Jack Anderson (journalist)

Jack Northman Anderson (born October 19, 1922 in Long Beach , California - † December 17, 2005 in Bethesda , Maryland ) was an American investigative journalist ( muckraker ) and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1972.

Life

Jack Anderson began his journalistic career at the age of twelve with the "Murray Eagle", a local paper, where he reported on the activities of local boy scouts . At the age of 18 he began to work at the "Salt Lake Tribune"; the Second World War forced him to take a break in his journalistic activities. As a soldier he fought with guerrillas against Japan.

In 1947 Drew Pearson brought him to the Washington Post as a journalist . In his columns, which appeared in up to 1,000 newspapers, he has since exposed several scandals.

Because of his Parkinson's disease, Jack Anderson finally retired from journalism in July 2004. He died on December 17, 2005 in Bethesda, Maryland, of complications from his illness.

Anderson's accomplishments and his role in the Watergate era

Anderson became the main journalistic nuisance of the White House under President Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s . Whenever his name was mentioned in connection with revelations from government circles ("leaks"), Nixon was both angry and alarmed. An investigation conducted by the CIA at the request of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in October 1972 showed that in the previous years no fewer than 73 different articles by Anderson had been based on secret government documents, some from circles of the CIA and some from the National Security Council (NSC) came.

Through his often extremely informative articles, Anderson made a decisive contribution to the development of a paranoid climate around the president. In the end, Nixon even saw large parts of the government bureaucracy infiltrated by people who wanted to deliberately damage the government and himself personally by passing them on to the media. Incidentally, this paranoia is well documented on the tape recordings of conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office , which Nixon had secretly made since the beginning of 1971 ("White House Tapes" or " Watergate Tapes"). The journalist most cited by the President in this regard was Jack Anderson. Nixon's sometimes drastic demands on his closest co-workers to finally effectively "plug" leaks like the ones Anderson and his colleagues skimmed off for their stories, were the initial spark for the chain of disreputable to illegal activities of his government under the heading Watergate affair are well known.

It was no wonder that Jack Anderson himself came into the crosshairs of the American intelligence services during this time. Their competence, which does not include operations of the CIA within the USA, exceeded the foreign intelligence service and carried out, for example, between February and April 1972 under the name "Celotex II" a comprehensive surveillance of Anderson and his employees. Their goal was to find out who supplied Anderson with internal CIA information. A secret report published by the CIA in 1973 ("Family Jewels"), published in June 2007, shows that, among other things, a separate observation post was set up for this purpose in the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Washington , across from Anderson's office.

This monitoring was preceded in December 1971 by Anderson's publication of an internal, top-secret memo from the National Security Council. This exposed the supposedly neutral policy of Washington in the current 3rd Pakistani-Indian War ( history of Pakistan ) as hypocrisy and proved that Nixon and security advisor Henry Kissinger secretly supported Pakistan and its military ruler Yahya Khan ("tilt to Pakistan"). For his publications in this context, Anderson received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Journalism in the category "National Reporting" in 1972 .

However, Anderson's activities were viewed quite differently, as sheer treason, by government officials, especially G. Gordon Liddy . In 1972 he officially held the position of chief lawyer of Nixon's re-election committee . In secret, however, Liddy was mainly responsible for the organization of the secret campaign with which Nixon's employees wanted to spy on and discredit the Democratic Party and its presidential candidates ("Operation Edelstein"). When he received the information in February 1972 that an American foreign agent had been exposed and killed on the basis of another article by Jack Anderson, Liddy later devised frankly admitted plans on his own to get the unpleasant journalist out of the way by an assassination attempt. Anderson was supposed to either be poisoned by slipping LSD (which, after consulting a doctor, turned out to be impractical) or by Liddy himself to be shot on the street. According to Liddy's account, Jack Anderson survived 1972 only because his superiors apparently did not approve of these plans. Liddy's admission caused a sensation when his memoir, which was published under the title Will , was published in 1980 in the United States, but it had no legal consequences for him.

Jack Anderson acquired further trouble for the Nixon people through revelations in the so-called ITT affair in the spring of 1972. It involved the allegation that the electronics giant International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation / ITT had in the summer of 1971 in return for the termination of far-reaching antitrust proceedings concealed the planned hosting of the election convention of Nixon's Republican Party in the summer of 1972 in San Diego . Anderson published a leaked, alleged memo from an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard on February 29, 1972, which appeared to substantiate allegations. In a sensational investigation initiated by the US Congress in March / April 1972, however, the allegations could not be clearly proven - also because the authenticity of the memo remained controversial. It was only when these events were later rolled out as part of the Watergate investigation that the accusation of taking advantage of the Nixon government was justified. Congress later defined the ITT affair, largely forgotten per se, by law as one of ten aspects of "those abuses of government powers that have become popularly known under the collective term Watergate ".

Less noteworthy were Anderson's accomplishments on the central aspect of the Watergate affair , namely the Gordon Liddy-led, failed break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters in an office section of the Washington Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, or the subsequent efforts of the White House to cover up one's own responsibility for this. To his "perpetual regret" Anderson (as he writes in his memoir) had leaked information about the planned action two months before the break-in, which ultimately came down to a talkative member of Liddy's team, classified as unreliable and not pursued further. This detail later played a role in the various Watergate investigations, but was lost in the abundance of revelations at the time. Later, Nixon's employees, Republicans in Congress and various authors with a penchant for conspiracy theories (such as Jim Hougan with Secret Agenda , 1984), with reference to the information leaked to Anderson, suggested that "Operation Edelstein" was apparently deliberately sabotaged from the start in order to expose the Nixon government. Also that Anderson had been friends with one of the Watergate burglars, the Italian-American Frank Sturgis , for years and that he ran into him the day before the break-in in the presence of his companions at the National Airport in Washington, DC and briefly with him had spoken to him was later examined by Watergate investigators for possible conspiracy implications. However, credible evidence or evidence could never be presented in this context.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jack Anderson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jack Anderson in the nndb (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Family Jewels" of the CIA, published on June 26, 2007, p. 27, see under [1] .