Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  In November 1973, the Watergate Committee questioned Anderson under oath. Senators decided not to have the muckraker testify in public because they were nervous that he would be “a loose cannon” and embarrass them. Anderson swore that he did not pay Frank Sturgis any money, that their airport meeting was just a chance encounter, and that his attempt to have the Watergate burglar released from jail into his custody was simply a tactic to try to get a scoop. Senate Republicans did not believe him. One committee counsel “proceeded to bore in on Anderson,” Thompson said, “giving the interview the appearance of the old Mutt ’n’ Jeff police interrogation.” Anderson’s claim that he was unable to corroborate rumors of the Nixon campaign’s bugging—and had misplaced two sets of paperwork informing him about it—met with skepticism. “The man who made his living exposing the frailties of others had somehow managed to lose two files dealing with the same subject matter,” Thompson scoffed. “All of us found the story hard to accept.” In addition, Thompson doubted Anderson’s explanation that he was on his way to a speaking engagement in Cleveland when he inadvertently encountered Sturgis at the Washington airport: “There was nothing in the Cleveland newspapers at the time that had any reference to an Anderson appearance,” Thompson charged.

  Anderson complained that the Republicans’ “investigation of us . . . seemed almost as intensive as its investigation of Watergate” because they “were sure the break-in wasn’t by accident” but “was my diabolical work.” In fact, however, the conspiracy theories about Anderson were deliberate disinformation planted by the White House, one last Nixonian attempt to punish Anderson and cover up Watergate. Further investigation confirmed that Anderson was indeed on his way to a college journalism fraternity outside Cleveland when he ran into Sturgis at the Washington airport, and the newsman’s notes about the Nixon campaign’s bugging operation eventually turned up as well. (Thompson “couldn’t believe that the legendary Jack Anderson would misplace something,” Anderson laughed. “He had obviously never seen my desk.”) Sturgis also corroborated Anderson’s account that their airport meeting was strictly accidental: “It is a coincidence and it is a big coincidence, but I’m willing to take sodium pentothal [to prove it],” the burglar testified. Sturgis also swore under oath that he never received a wad of cash from Anderson. “Aside from the fact that I have never seen a big stack of $50 bills and would never be foolish enough to give one away,” the columnist said, “the bigger question was why I would sit on the Watergate story. Even Thompson couldn’t figure out the answer to that one.” In the end, the attempt to frame Anderson for the Watergate break-in failed.

  But Republicans soon came up with another way to try to help the President. “Why don’t we distract attention from the White House,” Senator Howard Baker suggested, “by getting the story out in public” about the navy yeoman who “leaked all this information to Jack Anderson?” A few weeks later, the previously secret story of Pentagon spying on Henry Kissinger was leaked to the press. The timing was no coincidence. Top Nixon advisors were now facing trial for burglarizing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and their defense rested on the dubious proposition that they had done so to protect national security. To buttress their case that they had been trying to ward off grave dangers to the Republic, they now exposed—and exaggerated—the actions of Anderson’s source, Yeoman Charles Radford. In truth, his spying for the Defense Department was not a classic case of espionage; after all, Radford passed information not to a hostile foreign government but to another branch of the administration’s national security team. Indeed, although the incident understandably alarmed the Nixon White House, such covert intelligence-sharing took place in both previous and subsequent administrations.

  Still, in the paranoid atmosphere of Watergate, the revelations created a furor, and the Senate Armed Services Committee began holding hearings in February 1974. Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that he didn’t know the documents Radford gave him were stolen from the White House and insisted that he was authorized to have them anyway. Henry Kissinger, who two years earlier had called for Moorer’s firing because of the spying, now took the witness stand to defend the admiral who had targeted him. The real culprit, Kissinger said, was not Moorer but Jack Anderson, who published the documents that embarrassed Kissinger. For his part, Yeoman Radford swore that his theft of White House paperwork was authorized by the Pentagon high command but steadfastly denied leaking classified documents to Anderson. Senators tried to shake Radford’s story.

