In Jack Anderson's Papers, a Hidden History of Washington

A professor explores the archives of a newspaper columnist entwined with power

Related materials

Audio Slideshow: Hear Mark Feldstein, a professor at George Washington U., discuss the importance of the Jack Anderson archive

Timeline: Jack Anderson, 1922-2005

Letters: Items from the archive

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines 150 Campuses Win Recognition in Survey of Great Colleges to Work For More than 300 four-year and two-year colleges signed up for the second annual survey by The Chronicle, and 39 were named to a new Honor Roll for their workplace policies. New Top Republican on House Panel: Washington Doesn't Always Know Best They Thought Globally, but Now Colleges Push Online Programs Locally Jill Biden Shines Global Spotlight on U.S. Community Colleges A Town Rich in Colleges and Cows Gains a Crown College Towns as Baby Names? A Few May Resist Trendiness Commentary Kevin Carey: Stanford U., Duke U., Rice U., ... and Gates U.?

By SCOTT CARLSON

Washington

After gently digging through a few boxes, and finding only letters and old memoranda, Kevin Anderson settles on Box No. 83 and opens the lid. In a file called "Afghanistan Guerrillas," on the back of a sheet of paper that says "Season's Greetings 1984," he finds what he has been looking for: a sample of his father's enigmatic, idiosyncratic shorthand.

The writing is that of Jack Anderson, author, with Drew Pearson, of the famous Washington Merry-Go-Round column than ran for decades after World War II. If this note spells out political secrets or hidden sources — and there are plenty of those in this box-filled room at George Washington University's Gelman Library — they may be lost with the late muckraker.

"It's a shorthand that only he knew," says Kevin Anderson, crouched over the box and holding up the note. The writing looks something like streamlined Arabic.

Laurie Anderson-Bruch, Kevin's sister, leans over to examine the note. "He never taught any of us how to read it," she says.

The Andersons, some university officials, and Mark Feldstein, Jack Anderson's biographer, are gathered at the university on a February morning to spend a few hours digging through the old files.

Mr. Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs and our tour guide this morning, begins by showing off the centerpiece of the collection: a huge index-card file — a hand-typed, cross-referenced catalog made by Merry-Go-Round staff of all the topics and personalities ever to have appeared in the column since 1932. Mr. Feldstein, Kevin Anderson, and Ms. Anderson-Bruch typed out some of the cards when they worked in Anderson's office in the 1970s.

Mr. Feldstein flips to the H's and pulls out a card for J. Edgar Hoover, one of Anderson's most persistent enemies.

He reads some of the highlights from the card. "Let's see, 'fond of poetry.' Mmmm," he says, humming suggestively. "'Has collection of G-Men toys in his office.' They would hint at sex in a way that was unusual in those days."

If only Hoover could see this archive today. In fact, until recently, the Anderson papers were sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency wanted to review the files and pull out anything it deemed sensitive or secret. But after a public outcry and hearings on Capitol Hill, the FBI quietly dropped its pursuit of the archive in November.

During hearings with Justice Department officials, Sen. Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, suggested that the FBI was digging for photographs of J. Edgar Hoover in dresses, lingerie, or pantyhose. Mr. Feldstein, a former reporter who has been through the files for the biography he is writing of Anderson, says he has seen no such photos.

But, Mr. Feldstein says, the archive is a rich "hidden history" of the way political power and the news media work in Washington. "It's not the way it's taught in the civics textbooks," he says. "There is all this behind-the-scenes maneuvering — bribery, blackmail, threats, and the press used as a vehicle for this."

However, the archive has not yet been organized and indexed by archivists, a job that will cost the university library about $125,000. (Digitizing the collection, which university archivists are considering, could cost millions.) The library plans to start raising that money once ownership of the archive is transferred from the Andersons to the university.

For now, opening any box could yield either gems (like a letter from John Lennon, supposedly in here somewhere) or the dust of history (like letters from readers and fans). As he loads several boxes onto a cart, Kevin Anderson warns that his father was not a diligent records keeper. "Once the column was done, he didn't try to maintain his files," he says. That disorganization applied to awards as well: Kevin Anderson once found his father's certificate for the 1972 Pulitzer Prize rolled up and stuffed in the back of a closet at home.

When the cart is full, the small party wheels it to a viewing room down the hall, where Anderson's children begin to open the boxes.

