The Tenacious Muckraker

Drew Pearson once remarked that his job as a newspaperman was "to spur the lazy, watch the weak and expose the corrupt." For 37 years, until his death of a heart attack last week at 71, Pearson took on that task with the zeal of a cub reporter and earned for himself more controversy than any other journalist of his time. In the view of his admirers, he provided extra-constitutional checks and balances against negligence, incompetence and malfeasance by public officials. From detractors, he prompted unprintable epithets and paroxysms of billingsgate. A Tennessee Senator was once moved to fury so intense that it almost scanned: "An ignorant liar, a peewee liar, a revolving, unmitigated, infamous liar."

Which, of course, was simply untrue. Pearson was, rather, a dedicated muckraker who sometimes erred in piecing together an event from details provided by his friends--or even by his enemies out to get someone. He often played favorites (Lyndon Johnson, Wayne Morse), but favoritism was no safeguard against Pearson criticism. Despite the bitterness he provoked, he never lost his sources. "When I call," he said, "people don't know if I've got something on them or am giving them the chance to clear up something--so I get through."

Enemy of Rascals. Unlike many other columnists, Pearson was not ideologically predictable. He was a New Deal liberal, but he attacked F.D.R. for trying to pack the Supreme Court as enthusiastically as he later crusaded against Senator Joseph McCarthy. Over the years, disclosures in Pearson's column sent four Congressmen to jail and led to the resignation of officials from Sherman Adams on down. He accused General MacArthur of lobbying for his own promotion (MacArthur sued and lost) and was the first to report the General George S. Patton slapping incident.

Though Pearson thrived on the vitriol in his professional life, in his private life he was a pleasant and gentle man, a Quaker with a sense of humor. For his epitaph, he said he would prefer not a remembrance of his fame as an enemy of rascals but of his less well-known role as the organizer of the Friendship Train, which sent $40 million worth of food to postwar France and Italy in 1947, and as the rebuilder of a Tennessee high school that was bombed out in 1958.

His "Washington Merry-Go-Round" was carried by more than 650 papers, almost twice as many as any other column, and last week's TIME-Louis Harris Poll showed him to be the best-known columnist in the U.S. The column will continue under the byline of Jack Anderson, a former assistant who has functioned more as an equal partner in the past few years.

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