Years later, after the threat of additional prison time no longer hung over their heads, Hunt and Liddy would both admit their role in the White House plot to assassinate Anderson. Hunt said that he and Liddy had secretly staked out Anderson’s home to see how to break into it, and tailed Anderson in his car to observe his driving route. Their motive, Liddy asserted, was patriotism: “As the direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days. That was too much. Something had to be done.” In fact, there was no evidence that Anderson’s reporting ever led to the death of any American intelligence asset and neither Liddy nor anyone else ever provided any such proof. Still, to the very end, Liddy was prepared to carry out the Anderson hit, if necessary all by himself: “I would have knifed him or broken his neck, probably. One of us would have died, no doubt about it.”
To be sure, the White House plot to assassinate Anderson was ultimately aborted and the conspirators were soon caught breaking into the Watergate building. But the final outcome could easily have been very different. Anderson, for one, believed that it was just a fluke that he wasn’t murdered, and then only because the CIA failed to trust Nixon’s men with the necessary toxins. As always, the moral responsibility went back to the man at the top. “One day we’ll get them,” President Nixon had told Colson, “we’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist.” If not for bad luck at the Watergate complex, Nixon’s second term might well have contained the kind of lethal revenge his men plotted against Jack Anderson—and no one but the conspirators themselves might ever have known about it.
After his resignation, Richard Nixon struggled for the remaining twenty years of his life to rehabilitate his tarnished reputation. A year after being forced from the presidency, he made his first public appearance at a Teamsters Union golf tournament that was attended by several well-known mobsters. This inauspicious beginning was followed by a more respectable stop along the comeback trail: a trip to China, the first in a series of international travels designed to remind the public of his foreign policy achievements. In 1977, Nixon advanced his revisionist narrative—and received more than half a million dollars—by sitting down for a lengthy interview with television personality David Frost. A worldwide audience of fifty million watched as Nixon denounced the news media and argued that he broke no laws because “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” Ever defiant, Nixon refused “to get down and grovel,” seeking forgiveness. Watergate, he insisted, was the result of his enemies seizing on his mistakes: “I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish. And, I guess, if I’d been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”
The next year, Nixon collected $2.5 million for a lengthy, self-serving memoir. He went on to write six more books, filled mostly with windy platitudes about foreign policy. He also moved back to Manhattan and cultivated the mien of a senior statesman by inviting elite journalists and politicos to dinner parties at his East Side townhouse. By the mid-1980s, media outlets once again embraced the latest incarnation of a New Nixon. The New York Times called him “an elder statesman, commentator on foreign and domestic affairs, adviser to world leaders, a multimillionaire and a successful author and lecturer honored by audiences at home and abroad.” Newsweek put the former president on its cover under the headline: HE’S BACK: THE REHABILITATION OF RICHARD NIXON.
In 1990, this historical revisionism achieved its apotheosis in the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, complete with a 52,000--square-foot museum and interactive video theaters. Funded by wealthy Nixon supporters, hagiographic exhibits depicted Watergate as a coup engineered by Nixon’s enemies; “irresponsible journalists” were banned from the library’s premises. But Nixon’s final cover-up could not alter reality and his propaganda efforts could only achieve so much before the bar of history. “Watergate proved fatal to his political life and undoubtedly will haunt his historical reputation,” the scandal’s leading historian concluded. “History will record a fair share of the significant achievements of Nixon’s presidency, but Watergate will be the spot that will not out.”
In June 1993, Pat Nixon died following a battle with lung cancer. Her husband was inconsolable. The former president broke down in public at her funeral and clutched the hand of his longtime psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, who was seated with the Nixon family. Ten months later, Nixon himself died of a stroke at the age of eighty-one. His funeral was attended by the five presidents who succeeded him in office. “He made mistakes,” Bill Clinton eulogized. “But the enduring lesson of Richard Nixon is that he never gave up.” Rose Mary Woods, Bebe Rebozo, Spiro Agnew, and even George McGovern attended the funeral. So did two men who went to prison in service of their leader: Charles Colson wept, while Gordon Liddy gave Nixon’s coffin a brisk military salute.
Unlike Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson did not seek rehabilitation after Watergate; he sought restoration, as America’s leading investigative reporter. But it was not to be. Anderson never made his own comeback. Instead, his career plummeted over the next thirty years as he became embroiled in scandals of his own making and marginalized as a figure of scorn.
Without Nixon to kick around anymore, Anderson focused his attention on Jimmy Carter. The new president “was an introvert in an extrovert’s job, just like Richard Nixon,” Anderson believed, and “I came to understand that no two presidents were more alike,” each “burdened with insecurities, eager for acceptance, [and] disdainful of critics.” In truth, Carter bore little resemblance to Nixon; but like a general fighting the last war, Anderson persuaded himself that Nixon’s ghost had returned to the White House disguised as a former peanut farmer from Georgia. The muckraker began what presidential press secretary Jody Powell called a four-year “vendetta” against Carter. “I was just doing the same thing that I did to Nixon,” Anderson insisted, but his legman Joe Spear thought Anderson’s underlying motive was hunger for the kind of notoriety that had escaped him during Watergate.
