(1) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

Honest men will lie and decent men will cheat for power. Few reach the political pinnacles without selling what they do not own and promising what is not theirs to give. In the great and grueling quest for power it is easy to forget that power belongs not to those who possess it for the moment but to the nation and its people.

While power need not be corrupting, it is impossible to deny that the American political system invites corruption. Men must accumulate funds to campaign for office. Those who finance the campaigns expect a return on their investment. Those who are elected must listen to the special interests while they preach about the public interest. To lead they often must follow men whose motives are self-serving.

To keep the White House, Richard Nixon raised more campaign cash than it cost him originally to gain the White House. His agents systematically contacted the nation's great corporations and gave them campaign quotas for their executives to raise. Some paid their allotments hoping it would keep the government off their backs. Others, like International Telephone and Telegraph, sought to make a deal in return for a campaign commitment. Only a few, like American Motors, refused to ante up. Staggering sums were raised to reelect the President. The cost to the people of the United States, and to the free enterprise system, is still being paid in installments.

 

(2) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

The experience of ascending the pinnacle of power changes the men who must exercise power. Some men can grow and be strengthened by the process. Most are diminished. When Lyndon Johnson was President, it was possible sometimes to glimpse the gangling adolescent from the Texas dirt farm. And somewhere under the brittle shell of Richard Nixon lurks the quiet, studious youngster in Whittier who wanted to be a railroad engineer. But in the White House, they no longer were the men they once had been. The aging process for all human beings tends to replace
idealism with cynicism; for the powerful the change is often more pervasive.

The men of the press seldom remind the leaders of their obligations, nor the citizens that they are the true owners of power. All too many who write about government have been seduced by those who govern. The press, like the powerful, often forgets its obligations to the public. Too many Washington reporters consider it their function to court the high and mighty rather than condemn them; to extol public officials rather than expose them.

It is far more pleasant to write puffery about the powerful, of course, than it is to probe their perfidy. Public officeholders are usually likable; that is why they got elected. Many reporters are taken in by this personal charm, are awed by the majesty of office; and they become publicists rather than critics of the men who occupy the offices.

 

(3) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

The need for the press to occupy an adversary role was clear to America's founding fathers. That is why they made freedom of the press the first guarantee of the Bill of Rights. Without press freedom, they knew, the other freedoms would fall. For government, by its nature, tends to oppress. And government, without a watchdog, would soon oppress the people it was created to serve.

 

(4) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

Unquestionably, the way an investigative reporter is compelled to operate is an imperfect system of newsgathering. Sometimes the sources do not have all the details. Sometimes the jigsaw pieces of information do not form a complete picture and the missing pieces are buried too deeply. Investigative reporters must work without the power of subpoena. They lack the money and manpower that the government can marshal to counter their efforts. The authority to classify embarrassing facts, the ability to shut off channels of information, the power to intimidate sources who could tell the truth - all these are on the side of the government.

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that investigative reporters do not always get all the facts. They can uncover enough hidden scraps, however, to cast light on a blunder or an embarrassment or a scandal that the people in power had conspired to conceal. If our society was as free and open as it should be, and if government officials fully subscribed to their oaths to protect the public interest, there would be little difficulty in quickly establishing the truth. But officials all too often cover up the facts and then lie to the public.

Investigative reporters must work harder, dig deeper, and verify their facts more carefully than establishment reporters. Preposterous lies can be told to make the powerful look good; grievous blunders can be committed by officials in the name of the government; the public can be cheated by men sworn to uphold the public trust. But let an investigative reporter make a mistake and there will be howls of outrage. There can be a good word for a Lyndon Johnson who sent boys to die in a senseless war, or a General Motors which releases unsafe cars upon the highways, or a Richard Nixon who condones lawlessness while preaching law and order. But there is no good word for an investigative reporter who wrongly condemns someone in authority.

