Obituary | Jack Anderson was Pulitzer winning columnist
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WASHINGTON — Jack Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who for years was America's most widely read newspaper columnist, died Saturday at his Bethesda, Md., home at age 83. He had Parkinson's disease.
Unbounded by contemporary notions of objectivity, Mr. Anderson was highly successful in the 1950s and '60s, when few reporters actively sought to uncover government wrongdoing. At one point, his column appeared in about 1,000 newspapers with 45 million daily readers.
The number of scoops that he had a hand in was amazing: the Keating Five congressional-ethics scandal; revelations in the Iran-contra scandal; the U.S. tilt away from India toward Pakistan, for which he received the 1972 Pulitzer Prize; the ITT-Dita Beard affair, which linked the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT by the Justice Department to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican convention; the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro; the final days of Howard Hughes; U.S. attempts to undermine Chilean President Salvador Allende; allegations about a possible Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the pope; an Iranian connection to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
"He had such huge strengths and huge weaknesses," said Mark Feldstein, director of the George Washington University journalism program, who is writing Mr. Anderson's biography. "He practiced journalism like a blue-collar craftsman with a populist point of view. He was practicing a crusading craft rather than a profession, and [investigative reporting] has lost some of its juice, its verve, its gusto in trying to be objective. Anderson didn't try to hide his politics or his agenda."
Mr. Anderson was an investigator from the start, when he went to work in 1947 as a "legman" for his predecessor Drew Pearson's column. Pearson died in 1969 and left the column to him. Mr. Anderson ran it, with an ever-changing cast of interns, until he unofficially retired in 2001, when Douglas Cohn, his writing partner since 1999, and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift took over.
The column ran until July 30, 2004, when United Feature Syndicate announced its end.
Mr. Anderson's work enraged those in power. President Nixon tried to smear him as a homosexual, the CIA was ordered to spy on him, and, according to the Watergate tapes, a Nixon aide ordered two cohorts to try to kill the journalist by poisoning.
Despite all his scoops and his high profile in middle America, the power elite in Washington, D.C., saw him as an uncouth gossipmonger and shameless self-promoter.
Mr. Anderson, a Mormon who eschewed smoking, drinking, cursing and caffeine, was cast from the dissenter mold of journalism. He called himself a muckraker, a term from the turn of the 20th century.
He launched the careers of scores of journalists, employing them as uncredited interns and underpaid associates. They included Brit Hume of Fox, Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News Service, Howard Kurtz and Jonathan Krim of The Washington Post, Roll Call columnist Ed Henry and novelist Les Whitten.
Mr. Anderson himself grew into a multimedia personality, penning not only a syndicated newspaper column but more than a dozen books and subscription newsletters. He was Washington bureau chief for Parade magazine. He broadcast a syndicated radio show; had a years-long gig on ABC-TV's Good Morning America; and had a TV show, "Truth," which featured public figures hooked to a lie detector.
As well as the Pulitzer, he won the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi "Service to Journalism" award in 1987 for his role in breaking the Iran-contra story and later was inducted into its Journalism Hall of Fame.
"I have to do daily what Woodward and Bernstein did once," he told The Washington Post in 1983, without a trace of embarrassment.
Born in Long Beach, Calif., but reared in a small town outside Salt Lake City, Mr. Anderson was interested in newspaper work from an early age. At 12, he edited the Boy Scout page of the Deseret News and soon advanced to a $7-a-week job with the Murray (Utah) Eagle.
Upon graduation from high school, he joined the staff of the Salt Lake City Tribune. He attended the University of Utah briefly and on Dec. 7, 1941, became a missionary, a typical rite of passage for devout Mormons, working in the South. Two years later, he enrolled in the Merchant Marine officer-training school. After about seven months, he persuaded the Deseret News to accredit him as a foreign correspondent in China. He was supposed to report hometown, local-hero news, but he soon found that assignment dull.
So Mr. Anderson hitched a plane ride to a secret, behind-the-lines base operated by the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. OSS brass sent him to contact a band of Chinese Nationalist guerrillas. From them, he found that a Chinese civil war was still raging, but he could not interest any U.S. paper in the news.
His draft board had been looking for him for some time, and it finally caught up with him in 1945. He was inducted into the Army in the Chinese city then known as Chunking and served with the Quartermaster Corps until 1947, working on service newspapers and Armed Forces Radio.
Upon his discharge, he applied to work for Pearson, who had been exposing government corruption for more than a decade. Mr. Anderson was hired immediately. In his off hours, he attended Georgetown University and took a course in libel law at George Washington University but did not earn a degree at either school.
His anonymous labor for Pearson finally irked Mr. Anderson enough that in 1957 he threatened to quit. Pearson promised him more bylines and pledged to leave the column to him.
In 1965, Mr. Anderson finally achieved full partnership in the column, sharing a byline with Pearson, although he was paid a paltry sum — about $15,000 in 1969 — for his work on the biggest column in the nation. Upon Pearson's death, Mr. Anderson inherited the column and split the proceeds with Pearson's widow.
Mr. Anderson's columns on misappropriations of campaign donations by Sen. Thomas Dodd, D-Conn., were recommended for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1967, but the Pulitzer advisory board rejected the choice of the nominating jury.
Mr. Anderson was considered significantly more accurate than his predecessor, although he was not error-free. He admitted he wrongly charged Donald Rumsfeld with lavishly decorating his office while cutting expenses on programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity. The columnist also admitted giving covert aid to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early days of his anti-Communist crusade, although he turned on McCarthy later.
Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Olivia Farley Anderson of Bethesda; nine children; 41 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.