During Carter’s second year in office, Anderson accused White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan of participating in a “political fix” by blocking the capture of the fugitive Robert Vesco after a childhood friend of Jordan’s received stock from the crooked financier. But the story wasn’t true: Anderson had relied on a swindler who turned out to have manufactured bogus paperwork to falsely implicate the President’s closest aide. Still, Anderson testified in court on behalf of his unsavory source, who had forged the fraudulent documents to try to get pending embezzlement charges dropped. Undaunted, Anderson then used his influence to provoke a Senate investigation and helped ghostwrite its one-sided findings, which he then quoted in his column without revealing his own behind-the-scenes role. President Carter publicly blasted Anderson as “the one columnist in this nation who habitually lies.” Similarly harsh judgments were “shared by a large number of the more respected journalists in Washington,” Carter’s press secretary said, because Anderson’s “modus operandi is to take care of those who will feed him dirt on others, and flail away at everyone else.” That indictment reflected a growing sentiment in the nation’s capital that was rapidly becoming conventional wisdom.
Anderson reinforced this harsh verdict following the seizure of fifty-three U.S. hostages by Iranian militants in the fall of 1979. Nine months later, with the Americans still languishing in captivity after a botched rescue effort, Anderson charged that President Carter was planning a larger military invasion to free them in a forthcoming “October Surprise” designed to ensure his reelection the following month. Although this “startling, top-secret plan” was opposed by the Pentagon, Anderson reported, Carter was “rushing ahead” anyway “to save himself from almost certain defeat” in the upcoming election. The White House denounced the Anderson columns as “absolutely false . . . grotesque and totally irresponsible.” The muckraker hadn’t even both
ered to call the Defense Department or White House for comment. Numerous newspapers, including The Washington Post, spiked the “Merry-Go-Round” after being unable to verify the incendiary allegation. “Had [the story] been true, Anderson would have had the scoop of the century,” Carter’s press secretary admitted. “But the allegation was totally false, a fabrication from start to finish, and a particularly vicious one” because Anderson portrayed the President “as a man who would send thousands of Americans to die in combat . . . simply because he wanted to improve his political prospects.”
Anderson’s October Surprise story was planted by a group of conservative Republican strategists whose mission, according to former Nixon aide William Safire, was to “embarrass, bedevil and defeat” Carter in the upcoming election and replace him with Ronald Reagan. Operatives even fabricated bogus CIA documents criticizing the President and leaked them to Washington journalists. But only Anderson fell for the disinformation campaign. The muckraker who had made his reputation exposing Nixonian lies was now feeding at the propaganda trough put out by Nixon’s successors.
Anderson’s credibility eroded further in the 1980s, when he was seduced and coopted by President Reagan. “There was an all-American quality” about Reagan, the columnist wrote unabashedly, that was “reflected in his amiable, open face, which compelled trust and confidence. It was also his easiness of manner, his engaging sincerity, the way his whole personality smiled every time his face lit up in a grin.” Anderson’s toadying earned him frequent visits to the White House, where he dispensed advice and chatted with the President. Although Reagan did not disclose newsworthy information in these meetings, Anderson publicly bragged about his “exclusive” interviews, which he milked for many columns. During one get-together, the newsman suggested that Reagan create a “Young Astronauts” program to stoke student enthusiasm for science. The President was encouraging and asked Anderson to chair the group; he happily obliged. Anderson then used his column to tout Reagan’s “dramatic bid to keep America ahead” in the space race and quoted from his memos to the White House on the subject. Two of Anderson’s children were put on the Young Astronauts’ payroll while their father and the President solicited financial donations for the organization, including from Richard Nixon’s old corporate benefactors whom Anderson had investigated just a few years earlier. The obvious conflict of interest seemed to escape the newsman.
In addition, President Reagan appointed Anderson to co-chair a presidential commission designed to root out wasteful government spending. Once more, Anderson promoted the Reagan initiative in his column and personally lobbied wealthy business executives to support it financially. Again, the columnist seemed oblivious to the journalistic impropriety of soliciting money from potential investigative targets or openly shilling for the President. “Jack decided to sell his soul to Ronald Reagan,” one of Anderson’s reporters said sadly. Another explained that “what Jack craves even more than fame is acceptance.”
In fact, Anderson became so compromised by his coziness with Reagan that he helped cover up the biggest White House conspiracy since Watergate. In 1985, in exchange for the release of yet another group of American hostages captured in the Middle East, the President approved clandestine arms shipments to the militant Islamic regime of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, whose theocracy had supported the first seizure of U.S. prisoners five years earlier. Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages pact violated both an international embargo and his bellicose antiterrorism policy against rewarding kidnappers. So, to hide its arming of Iran, the Reagan White House established a covert off-the-shelf operation that resembled Nixon’s Plumbers. The scandal was exposed a year later, not by investigative reporters in Washington, but by an obscure Beirut magazine that learned of the scheme from feuding extremist factions in Iran. However, it turned out that Anderson and his partner Dale Van Atta had known of the disastrous deal almost from the very beginning. But administration officials warned Anderson that publishing the story would be “irresponsible, even traitorous” because it might endanger the hostages and leave the columnist with “blood on your hands.” After a personal appeal from Reagan, Anderson censored his blockbuster story. The crusading reporter who refused to be intimidated by President Nixon’s bogus national security claims helped conceal the worst presidential scandal since Watergate. It was, Van Atta believed, “the lowest point for Jack as a journalist” during his entire career. In old age, the once-hardened muckraker had grown soft.