 

(5) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

The article described efforts by the White House staff to influence Dita Beard to disown her memo and also their attempts to discover some suitable scandal involving myself. The Post went on to quote from an "interim memorandum" written for the White House by its investigators reporting on my personal and business life. I was one of the founders of the Chinese Refugee Relief Organization, the report revealed; my fellow founders included Mrs. Claire Chennault, a prominent Republican and the widow of the organizer of the Flying Tigers; I had a bank account at the D.C. National Bank where the widow Chennault was on the board of directors; I owned a small interest in the Empress Restaurant in Washington and in a newspaper in Las Vegas. The incriminating picture was rounded out by a mysterious claim that I maintained "a close association with the operating arm of the Democratic Party," an entity I had thought to be nonexistent. The White House report was dismissed by the Post as "dealing with already known and generally uncontroversial details about Anderson." Such entries, while they might be helpful in an application for credit at Thorn McAn's, seemed to me unworthy of sleuths operating at the presidential level.

What I did not take into account was the secret doings that were then fragmenting the energies of the compilers of my White House biography. These gentlemen - James McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, lohn Dean, and various presidential dispatchers and controls - were engaged in truly momentous events, compared with which their investigation of me was just a sideshow. For example, they were preparing blueprints for the burglarizing of Watergate and the bugging of George McGovern headquarters; they were perfecting schemes to burglarize the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, to recruit call girls who would romance Democratic party leaders and report back the pillow talk, to forge documents framing President Kennedy for the murder of President Diem, to fabricate a new version of Chappaquiddick. The operatives were occupied not only with conceiving and planning these vaulting designs but in making formal presentations to the Attorney General of the United States and various high aides to the President - presentations replete with elaborate charts so that busy Nixon proconsuls could get a quick grasp of the finer points of the felonies within their purview...

As it happened, I was personally acquainted with some of the Waterbuggers. Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune who had roamed the world in search of danger and excitement, had been a friend of mine for years. I had written about his exploits fighting first for and then against Fidel Castro. Sturgis introduced me in Miami to Bernard Barker, a short, swarthy swashbuckler who was known to his associates as Macho (he-man). Both of them spoke of Eduardo, their CIA superior during the Bay of Pigs, who I realized much later was E. Howard Hunt. They were a collection of romantics, forever seeking adventure, forever finding misadventure.

 

(6) Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (1973)

If government is to regain the trust of the nation, the administration of justice must be even-handed and freed from the pressures of political favoritism. The recent custom of appointing election campaign managers as attorneys general must cease. It is transparent that the men who raise the money to elect a President cannot be expected to deal honestly with major contributors. The lustice Department, if its name is to have meaning, should be led by the nation's best lawyers, not its political hacks. Its proceedings should be open, its prosecutions just.

The FBI, Justice's investigative arm, must be allowed to free itself from the web of politics now entangling it and regain its reputation as an unbiased, straightforward servant of the people. The responsibilities for internal security were thrust upon the bureau as America hurriedly geared itself for World War II. The emergency is long past; it is time for a new approach. No agency is as well equipped to fight crime as the FBI. That should be its job. The responsibility for evaluating political thought and activity should be turned over to a new branch of government closely supervised by Congress. America cannot afford a political police force.

Perhaps most important of all, Congress must rip aside the veil of censorship that prevents the American people from knowing what their government is doing. The United States now possesses more than twenty million documents that are hidden from public scrutiny by the censor's stamp. Men familiar with this hoard insist that only ten to thirty percent of the papers have any genuine bearing on national security. The rest are classified to keep Americans from learning of malfeasance, or bungling, or simply because the censor lacked the wit to make the papers public.

We are willing to agree, albeit grudgingly, that the President cannot make many of the cold, hard decisions he faces in the bright light of publicity. There are maneuvers of extreme delicacy that must be executed, and unpublicized deals that must be negotiated, if he is to meet his responsibilities. Let him keep these documents secret, for up to two years if necessary. Documents dealing with national security, of course, should remain secret as long as they remain sensitive. But the President and his underlings cannot be allowed to decide arbitrarily what will remain secret.

We call for the establishment of a national commission on security, comprised of intelligent, trustworthy individuals from outside the government, who would periodically review those documents the government feels must remain classified. The burden of establishing the need for secrecy would be on the government, rather than the present rule, which compels scholars and researchers to show why certain papers - some dealing with World War II - should be made public.