  “Yeoman Radford, do you consider it a coincidence that you had dinner with Mr. Anderson the day before these leaks appeared in his column?” Senator Strom Thurmond asked. “Yes, sir, I do; most definitely I do,” Radford replied. “Do you say again that you passed no material to Mr. Anderson and you passed no material to anyone else who passed it to him?” Thurmond repeated. “Yes, sir, I do say that,” Radford reiterated. Chairman John Stennis pressed further: “You had no connection, telephone calls or connections with him in any way through other people?” “No, sir,” Radford replied. “You did not write to him, you did not use the mail or anything like that?” “No, sir.” But in fact, the FBI traced both mail and phone calls between Anderson and Radford, including a conversation in which the yeoman “expressed pride in the fact that Anderson’s columns had won the Pulitzer” and relished the “triumphal moment” with him.

  The Senate panel convened in secret session to decide what to do. Democrat Sam Nunn declared that Radford “very likely” gave “perjured testimony” to the committee and recommended that the Justice Department conduct a criminal investigation. Senator Thurmond wanted Anderson to testify under oath but Senator John Tower believed that the panel was “not going to get anywhere” doing that. Chairman Stennis sought legal advice on how to punish the muckraker but White House counsel Fred Buzhardt advised that it would be virtually impossible to prove that “Anderson had an intent to harm this country or to give aid to another country by publishing the material,” as required under the federal Espionage Act. Senator Barry Goldwater thought Anderson might be vulnerable for making an “offer [of] money to Radford” in exchange for classified documents but that “we should not bother with” such a prosecution. Senator Hugh Scott, a longtime Anderson source, agreed that “we ought to drop the matter.”

  In the end, the Senate committee issued a report absolving the Pentagon for spying on the White House and attacked Anderson for publishing “at least 70 highly sensitive, classified documents” in “a serious compromise to national security.” The panel concluded that Anderson’s “lack of prosecution” was “deeply regrettable.”

  At long last, filing criminal charges against Anderson had bipartisan support. But President Nixon was now too politically wounded to take advantage of the opportunity.

  By 1974, investigations by prosecutors and Congress had expanded beyond Watergate to include a broad range of criminal activity by the President and his aides. These “White House horrors,” as former attorney general John Mitchell characterized them, ranged from burglary and forgery to warrantless wiretaps and bombing plots. Nixon’s financial propriety was also, once again, at issue. Besides his receipt of cash from Howard Hughes, the President was accused of spending more than $1 million in public funds for personal improvements on his vacation houses in Florida and California, and had to pay $284,000 in taxes amid allegations that he had backdated paperwork to finagle improper deductions. The shadow of financial chicanery that first attached itself during Nixon’s slush fund scandal more than two decades earlier haunted him to the end, even as he vigorously defended his integrity. “I earned everything I got,” the President told an audience of newspaper editors. “I am not a crook.”

  As always, Nixon blamed his troubles on his enemies—especially in the media—rather than himself. “These assholes are out to destroy us,” the President raged. “Screw them, screw them . . . we’re going to treat them with the contempt they deserve.” In public,
Nixon denounced what he called the most “outrageous, vicious, distorted” reporting he had ever seen. “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger,” he told journalists bitterly. “You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.” (The President’s acolytes followed his lead; one of them, Karl Rove, used a phony grassroots organization to rally supporters against the “lynch mob atmosphere created [by] the Nixon-hating media.”)

  But attacking the press did little to salvage the President’s mounting legal and political woes. His continued refusal to turn over subpoenaed tapes aroused further suspicion when one turned out to have a mysterious “gap” of eighteen and a half minutes. Nixon’s loyal secretary publicly took the blame for what experts said were at least five deliberate erasures during a key conversation between the President and his chief of staff three days after the Watergate break-in. But although Rose Mary Woods claimed that she accidentally obliterated the tape while trying to transcribe it, not even her coworkers in the White House believed that. More likely, the President himself erased it in a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence that implicated him.

