Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  So did Karl Rove, Bush’s political mastermind who first got his start as a young Nixon operative and briefly came to the attention of Watergate prosecutors investigating campaign dirty tricks. Rove’s reputation for scurrilous tactics—particularly for impugning his opponents’ sexual orientation—would follow him throughout his career, although his direct culpability was never proved. But his pandering to homophobia by exploiting the issue of gay marriage was just one of many “wedge issues” used to divide the public. In the White House, said an old Nixon hand, Rove operated with the ruthless authority of “Haldeman and Ehrlichman all in one.”

  President Bush also turned to another Nixon veteran, Charles Colson. The Watergate felon emerged from prison as a born-again Christian and bonded with the President over their evangelical beliefs. Colson was invited to the White House and became a “confidant” of Bush and Rove, Colson’s biographer wrote, exerting “considerable influence” on the “Christian direction” of the President’s policies. Colson also received $2 million from the administration to support his “faith-based initiatives.” In 2004, Nixon’s old hatchet man campaigned against Bush’s Democratic opponent at anti–gay marriage rallies, where he publicly suggested that homosexuals are “lower than the animal species.” Colson was Rove’s “spiritual ancestor,” said Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar who had been Colson’s partner in crime, and his resurrection by the Bush White House seemed fitting. The Watergate criminal who allegedly ordered the assassination of Jack Anderson was respectfully feted in television interviews, where deferential hosts identified him only as a “former White House counsel” and made no mention of the felonies that had made him infamous.

  In all, the post-Watergate turnaround was breathtaking. Three decades after Nixon’s resignation, his acolytes had completed a stunning reversal, expanding executive power while taming the news media. After the “erosion” that followed Watergate, Vice President Cheney said proudly, “we’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency.” Thanks to sophisticated propaganda, hardball intimidation, sensationalist distractions, and deregulatory bribery, Nixon’s men had poisoned the press in a way their mentor never dreamed possible. Richard Nixon would have been proud.

  Washington’s merry-go-round had once again come full circle. But the author of the column that bore that name was too ravaged by disease to fully appreciate how Nixon’s men had returned to power. It was just as well. Jack Anderson would not have wanted to believe his life’s work was in vain.

  Still, the old reporter never stopped wondering about the White House plot to assassinate him. Charles Colson had always denied that he or President Nixon was culpable, but Anderson didn’t believe it. In the columnist’s final years, while hospitalized for Parkinson’s disease, he hatched one last sting to try to link Nixon to the plot. The newsman passed word to Colson that he was dying and asked him to call out of Christian compassion. Colson did. “I told him I’d been at the hospital and was having a hard time,” Anderson said, and that “no recovery was possible.” The two men exchanged pleasantries and flattery, and talked about old times. Anderson had once offered to loan Colson money before he went to prison and Colson remembered the gesture with gratitude. Nixon’s evil genius had even autographed one of his books for his old foe: “Jack,” the inscription said, “Bless you—you are a good man in every sense.” Finally, with their chat flowing warmly, as casually as he could, Anderson brought up the White House murder plot. “There’s one thing I’d like to know,” the old newsman said. “After all these years, what really happened?” The conversation’s tone changed completely, Anderson recalled, and Nixon’s aide once again denied complicity “almost word-for-word” in the same language as he had in years past. Anderson believed the answer was “contrived” because Colson was “too cavalier” about such a serious subject, that the Watergate felon was “cordially lying” one last time to protect Nixon.

  Anderson took it all in stride. In the last months of his life, as he withered away in his sickbed, he jokingly suggested that a visitor try to “blame this”—his cancer and Parkinson’s disease—“on Nixon.”

  Six weeks after Anderson died, the FBI contacted his seventy-eight-year-old widow and demanded to inspect all of the personal papers the newsman had left behind. Authorities asserted that Anderson’s archives—some two hundred boxes in all—might contain classified documents that could jeopardize national security. A young female FBI agent deftly befriended Olivia Anderson the way her late husband had with so many reluctant informants. In this case, the federal investigator bonded with the trusting housewife over their shared roots in West Virginia and convinced Olivia that they might be distant cousins; soon, Anderson’s widow was persuaded to sign a form granting the FBI access to her husband’s records. Olivia’s children were outraged when they discovered what had happened and insisted that the FBI had duped their grieving mother. The family banded together: they refused to cooperate with the government and went public about the incident.