No other nation has been as successful as the United States in maintaining a free society. Yet the invasion of this freedom - secrecy, the politicization of justice, the hoarding of authority, official deception - are abuses of power that threaten our freedom.

Power corrupts not only those who abuse it, but whole nations as well, when they tolerate this abuse.

 

(7) Louis Stokes, House Select Committee on Assassinations (September 28, 1978)

In 1967, 1971, 1976, and 1977, those 4 years, columnist Jack Anderson wrote about the CIA-Mafia plots and the possibility that Castro decided to kill President Kennedy in retaliation. Mr. Anderson even contends in those articles that the same persons involved in the CIA-Mafia attempts on Castro's life were recruited by Castro to kill President Kennedy. The September 7, 1976 issue of the Washington Post contains one of Mr. Anderson's articles entitled, "Behind John F. Kennedy's Murder," which fully explains Mr. Anderson's position. I ask, Mr. Chairman, that at this point this article be marked as JFK exhibit F-409 and that it be entered into the record at this point.

Mr. Trafficante, I want to read to you just two portions of the article I have just referred to, after which I will ask for your comment. According to Mr. Anderson and Mr. Whitten in this article, it says: Before he died, Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy's murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. By Roselli's cryptic account, Castro learned the identity of the underworld contacts in Havana who had been trying to knock him off. He believed, not altogether without basis, that President Kennedy was behind the plot. Then over in another section, it says: According to Roselli, Castro enlisted the same underworld elements whom he had caught plotting against him. They supposedly were Cubans from the old Trafficante organization. Working with Cuban intelligence, they allegedly lined up an ex-Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been active in the pro-Castro movement. According to Roselli's version, Oswald may have shot Kennedy or may have acted as a decoy while others ambushed him from closer range. When Oswald was picked up, Roselli suggested the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them. This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald making it appear as an act of reprisal against the President's killer. At least this is how Roselli explained the tragedy in Dallas.

 

(8) Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker (1979)

My mentor's sympathies, then, lay with (Howard) Hughes, but Drew (Pearson) felt stranded in an unsatisfying posture. It was his nature to want to play an important part in the great political brawls of the time, to put his mark on them, to help shape their outcome toward the benefit of his causes or the distress of his foes. Yet he would not take Brewster's side and could not take Hughes's. For though Hughes was probably the victim of an unsavory gang-up, his own conduct in the matter was too shabby to defend and he was not even making a fight of it himself. Grumbling at each day's leaks, Drew held back, watching the thing spin, looking for a handle to pick it up by.

At this point in his disintegrating fortunes, Howard Hughes phoned Drew from one of his West Coast redoubts. He had long considered Pearson to be journalism's leading molder of public opinion and the man most knowledgeable about the Byzantine twists of conspiratorial Washington. And since Drew's animus against Hughes's tormentors was clear, there was a mutuality of interest present that encouraged him to seek Drew's help and advice.

In the manner of cornered men whose expense accounts have already been made public, Hughes admitted to misdemeanors but pled innocent to felonies. He had indeed wined and wenched government officials and military brass, sometimes to excess. It was necessary, he said; his competitors did it, and as a relative newcomer trying to buck long-entrenched interests and liaisons, he had to play the game in order to get a hearing on his proposals. He had never looked on aviation as a moneymaker, he insisted; he was in it because he had a passion for it. He yielded to no man in his mastery of the dark arts of making money, as the astronomical profits of his other businesses showed, but in aviation, he had lost $14 million in thirteen years.

Then he got to the nub: three months before, Brewster had attempted to lobby him in behalf of Pan Am, he said, and having failed, they were both out to destroy him. Pan Am had put great pressure on him to merge Trans World with Pan Am and co-sponsor the chosen-instrument plan. Brewster himself had told him at the Mayflower Hotel that the probe would be dropped if he joined forces with Pan Am.