Postwar Washington

Mr. Feldstein's connections to Jack Anderson go back more than 30 years. When he was a reporter for his high-school paper in Arizona, he admired the muckraker for his nerve and tenacity. In both 1973 and 1976, Mr. Feldstein came to Washington and worked in Anderson's office as an intern, one of many Anderson associates who would go on to a successful journalism career. A list of former Anderson interns and reporters reads like a Who's Who of journalism: Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker, Brit Hume of Fox News, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, and Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism are among them.

After working for television news outlets like Dateline and CNN in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Feldstein decided to study media history. He wrote his dissertation on his former mentor and, after he was hired by George Washington University, interviewed Anderson extensively before his death in 2005. Mr. Feldstein's work with Anderson was a major reason that the papers were given to the university.

Mr. Feldstein's book, which will be published in 2008, will examine postwar politics and scandal in Washington through Anderson's personality and work. Journalists have long had a role in shaping the republic, Mr. Feldstein says, but in Anderson's era journalism was entwined with power more subtly than it is today. Journalistic ethics were also considerably looser. Reporters moonlighted as lobbyists, ghostwrote speeches for prominent politicians, and were even on the payrolls of powerful people. Mr. Feldstein points out that Anderson himself was a ghostwriter for Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Anderson also admitted in his autobiography that he fed McCarthy information about alleged Communists.

For decades, Anderson was in the middle of it all. "He is this Zelig-like character who shows up in every Washington political scandal from Truman's presidency up through the early 21st century, when he gave up his column," Mr. Feldstein says.

The archive reveals a gritty, gloves-off style of newsgathering. Mr. Feldstein describes a memorandum he found in the archive as an example: Anderson's reporters heard that Richard Nixon had been treated at a hospital for mental illness — a rumor that has never been substantiated. The memorandum discusses "how to get some nurses at this institution drunk and seduce them to get them to talk about Nixon being hospitalized there," Mr. Feldstein says.

"The methods that the reporters were using — not the kind of thing I teach in my journalism classes — are a fascinating window into the kind of old-school, Front Page tactics that really were not uncommon in an earlier era," he says.

The archive also contains original versions of all the columns, along with a guide through the card index. Decades before Nexis and the Internet, the card index was a key to finding topics of and links between past columns.

Even today, the card file and the original columns are among the most important components of the collection because much of Anderson's published work was censored. For archives of the Merry-Go-Round column, "most people go to The Washington Post because that has been digitized," Mr. Feldstein says. "The trouble is that the Post was more conservative than many newspapers, and did more censoring of the most touchy and most interesting columns."

For example, a Merry-Go-Round column from April 22, 1954, explains how Herbert Brownell Jr., attorney general under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, publicly embarrassed Sen. Joseph McCarthy: On the pretense of protecting McCarthy, Brownell indicted the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun for inciting attacks on the senator's life by writing an editorial that called McCarthy a "disreputable pervert." When the editorial entered the public record as part of the indictment, it became libel-proof and was quoted in other newspapers.

But all references to McCarthy as a "disreputable pervert" have been struck from the digitized version in the Post, found via ProQuest.

"It's like Pravda," Mr. Feldstein says. "It's like it didn't happen."

Salacious Stories

In the viewing room at the library, Mr. Feldstein sets his stack of papers on a long table covered with a felt cloth, while Kevin Anderson and Ms. Anderson-Bruch unload a couple of boxes and begin picking through the contents.

Mr. Feldstein begins by pulling out a memo from J. Edgar Hoover to the Nixon White House in 1969. In it, Hoover tells Nixon that he is looking into rumors of homosexuals among the White House staff and that he is going to keep the information he has found locked up at the FBI. The underlying purpose, Mr. Feldstein says, is clear: Political blackmail.

Outing homosexuals and exposing sexual peccadilloes were frequently used for leverage in Anderson's era, Mr. Feldstein says, but Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson were among the few journalists who regularly dealt in such salacious material. "You have to remember, in this era, the mainstream media did not touch these kinds of stories," Mr. Feldstein says. "So this archive is the one repository for this stuff."

The archive also contains references to more traditional political strategy. In a 1956 letter, Anderson tells Pearson that Robert F. Kennedy, then a lawyer investigating labor rackets for the Senate, is going to leak information about the ties of a Nixon aide, Murray Chotiner, to the Mafia. "Bobby Kennedy wanted to nail Nixon through Chotiner as a way to discredit Nixon because he knew his brother was going to run against him for president," says Mr. Feldstein. "And who is he leaking to? Jack Anderson."