  The news generated front-page headlines around the world. USA Today criticized the administration’s “dubious-sounding excuses to paw through” Anderson’s archives. The Salt Lake Tribune pointed out that the FBI “waited until Jack Anderson was dead before going after what the muckraking columnist would never have given the agency in life” in “the sort of government excess that Jack Anderson spent his life exposing.” The Kansas City Star thought the “attempted raid on Anderson’s files looks like a poorly veiled effort to remove material that could be embarrassing to federal agencies and perhaps enable them to punish people who once shared information with Anderson.” Time observed puckishly that “Anderson has now performed a feat of Mau-Mauing perhaps unique among all muckrakers: he is irritating the government from the grave.”

  In a post–September 11 world, the misplaced priorities of the government seemed glaring. “Is the public really best served in the age of high-tech terrorism by having F.B.I. agents rifling through a dead reporter’s files?” The New York Times wondered. The ghoulish overtones were equally inescapable. The Austin American-Statesman complained that the administration was “rifling Anderson’s corpse” and “picking his bones,” while the Chicago Tribune scolded that “the FBI won’t let his work rest in peace.” Columnist Molly Ivins joked that “Anderson is still under investigation, although seriously dead.” Perhaps the FBI was “worried he might have photos of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress after all these years,” she added.

  The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the affair. “Is there any truth to the fact that some of these papers were looked at because it goes into the personal life of J. Edgar Hoover?” Senator Patrick Leahy wanted to know. Senator Arlen Specter wondered why the government hadn’t sought Anderson’s files during his lifetime if they were so important. Senator Charles Grassley accused the FBI of “tricking” Olivia Anderson by getting her away from her skeptical children and pressuring her into “signing a consent form that she didn’t understand.” In the end, the withering criticism forced the administration to back off. Meanwhile, the Senate panel that had so often clashed with Anderson while he was alive now treated his memory with a reverence the newsman would scarcely have recognized. Chairman Specter enthusiastically asked the “wonderful” Anderson family to stand and be publicly recognized: “Congratulations to you, Mrs. Anderson, and all the Andersons.”

  Gordon Liddy was disgusted. The loyal Nixon apparatchik still believed the old canard that Anderson had betrayed his country by publishing state secrets. Now the late columnist was being lionized by Republicans as well as Democrats. Liddy’s e-mailed reaction was ungrammatical but unmistakable:

  too bad the plumbers didn’t get to that anti american traitor jackoff anderson, good riddence

  Anderson would have relished all of it. Media outlets resurrected film footage of the newsman in his prime: pecking away on his manual typewriter, taunting the Nixon administration by waving classified documents in the air, posing for photos with his
would-be White House assassins. The New York Times published lengthy excerpts from Anderson’s memoir while other publications offered primers on his career for those too young to remember it. “Back in the day, Jack Anderson was a one-man truth squad who wrote a ripsaw column,” the San Francisco Chronicle explained. “In today’s blogosphere and news channel cycles, there’s no equivalent—and maybe even less memory of Anderson’s stature.” The Deseret Morning News noted the historical irony: “Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson may both be dead, but their fight continues.”

  The old muckraker’s antagonists managed to achieve what Anderson tried in vain to accomplish during the last quarter century of his life: get him back on the front page as a journalistic hero standing up to the government. In death as in life, Jack Anderson—just like his old adversary Richard Nixon—would forever be defined by his enemies.

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson left behind an extensive if not unprecedented paper trail, one that makes them ideal case studies of the relationship between politics and the press in Washington. Nixon’s presidency was the best-documented in American history, primarily because his White House surreptitiously recorded nearly four thousand hours of conversations, using automatic voice-activated technology that captured embarrassingly frank discussions in real time. In addition, Nixon’s advisor Henry Kissinger secretly preserved twenty thousand transcript pages of his own contemporaneous phone conversations; multiple government investigations of Watergate led to voluminous subpoenaed documents and testimony; and officials implicated in the scandal published an unusual number of tell-all memoirs to help pay their legal bills. At the same time, Anderson’s journalistic output during his fifty-year career in Washington produced literally millions of words in twenty books, more than ten thousand syndicated columns, and thousands more magazine and newsletter articles, radio and television broadcasts, speeches, and interviews, which are preserved along with his correspondence, internal memos, and reporter’s notes in some two hundred storage boxes at George Washington University.

  For my research, I consulted hundreds of books and articles and thousands of primary source records housed in dozens of archival collections around the country. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with fifty different agencies of the federal government, followed by numerous appeals to gain access to withheld documents—sometimes with the help of legal counsel—with varying degrees of success. In addition, I conducted more than two hundred oral history interviews and tracked down dozens of hours of taped interviews conducted by others, which I had transcribed. Specifics about all of this are detailed below. Unfortunately, several key surviving figures from the Nixon administration, including Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy, declined my repeated requests to be interviewed.