 

(9) Jack Anderson, Peace, War, And Politics (1999)

When CIA chief John McCone learned of the assassination, he rushed to Robert Kennedy's home in McLean, Virginia, and stayed with him for three hours. No one else was admitted. Even Bobby's priest was turned away. McCone told me he gave the attorney general a routine briefing on CIA business and swore that Castro's name never came up. Yet McCone's agency had been trying to kill Castro, and just two months earlier Castro had threatened to retaliate if the assassination attempts continued. Another thing: On November 22, 1963, when I could talk about nothing else, when my wife could talk about nothing else, when the entire world was riveted on Dallas, the director of the CIA claimed that he spent three hours with the brother of the slain president and that they discussed routine CIA business.

Sources would later tell me that McCone anguished with Bobby over the terrible possibility that the assassination plots sanctioned by the president's own brother may have backfired. Then the following day, McCone briefed President Lyndon Johnson and his National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Afterward, McCone told subordinates - who later filled me in - what happened at that meeting. The grim McCone shared with Johnson and Bundy a dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, strongly suggesting that Castro was behind the assassination.

The CIA chief put this together with what he knew of the mood in Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev was on the ropes inside the Kremlin, humiliated over backing down less than a year earlier during the Cuban missile crisis. If Castro were to be accused of the Kennedy assassination, Americans would demand revenge against Cuba, and Khrushchev would face another Cuban crisis. He was an impulsive man who could become dangerous if backed into a corner. McCone warned that Khrushchev was unlikely to endure another humiliation over Cuba. This time he might do something reckless and provoke a nuclear war, which would cost forty million American lives. It was a staggering figure that the new president repeated to others.

A trusted source told me that Johnson later picked up the phone and called a man who had been his neighbor in Washington for three decades - FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. From all that I have learned about those two men, I can speculate what Johnson told Hoover. More than likely, LBJ invoked flag, country, and the fate of forty million Americans who might die. He probably asked Hoover to make sure that the FBI postmortem on the Kennedy assassination did not even hint at the name Fidel Castro.

In times of national trauma, many people fancy themselves heroes. Witnesses see things that never happened; eavesdroppers overhear things that were never said; patriots fabricate stories to protect the national well-being; bureaucrats doctor paperwork to fit the official line; statesmen hide the truth while it is too painful to tell. Lies are told and rules are broken in the name of a greater good. Hoover was a man of many motives, but above all he was a patriot and a master bureaucrat. He despised many of the presidents who were his bosses; he was loyal only to his perception of the United States and the FBI. But LBJ knew how to appeal to Hoover's patriotism. To save forty million Americans from nuclear oblivion, the J. Edgar Hoover I knew would not only have agreed to whitewash the most important murder investigation of the century; he also would have agreed to use his power and control over the FBI to impose his will.

In less than a week, Hoover notified Johnson that the FBI investigation into the assassination was almost complete. It would lay the blame on a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who could no longer challenge the findings because by then he was dead.

 

(10) Jack Anderson, speech at the University of Utah (22nd September, 1999)

The press in America today is not particularly popular. It probably does not deserve to be particularly popular. We have adopted many of our mainstream organizations radio, TV, newspapers have adopted the legal profession's way of learning the truth. A lawyer can prove anything. He may represent the defendant one day, the plaintiff the next, and he can take whatever facts are available on one side of the story and spell out a tale that proves either side, and he doesn't much care which side he is on. Depends usually on who offers him the biggest fee. Increasingly tabloid television programs and tabloid newspapers are doing the same thing. They decide what would make a good story and then they go out to prove the story, and they can prove anything there, investigate your background, find out all there is to know, all there is on the record about you, and take all the derogatory stuff that I learned, and put it all in one column without any compensating favorable information on the other side, and I could destroy your reputation. Well, I appeal to you, who are going in to this business, you who are taking communications under a great communications director, who will teach you right.

Let me tell you what I tell my reporters. I say I want to know the facts. I want to know the facts as they are, not as you think they are, not as you hope they are, not as someone tells you they are. I want to know the facts as they are, and I confess it is more difficult for them to find out those facts than it is for me to tell them to find out those facts. But I tell them that politicians (whom it is our duty to cover in Washington), that politicians are proud, egocentric people. Most of them would give an arm or a leg before they gave up their reputations, their good name. I can tell you that a man named Bill Clinton is in absolute agony over the stories about his personal life. He suffers. He has complained petulantly to friends: "How can they write these stories about Hilary and me? What do they know? Only Hillary and I know what our relationship is. How can they write these terrible stories?"

