Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Many of Anderson’s sexposés were watered down or suppressed by the largest newspapers that subscribed to his column. “By the end,” Anderson’s partner Van Atta recalled, “we got more notice for the columns that were killed than for the ones that ran. The only attention we got was for the salacious stories.” ABC scaled back Anderson’s on-air commentaries. “He hasn’t had a hot scoop in some time,” a network executive complained. Anderson tried to compensate for his weak material by increasing the decibel level of his delivery. But his melodramatic bombast—honed during the fire-and-brimstone missionary sermons he delivered on street corners of the rural South a generation earlier—was a poor match for the cool medium of television. ABC fired him from its morning show. Washington Post editors, too, viewed Anderson as a vaudevillian relic and discussed canceling his column; instead, they decided to run the “Merry-Go-Round” less often and edit it more carefully.

  Despite it all, Anderson reveled in his notoriety. He became close with a beautiful jet-setting Persian oil heiress, Lilly Fallah Lawrence, who fed him inside information about corruption in Iran—and lavished the columnist’s inner circle with caviar and truffles. To house his growing staff, Anderson bought an elegant nineteenth-century Victorian mansion six blocks from the White House. With “corner turrets and imposing stone steps, finely carved wood trim and huge office fireplaces inside,” one journalist wrote, it “is eerily reminiscent of the stately surroundings favored by the powerful Washington lawyers and lobbyists Anderson has often derided.” The twenty-three-room “Castle,” as his employees called their new office, had once been a tony Washington bordello. Anderson used its bidet to store government documents and reporters’ notes.

  Anderson’s expanding journalistic franchise was legally registered under the name “Muckrakers, Incorporated,” an oxymoron that symbolized the contradiction between the newsman’s old public-service idealism and his new role shilling for corporate sponsors. His “buck-raking”—collecting $250,000 a year in speaking fees from the kinds of special interest groups he targeted for investigation—was publicly compared to bribery. Worse was Anderson’s choice of business associates. One was accused of fraud and lying to the federal government. Another, a former Reagan campaign aide and high-level CIA spy, was allegedly involved in improper stock trading. A third had been implicated in a notorious television quiz-show scandal and produced teen “sexploitation” films. A fourth was the publisher of a pornographic magazine. A fifth was the reputed leader of a bizarre cult that claimed to communicate with space aliens. “There was always some marginal character buzzing around Jack, promising to make him a millionaire, supposedly with little effort on his part,” legman Jack Mitchell remembered. “Jack always listened, no matter what those around him said or how many times they warned him. He wanted the money.”

  In another deal that sounded like the kind of scam that Anderson himself once exposed, an ad designed to look like a news article asked: “Want To Become A Millionaire? . . . Jack Anderson, the famous Washington Investigative Reporter, will participate in a multi-million-dollar program to work with a select group of individuals to show them how to make money.” Anderson offered to “teach people how to be successful in real estate investing or some other entrepreneurial business . . . and market that great idea they have always dreamed about”—for a price, of course. Anderson’s employees were so appalled, they banded together to sign a joint letter informing their boss that they had been “flooded with calls” from potential customers who “are clearly naïve about business decisions and are willing to make an investment based solely on your good name.” These “cheap advertising tricks and high-pressure sales tactics smack of a con,” Anderson’s reporters warned. “We are seriously concerned for your reputation and the reputation of the column.”

  But Anderson’s dubious moneymaking schemes continued unabated. He proposed selling classified government documents that whistleblowers had leaked to him over the years by loading them into a computer database and charging hefty fees for access to the records. Besides potentially jeopardizing the identities of his confidential sources, the venture also risked forfeiting Anderson’s protected status as a journalist and leaving him legally vulnerable to criminal prosecution if he profited from selling national secrets to foreign agents who signed up for his service. “It boggled the imagination how he could be so smart on some things and so dumb on others,” Van Atta marveled. At the same time, Anderson kept accepting money under the table from Irv Davidson, even after the shady Washington lobbyist was indicted in a Mafia bribery case and pled guilty to federal fraud charges. Anderson “feels his reputation is so golden that no one could ever believe he had done anything wrong,” one of his reporters explained.

