“You’re the most generous son a father could have,” Orlando cried.
It was the only time Jack ever saw his dad weep. And, as it turned out, it was the last time he would ever see him alive again. Jack hugged Orlando and gently patted him on the back.
“It’s all right,” he told his father soothingly, eyes moist with his own tears. “It’s all right.”
In the summer of 2004, the last of America’s old-fashioned muckrakers finally decided to call it quits and announced the demise of what was the longest-running syndicated column in the nation. Jack Anderson’s retirement was not so much the end of an era—after all, that had long since passed—as it was a reminder of a kind of journalism that had already faded into history. “Jack understood the folks out there,” Anderson legman–turned–media critic Tom Rosenstiel pointed out. “That’s what print journalism lost over the years as it focused on demographics and advertising while Jack focused on his readers.” But now, the column that had once championed the proverbial Kansas City milkman had become as archaic as the milkman himself, as obsolete as door-to-door dairy delivery in an Internet age. Even the “Merry-Go-Round” name was a throwback to a time when children rode carousels with innocent abandon, before computer chips and video games supplanted such old-fashioned pastimes. And yet the imagery of Washington’s merry-go-round, with its predictable circularity of scandal and exposure, remained as timeless as ever.
Anderson’s health would not have allowed him to keep the column going even if he had wanted to. Since 1986, he had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His symptoms were mild at first but would eventually include tremors, rigid muscles, drooling, and occasional hallucinations. It was a painfully debilitating condition made more wrenching because Anderson’s mind remained sharp even while his body left him bedridden. At the same time, he developed prostate cancer, which ultimately spread throughout his body. Anderson’s family gave him expensive and loving care throughout, retrofitting a bedroom to accommodate his wheelchair, hanging framed magazine profiles about his journalistic crusades to remind him of his glory years. His illness managed to achieve what none of his political adversaries ever could: it humbled him. The modest and unassuming nature that had first endeared Jack to friends when he arrived in Washington more than a half century earlier returned at last, accompanied by a sweetness of disposition rarely associated with his thundering public persona. As his prognosis worsened, he found comfort in impish humor and in rereading the Book of Mormon. By the end, he had to be outfitted with an oxygen mask and, unable to swallow, received food and morphine intravenously.
Anderson died in December 2005, in his bed at home in suburban Washington, at the age of eighty-three. His funeral in the chapel of the local Mormon temple was filled with three hundred people—congregants, former staff, friends, and a family brood that included several dozen grandchildren. A frail Irv Davidson, the eighty-four-year-old Mafia lobbyist and longtime Anderson financial angel, nodded off as a choir sang a Christian hymn on virtue:
Do what is right
Let the consequences follow
Battle for freedom in spirit and might
And with stout hearts look ye forth till tomorrow
God will protect you
Then do what is right.
Not everyone believed the columnist had lived his life by that lofty spirit. “Jack Anderson had feet of clay,” his onetime reporter Sally Denton wrote in an obituary essay. “He entered into business partnerships with nefarious characters, squandered an empire that by all rights belonged to the public trust, protected sources who were manipulating him, allowed his ego to dictate his judgment, and abandoned those who were most devoted to him.” Les Whitten believed that Anderson “betrayed the ideal” when he “stopped being a reporter and started being a celebrity. He was really corrupted by his ego.” And yet, as Whitten understood, 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, who demanded an equal place at the table on behalf of the public. They were imperfect tribunes, sometimes reckless ones. But almost single-handedly, they kept muckraking alive when it was needed most, until a new generation could extend and improve on it. Unlike the professional class of investigative reporters who followed—well educated and paid, backed by powerful media companies—Anderson did it on his own. “Jack had no network to back him up,” Brit Hume observed, “no institutional body to take care of him and fight for him.” His victories, like his defeats, rested squarely on his own shoulders.
Mistakes were inherent in such reportorial combat. “Look,” a rival columnist said, “when you are in the front lines the way he is, you sometimes shoot your own men.” Anderson’s strengths, like his flaws, were glaring; both were rooted in the stony soil of his Utah upbringing and stemmed from his rigid resolve to influence events as well as chronicle them, an unyielding insistence that the First Amendment was more than just a stenographer’s license. “Power is Washington’s main marketable product,” the reporter knew, “seldom permanent, shifting with the pressures of the times and the advantages of the moment.” Above all, his career was about power—political, governmental, journalistic—about how to use it, how to abuse it, and how to expose it. He understood all too well the inherent and inevitable cost of power’s dirty compromises.
That wasn’t how Anderson liked to think of himself, of course. He held himself up as a crusader on a mission, a righteous preacher against wickedness and venality. “His readers were his flock,” one of his legmen wrote, “his reporters his evangelists and disciples” as he “walked among the heathen with the Constitution as [his] Bible,” exposing sinners, and condemning them “to hell or purgatory . . . His ethics were to use his column-pulpit to make the world more ethical. Even if it meant turning into a thief to expose a thief.”