 

(11) Jack Anderson, Peace, War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (1999)

The CIA's Sheffield Edwards was supposed to make the contact with the underworld. He approached a former FBI agent and CIA operative, Robert Maheu, who moved at the subterranean level of politics. Maheu knew his way around the shady side of Las Vegas; he had been recruited by billionaire Howard Hughes to oversee his Las Vegas casinos. Happily, Hughes was a friend who owed me a favor. Intermediaries persuaded Maheu to confide in me. He confirmed that the CIA had asked him to sound out the Mafia, strictly off the record, about a contract to hit Fidel Castro. Maheu had taken the request straight to Johnny Rosselli.

Rosselli had a reputation inside the mob as a patriot; he was quite willing to kill for his country. But as he told me, there was an etiquette to be followed in these matters. Santo Trafficante was the godfather-in-exile of Cuba after Castro chased out the mob. Rosselli couldn't even tiptoe through Trafficante's territory without permission, and he couldn't approach Trafficante without a proper introduction. So Rosselli prevailed upon his boss in Chicago, Sam "Momo" Giancana, to attend to the protocol. Since Giancana had godfather status, he could solicit Trafficante's help to eliminate Castro. The project appealed to Giancana who had commiserated with other dons over the loss of casino revenues in Havana. Killing Castro for the government would settle some old scores for the mob, and it would put Uncle Sam in the debt of the Mafia.

Maheu had been ordered to keep a tight lid on the involvement of the U.S. government. The CIA was ready with a cover story that the Castro hit had been arranged by disgruntled American businessmen who had been bounced out of their Cuban enterprises by Castro.

On September 25, I960, Maheu brought two CIA agents to a suite at the Fountainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. Rosselli delivered two sinister mystery men whom he introduced only as Sicilians named "Sam" and "Joe." In fact, they were two of the Mafia's most notorious godfathers, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, both on the FBI's ten-most-wanted list. They discussed the terms of Castro's demise, with Giancana suggesting that the usual mob method of a quick bullet to the head be eschewed in favor of something more delicate, like poison.

The wily Giancana was less interested in bumping off Castro than in scoring points with the federal government, and he intended to call in as many chips as he could before the game was over.

 

(12) Mark Feldstein, The Last Muckraker, Washington Post (28th July, 2004)

Jack Anderson, 81 and ailing with Parkinson's disease, quietly gave up his syndicated column last week after more than half a century. It was not the ending some of Richard Nixon's men once had in mind.

In 1972, in one of the most bizarre and overlooked chapters in American political history, Anderson was the target of a Mafia-style hit ordered in the White House itself. Two Nixon operatives admitted under oath that they plotted to poison the troublemaking investigative reporter at the behest of a top aide to President Nixon. Ultimately the plot was aborted and the conspirators were arrested a few weeks later, as part of the Watergate break-in.

Anderson's retirement symbolizes the end of an era that predates Watergate. He was the last of the old-fashioned muckrakers. In his heyday, from the 1950s through the '70s, his daily "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column was the most widely read in the nation, reaching an audience of 40 million in nearly a thousand newspapers.

Anderson's dramatic exposés of political scandal led to resignations and prison terms. He swiped secret documents, used bugging equipment to eavesdrop on conversations, and jubilantly savaged his enemies, unconcerned with such journalistic niceties as fairness and balance.

Anderson was an important transitional figure in the evolution of adversarial journalism, a link in the historical chain between the advocacy of Progressive-era reformers from the early 1900s and the more professionalized class of investigative reporters who came to dominate Washington in the 1970s. After World War II, when he joined the column under the tutelage of the late Drew Pearson, Anderson was for years the only Washington reporter of genuine influence who consistently exposed wrongdoing in the nation's capital - from the fur-coat scandals involving presidents Truman and Eisenhower, to corruption by numerous members of Congress, to the secret foreign policy machinations of the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Anderson was able to break these stories in part because he was an independent journalistic entrepreneur, empowered by the technology and economic autonomy of the syndicated column. His reach extended beyond the control of any single editor or publisher.

