Poisoning The Press

Mark Feldstein., “Poisoning The Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and The rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 368 pp plus 80 pgs of notes and bibliography


Author Mark Feldstein was an on-air correspondent and investigative reporter for CNN, ABC News and NBC News for more than 20 years. In this book, he describes the continuous battle, beginning in 1947, between Nixon and the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and how this battle continues today between the press and other politicians. Anderson began his Washington career as a researcher for Drew Pearson. In the two decades that followed, the conflict became so intense Feldstein says, that Nixon ordered CIA surveillance of Anderson and his family — and White House operatives seriously considered assassinating the journalist. "They actually conducted surveillance. They followed him from his work to his house," Feldstein says. "They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities ... [and discussed] how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle. They talked about how they could spike his drink and they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash." The plot was ultimately called off, Feldstein says, because Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, the two men who were to allegedly assassinate Anderson, were instead tapped to break into Watergate.

My Notes:

Pg. 4: In many ways, the rise of Washington’s modern scandal culture began with Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson, and their blistering twenty-five-year battle symbolized and accelerated the growing conflict between the presidency and the press in the Cold War era. This bitter struggle between the most embattled politician and reviled investigative reporter of their time would lead to bribery and blackmail, forgery and burglary, sexual smears and secret surveillance—as well as the plumbers assassination plot to kill Anderson. Their story reveals not only how one president sabotaged the press, but also how this rancorous relationship continues to the present day. Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson: the most hated politician and reporter of their time rose to power through unremitting attacks on their opponents.

Pg. 35: In May 1947 Anderson was hired as a researcher by syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson had started his “Merry-Go-Round” column in 1932 as an antidote to the overwhelmingly conservative and Republican newspapers of the day. It was a kind of cross between the reformist muckraking of Lincoln Steffens and the broadcast tattletale of Walter Winchell, a format that Anderson would imitate and extend into the early twenty-first-century.

Pg. 36: During WWII Pearson exposed General Patton for hitting a shivering soldier who had been hospitalized for shell shock. He also helped turn public opinion against Father Charles Coughlin, the right-wing radio priest, by revealing that the man of the cloth had paid $68,000 as compensation for “alienating the affections” of a physician’s wife. Douglas MacArthur backed down from a lawsuit against the newsman when Pearson threatened to make pubic embarrassing love letters the general had written his teenage mistress.

Pg. 42: Joseph McCarthy, the freshman senator from Wisconsin, confided to J. Edgar Hoover that he had shot his mouth off when he claimed he had a list of 205 Communist State Department employees; could the FBI help out? Anderson happened to be in Nixon’s office when McCarthy called him for help. Anderson shared McCarthy’s hostility to communism so did nothing to stop this attack.

Pg. 44: When Drew Pearson was investigating Nixon’s slush fund which ultimately led to the famous “Checker Speech”, a Nixon spokesman delivered the message to lay off or Nixon would label him as a Communist. Pearson’s response was that he would now dig even deeper.

Pg. 49: Anderson, ashamed of his earlier collaboration with senator McCarthy, helped attack McCarthy in more than four hundred “Merry-Go-Round” columns and innumerable radio broadcasts.

Pg. 61: In December 1956, just a month after Nixon had safely been reelected as Vice President, Donald Nixon (his brother) received a $205,000 loan from Howard Hughes. Decades later, after Nixon was dead, one of his best friends admitted that while the Hughes money was channeled through his brother Donald, it was really for Richard, to help him live.

Pg. 97: In 1968, while the presidential race was in process, Anderson and Pearson learned about Nixon’s secret visits to his psychotherapist, Dr. Hutschnecker. After confirming that Nixon had in fact been a patient, Anderson composed a column announcing Nixon’s visits to a psychiatrist. Predictably, Nixon denied that this was true. Dr. Hutschnecker now claimed that Nixon had only seen him for medical, not psychiatric, problems. Pearson did kill this story. Five nights later, on November 5, 1968, Nixon was elected president with 43 percent of the popular vote, a margin of less than one percent over Hubert Humphrey. With nearly 14 percent of the ballots, independent George Wallace almost cost Nixon the election.

Pg. 111: In September 1969 Pearson had a heart attack and died. The “Merry-Go-Round” now became Anderson’s sole responsibility.

Pg. 130: Nixon instructed J. Edgar Hoover to compile “a run down on the homosexuals known and suspected in the Washington press corps.” Nixon told aides to “pick the twenty most vicious Washington reporters” and leak derogatory information about them: “Just kill the sons of bitches.” Jack Anderson’s name was first on an official White House enemies list that eventually swelled to more than two hundred foes: these adversaries, presidential counsel John Dean declared, would be targeted for retaliation by tax audits, government lawsuits, and criminal prosecution as part of a strategy to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

Most ominous of all, the President approved illegal wiretaps, without court-ordered warrants, on newsmen who criticized the administration. Unfriendly reporters even experienced mysterious burglaries in their homes in which no valuables were stolen but reporters’ notes were rifled.