Across the table, Kevin Anderson and Ms. Anderson-Bruch are finding drafts of columns and depositions from lawsuits Anderson was involved in.

Kevin Anderson holds up a manila folder labeled "Dodd's Free Vacation." In the mid-1960s, Jack Anderson investigated and wrote extensively about Sen. Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, alleging corruption and bribery. (Anderson's sources were staff members within Dodd's own office.) The reporting effectively ended Dodd's political career.

A memorandum inside the folder outlines a travel itinerary for Dodd, including his free accommodations at the ritzy Galt Ocean Mile Hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

Being the Anderson kids meant having an unusual childhood, they say. In 1972, when the CIA opened Operation Mudhen, its illegal mission to dig up Anderson's skeletons and sources, Laurie and Kevin, then teenagers, responded by tormenting the agents staked outside their home. Laurie dressed up in her father's hat and coat, walked out to the car, and led agents on pointless drives around town. Kevin and his friends tried sneaking up on agents' cars and letting the air out of the tires. (Not long before that time, young Kevin found a direct phone number for the Oval Office among his father's notes. He made the ultimate prank call. "I said, 'Is your refrigerator running?' That kind of thing," he says. On the other end of the line, "I think it was Rose Mary Woods," Nixon's dutiful secretary.)

The file for Operation Mudhen, probably named for the way a chicken scratches in the dirt, is also part of the collection. It shows that an army of secret agents managed to capture only mundane details about the journalist's life: "13:30: [Anderson] walked to Farragut Square, sat alone having lunch" and "Subject and spouse enter Renwick ... Spouse goes to a newspaper dispensing machine. She apparently has trouble and spouse assists."

Mr. Feldstein reads some of the logs aloud and shakes his head. "Talk about the banality of evil," he says.

Modern Relevance

The Andersons still own the archive and are negotiating details about the gift to the university. They would like to gather more material — footage of their father's television appearances, for example — and add it to the collection. "We would love to see it all in one place and available to people," says Ms. Anderson-Bruch.

But they realize that a good deal of their father's material has been lost over the years. "I've heard stories," Kevin Anderson says, "of boxes that got thrown out of the house that had stuff in them."

A lot of other people have had access to the collection, such as Anderson's former reporters and colleagues, says Ms. Anderson-Bruch. "We don't know how much has been taken out."

Mr. Feldstein hopes the university's collection expands beyond the Anderson papers. In the future, he would like to attract papers from other venerable political journalists.

One of the themes of his book, he says, will be the modern relevance of Anderson's work and the striking parallels between Anderson's era and our own. Figures from the Nixon administration, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, are back in power, during an unpopular war. The Bush administration has considered using the Espionage Act against journalists just as Nixon considered using it against Anderson. The lobbying and corruption scandals that Anderson doggedly broke at the peak of his career find their parallels in Randy (Duke) Cunningham and Jack Abramoff. As the resignations of former Gov. James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, and the Rev. Ted Haggard show, allegations of homosexuality or sexual dalliance are still a weapon and a curse in politics.

"There was a reason the column was called the Washington Merry-Go-Round," Mr. Feldstein says. "Because there was a circularity to the themes, the issues, and the corruption that was never ending."

TWO LETTERS FROM THE ARCHIVE In this memorandum, Cartha D. (Deke) DeLoach, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, describes a call he had gotten from Jack Anderson, who was looking into a tip about homosexuals on Gov. Ronald Reagan's staff. Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, received the letter. Anderson's name has been blacked out on this letter, as have those of the owners of the cabin called "Heavenly Paradise." This scandal hurt Reagan's presidential campaign in 1968, Mr. Feldstein says. This letter was written by Jack Anderson in 1946, when he was a 24-year-old reporter in the Shanghai bureau of The Stars and Stripes. In his memoir, Peace, War, and Politics, Anderson noted that he was constantly butting heads with military brass over his stories, and this letter recounts one instance. Despite pressure from generals and admirals, Anderson refuses to reveal his source for a story on smuggling a consul into China "on grounds that a newsman's sources are a newsman's secret." Anderson is cavalier about the trouble he is giving military officials: "No order to shoot me at sunrise has been posted yet." Photographed by Dennis Brack, Black Star