He was buried in a family plot in Virginia. His tombstone described him with three words: “Husband—Father—Muckraker.”
EPILOGUE
The ghosts of Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson continue to haunt Washington long after their departure from the nation’s capital. The poisoning of politics and the press that marked their careers has tainted governance and public discourse ever since.
Of course, the rise of Washington’s modern scandal culture is the product of larger forces and deeper institutional changes beyond these two men. 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.
In the immediate aftermath of Watergate, journalists and public officials vowed to do better. Congress passed legislation to strengthen ethics codes, open up official records, and reform campaign financing. But politicians quickly found ways to circumvent these changes. Similarly, Watergate initially led to a flourishing of investigative reporting at both local and national levels, as well as nonprofit organizations to support it. But in Washington, the zeal for muckraking soon began to fade. “In learning from Watergate,” one historian observed, journalists “too often emulated not the trailblazers whose skepticism had produced fruitful inquiries but the latecomers who jumped on Watergate only as it was becoming a media spectacle.” Such “cynicism fed easy opinion-mongering and bandwagon journalism [that] was bound to be superficial and fickle—and could easily revert to its mirror image, an equally shallow pose of credulous appreciation.”
The lessons of Watergate had a different meaning for two young Nixon aides, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They feared the presidenc
y had been gravely weakened by Nixon’s ouster—and the news media dangerously empowered—and would spend the rest of their years in public life trying to change that dynamic. The problem, they believed, was not President Nixon’s conduct but the failure of his aides to protect their boss from harm. Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined it would not happen to them again. Three decades later, they would succeed during the presidency of George W. Bush in what Cheney called “a restoration” of the pre-Watergate “power and authority of the president.”
This transformation took a generation to achieve. Nixon’s loyalists started their long march under President Gerald Ford, who appointed Rumsfeld—“a ruthless little bastard,” Nixon had said admiringly—to be the new White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld in turn tapped Cheney as his deputy. The two men engineered a takeover that stripped power from moderate Republicans in favor of hard-line conservatives. Their reign was briefly cut short by Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but the true post-Nixon “restoration” that Cheney sought began four years later with Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House.
With his handsome looks, melodious voice, and aw-shucks demeanor, President Reagan was a media manipulator’s dream. Decades of coaching in Hollywood had trained the “Great Communicator” for the role of a lifetime. His success, one Reagan aide explained, was simple: “He’s an actor. He’s used to being directed and produced. He stands where he is supposed to and delivers his lines.” Reagan was “the ultimate presidential commodity,” his campaign press secretary realized, “the right product” to market to the American public. And the White House admen were some of the best in the business. Reagan’s PR team built on Nixon’s, using the same line-of-the-day message, advertising gimmicks, and mass-marketing techniques but expanding them with detailed polling and focus groups as well. They also played to the media’s institutional weaknesses—especially television’s need for compelling visuals—by positioning Reagan with picturesque backdrops to reinforce whatever image they were trying to promote. “The idea was to divert people’s attention away from substantive issues,” one scholar wrote, “by creating a world of myths and symbols that made people feel good about themselves and their country.” Press Secretary Larry Speakes, a veteran of the Nixon White House, was open about the administration’s strategy. “You don’t tell us how to stage the news,” a sign on his desk declared, “and we don’t tell you how to cover it.”
Reagan’s men played hardball, ruthlessly staying on message by tightly restricting presidential access, punishing dissident journalists, increasing government secrecy, and administering lie detector tests to suspected leakers. Except, of course, when the leaks were sanctioned from on high, in which case news organizations lapped up what they were fed. Jimmy Carter’s staff could only shake their heads in wonder at it all. The lesson, said Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, was that “the press’s bark is much worse than its bite. They’ll huff and puff around, but in the end you can severely cut into the flow of information and manage it with a much firmer hand than we were able or willing to do.” The Nixon veterans who peopled Reagan’s media apparatus learned to camouflage their contempt for the press. Reagan’s men were “slicker and smarter and therefore more dangerous and more effective” than Nixon’s, said CBS News anchorman Dan Rather, who covered both administrations.
Reagan’s transformation of the relationship between the president and the press went beyond merely the stagecraft of the moment. More lastingly, his administration began deregulating broadcasting, stimulating media mergers and expanding corporate profits. This windfall to communications conglomerates advanced the rise of right-wing talk radio, which further promoted the conservative agenda. Rush Limbaugh was the most famous of the broadcasters to saturate the airwaves in the wake of Reagan’s radio revolution. Another was Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar who conspired to assassinate Jack Anderson but nonetheless became a right-wing folk hero, easily recognizable by his distinctive shaved head and bushy mustache. As a bestselling author, actor, and lecture-circuit staple, Liddy used his syndicated radio show to attack “fulminating feminists, proselytizing poofters, the environmentally ill, these multilateralist UN one-world government worshippers and other politically correct castrati.”