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. It did not help that he had to fire several of his reporters for fabricating information. One staffer, Ron McRae, invented a “top-secret” Pentagon program that was supposedly conducting research on the “transmission of nuclear bombs instantaneously around the world through the power of positive thinking.” The bogus story was published in nearly a thousand newspapers in January 1981, unencumbered by any subsequent retraction. Nine months later, an academic survey of editors around the nation ranked Anderson as Washington’s worst columnist for both accuracy and integrity. Within a few years, even his client newspapers complained that Anderson’s image had become “tarnished,” his stories “beaten to death” and filled with nonstop self-congratulation about past scoops. “Jack got passed off as an entertaining crank,” Brit Hume recognized. “He pressed ahead and kept going for another twenty years, but it was never the same. Once you lose your reputation for reliability, it diminishes your impact tremendously.”
As his influence shrank, Anderson’s ego ballooned. Dazzled by the fame and money television generated, he signed a multimillion-dollar contract to appear daily on ABC’s Good Morning America program, where he wore a girdle under his suit to hide his pot belly. “He fell in love with being a celebrity,” his daughter Laurie recalled, and it “inevitably went to his head. He was just full of himself.” Anderson publicly complained, “I have to do almost daily what Woodward and Bernstein did once.” But with his daily column and television broadcasts, plus regular radio reports, newsletters, and lectures, he no longer had time to uncover original investigative stories himself. “Jack spread himself thinner and thinner,” one of his legmen recalled. “The column began to slip because the same amount of material had to be spread over a lot more outlets.” To compensate, Anderson expanded his staff by hiring young, low-salaried assistants, but they were mostly too inexperienced to dig up important stories. One reporter bought a rubber stamp with the word CONFIDENTIAL on it to make leaked memos sound more important. “That was our currency,” another Anderson legman, Howard Rosenberg, explained, “so the more secret documents you could get, the better, even if they were filled with official self-serving bullshit.” The column’s downward spiral would prove irreversible.
The problem was greater than just Anderson’s idiosyncratic personality. As elite media outlets began practicing the kind of investigative reporting that Anderson helped pioneer, he found himself pushed further to the fringes of mainstream journalism. The ever-entrepreneurial columnist adapted by focusing on sensational theatrics rather than substantive newsgathering. He began writing a column for The National Star, a supermarket scandal sheet, joined the staff of the tabloid TV show Inside Edition, and hosted syndicated entertainment programs that his own staff compared to a Barnum & Bailey act. In a cheesy television series called Truth, Anderson grilled disreputable characters hooked up to polygraph machines to see whether they were lying. In another program, Target: USA!, he smuggled a handgun into the Capitol building and, with cameras rolling, whipped it out on a senator to demonstrate lax congressional security procedures. Anderson also negotiated to have Hollywood produce a film and then a TV sitcom about his life, but the idea never got off the drawing board. “He was always looking for the big score,” his agent Lucianne Goldberg remembered. “He wanted me to market a ‘Jack Anderson Board Game’ to Parker Brothers, but the idea nev
er went anywhere.”
Anderson was more successful generating public notice with stories about hanky-panky in the nation’s capital. He helped expose several members of Congress for using cocaine and marijuana. He also reported that Senator Harry Byrd, Jr., seduced a distraught but “voluptuous” female constituent—“her measurements are 40-26-36”—who sought federal help locating her missing husband. Byrd admitted inviting the woman to his apartment but denied taking advantage of her, so Anderson suggested that the senator submit to an independent medical exam to verify the accuser’s “intimate physical description” of his anatomy. The lawmaker declined the proposal.
Homosexuality also returned to the “Merry-Go-Round” as a subject of investigation. The columnist who in earlier decades only hinted at rumors about Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover now engaged in explicit gay “outings.” In 1986, Anderson’s old enemy Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s onetime Senate counsel who had become a politically connected superlawyer, became gravely ill with what he claimed was liver cancer. In fact, the closeted Cohn was dying of AIDS and Anderson exposed this fact in his column, along with an account of how Cohn used his influence to get special medical treatment from the government. Afterward, Anderson outed Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s spokesman, Pete Williams. “Here you have more than 10,000 people discharged from the military” because of homosexuality, Anderson declared, while Pentagon civilians like Williams, who “held the same security clearances and were privy to the same secrets as uniformed personnel,” faced no such penalty. This “double standard and outdated piety” made Williams’s sexual orientation newsworthy, Anderson insisted. Cheney, the future vice president who was also the father of a lesbian daughter, “was very angry,” Anderson recalled, and Cheney’s wife “snapped at me” when they next met at a Washington party.
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