Jack Anderson (columnist)

Jack Northman Anderson (October 19, 1922 – December 17, 2005) was an American newspaper columnist, syndicated by United Features Syndicate, considered one of the founders of modern investigative journalism.

He joined The Salt Lake Tribune in 1940, where his muckraking exploits included infiltrating polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sects.

In 1944, he joined the United States Merchant Marine and served on cargo ships that went to New Guinea and India.

In the spring of 1945, he resigned from the Merchant Marine, and became a war correspondent stationed in Chungking, China.

Shortly after World War II ended, he was drafted into the United States Army, and served until the fall of 1946 as an armed forces newsman and radio broadcaster.

While in the Army, Anderson worked on the Shanghai edition of Stars and Stripes, produced by troops and XMHA, the Armed Forces' radio station.

After his stint in the Army, Anderson was hired by Drew Pearson for the staff of his column, the "Merry-Go-Round".

Anderson feuded with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, when he exposed the scope of the Mafia, a threat that Hoover had long downplayed.

In the mid-1960s Anderson exposed the corruption of Senator Thomas J. Dodd and unearthed a memo by an ITT executive admitting the company made large donations to Richard Nixon's campaign to so that Nixon would Stymie anti-trust prosecution.

His reporting on Nixon-ITT corruption earned him a place on the Master list of Nixon's political opponents.

Anderson collaborated with Pearson on The Case Against Congress, published in 1968.

When Pearson died in 1969, Anderson inherited responsibility for this column and gave his own name to it – Washington Merry-go-Round.

In its heyday, Anderson's column was the most influential and widely read in the U.S.; published in nearly a thousand newspapers, he reached an audience of 40 million people.

Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment lasted into the 1970s.

Hoover once described Anderson as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."

Anderson told his staff, "Let's do to Hoover what he does to others," and he instructed them to go through Hoover's garbage, a tactic the FBI used in its surveillance of political dissidents.

Anderson grew close to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the two exchanged information from sources.

When Pearson went after McCarthy, Anderson reluctantly followed.

Other topics that Anderson covered included organized crime, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Ted Kennedy's role in the drowning death of a staffer at the Chappaquiddick incident, the Watergate scandal, the 1970 meeting between Elvis Presley and President Nixon, fugitive Nazis, the white supremacist organization the Liberty Lobby and other far-right organizations, the death of Howard Hughes, the ABSCAM public corruption investigation, the investigation into fugitive financier Robert Vesco, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the activities of numerous Washington agencies, elected officials, and bureaucrats.

Anderson's column occasionally published erroneous information for which he issued retractions.

According to the Family Jewels Central Intelligence Agency documents, in 1971, during the Indo-Pakistani War, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, had a wiretap put on Anderson's phones.

Anderson won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation on secret U.S. policy decision-making between the United States and Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

In addition to his newspaper career, Anderson also had a national radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System, acted as Washington bureau chief of Parade magazine, and was a commentator on ABC-TV's Good Morning America for nine years.

Among the exposés Anderson reported were the Nixon administration's investigation and harassment of John Lennon during its fight to deport Lennon; the continuing activities of fugitive Nazi officials in South America; and the savings and loan crisis.

He revealed the history of a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro and was credited for breaking the story of the Iran–Contra affair under President Reagan.

He said that the scoop was "spiked" because the story had become too close to President Ronald Reagan.

Anderson was born in Long Beach, California, to Orlando and Agnes (née Mortensen) Anderson, devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of Swedish and Danish descent.

He grew up with his family in Salt Lake City, Utah.

After high school, he served two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the church's Southern States Mission.

Anderson's aptitude for journalism appeared at the early age of 12 when he began writing the Boy Scouts Column for The Deseret News.

He published his first articles in his local newspaper, The Murray Eagle.

He edited his high school newspaper, The Granitian.

During the 1972 presidential race, Anderson retracted a story accusing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton of multiple drunk driving arrests.

But Eagleton's campaign was already severely damaged, and he was dropped from the ticket.

In 1972 Anderson was the target of an assassination plot conceived by senior White House staff.

Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath that they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from senior White House aide Charles Colson.

White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging.

The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in.

Nixon had long been angry with Anderson.

He co-founded Citizens Against Government Waste with J. Peter Grace in 1984.