  To combat prosecutors’ subpoenas, Nixon released written transcripts of his conversations, which he personally edited to remove the most embarrassing sections, including voluminous explosions of presidential profanity that were sanitized with the notation “expletive deleted.” Still, even these cleaned-up transcripts produced a wave of public revulsion. Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott called them “shabby, disgusting, immoral.” The Los Angeles Times, once Nixon’s most ardent booster in the press, joined the growing chorus urging Congress to impeach the President.

  In May 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings. After months of gathering evidence, the panel voted to charge Nixon with obstructing justice and abusing his presidential power. Lawmakers twice cited Jack Anderson’s reporting in their final impeachment report: first, because Nixon “knew or had reason to know” that Attorney General Kleindienst had “testified falsely” about ITT during Senate hearings instigated by the “columns [of] Jack Anderson”; second, because Nixon had violated “the constitutional rights of citizens” by “misusing IRS information,” including the “sensitive” tax records of Alabama governor George Wallace that were “transmitted to columnist Jack Anderson” and published in the “Merry-Go-Round.” In these and other instances, the committee found, “Richard M. Nixon acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government” and “by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

  Any doubt that Nixon would be forced from the White House was removed when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that he must turn over all subpoenaed tapes. Among them was a so-called smoking gun recording in which the President clearly conspired to cover up Watergate by halting the FBI’s investigation of the break-in. The damning recording led every single Republican on the House Judiciary Committee—even the President’s most diehard stalwarts—to support impeachment.

  Nixon’s final days in office were filled with depression and rage. He slurred his words in drunken late-night phone calls. Aides worried that he would commit suicide. But his cover-up continued to the very end. Presidential staff worked overtime shredding sacks of incriminating documents; according to one witness, the Oval Office was “heavy with the acrid smell of paper recently burned in the fireplace.” In his last hours in the Executive Office Building, Nixon broke down and sobbed uncontrollably in the arms of Henry Kissinger. “What have I done?” the President cried. “What has happened?”

  In August 1974, Richard Nixon became the only president in American history to resign from office. In a tearful farewell speech to his White House staff, televised live, he finally seemed to realize what led to his disgrace: “Never be petty,” he said. “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  PART IV

  ENDINGS

  17

  FINAL YEARS

  Richard Nixon waved goodbye from the helicopter that picked him up one last time from the White House lawn. Soon after, as Air Force One took him into exile, the former president sat in his cabin, silent and alone. A quarter century after he first arrived in the nation’s capital, he was heading home to California. “Our long national nightmare,” declared the new president, Gerald Ford, “is over.”

  Not for the disgraced ex-president. In San Clemente, Nixon alternated between shock and grief, anger and self-pity. “Fiercely proud, he could neither admit his emotional dependence on approbation nor transcend it,” Henry Kissinger wrote. “Deeply insecure, he first acted as if a cruel fate had singled him out for rejection and then he contrived to make sure that his premonition came to pass.” Nixon needed to believe that he was the victim of a partisan witch hunt, the unfair and unfortunate target of a conspiracy between his many enemies in politics and the press. In fact, however, Watergate was not some inexplicable aberration but, in the context of his caustic career, a predictable if not preordained consequence.

  In the end, more than seventy people were convicted of Watergate-related crimes. Nineteen went to prison, from the burglars themselves to the top echelon of the Nixon White House: H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Charles Colson, John Dean. But Richard Nixon was spared. Just a month after his resignation, President Ford pardoned him for all crimes he committed while in office. Nixon never had to face indictment or trial. He had “suffered enough,” Ford declared, and it was time to end the “ugly passions” of Watergate. Nixon thanked his successor for his compassion and acknowledged that he should have acted “more decisively and more forthrightly” during Watergate. But his limited contrition did little to stem the furious public reaction. Ford’s popularity plummeted, his pardon widely blamed for the loss of his presidency two years later.