He was a strict Mormon who viewed investigative reporting as a noble calling from God. He believed as a matter of theology that life is an eternal struggle between good and evil, and that the First Amendment was quite literally a divinely inspired charter that sanctioned his muckraking mission.

Anderson was decidedly unencumbered by ties to the Washington establishment, and he was in many ways uniquely situated to hold the muckraking banner aloft. He provided a vital check on governmental power during a time when journalists preferred to socialize with public officials rather than investigate them.

To be sure, his flaws could be glaring. He was bombastic and self-righteous, even when retracting stories, such as his false report that a Democratic vice presidential nominee had been arrested for drunk driving. The muckraker's unsavory techniques included threats, rifling through garbage, and financial relationships with sources. He openly lobbied senators on their votes, ghost-writing their speeches and using his column as leverage to influence them. His cliche-ridden evangelical style was an anachronism that sacrificed complex truths for simplistic but dramatic portrayals of good guys vs. bad.

In this respect, too, Anderson was ahead of his time, anticipating the victims-and-villains entertainment values that have come to dominate 21st-century television news. Ironically, despite the black-and-white view he expressed in his column, Anderson's own reporting was itself a far more grayish mix of courageous digging and sensationalistic self-promotion. In many ways, the columnist embodied the contradictions that have characterized investigative reporting throughout American history; from the beginning it has alternated between the highbrow ideals of public service and the lowbrow reality of celebrity gossip.

Part circus huckster, part guerrilla fighter, part righteous rogue, Anderson waged a one-man journalistic resistance when it was exceedingly unpopular to do so. That no one has emerged to take his place shows not only the void he leaves behind but also how much America's media landscape has changed.

 

(13) Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post (18th December, 2005)

Anderson, who died yesterday at 83, was the most feared investigative reporter of his day, but in person Jack was the gentlest of men. He was patient and avuncular with the young and ambitious wannabes who rotated through his small office (and whose numbers included Fox News's Brit Hume, NBC's Jack Cloherty, the novelist James Grady and prizewinning Los Angeles Times correspondent Gary Cohn). He was a wonderful storyteller, a good listener and a devoted father of nine kids who was happy spending summer weekends at a big beach house in Rehoboth. He would begin even routine phone conversations with "Good to hear your voice." He once told me that the best way to develop a source was to be inconvenienced together at some distant airport.

It is hard to imagine now, when every minor publication is clawing away in search of government secrets, but Anderson was once one of the capital's few purebred investigative journalists. He managed to compete with the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post based on his own ingenuity and a tiny staff, though he was never quite seen as being establishment, in part because he was a lone figure blazing his own iconoclastic path.

He would produce worldwide headlines with scoops about chicanery by corporate giant ITT or behind-the-scenes dealings involving India and Pakistan, the latter work earning him a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. He could also be spectacularly wrong, put his faith in a bad source and have to issue an embarrassing retraction. But his ability to persuade people at the highest levels of government to share secrets with him was uncanny, especially in an era when most journalists were deferential toward the nation's leaders and when top political columnists had cozy relationships with the high and mighty.

Anderson was for decades the most widely read columnist in America, appearing in about 1,000 newspapers, including his odd but hardly obscure spot in The Washington Post's comics pages (before the paper dropped him almost a decade ago). He was also a regular on "Good Morning America" and churned out best-selling books. When I later served a two-year stint with him as a reporter in the late '70s, almost anyone, from senators to Cabinet members, would quickly return my calls. And Jack was generous with credit, writing the names of his "associates" into pieces they had reported. I think he was sensitive on this point because he had spent so many years as the less heralded legman for Drew Pearson, from whom he inherited the Washington Merry-Go-Round column. Nor was Anderson above telling the greenest rookie that if he worked hard, one day he might take over the franchise.

