personally. Nevertheless, I have faith in my sources and stand by the story. If this faith should ever turn out to be unwarranted, I will issue a full retraction and apology.”

  Anderson’s refusal to admit that he was wrong now transformed him, rather than Eagleton, into the media’s prime investigative target. It did not help that True Davis had passed on the same unverified rumors about Eagleton to other Washington journalists, who realized, as one put it, that Anderson’s source had only “very vague” secondhand information that “did not stand up under the sort of reexamination that any responsible news reporter would be obliged to give it before making it public.” Davis himself announced that he was “quite embarrassed” and “sorry” that his remarks were “made public without verification.” Still, while Anderson grudgingly conceded that his reporting had not been up to “prizewinning standards,” he stubbornly refused to recant. His admission that he felt “the hot breath of other newsmen on my back” and “wanted to score a scoop” only reinforced the belief that he was driven by personal ambition, not principle. Anderson’s “wholly unsubstantiated” report, The New York Times editorialized, was “irresponsible journalism.” The muckraker “aired the story without supporting evidence, managed to do an incredible disservice to Senator Eagleton, and now seems to be backing off with a series of lame excuses,” The Washington Post pronounced. “Metaphorically speaking, it is Mr. Anderson, not Senator Eagleton, who should be charged with reckless driving.”

  In response, Anderson defiantly vowed to “go after” Eagleton even more aggressively. The columnist’s worried staff now descended on his home in suburban Washington to try to persuade him to change his mind. The “longer it continued without some acknowledgment of major error on Jack’s part,” Hume believed, “the more it would look as if he didn’t know when a story was proved and when it wasn’t. Far from being America’s number one investigative reporter, Jack would appear a dimwit with no conscience.” But a quarter century of pugnacious crusading had conditioned Anderson to launch automatic retaliatory strikes when attacked; self-reflection could always wait until later and be contemplated in private. The brave imperviousness to criticism that had long been Anderson’s greatest investigative strength now became a crippling weakness.

  As he consulted with his staff, Anderson “looked drawn and the muscles in the back of his jaw were working visibly,” Hume recalled. “I had never seen him as tense.” His hands trembled. Still, Anderson doggedly argued that his story was “technically true.” “No, it wasn’t,” Hume shot back. “You said you’d located the documents when you hadn’t located them.” Anderson blamed other reporters for his woes; they had inaccurately characterized his clarifications and were jealous of his many scoops over the years. Jack “was so heavy into denial” that it was easy to miss how “horrible” he was feeling, Whitten remembered. “He knew he’d been had but he prayed that somehow his story was going to turn out to be true.” Anderson told his staff he would think about issuing a public apology but made no firm commitment.

  The next day, Anderson and Eagleton appeared together on the CBS News program Face the Nation. “This is the first time I’ve had a chance to face you,” the columnist told the senator, “and I do owe you an apology.” Anderson admitted that he “did not authenticate whether or not these tickets were genuine” and “went ahead with a story that I should not have gone ahead with, and that was unfair to you, and you have my apology.” Eagleton was gracious in victory: “Well, let me say, Mr. Anderson, that the true test of moral character is, I guess, to admit when one makes a mistake . . . It takes quite a man to get on nationwide television to say he made a mistake, and I commend you for your courage.” But unable to leave it at that, Anderson went on to declare, “I wish that I could now retract the story completely [but] I cannot do that yet” because it “still hasn’t been pursued to a final end.” Anderson said he had unanswered questions he wanted to investigate further and so his “conscience won’t allow me” to issue a retraction. Eagleton was flabbergasted. The “story has been so thoroughly discredited,” he replied, “that I just—it leaves me in a puzzlement as to why you can’t retract a story that you say shouldn’t have [been aired] in the first place.”

  Anderson’s “apology” generated yet another wave of indignant press coverage. His “performance has been a reckless and wholly regrettable excursion into the worst kind of ‘journalism,’ ” The Washington Post judged. “What exactly was Mr. Anderson refusing to ‘retract’ if not the allegations which, by his own account,
it had been irresponsible to broadcast?” Anderson’s “astonishing hedge,” wrote columnist Charles Bartlett, “left Eagleton still impaled on the hearsay.” Even the muckraker’s staff was appalled and joked darkly that their boss’s television platform should be renamed Disgrace the Nation. “Jack had acted terribly on the show,” Hume believed. “Invoking conscience as justification for clinging to this discredited story was outrageous.”