  Two caveats: First, this book does not purport to be a biography of Richard Nixon or a full chronicle of his administration’s successes and failures; other works have amply covered this ground. Nor is this a comprehensive biography of Jack Anderson’s personal and professional life. Rather, this is an account of the interaction between these two men that illustrates larger issues about government and the media—and the rise of investigative scandal coverage—during their time. Second, although the book’s narrative is presented largely in chronological order, I have on occasion deviated from a strict time line to avoid confusing the reader. In particular, a minute-by-minute rendering of Nixon’s meandering White House conversations proves repetitive and tedious, so I have in places combined and condensed material to avoid bogging down the reader even while painstakingly attributing distinct quotations and other source information in the endnotes.

  The Nixon tapes posed the greatest single challenge—and opportunity—of my research. They proved to be the most honest record of the President’s battles with Anderson and the press, but they are often muffled or scratchy, making them difficult to hear clearly. With the help of several student research assistants I transcribed dozens of previously unpublicized White House tapes and hired an audio engineer to try to make the words more comprehensible. I was also careful to have at least two sets of ears listen to each recording quoted in this book to try to ensure accuracy as much as is humanly possible. Audio excerpts from these new, enhanced tapes have been streamed online and are available on the book’s website.

  Surprisingly, much of this primary source material—which offers a fascinating window on our political history—is still unknown to the public. The time-consuming nature of transcription has deterred historians and journalists from going through all the Nixon tapes released so far; and the Nixon estate and various federal agencies continue to resist full declassification, citing national security and personal privacy even though virtually all individuals involved died long ago. For example, the FBI heavily redacted eight thousand pages of files it released on Jack Anderson and his boss Drew Pearson, who died in 1969; and the CIA’s response to my Freedom of Information Act request on Anderson consisted mostly of news articles or other material already available to the public—with internal memos often so heavily censored as to be worthless. In addition, both agencies, and other parts of the federal bureaucracy, withheld documents that Anderson himself publicly disseminated more than three decades earlier, raising questions about what else the government is still holding back. Still, I will continue to file legal appeals for additional material.

  Meanwhile, I encourage interested readers to view additional photos, read supplementary material, and listen to selected excerpts of the Nixon White House tapes at www.poisoningthepress.com.

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  AP

  Associated Press

  CCP

  Charles Colson papers, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL

  Chp. Chapter

  CIAFOIA

  Central Intelligence Agency subject files on Jack Anderson obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act

  DOJFOIA

  Department of Justice civil division files from Anderson v. Nixon lawsuit obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act

  DP

  Drew Pearson

  DPP

  Drew Pearson papers, LBJ Library, University of Texas, Austin, TX

  DVAP

  Dale Van Atta private paper collection, Ashburn, VA

  EZP

  Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt papers, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX

  FBIFOIA

  Federal Bureau of Investigation subject files obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act

  HBP

  Sen. Howard Baker papers, Hoskins Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

  Intv.

  Interview

  JA

  Jack Anderson

  JAP

  Jack Anderson papers, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

  JA v. RN

  civil suit #76-1794, Jack Anderson v. Richard Nixon, Washington, D.C.

  JEP

  John Ehrlichman papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

  JFKAA

  John F. Kennedy assassination archives, National Archives, College Park, MD

  LBJL

  Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, TX

  LCP

  Len Colodny private paper collection, Tampa, FL

  LWP

  Les Whitten papers, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

  MCP

  Sen. Marlow W. Cook papers, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY

  MGR

  Washington “Merry-Go-Round” column; originals housed with Jack Anderson papers, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

  MLKP

  Martin Luther King papers, Martin Luther King Library, Atlanta, GA

  ND

  Not dated or date unknown

  NARA

  Richard Nixon presidential papers, National Archives, College Park, MD

 
NSA

  National Security Archive, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

  NISI

  News Items of Special Interest, the Pentagon’s daily internal summary of media coverage of the Defense Department

  NYRB

  The New York Review of Books

  NYT

  The New York Times

  PCP

  Public Citizen Papers, Washington, D.C. (ITT hearings)

  PPP

  Pulitzer Prize Papers, Columbia University, New York, NY

  RMP

  Robert C. Mardian papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

  RNL

  Richard Nixon Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA

  RNVPP

  Richard Nixon vice presidential papers, National Archives, Laguna Nigel, CA

  SASC

  Senate Armed Services Committee files, Center for Legislative Affairs, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (1974 Joint Chiefs of Staff–National Security Council document transmittal hearings)