When You Knew Jack

[December 21st, 2005] The King is dead.

On Saturday, at the age of 83, one of America's greatest investigative reporters passed away.

Jack Anderson could be hyperbolic and self-righteous. In other words, he had the ideal traits to be a damn fine reporter. And he was.

Once upon a time, Anderson was the most powerful newsman in America. More than 1,000 newspapers ran his Washington, D.C.-based column covering the overlords of American politics and business with a tenacity like no other.

In his heyday in the 1970s, Anderson exposed the corruption of Sen. Thomas Dodd, the CIA plot to use the Mafia to assassinate Castro, and the $400,000 payoff from ITT to the Republican Party in exchange for getting the Justice Department to back off of an antitrust suit.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on America's foreign-policy shift away from India and toward Pakistan. Anderson was such a pain in Richard Nixon's ass that two of the president's operatives admitted under oath plotting to murder him.

In 1979, I was a young reporter for a daily newspaper in upstate New York, looking for more action. I applied for an internship with Anderson. The staffer in charge of these hires was from Eugene, noticed that I had a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, and gave me a call.

I left a paying job and my girlfriend for an unpaid internship and a room in a rundown home that had bars on the windows near the Washington Mall. It was the best fork in the road I ever took.

In those days, Anderson was a conglomerate. In addition to his column, he had a magazine and a regular appearance on ABC's Good Morning America. A syndicated radio show. Regular contributions to Parade magazine. Newsletters. Books. And a lecture schedule that kept him out of the office much of the time.

Much of Anderson's column was the work of his staff of a dozen or so reporters and interns, who worked out of a wonderful building near DuPont Circle that, story had it, was once a bordello. It was a wonderful bit of irony, given that Anderson was a ramrod-straight Mormon, for whom even alcohol and caffeine were taboo.

In those days, Anderson's posse was a group of remarkable journalists—people like Gary Cohn, who went on to win a Pulitzer at the Baltimore Sun, Dale Van Atta, who I swear was wiretapping the CIA, Les Whitten, who for many years co-wrote the column with Anderson and Lucette Lagnado, who went on to do great work for the Wall Street Journal.

The mother hen of this crew was a southern woman named Opal Ginn, who had an acquired taste for the 4 o'clock cocktail and a fondness for any reporter who dared take her on at Scrabble. For Christmas, I got a pair of socks and $50. I was delighted.

I was given very little direction and oversight. Instead I was allowed to steep myself in the intoxicating brew of great journalists, whose network of sources was exceeded only by the quiet sense of purpose that they were doing very, very important work.

In those days, the imprimatur of working for Anderson had great clout. A few days after starting, I had been given a tip about an alleged land scam involving then-Sen. Charles Mathias of Maryland. I called his office hoping to get a factotum on the phone to answer a few questions.

Ten minutes letter, I got a phone call from Mathias himself, who had come off the Senate floor to talk to me. When Jack Anderson (or even his interns called) the ruling class listened.

Even so, Anderson, who grew up in Salt Lake City, was not a member of the Ivy League, Inside the Beltway fraternity of journalists who ran the Washington media establishment.

It was long held that this was the real reason his column appeared in the Washington Post, not on the op/ed page, but on the comics page!

When I was working for Anderson I wrote about government waste, the Commerce Department trading of highly valuable technologies to hostile nations and the strange relationship between the Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield and a shadowy European. The reward? Anderson would credit me in his column the way he would all his staff. It was better than a paycheck.

Anderson told me two things that have stuck with me to this day. First, don't write for the Senators, Congressmen and Cabinet officers you cover. Write for the milkman in Kansas City. And second, press conferences are almost always worthless.

What he showed me, however, was even more consequential—that truth typically is found only after the kind of digging and determination that few exhibited as well as Jack.