  The columnist was also compromised by a Washington businessman and socialite named Tongsun Park, who turned out to be a corrupt bagman in a scandal that became known as “Koreagate.” On behalf of the government of South Korea, Park was secretly bribing members of Congress with cash-filled envelopes and sex with attractive Asian women. He was also a silent partner in the Diplomat National Bank, whose founding director and executive committee chairman was Jack Anderson. The newsman hadn’t known about Park’s involvement, or the fact that associates of South Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon secretly and illegally owned the majority of the bank. But Anderson attacked federal investigators who uncovered this damning information and reportedly threatened to use his column to stop a burgeoning congressional probe of his business partners. The journalist’s heavy-handed tactics became page-one news across the country. Anderson “has finally been caught with his pants down,” The Washington Star declared, “and with some very strange bedmates.” The columnist escalated the scandal by vowing to sue his media critics and file charges against investigators who leaked information about his bank. The National Observer mocked the “awkward position—for an investigative journalist—of condemning congressional leaks and threatening libel suits . . . It’s the kind of story that columnist Jack Anderson ordinarily thrives on.” He was ultimately forced to sever his ties with the bank, but it was too late to salvage his credibility in the affair.

  Anderson’s far-flung outside business connections inescapably tainted his journalism. According to one of his reporters, he killed a story about Frank Sinatra’s organized-crime ties because the two men had become partners in a Nevada company. Anderson allegedly spiked another article because it might have angered a potential investor in his expensive bimonthly newsletter, Jack Anderson Confidential. The columnist even wrote a puff piece in Parade magazine about an “innovative” martial arts instructor named Jhoon Rhee who had “transformed” the “spectacular sport” by designing special safety equipment—without disclosing his own financial interest in Rhee’s company or that Anderson and some members of his family and staff received free karate lessons from Rhee. It was “not corruption in the classic, conscious sense,” Anderson’s legman James Grady believed, “just the kind of mindless cheapness that Jack would have loved to expose in others.”

  More disturbing was Anderson’s receipt of $10,000 from Exxon to produce a television documentary minimizing its notorious Valdez supertanker oil spill in Alaska. Although more than ten million gallons of crude had been discharged into Prudhoe Bay in one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters in history, Anderson breezily declared that “no species affected by the spill is in danger of extinction” and the “food chain is very much intact” because wildlife had “made a strong rebound” and “returned to their natural habitat.” Most damning of all, Anderson concealed Exxon’s underwriting of the broadcast because the corporation insisted on being a “stealth sponsor.” Anderson pulled out of the deal only after an internal revolt by his staff, who leaked the story to Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, himself a former “Merry-Go-Round” legman. “I always had a hard time understanding why a man of Jack’s talent and track record kept getting into jams with unsavory characters or questionable sources of funds,” Kurt
z later said. “But he ran his operation like a mom-and-pop store and always had a Depression-era mentality that he might get caught short and fold up shop.”

  These endless disasters demoralized Anderson’s staff. We “had made a long climb up a slippery slope to achieve the credibility and impact the column had,” Brit Hume wrote. “Now, it seemed, we had slid near the bottom of the greasy pole again and would have to start all over.” Bickering divided Anderson’s newsroom. Les Whitten, who did more of the column’s reporting than anyone, resented the rapid rise of the younger Hume, whom Whitten considered a lazy glamour boy. “After each story Brit did, he spent a week on the phone talking to all his friends about how great he was,” Whitten complained. “I yelled at him about it and said he should see a psychiatrist. He cried and said, ‘You’re right, I don’t know why I do that, I guess I’m insecure. I do need a psychiatrist.’ ” The problem, Hume wrote, was that his work for Anderson “was not as exciting as it had been” and he found it “hard to crank out” the endless copy the column required: “I got into a rut. The feeling that it was time to move on became irresistible.” By 1973, Hume left the column; he eventually became famous in his own right as the leading anchorman for Fox News. In the years that followed, Whitten and other reporters also departed, many disillusioned by the boss they had once so admired.