  Two days later, Anderson finally bowed to the inevitable and issued an “unqualified” and “total” retraction. After meeting in private with Eagleton in his Senate office, Anderson told journalists that he had gone over “every scrap of evidence” he possessed and was now “totally” convinced that Eagleton was never arrested for drunk driving and that it was “inexcusable” for him to have reported otherwise. “I think the story did damage to the senator and I owe him a great and humble apology,” Anderson admitted. He followed up with a half-hour mea culpa on NBC’s Today show, acknowledging that he deserved to be “raked over the coals” for his mistake.

  But it was too late to undo the damage. The day before Anderson’s belated retraction, Eagleton had been forced to resign as McGovern’s running mate. “Any chance, however slim, of salvaging the ticket was destroyed by Jack Anderson’s erroneous charges,” McGovern’s campaign manager later wrote. Anderson’s broadcast was “the straw that broke the Eagleton back,” the Missouri senator agreed. “I might have remained on the ticket but for that.”

  The affair proved equally destructive to Anderson. Mainstream media outlets that had long disdained the newsman now seized the opening and publicly denounced him in scathing terms. Anderson was “mean and unreliable,” one journalist opined; a “liar,” declared another. His performance had been “scurrilous,” a third reporter announced; “shameful,” proclaimed a fourth; a “national disgrace,” concluded a fifth. “Unethical? Unconscionable? Despicable? Pick your own adjective and feel free to apply it to Jack Anderson,” a sixth newsman wrote. “The Anderson tactics are now clearly visible through the veneer of respectability his Pulitzer Prize afforded him earlier this year . . . Too bad the Pulitzer itself can’t be ripped away.” Mail from readers was overwhelmingly—often vituperatively—negative. Several newspaper clients canceled the “Merry-Go-Round” column. More than one urged him to give up journalism completely.

  To his family and friends, Anderson seemed on the edge of emotional collapse. “He had been deflated, reminded of his proper place,” one writer observed. “And he had done it to himself . . . made prideful and overly certain by his rise.” It was the classic Washington story of reckless ambition undone by hubris, of opportunism punished by the kind of righteous retribution that Anderson himself had so often meted out to others for the past twenty-five years. “He had risen to a position of fame and credibility never before achieved by a muckraking journalist and, almost overnight, he had lost it,” Hume wrote. “It seemed that Jack had had an upside-down reaction to his own success. Instead of feeling more secure, he felt more compelled. And once he had slipped, it was more difficult than ever to accept the humiliation of admitting error.”

  Just like his adversary Richard Nixon. The parallel, and the irony, was inescapable: after decades of successfully dodging so many hazards—from private lawsuits and public vilification to government spying and death threats—Anderson now managed to damage himself as none of his antagonists ever could. A lifetime of taking shots at others had finally backfired, and the greatest victim of Anderson’s reporting became his own reputation. His lesion was as grave as it was preventable, caused not by his enemies but himself. And the number one beneficiary was of course his implacable foe in the White House. “No human hand could have devised the utterly satisfactory situation in which Nixon finds himself,” columnist Mary McGrory noted, for the “next time Anderson uncovers a skeleton in Nixon’s closet—a Dita Beard memo for instance, or inside papers about a ‘tilt towards Pakistan’—Nixon need only loftily recall” Anderson’s “second-hand charges about Eagleton’s drinking habits” to make the exposé vanish.

  The scandal also inflicted a mortal wound on Nixon’s chief political adversary. The “Eagleton affair destroyed any chance I had of being elected President,” McGovern said, and “became the number one news and editorial development of that campaign. It overshadowed the Watergate scandal as a subject of journalistic concern. It—not Watergate, not Vietnam, not the American economy—was the political story of 1972.”

