THE F.B.I. said last week that it was seeking to go through the files of the reporter Jack Anderson, all 188 boxes of them, to remove classified documents.
An F.B.I. spokesman said that the bureau had determined the files, which go back decades, contained a number of such documents, and that by law they were government property.
News of the request, which has been refused by his family, probably would have pleased Mr. Anderson, who died in December at 83.
He came to Washington in 1947, to work for Drew Pearson on his syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” and became famous for uncovering what the government wanted hidden.
J. Edgar Hoover once referred to Mr. Anderson “and his ilk” as having minds that are “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures,” according to “Confessions of a Muckraker,” a memoir written by Mr. Anderson with James Boyd in 1979.
The book describes the scoops Mr. Anderson helped bring to the column and the methods he used to get them up to the death of Mr. Pearson in 1969. It makes for interesting reading at a time when the proper balance between freedom of the press and the government’s claims of national security are matters of heated debate.
Following are excerpts.
Politicians and reporters have always been mutually dependent. Before he began his Communist “witch hunt,” Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed conspiring with a hungry young reporter.
Joe McCarthy and I were on close terms for a senator and a muckraker. … He knew how to make a footsore reporter feel esteemed. Sometimes when we were talking alone in his office, his secretary would interrupt to say that such-and-such cabinet member was on the phone, and Joe, in a violated tone, would protest: “I can’t take any calls. I’m talking to Jack. Tell him I’ve gone to China.”
With his gift of straightforward deviousness, McCarthy made himself available to us as a source, a purveyor of inside information about his colleagues and their secret conclaves. At my prompting he would phone fellow senators to ask what had transpired this morning behind closed doors or what strategy was planned for the morrow. While I listened in on an extension he would pump even a Robert Taft or a William Knowland with the handwritten questions I passed him. This blot upon senatorial honor was for a reporter a professional coup of high rank and I rejoiced in it, prying out of McCarthy every last morsel of confidential information.
Another thing that hasn’t changed is the budgetary competition among the armed services, and their use of leaks to protect their interests. In 1948, military budgets were being slashed and a “cruel uncertainty thus clouded the air for the military careerists,” Mr. Anderson writes.
For the brash reporter, this produced a favorable climate for inducing leaks of classified information that would aid or embarrass this or that branch in the mortal competition. Instead of being scorned, as I had at first feared, I was soon in unseemly alliance with generals, admirals, assistant secretaries, yes, even secretaries. Thanks to their whisperings, I began to bring to Drew one scoop after another: the top-secret Navy arguments for displacing the Air Force as the prime deliverer of atomic payloads in the next war; the suppressed report on the Bikini atomic weapons tests showing unexpected vulnerabilities of navy vessels to distant atomic explosions; the blow-by-blow on the Air Force’s campaign to win Congressional backing for a 70-group air armada instead of the 48 groups back by Truman and Forrestal; indications of shocking unpreparedness on the industrial front.
Two years later, Mr. Anderson again tapped Pentagon sources to gain sensitive material, this time about Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the United Nations-sanctioned force, dominated by Americans, fighting in Korea. The general appeared to many to be attempting to usurp President Harry S. Truman’s role in directing the war. Starting in November 1950, Anderson writes, the Pearson organization decided to “cut MacArthur down to life-size….”
One source would speak only on a theoretical or high-policy plane of the possible differences between MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs. … A second would show me, if I asked the right questions, documents in which those theoretical differences took on the flesh of dispute over combat decisions. … A third gave me access to daily intelligence digests, including from MacArthur’s headquarters, which contradicted his public communiqus. A fourth would let me watch, on occasion, a new-fangled Pentagon screen on which was flashed the secret dialogue between the Joint Chiefs and the supreme commander.
A dozen times during the tumultuous month of December 1950, our columns and broadcasts featured authoritative, exclusive exposs, based on secret assessments by the Joint Chiefs, smuggled reports of White House briefings and classified cables sent to MacArthur or received from him.
Intelligence officials eventually met, writes Mr. Anderson, to consider ways to plug the leaks that appeared in the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column. It was a futile undertaking.
One of the brainstormers, a general, happened to be a key source of mine, and after the meeting, he phoned to brief me on it. The most popular proposal … was to station intelligence men at every entrance to the Pentagon building so as to spot me whenever and wherever I arrived and initiate an elaborate surveillance scheme. The plan disturbed my source, for it had the potential of being effective. And so he intervened. “Has anyone here counted all the entrances to the Pentagon?” he asked. “Has anyone figured out the number of shifts and the total manpower this will take? Or how we’ll look if this ever gets out?” A less ambitious plan was adopted….
Among the rewards a muckraker could expect was the enmity of those they exposed. Take this example of florid outrage, from an attack on Mr. Pearson delivered by Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee on the Senate floor.
While finding his range, McKellar fired off the lesser and obligatory calumnies, calling Pearson a “dishonest, ignorant and corrupt and groveling crook.” But it was the hues and gradations of Pearson’s falsity, its natural and acquired characteristics, that McKellar wished to delineate to his visibly appreciative brethren: “He is a natural-born liar, a liar by profession, a liar for a living, a liar in the daytime , a liar in the nighttime. He is an ignorant liar. A pusillanimous liar. A peewee liar. A revolving, constitutional, unmitigated, infamous liar.”
