Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  The President was appalled. It was “shocking” to read the grand jury testimony in the newspaper, Nixon told his staff, but “Jack Anderson has them—ugh—verbatim” and “it is a major story.” The President’s men were equally dismayed. “Such leaking was normally a criminal offense,” Howard Hunt complained. “Anderson, never one to miss the fun when human blood might be drawn,” had even displayed the transcripts “boastingly to other reporters,” Nixon fund-raiser Maurice Stans fumed. “Prosecutors were going crazy because they couldn’t figure it out,” Anderson’s legman Mike Kiernan said. “Jack was a fast typist and took marvelous shorthand so everybody wondered if somebody was dictating the transcripts to him.” Given his history of electronic eavesdropping, the FBI decided to conduct an electronic sweep of the grand jury room to uncover any hidden bugs that Anderson might have planted inside. But nothing turned up and Anderson’s disclosures continued unabated. His columns were “incredible . . . devastating . . . unheard of,” prosecutor Earl Silbert wrote in his diary; the foreman of the grand jury “was screaming about summoning Anderson” and forcing him to testify under oath to reveal his source. Silbert proposed a more draconian measure: suppressing Anderson’s reporting in advance by having the court issue a restraining order to prohibit him from publishing additional transcripts.

  On April 23, all fifteen federal judges in Washington met in a special executive session to decide what to do about the “Merry-Go-Round” leaks. An hour later, Judge Sirica directed prosecutors to conduct a criminal investigation of Anderson. “All hell broke loose,” the columnist remembered happily. “Someone had broken the law, and the Justice Department and the judges damn well wanted to know who.” Prosecutors faced a daunting task. “I am not to[o] optimistic” about uncovering Anderson’s informant, Silbert wrote in his diary, and “just deploring” the leak without also gagging Anderson was a “wishy-washy result.” One federal judge suggested granting the columnist immunity from prosecution to force him to reveal his source; if, as expected, Anderson refused, he could then be jailed for contempt of court and charged with obstruction of justice. “We thought we were about to be clapped behind bars,” Anderson’s legman Jack Cloherty recalled.

  Defiant as always, Anderson publicly announced that he would not divulge his sources even if ordered to by the court. “Under our Constitution,” he insisted, “we are free to publish any and all news.” Anderson argued that the public had a right to know about the Watergate cover-up and pointed out that other journalists had already published grand jury testimony based on anonymous sources: “The government is upset, apparently, because we nailed down the testimony precisely rather than relying on hearsay.” Hume worried that “Jack was not only saying publicly that he was being singled out for his accuracy” but was also preaching “a little civics lecture. I winced at the thought of how Jack’s statement must have been received by those fifteen judges who had voted to have him investigated.”

  Anderson’s defense may not have been humble but it was accurate, at least about grand jury secrets published by other reporters; however, those were verbal, not written, leaks, unlike Anderson’s hundreds of pages of verbatim transcripts. Indeed, the columnist received not merely a leak but a veritable flood, one that continued day after day on the pages of hundreds of newspapers across the nation, making a public mockery of the grand jury’s purportedly confidential deliberations. Anderson’s glaring breach of secrecy posed a public challenge that was impossible for the judiciary to ignore.

  “You’ve got to get off this collision course you’re on with this court,” Hume warned Anderson, or “you’ll wind up in jail.”

  “I know what the risks are,” Anderson retorted. “I’ll put the column out from a jail cell if I have to.”

  The President would have been delighted to oblige. The leaks to “Jack Anderson’s column,” Nixon told a top Justice Department official, “the way the leaks are coming out, I mean, it gives the impression that we really aren’t getting at it”—investigating the scandal. Which, of course, was precisely Anderson’s point. “I didn’t trust Nixon to prosecute his own wayward aides,” the columnist said, and the President “looked upon the grand jury as a safe rug to sweep the Watergate scandal under. His intention, my sources said, was to lift a corner of the rug just enough to quiet the public clamor. He believed that as president he could control the prosecutors.” Indeed, as White House tapes later demonstrated, that was exactly what Nixon was doing.

  The President was convinced that Anderson had obtained the secret transcripts from dissident prosecutors trying to thwart the White House cover-up. “I think there’s terrible significance to . . . these continuing leaks,” Nixon told his staff, because they suggested a deliberate effort to keep the investigation alive by publicizing Watergate evidence. The President ordered his assistant attorney general to “take the three members of the prosecuting team and put them to a lie-detector test.”