  Indeed, media coverage of Watergate during the rest of the campaign was both paltry and reflexively supportive of the White House. Barely a dozen reporters out of approximately 1,200 domestic Washington correspondents were assigned to the story full-time. One third of the most important Watergate developments were not carried at all by the nation’s largest newspapers; and the remaining two thirds were primarily cursory items buried in the back pages. Television coverage was equally scanty. In the ten months after the bungled break-in, reporters failed to ask even a single question about Watergate in nearly 90 percent of all White House news briefings.

  The Watergate cover-up was working.

  •

  In November 1972, President Nixon was reelected in a landslide, carrying forty-nine states and winning 520 out of 538 electoral votes. But he did not savor his triumph. “It was as if victory was not an occasion for reconciliation,” Henry Kissinger remembered, “but an opportunity to settle the scores of a lifetime.” The President’s advisors should not have been surprised. “Just remember all the trouble they gave us,” Nixon said of his enemies a few weeks earlier. “We’ll have a chance to get back at them one day.” Now that day was at hand. “I want the most comprehensive notes on all of those that have tried to do us in,” the President ordered; “they are going to get it . . . We haven’t used the [FBI] and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now.”

  In particular, Nixon wanted federal prosecutors to bring criminal charges against Jack Anderson: “I certainly don’t intend to let that son of a bitch get away with” publishing the India-Pakistan documents. “I think we’ve got to prosecute that son of a bitch” and just “let the heads roll,” the President told his advisors.

  Ten days after the President’s reelection, White House aides once again began searching for specific ways to go after Anderson. Charles Colson passed on a fanciful claim that Anderson received a $100,000 bribe fourteen years earlier to write favorably about Cuba’s dictator. “You know my personal feelings about Jack Anderson,” Colson added in a memo to presidential counsel John Dean. “After his incredibly sloppy and malicious reporting on Eagleton, his credibility has diminished. It now appears as if we have the opportunity to destroy it. Do you agree that we should pursue this actively?”

  But before the White House could destroy its enemies in the press, it had to contain the damage from Watergate. So far, the burglars had kept silent, but they were unhappy with the amount of hush money they were receiving from the President’s men. Frank Sturgis confided some of this to Anderson, who traveled to Miami to see what he could learn from his old friend. The day after Christmas, in a little-noticed column, Anderson reported that “the mystery deepens over who is paying the legal expenses” for the “high-powered, high-priced attorneys” defending the burglars. Anderson quoted Sturgis—shielded by anonymity—as saying, “We were told when we took the job that we would be taken care of.” But the columnist was unable to flush out further details.

  Two weeks later, the trial of the Watergate conspirators began in Judge John Sirica’s Washington courtroom. In January 1973, the group’s ringleader, E. Howard Hunt, pled guilty to all charges and falsely claimed that no higher-ups from the Nixon administration had been involved. Judge Sirica didn’t believe him. “Who started this?” the judge demanded to know. “Who hired” the burglars in the first place?

  Like everyone else, Anderson had the same questions. He treated Sturgis to lunch at a Chinese restaurant to try to get some answers. Sturgis told Anderso
n that his crew was following orders as part of a secret government operation. “We’re having a meeting tonight,” Sturgis added. “A White House representative wants to talk to us.” “If I were nearby, would you come and tell me what happens?” Anderson asked. “Okay,” Sturgis replied.

  That evening, Anderson bought dinner for the burglars’ defense attorney, Henry Rothblatt, a flamboyant litigator who sported a bow tie, black toupee, and waxed pencil mustache. Rothblatt was upset that he had not been fully paid for his legal work and that the White House was pressuring his clients to take sole responsibility for the break-in. Anderson offered to try to help persuade Sturgis to put aside his loyalty to Nixon. After dinner, the newsman accompanied Rothblatt to the Arlington Towers, an apartment complex across the Potomac River where the burglars and their attorney were staying. Rothblatt let Anderson camp out in his sixth-floor suite while the burglars met in another room downstairs. Sturgis secretly shuttled back and forth between floors, briefing Anderson on the conspirators’ ongoing meeting. It turned out that Hunt was urging them to follow his lead and stay silent by pleading guilty to the charges against them. “They’ve offered to pay all our legal expenses if we keep our mouths shut,” Sturgis told the columnist. “And they said they would take care of our families while we were in jail” by paying them $1,000 a month. Anderson realized it was hush money and that “they were being bribed” to obstruct justice.