On the Death of Jack Anderson and Long Live Investigative Journalism
December 18th, 2005
by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
LocustFork.Net
One of the great investigative reporters of the 20th century passed from the earth this week - the same day the presidency of George W. Bush began to unravel in the uniquely American war between security and liberty.
Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt, secretive politicians everywhere, died Saturday at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 83.
Anderson’s dogged pursuit of corruption in the Nixon administration in the early 1970s led G. Gordon Liddy to plot his murder. If not for the debilitating Parkinson’s disease that caused him to retire his column in 2004, Anderson would have been all over the story of how Bush circumvented the Constitution and Congress to authorize the National Security Agency to spy on Americans.
I met and questioned Anderson in 1986, the same year he broke a big story on the Iran-Contra scandal and the year he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He came to Alabama to speak at Jefferson State Community College.
He was a larger-than-life character for me, a cub reporter who had just been through one of my own first experiences with investigative reporting. He had large hands and a firm handshake, and reminded me of Arnold Palmer, another bear of a man who I had the honor of interviewing and playing golf with a few years later.
Anderson came to Alabama at a time when George C. Wallace was climbing his last political mountain in his final year as governor - and a gung-ho grocer in North Alabama named Tommy Posey had become involved in running supplies to the Nicaragua Contras.
As a reporter for a daily newspaper in North Alabama myself, I had come into contact with Posey and got a small piece of the story, although Anderson broke a crucial piece - proving that the Reagan administration had been involved in a secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.
In the heyday of his column, Anderson’s “Merry-Go-Round” appeared in about 1,000 newspapers across the country. I remember Anderson talking about journalism as a calling, like the priesthood.
I asked him for advice on how to succeed in journalism. Anderson, who was considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting and renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation’s capital, offered encouragement and said to stick with it no matter what.
“He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate,” Mark Feldstein, Anderson’s biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press. “He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power.”
I was one of the post-Watergate inspired reporters. But by the time I started my first full-time job as a newspaper reporter in 1984, the press had already started its long march to the right in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, fed in part by the growing power of the Christian Right and the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
Investigative reporting in the United States took a nose dive in those days and has only occasionally gotten back on its feet since.
One of the memories from 1986 that stands out vividly is due to the new cable channel in those days called C-SPAN.
I sat in a fellow reporter’s kitchen in Vestavia, Alabama, and watched the debate when Congress voted to authorize funding for the so-called “Freedom Fighters” in Nicaragua. I remember being disappointed in that vote, because my friend and I were lined up to take a trip with Posey to Central America. The vote put Posey’s private war against the Ortega brothers out of business and caused us to cancel the trip. It would be one of many missed opportunities in a journalism career, but it was probably best for the country.
To this day I am a C-SPAN addict. I watched the historic debate in the U.S. Senate on Friday as a coalition of Democrats and Republicans filibustered the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, in part due to an investigative story that appeared in Friday’s New York Times. The paper reported that Bush authorized the NSA to spy on U.S. citizens in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on America.
The troubling thing about the story, though, was the revelation that the Times knew about it and held the story for a year. That means the management of the paper knew about this and could have revealed it before the presidential election in 2004. It chose not to apparently because of management’s deference to the Bush administration in the so-called war on terror.
Since I have worked for the Times myself, I know that everyone in New York was traumatized by the suicide airliner attacks that brought down the World Trade Towers. It was obvious that the paper’s management was incredibly paranoid that another radical Muslim with a dirty nuclear bomb could destroy New York City and make the island of Manhattan uninhabitable.
The new management was also reeling from the Jayson Blair scandal, and fighting with the Bush administration for historic access to sources of information.
Perhaps it is a testament to the times. But one of the reasons I wanted to work for the Times for years was because of the courage displayed by the paper’s management in standing up to Nixon and defying the U.S. Supreme Court when it ran the secret report on Vietnam called the “Pentagon Papers.”
I still have a copy of that report, published in paperback. It was one of the events that inspired me to pursue a career as an investigative reporter in the first place.
Obviously the world is a different place today in many ways than it was in Jack Anderson’s heyday. But perhaps the story of his life and death can inspire a new generation of American reporters to get up off their duffs and get after the Bush administration.
The parallels to the Nixon years are striking. Lying about a war. An obsession with secrecy. Spying on innocent Americans in the name of national security.
As I watched the president try to defend himself Saturday morning in his televised radio address, the images running through my mind included the scene in Oliver Stone’s 1995 movie “Nixon.” I re-watched the movie recently on late night cable.
Remember the scene when Nixon holds a press conference to announce the cease fire in Vietnam in the wake of the secret and illegal bombings in Cambodia? The president thought he would be welcomed with open arms by the press for bringing the war to an end. Instead, he was bombarded by questions about the Watergate break in.
As he left the briefing room in a sweat, Nixon started throwing things in the White House and cussing at his staff.
“I did what the fucking New York Times said I should do,” Nixon screamed. “I ended the goddamn war. What do they want from me?”
Clearly, the Bush administration had been counting on some positive press for a change due to the relative quiet on the streets of Iraq during the election there on Thursday. But then came the New York Times story on the NSA and the stunning defeat on the Patriot Act vote.
Maybe Capitol Hill Blue will come out with a behind the scenes story this week on the violent reaction inside the White House. Perhaps Oliver Stone is planning a new movie on Bush.
And just maybe the press in this country will become emboldened again and stand up to the powers that be in Washington. Now that would be something to celebrate in this holiday season. Long live investigative journalism.
Tags: Domestic Surveillance