  Actually, however, the Anderson transcripts came not from prosecutors but from the trash. Decades later, the columnist admitted that a man he had never met before simply walked in off the street and offered to sell the carbon paper used to make copies of the transcripts. “We were so excited we didn’t know what to do,” Les Whitten recalled. Anderson delicately finessed the request for a bribe because “we had a fish on the line and I didn’t want to lose him.” Anderson’s staff assiduously lobbied the source, trying to persuade him that he had a moral duty to give them the paperwork gratis. To make sure they weren’t being set up, Whitten drove the informant around Washington while legman Cloherty, a burly, bearded ex-quarterback in a leather trench coat, acted as a “third-rate Mob lookout in a cloak-and-dagger operation whose job was to make sure nobody saw us.” Eventually, the reporters persuaded their source to dig through the courthouse trash bins for no charge and raced back to the “Merry-Go-Round” office with hundreds of carbon pages. “We all had dirty hands,” Cloherty remembered. “I had to scrub mine several times to get the ink off.” Opal Ginn, Anderson’s devoted secretary, taped the carbon paper to a lampshade to illuminate it and then retyped it all at her desk. Anderson’s staff worked round the clock putting together a complete set of nearly five hundred pages of transcripts.

  To try to uncover Anderson’s source, the FBI interrogated stenographers who had transcribed the testimony, but the typists denied leaking it. Agents also investigated a private company that hauled away trash from the district court. Slowly but steadily, the FBI seemed to be zeroing in on the columnist’s secret informant. In response, to protect their source’s identity, Anderson and Whitten devised a contingency plan to keep the FBI from confiscating their notes by locking themselves in their office and throwing their paperwork out the window. “I know it sounds romantic and crazy, these two overweight middle-aged people . . . physically trying to keep them from getting into our files,” Whitten recalled, “but we were determined to do this” as a “tribute to the First Amendment.” Anderson fully expected to go to prison: “When you’ve got all the judges in the District of Columbia and the U.S. attorney on your tail, and you know that the White House is using every arm-twisting method it knows, you’re not too sure you’re gonna win.”

  But the Nixon administration decided not to make a martyr out of the columnist. “I don’t want to go too far there, because I don’t want to get into a diversionary battle with Jack Anderson,” Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen told the President. Nixon agreed: “Oh, hell, no.” That would give it “too much attention. I agree. I agree. Well, what I mean is, do [your] best to control it.” The best way to control Anderson, prosecutors decided, was with honey, not vinegar. Assistant U.S. Attorney Seymour Glanzer believed that any criminal charges filed against the newsman would ultimately be thrown out of court, anyway. More important, Glanzer said, “we didn’t want to prosecute the crime, we wanted to prevent it.” So he proposed a face-saving solution that would get Anderson to stop publishing the transcripts by appealing to his “patriotic” desire to h
elp the Watergate probe: instead of trying to force Anderson to reveal his source, he could return the documents directly to Judge Sirica rather than the Nixon Justice Department.

  On April 25, the columnist and his attorneys gathered at the federal courthouse in Washington for a conference with Watergate prosecutors. “Jack had been warned repeatedly by both his lawyers before going into the meeting that the law was against him and that he must take a penitent approach,” Hume recalled. One attorney explained that “Jack really doesn’t have much to bargain with.” Another emphasized that “we are coming in as supplicants, not as aggressors.” According to Hume, Anderson—“one leg already in the jailhouse door”—was unconcerned. “Don’t worry,” he told his lawyers, “you let me handle it.”

  For nearly two hours, the muckraker and the Justice Department attorneys argued back and forth. Prosecutors explained that they had been instructed by a judicial panel to bring charges against Anderson’s source and had to comply with that order. Anderson refused to reveal the identity of his informant and invoked the First Amendment’s protection of religion as well as the press: “The Mormon faith holds that the Constitution of the United States is divinely inspired,” Anderson pointed out. “So I could never consent to identifying a confidential source, no matter what.” The newsman then bluffed prosecutors, pretending that he had obtained all of the Watergate grand jury transcripts and was on the verge of publishing additional columns about them: “I have requests right now from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the wire services for the full transcripts. My inclination is to give them to them. But before I do, I wanted to hear your case.” According to Hume, “Jack was playing boldly with a weak hand, but I have watched him intimidate other formidable people with that booming voice, ringing with certainty, and that stern expression of his.” Justice Department attorneys repeated their familiar arguments about the importance of grand jury secrecy. “They were reasons well known to Jack,” Hume said, “as they are to any experienced reporter. But he listened most attentively.” At the end of the lecture, Anderson surprised his audience. “You’ve convinced me,” he said. “I have no desire to interfere with the investigation of the case.”

  Anderson agreed to stop publishing the transcripts and turn them over to Judge Sirica. But to try to keep prosecutors from coming after him, he added, “I will never tell you any more before a grand jury than I am telling you here today. So if you now call me before the grand jury [to try to force him to reveal his source] I can only conclude that the reason is that you want to put me in jail.” Anderson warned that such a move would turn him into a journalistic hero. He emerged from the meeting and announced to reporters that he had voluntarily decided to stop publishing the grand jury transcripts. Anderson explained that the prosecutors had persuaded him that his column was scaring witnesses from testifying about Watergate. “I don’t want to hamper their investigation,” the columnist added. “They made such a passionate point of it.” Naturally, he did not volunteer that he had already milked all of his documents for everything that was newsworthy in them. But he did emphasize that he had not been cowed: “There was no intimidation, no threats, no coercion of any kind. If there had been, I’d have walked out and handed the transcripts to everybody” in the press. In a more formal written statement, Anderson declared that “as a journalist, I have an obligation and a right to continue to report any and all pertinent information on this sordid scandal that so many people in high places have worked so hard to keep from the public.”