  Throughout it all, the aging columnist resisted naming a permanent successor to replace him. Anderson had worked too long and hard to get to the top to turn it all over now, even though he was increasingly removed from day-to-day reporting and began referring to himself grandiloquently as the “publisher” of his multimedia franchise. Under duress, Anderson agreed to share the “Merry-Go-Round” byline with a rotating cast of employees who were temporarily groomed to inherit his mantle. But for one reason or another, none ever seemed to work out; the old newsman evidently didn’t want to contemplate his own mortality. Behind his back, staffers began mocking him.

  This derision obscured the positive deeds that Anderson still accomplished—the occasional scoop that others overlooked, the mentoring of young journalists, the backing of a new nationwide organization to train the next generation of muckrakers. More significantly, Anderson also spent millions of dollars in legal fees defending freedom of the press. His most expensive case was against Liberty Lobby, a right-wing hate group that Anderson accurately characterized as racist, neo-Nazi, and anti-Semitic. “They dragged Jack through ten years of litigation,” Anderson’s lawyer Michael Sullivan recalled with admiration, “but he wouldn’t pay those bastards a dime even if it bankrupted him.” Yet he received little support in Washington media circles for waging these lonely legal battles. Anderson eventually won his court battle against Liberty Lobby—a significant victory in communications law—but he lost the larger war: no insurance company would ever indemnify him again. “Jack was considered too hot to handle,” Sullivan said, “even though he never lost a libel case and his most dangerous stories were behind him.” Without insurance coverage to protect him, Anderson’s reporting necessarily grew more cautious. “I took a lot of chances,” the old muckraker sighed, “but it became riskier and riskier and I had to back off.”

  As Anderson’s column declined, so did its circulation. By the early 1990s, the number of newspapers that published the “Merry-Go-Round” was barely half that of its peak two decades earlier; those that remained were mostly smaller newspapers, often in rural areas with relatively few readers. In a devastating blow, Anderson’s longtime flagship paper, The Washington Post, canceled the column. “No one seemed to notice,” the paper’s executive editor said acidly, and readers were told only that the newspaper “is reorganizing the features that appear in the comics pages.” Anderson’s diminishing audience led to shrinking revenue and staff layoffs. From a high of nearly two dozen reporters, his staff dwindled to just four. Financing was kept afloat by a home equity line and personal credit card debt.

  In 1991, Anderson laid off sixty-five-year-old Opal Ginn, his secretary of nearly four decades, with just three weeks’ notice and no severance. “I wasn’t even given time to apply for Social Security,” she said. Perhaps the parting was inevitable: “I’ve been wanting to do it for years,” Anderson confided to an intimate. Opal’s alcoholism had grown out of control. She mixed daily Bloody Marys in the kitchen of the “Merry-Go-Round” office and drank at her desk from a bottle of scotch stashed in a drawer. At home, she downed so much liquor that she regularly passed out at night in front of her television set. Once, Opal returned to the office after a liquid lunch “six sheets to the wind,” legman Marc Smolonsky recalled, and then “lay down on Jack’s desk, hiked up her skirt and spread her legs”—while a visiting television crew recorded her antics. “I grabbed her and hustled her out,” Smolonsky recalled, and the footage never aired. But Opal’s alcoholic anger was harder to suppress. She inspired fear among the rest of the staff, fomenting fights, spreading malicious gossip, playing employees off against each other.