I became an expert in Anderson's style because, for a time, I was ghostwriting the column, subject, of course, to his editing and approval. Jack spent much of his time on the lecture circuit, and for a very basic reason: For all its prestige, he lost money on the column. The speaking fees he raked in - and he was a skilled performer in front of crowds - were what kept the enterprise afloat.

And so I studied the art of Andersonian hype. He always "learned" this or that from "secret" or "eyes-only" documents, or reported on what was being "whispered in the capital's back rooms." I once went to Texas to write about a controversial state senator, and Jack, never having met the man, reworked my copy to say that the politician's "ruddy face turned redder" when asked about some outrage.

He once told me something that stuck in my mind. Although the 750-word columns were often devoted to exposing nefarious misdeeds, when it came to the person under fire, Anderson said, "Act like you're his defense lawyer." In other words, make the strongest possible case for the innocence of the public figure you were prosecuting....

In later years, I began to see that Anderson's judgment was often flawed. He had a disturbing knack for entering into business arrangements with shady characters, and the dealings would later blow up on him. In 1992 he had to back out of a television project on the Exxon Valdez oil spill after it turned out - Anderson later claimed ignorance - that Exxon had put up $10,000 for the program. The quality of his work declined with his advancing age when, despite a struggle with Parkinson's disease, he refused to retire. His column was his life.

 

(13) Douglas Martin, New York Times (18th December, 2005)

Mr. Anderson was a flamboyant bridge between the muckrakers of the early decades of the 20th century and the battalions of investigative reporters unleashed by news organizations after Watergate. He relished being called "the Paul Revere of journalism" for his knack for uncovering major stories first almost as much as he enjoyed being at the top of President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list.

His journalistic reach extended to radio, television and magazines, and his scoops were legion. They included the United States' tilt away from India toward Pakistan during Bangladesh's war for independence, which won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1972.

Another was his linking of the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT by the Justice Department to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican convention. Still another was revealing the Reagan administration's efforts to sell arms illegally to Iran and funnel the proceeds to anti-Communist forces in Central America.

In what was the nation's most widely read, longest-running political column, Mr. Anderson broke stories that included the Central Intelligence Agency's enlisting of the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, the savings and loan scandal, Senator Thomas J. Dodd's loose ethics, and the mystery surrounding Howard Hughes's death.

He liked to say that he and his staff of eager investigators did daily what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal.

But his bombastic, self-congratulating style, abbreviated exegeses and a blistering moral outrage fueled both by his Mormon upbringing and unabashed theatrical flair caused some to question his gravity.

When he made a mistake on a big story, it could reverberate mightily. In 1972, he had to apologize to Senator Thomas Eagleton for reporting on the radio about drunken-driving arrests that he could not later authenticate. Mr. Eagleton had to withdraw as the Democratic Party nominee for vice president in the face of disclosures that he had received psychiatric treatment.

Mr. Anderson's decidedly roguish techniques included eavesdropping, spiriting off classified documents, rifling through garbage (Mr. Hoover's, in particular) and sometimes blatant threats - methods he defended as justified in his lifetime campaign to keep government honest. His printing of verbatim transcripts of the secret Watergate grand jury thwarted Mr. Nixon's efforts to stonewall the scandal by hiding behind grand jury secrecy...

Not only was Mr. Anderson on Nixon's notorious list, but G. Gordon Liddy, a Watergate burglar, plotted his murder.

Mr. Anderson marked a departure from traditional Washington columnists like Walter Lippmann who reported on politics as insiders with high-level contacts. His approach also veered sharply from that of Drew Pearson, who began the "Merry-Go-Round" column in 1932.

Mr. Pearson basked in his own celebrity, confiding with the powerful and playing them for large scoops. Mr. Anderson, by contrast, kept his distance from politicians. He would rather go to a movie than a state dinner, which was fortunate because he was never invited to any.

He quietly cultivated dissatisfied and idealistic lower-level government workers, convincing them that the public's right to information trumped their bosses' personal interests. His stock and trade were the secret documents he persuaded sources to leak.

Mr. Anderson's prominence gradually faded, as the sort of investigative journalism he pioneered became more standard fare. As this competition for stories stiffened, Mr. Anderson was also spreading himself thinner and thinner as his television and radio enterprises demanded nearly constant news.