  The compromise was widely praised. Former Nixon speechwriter William Safire, a newly minted columnist for The New York Times, called Anderson’s move “gallant”—an adjective not normally applied to the muckraker, especially by Nixon loyalists. “Jack ended up gaining recognition for breaking the story,” Hume marveled, “and nearly as much for stopping it . . . It was one of the most remarkable Houdini acts anyone in trouble with the government has ever made.”

  What did Anderson’s publication of grand jury transcripts ultimately accomplish? The investigative reporter claimed that it helped foil the President’s Watergate cover-up, but that was a gross exaggeration. In fact, Anderson’s scoop came late in the rapidly accelerating scandal, after the White House was already well on its way to self-destruction. In the end, Anderson’s legal showdown had less impact on Nixon than on the columnist himself, and then only as a symbol of his decline as a new generation of younger investigative reporters pushed him aside. The story proved to be Anderson’s last real blast at the politician he had stalked for a generation.

  In any case, as promised, the newsman turned over his documents to Judge Sirica, who locked them in his office safe. Nine months later, the judge announced that the FBI’s investigation failed to turn up Anderson’s source. By then, the Nixon White House, in its final death throes, had more important problems than plugging leaks to Anderson.

  In the spring of 1973, the Watergate cover-up imploded. White House counsel John Dean warned the President that the burglars’ increasing demands for hush money had reached the point of blackmail and were bound to be exposed. “We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing,” Nixon’s lawyer told him. “It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now.” But the President directed Dean to continue their conspiracy: “If you need [more] money, I mean, you could get the money . . . you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where.” Afraid of his escalating criminal liability, Dean began cooperating with prosecutors and directly implicated Nixon and his top aides. The President was both terrified and enraged by his lawyer’s betrayal. “It isn’t like a little goddamn yeoman [Charles Radford] that did that horrible thing,” Nixon shouted. “This son of a bitch was [my] counsel.” To try to limit his exposure, the President fired Dean and forced other top advisors to resign. White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler tried to repair the public relations damage by apologizing to the press and announcing that his previous false statements about Watergate were “inoperative.” But none of it stopped the hemorrhaging.

  In the summer of 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee held hearings, televised live, that riveted the nation. Nixon aides testified in what became a public morality play starring North Carolina’s folksy Democratic senator Sam Ervin and Tennessee’s smooth Republican senator Howard Baker, who said the scandal boiled down to one key question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The answer, it turned out, was that Nixon knew virtually everything about the Watergate cover-up right from the start. And, as the panel soon discovered, it was all documented in hundreds of hours of secret White House recordings. The Nixon tapes transformed Watergate from a political scandal to a constitutional crisis. The recordings offered proof not merely of corruption by White House aides but of criminal conduct by the President himself. Nixon’s initial refusal to hand over the audio evidence also put him in direct conflict with Congress and the courts and suggested that he believed the President was above the law. That impression only deepened when he fired the special prosecutor who was investigating him, Archibald Cox (the “Coxsucker,” as he was indelicately called in the White House). The new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, quit in protest, as did his second-in-command, in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” The resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew amid unrelated bribery charges—and his replacement by the popular congressional leader Gerald Ford—further emboldened House Democrats to introduce resolutions to impeach the President.

  By the fall of 1973, Nixon’s struggle for survival was primarily a legal one, fighting subpoenas from Congress and the new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. But as always, public relations remained a top presidential priority and diversion a favorite presidential tactic. White House veteran H. R. Haldeman, who had first planted the rumor that Jack Anderson had orchestrated the Watergate bugging, continued to peddle this yarn to prosecutors and Republican allies on Capitol Hill. Haldeman made much of the fact that “Anderso
n just happened to be” at the Washington airport when the Watergate burglars arrived there a few hours before the break-in and that the columnist was the first person to visit the conspirators in jail after they were caught. Haldeman claimed to find it “incredible” and “astonishing” that the muckraker heard rumors of the crime before it was even carried out: “Jack Anderson, of all people in Washington, knew the Watergate break-in was going to take place. Why didn’t he publish this fantastic scoop?” Because it was all a setup, Haldeman maintained: “If he had published his information, Watergate would never have taken place.”

  The White House conspiracy theories about Anderson were forwarded to the Senate Watergate Committee. Aides to Republican counsel Fred Thompson, the future senator and presidential candidate, began investigating Anderson and soon became “convinced they were onto something.” Thompson’s staff located a witness who claimed that Anderson had recently given Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis “a stack of fifty-dollar bills” in a Miami hotel. Senator Baker, who was trying to defend the President, sensed an opportunity and decided that “we ought to have a talk with Mr. Anderson.”