In 1988, George H. W. Bush was elected president after a nasty campaign run with the assistance of Nixon’s media consultant Roger Ailes. Afterward, Bush’s Republican National Committee suggested that leading Democratic opponents in Congress were homosexuals. If Defense Secretary Dick Cheney—whose daughter and press spokesman were gay—objected to this homophobic vitriol, he never expressed it publicly. Instead, Cheney seemed focused on what he had learned from Watergate: “You don’t let the press set the agenda” because “if you let them do that, they’re going to trash your presidency.”
Four years later, Democrats finally learned from their mistakes and produced their party’s first successful two-term president in half a century. Bill Clinton’s charisma was matched by such hard-boiled tactics as “opposition research” into rivals’ vulnerabilities and a “rapid response” team run out of a “War Room” to shoot down attacks from the other side, but he would need all that help and more, thanks to an outsized libido and persistent corner-cutting that led to a series of self-inflicted mini-scandals. “Travelgate,” “Filegate,” and “Whitewatergate” were minor controversies inflated to Watergate-like proportions by the appellation of the now-overused suffix. These pseudo-scandals were relentlessly hyped by the right-wing radio industry that Reagan had unleashed a few years earlier and by the new conservative Fox News Channel run by Roger Ailes, the former Nixon spinmeister. At the same time, Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who once funneled money to Nixon’s presidential campaign, spent nearly $2 million to dig up dirt on the Clintons. Also secretly investigating Clinton’s sex life were conservative activists, including Lucianne Goldberg, the former Nixon spy turned literary agent provocateur. Eventually, Clinton’s enemies—with the help of Fox News commentator Tony Snow, the future White House press secretary—discovered the President’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and leaked the news to two reliable conservative allies: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and Internet gossip Matt Drudge.
The result was a kind of faux-Watergate—complete with aggressive prosecutors, congressional hearings, and a media orgy—but this time it was a cover-up without an underlying crime. Clinton’s attempt to hide his adultery simply couldn’t compare to the massive and systemic abuses of governmental power exercised by Nixon. Yet the structural apparatus that led to Clinton’s impeachment owed its origins to Watergate. “Richard Nixon’s downfall served as the touchstone for the scandal machine that followed,” Clinton’s attorney Lanny Davis recognized. “The cycle of ‘gotcha’ politics—with each side justifying their shock-and-awe attacks based on the other side’s last ‘gotcha’—became endless and systemic.” A poisonous press fueled Washington’s modern scandal culture, stoking sensationalism and partisanship to attract attention and profits. “Food fights masquerading as policy discussions on cable news networks, ravers and haters on talk radio, and the criminalization of political differences,” Davis observed, “generated a level of vicious and personally destructive power unlike anything seen in America before.”
The flip side to this fevered frenzy was journalism’s abdication of its watchdog role on issues of substance, from the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s to accounting, banking, and investment fraud in the decades that followed. During the presidency of George W. Bush, news outlets enthusiastically beat their war drums to support the invasion of Iraq, eagerly regurgitating administration propaganda about the menace posed by Saddam Hussein. But such manipulation did not change reality; as in Vietnam, Iraq turned into a quagmire in which the administration was reduced to bromides about staying the course while denouncing opponents as appeasers. The Nixonian echoes were impossible to escape: Henry Kissinger advised President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and Vietnamization morphed into Iraqization.
Bush’s policies may have been no wiser than Nixon’s but his PR efforts were more ambitious. The administration spent an estimated $1.6 billion on propaganda, outsourcing much of the work to independent firms to conceal the government’s role. To tout the success of the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon bribed Iraqi newspapers, undermining the very democratic freedoms America was supposedly fighting to promote. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the Nixon veteran known for operating on the “Haldeman model” of management, deployed a phalanx of propagandists—misleadingly billed as independent “military analysts”—to boost the war on network television; these supposedly unbiased experts were covertly paid and coached by the Pentagon. At the same time, the Bush administration secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to right-wing commentators to tout the domestic agenda of the White House. One conservative columnist on the government payroll interviewed Vice President Cheney on television about supposed liberal media bias, never revealing his own receipt of payola. In addition, at least twenty federal agencies produced hundreds of fake TV news reports that deliberately obscured the fact that this pro-Bush material was manufactured by the administration. Spinmeisters even posed as reporters to lob softball questions at government news conferences.
Bush’s inner circle could also play rough when necessary. After The New York Times exposed the administration’s warrantless spying on Americans—another throwback to the Nixon era—the President personally denounced the revelation as “a shameful act” that was “helping the enemy.” Like Nixon, Bush considered seeking an injunction prohibiting the Times from publishing its story. Yet the White House was perfectly willing to leak classified information to buttress its policies, and unhesitatingly revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent to retaliate against a leading government whistleblower. In an echo of the Nixon White House’s “enemies list,” a Bush appointee also secretly ordered a study of alleged bias in the media, categorizing coverage by whether it was pro- or anti-Bush. Public broadcasting’s Bill Moyers was singled out for opprobrium, complete with threats to halt federal funding. The administration “turned its hit men loose on us,” Moyers said. “I always knew Nixon would be back.”
Poisoning The Press Page 42