Goodbye Jack Anderson ... We'll Miss You

Mark Feldstein, in the Houston Chronicle (July 31, 2004):

Jack Anderson, 81 and ailing with Parkinson's disease, quietly gave up his syndicated column two weeks ago 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.

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. He provided a vital check on governmental power during a time when journalists preferred to socialize with public officials rather than investigate them.