The number of papers subscribing to "Washington Merry-Go-Round" finally dwindled to around 150. In 2002, Slate, the online magazine, noted that nobody had picked up Mr. Anderson's report that Senator John McCain was poised to switch parties. Mickey Kaus, the Slate writer, wrote that this demonstrated "how unseriously Jack Anderson is taken these days."

What many of his readers did not realize was that Mr. Anderson himself added up to a fascinating story. He was a close personal friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy before becoming one of his most fervent and earliest pursuers. He invited Adolph Eichmann's son to live in his home to learn about his upbringing.

One employee, Les Whitten, told Washingtonian magazine in 1997 how Mr. Anderson showed scant favoritism toward friends. Mr. Whitten recalled his boss glancing at a draft of a critical column he had written about Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, a friend of Mr. Anderson's.

 

(13) Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post (18th December, 2005)

A crusader in the mold of muckrakers from a century ago, unbounded by contemporary notions of objectivity, Mr. Anderson was highly successful during the 1950s and 1960s, when few reporters actively sought to uncover government wrongdoing. At one point, his column appeared in about 1,000 newspapers with 45 million daily readers.

His influence flagged in recent years, but for decades he had the investigative field virtually to himself. The number of scoops that he had a hand in was amazing: the Keating Five congressional ethics scandal; revelations in the Iran-Contra scandal; the U.S. government's tilt away from India toward Pakistan, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972; the ITT-Dita Beard affair, which linked the settlement of a federal antitrust suit against International Telephone & Telegraph to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican National Convention; the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro; the final days of Howard Hughes; U.S. attempts to undermine the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende; allegations about a possible Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the pope; an Iranian connection to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut...

Mr. Anderson and Drew Pearson, his predecessor on "The Washington Merry-Go-Round" column, were among the few investigative reporters working in the mass media after the Great Depression until the technique came back into style during the Vietnam War and Watergate era.

Mr. Anderson was an investigator from the start, when he went to work in 1947 as a "legman" for Pearson's column, which began in 1932. In 1969, Pearson died and left the column to him. Mr. Anderson ran it - with an ever-changing cast of interns - until he unofficially retired in 2001, when Douglas Cohn, his writing partner since 1999, and Eleanor Clift of Newsweek took over. The column ran until July 30, 2004, when United Feature Syndicate announced its end...

Mr. Anderson's work enraged those in power. President Richard M. Nixon tried to smear him as a homosexual, the CIA was ordered to spy on him, and, according to the Watergate tapes, a Nixon aide ordered two cohorts to try to kill the journalist by poisoning.

"I have to do daily what Woodward and Bernstein did once," Anderson told The Post in 1983, without a trace of embarrassment. The article called Anderson's "a column of tweaks, leaks and piques, born of idealism, stoked by cynicism, a brazen, high-risk, righteously indignant antiwaste, anticorruption, anticommunist watchdog of a column that has been called everything from 'gold' to 'garbage.' Sometimes on the same day. Sometimes in the same sentence."

Mr. Anderson was considered significantly more accurate than his predecessor, although he was not error-free. He admitted he wrongly charged Donald H. Rumsfeld with lavishly decorating his office while cutting expenses on programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He also admitted giving covert aid to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the early days of his anti-Communist crusade, although he turned on McCarthy later. He also regretted not publishing a scoop about President Reagan's arms-for-hostages swap.

He was not above flamboyant "Front Page" style tactics. During Watergate, when the FBI sought copies of grand jury transcripts that Mr. Anderson had obtained, he and Whitten decided to bar their office door and throw the papers out their window. Interns waiting below were supposed to scoop up the falling documents.

"We didn't have to do it because we got an agreement with Judge [John] Sirica," Whitten said. "He said if we'd return the papers and let him get rid of them, he would not pursue contempt of court against Jack. Jack agreed to that, and we took them out of a [hidden] panel in a desk. Jack took them home, what do you think he did? Xeroxed them and buried them in his backyard before he gave them back to Sirica. They're probably still back there."

 

 

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