Pg. 133: Vice President Agnew continued to receive payoffs while in office, using the money to fund extramarital affairs, including gifts of expensive jewelry and a foreign sports car that he lavished on a “well-endowed” brunette on his staff who was “the age of one of Agnew’s daughters.”

Pg. 171: U.S. involvement in Pakistan/India conflict.
As happened earlier in Vietnam and would later happen in Iraq, career professionals in the government were ignored or demoted for their dissent, while facts were shaped by politics rather than the other way around. Nixon and Kissinger believed they had to support Pakistan in the dispute or they would jeopardize their rapprochement to China. Nonetheless, despite all of the administration’s efforts, Pakistan’s army was quickly overrun by India’s vastly superior armed forces. Less than two weeks after instigating the war, Pakistan surrendered in a humiliating rout. Eastern Pakistan achieved independence as the nation of Bangladesh. Kissinger later acknowledged, and Nixon ultimately admitted that the U.S. had come close to nuclear war. Both men defended their belligerence as essential for courting China as an ally. In fact, however, what motivated the Chinese to seek closer ties to the U.S. was not America’s support of Pakistan but China’s need to counter the Soviet Union.

Pg. 186: Navy yeoman, Chuck Radford, was interrogated by the White House as a suspect in leaking documents to Anderson. The navy clerk eventually admitted that he had been spying on the White House but claimed that he was doing so not for Jack Anderson but—amazingly—for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which distrusted Nixon and Kissinger for their clandestine foreign policy initiatives. In all, Radford said, he stole more than five thousand pages of highly classified documents, which he also shared with Anderson as well as the Joint Chiefs. Just like seven days in May.

Pg. 222: On January 24, 1972, Anderson reported that “we have documentary evidence” that Hughes delivered $100,000 to the President through Rebozo. In subsequent columns, Anderson expanded his attack and suggested that the Hughes money was nothing less than an outright bribe. The payments coincided closely with two government decisions favorable to Hughes: Nixon approved the sale of Air West to Hughes and the Justice Department reversed an antitrust action which had barred Hughes from expanding his hotel-casino empire in Las Vegas. Anderson’s columns aroused panic in the White House. Senate investigators later determined that Rebozo had paid at least $50,000 of the President’s private expenses with cash collected from Hughes and other wealthy patrons: more than $45,000 in improvements on Nixon’s two vacation homes, including a swimming pool, golf putting green, and billiard table; and another $5,000 for platinum earrings studded with eighteen pear-shaped diamonds, a birthday present for the First Lady. In addition, Rebozo confided that he also passed out wads of Hughes’s hundred-dollar bills as gifts to the President’s brothers and to Nixon’s faithful secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

Pg. 268: Section of book dealing with the conspiracy between the CIA and ITT to overthrow Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile who would fall victim to a coup in 1973. Rather than be taken alive when his military stormed his residence in September 1973, he put a gun to his head and ended it. Nixon also wanted to be rid of Jack Anderson. In jus the first three months of 1972, the reporter had exposed many of the administration’s most embarrassing scandals: Nixon’s clandestine tilt toward Pakistan, his secret cash from Hughes, his fixing of ITT’s antitrust case, and his sabotage of Allende. But to date, none of the President’s efforts to stop Anderson had been successful. Not threats to file criminal charges. Not surveillance or wiretapping. Not even the President’s order to smear Anderson as a homosexual.

Pg. 292: The primary purpose of the Watergate breakin to the Democratic National Committee offices was to discover what the Democrats knew about the Hughes cash that Nixon had received (and already spent).

Pg. 297: Six weeks before the Watergate break-in J. Edgar Hoover died of a heart attack. Two days later Nixon named L. Patrick Gray as his successor. In short, Nixon chose a man who would execute his directives without question. Hoover’s men were outraged. W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s second in command, believed he had earned the top job for himself and was angered by the White House move to politicize the Bureau. Felt became “deepthroat”.

Pg. 345: Anderson’s final years were marred by careless factual errors, self-promotional stunts, and embarrassing financial conflicts of interest that generated widespread ridicule from his peers in the press. Yet, for decades Anderson exposed things that nobody else had the guts to expose. In an era when other journalists automatically deferred to those in power, Anderson and his mentor Drew Pearson were the only mainstream newsmen who vigorously challenged political leaders.

Pg. 359: Of course, the rise of Washington’s modern scandal culture is the product of larger forces and deeper institutional changes beyond these two men (Anderson and Pearson). The spread of cable, satellite, and the Internet has transformed the media into an instantaneous cacophony of infotainment delivered by profit-chasing conglomerates whose commodification of the news all too often manufactures political scandal where none exists, while ignoring substantive policy problems of far deeper significance. At the same time, government secrecy, special-interest money, political polarization, and corrosive cynicism have become ever present features of public life, reinforcing Washington’s media-driven scandal mania.