  Jack Anderson thought it wrong that Nixon’s “co-conspirators wound up in jail when he retreated into wealthy retirement,” costing taxpayers “a whopping” $1 million a year for Secret Service protection, office space and staff, and an annual federal pension. After such protracted public combat, Anderson viewed Nixon’s downfall as a kind of crowning victory and could not resist gloating from the moment it happened. Indeed, on the very day the President announced his resignation, the muckraker bragged in his column that he had “been in the forefront of those who have accused President Nixon of condoning lawlessness while he preached law and order.” Anderson then summarized his greatest anti-Nixon hits, “not to boast but to encourage public officials to tell the truth.” A Washington Post editor publicly described Anderson’s parting shot as a “tasteless column that amounted to an ill-timed advertisement for himself.”

  But Anderson’s self-congratulation could not mask the fact that history was now leaving him behind. “Jack was overtaken by events,” Brit Hume understood. “He had been one of a handful of investigative reporters in America and then Watergate made it all the rage. Every newspaper and television network began an investigative team. It took away Jack’s competitive advantage. He no longer had the field to himself.” The rise of television, and the dwindling influence of the syndicated column, further eroded Anderson’s clout. Our “column continues,” his secretary, Opal Ginn, wrote a friend. “But between you and me, hasn’t it been rather dull lately? We can’t get a handle on anything since Watergate.”

  The newfound celebrity of Anderson’s young rivals—especially Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were lionized in the popular film All the President’s Men—seemed like a cruel trick played on the old muckraker. “The man who had kept the torch burning, sometimes singlehandedly, always on the outside of the ‘in’ crowd, was ignored,” Anderson’s legman James Grady recalled, “even while the kind of investigative reporting that Jack had been doing became fashionable and defined that era in the history of journalism.” Anderson’s promoters tried to make up for it in advertisements: “Investigative journalism didn’t start with W
atergate. Jack Anderson has been at it for years.” But his PR campaign was unable to overshadow Watergate or its media mythology. Richard Nixon himself could not have come up with a more fitting way to deflate Anderson’s outsized ego.

  A year after Nixon’s resignation, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post revealed the White House plot to assassinate Jack Anderson. Based on anonymous sources, Woodward’s account was greeted with denials from Nixon acolytes. A quick and cursory internal CIA probe “found nothing” to the assassination allegations and cleared itself of wrongdoing. A congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church also began an investigation. Howard Hunt told the panel that he did not try to murder Anderson but did plot to drug him, a distinction he hoped would minimize his legal exposure. Poisoning Anderson might seem “hair-raising to an outsider,” Hunt testified, but “there were a lot of creative people, not only in the CIA, but also in the White House, and ideas were a penny a dozen.” For his part, Colson denied even Hunt’s limited confession, calling it “totally off the wall.” Beyond that, Colson’s memory was otherwise remarkably hazy: he acknowledged that Nixon asked him “many times” to discredit Anderson and that he “probably” did so in response; but he maintained that he could not recall what action if any he took against the dastardly journalist.

  Federal authorities never really attempted to get beyond the convenient memory loss and self-interested claims of the suspects. Ultimately, congressional investigators questioned only three people—Colson, Hunt, and Dr. Edward Gunn, the CIA toxicologist—all of whom had themselves been linked to the murder plot. The Senate panel failed to interview any disinterested witnesses or compel testimony under oath, while Gordon Liddy avoided all questioning by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Without issuing subpoenas or offering immunity from prosecution, authorities provided no incentive to any of the conspirators to provide truthful testimony. As a result, none of the government investigations ever got to the bottom of what happened. In the end, Senator Church’s committee uncharacteristically took the easy way out, issuing a four-and-a-half page report concluding that Nixon’s men had plotted to poison but not murder Anderson.