  Opal’s outward venom seemed to be the result of her inner, thwarted love for her boss. “He was her whole life and she had to protect every bit of that at all costs,” a coworker said. “As Jack’s influence diminished, Opal just tightened her grip to cling on to whatever she could.” Opal’s abrupt dismissal “broke her heart,” Whitten recalled, and was fraught with peril because “she knew everything about Jack.” For years, Opal had threatened to write a kiss-and-tell exposé of Anderson and claimed she had been offered $250,000 to do so but had turned it down out of loyalty to her boss. Now her allegiance was broken, devotion replaced by rage as her office husband of more than thirty years was “putting her out to pasture.” On her way out the door, Opal stuffed incriminating paperwork from her desk into several large garbage bags. She “knew every source he made up, every story he exaggerated, every place where he crossed the line,” a staffer realized. Anderson turned his ex-secretary into the kind of informant he had cultivated so successfully to ruin the careers of others: a woman scorned.

  Opal began writing her kiss-and-tell book. She also contacted an attorney, who sent the columnist a letter charging that Anderson was using Opal’s “abrupt, unwarranted dismissal” to stop paying her $10,000 annual pension. “Where others have agreed to ‘tell all,’ she steadfastly refused,” the lawyer noted pointedly. “Now, apparently you expect her to fade silently away . . . It is not going to be so easy.” Opal threatened to sue Anderson and reached out for help to other former “Merry-Go-Round” employees. Whitten wrote Anderson about Opal’s “dire straits,” which he said left her “near penury.” Her health had worsened from years of drinking and smoking: “She’s probably too proud to tell you how infirm she is and how she is already even pinching on medicine, but she told me.” Another former legman, Jack Mitchell, reminded his ex-boss of “a lifetime of loyalty to you by Opal,” whose “decades of dedicated selfless professional service” were “more instrumental over a period of many years for the successful operation of your office and column” than the work of any other staff member. Anderson replied that while he “share[d] your concern for Opal,” he never agreed to pay a pension to her or any other employee. Whatever the truth of the matter, one friend recalled, “after she was fired by Jack, Opal stayed home for weeks and just got drunk every night until she passed out.”

  In 1993, unable to afford Washington’s high cost of living, Opal decided to move back to her native Georgia. Her friends gathered to toast her farewell. Anderson was not among them. Over the next five years, in a bedroom of her sister’s house, Opal wrote her book-length exposé. “She wouldn’t let me read it,” her sister said. “She didn’t show it to anyone. She didn’t want anyone to read it.” Opal was profoundly ambivalent about her work: on the one hand, she wanted to get even for her humiliating rejection; on the other hand, she was more despondent than angry after her break with the only man she had ever truly loved. “After that,” Opal said, “I don’t care whether I live or die.” On her seventy-third birthday, she decided to destr
oy her book manuscript, and the diary on which it was based. “Don’t do it,” her sister begged. But Opal replied, “I can’t do it—stab him in the back.” She fed the written contents of her life’s work into a paper shredder and wept.

  Seven months later, Opal died in a nursing home in rural Georgia. “She kept drinking and smoking even after she had emphysema real bad,” a friend remembered. “Opal basically committed suicide.” When Anderson called to express condolences, he revealed that he had been in touch with Opal by telephone in the weeks before her death—and now wanted to know what happened to her manuscript pages. He was relieved to learn that they had been destroyed. On the day of Opal’s funeral, surviving family members looked hopefully to see if Anderson would attend the ceremony. He did not.

  Anderson never reconciled with his brother Gordon, who continued to fight with other members of the family but not with Jack, who had cut off all contact and never saw or spoke with him for the rest of his life. Jack did reach an accommodation of sorts with his disapproving father. At a birthday party in a Salt Lake City nursing home, Orlando Anderson, feeble and wheelchair-bound at age ninety-two, was overcome with emotion.

  “We’re proud of you, Jack,” he told his son. “You know that.” It was the first time his father had ever said those words.

  “I guess you get to be ninety and you repent,” Anderson joked. But his father turned serious and began sobbing.