The Aggressive Inheritor

In 22 years, he has had more doors slammed in his face than a traveling salesman and has caused more telephones to be hung up in anger than a recorded message. But few Washington reporters have earned more respect from their colleagues than Jack Northman Anderson, 46, inheritor of the Drew Pearson column.

There was little in the genial teenage editor of the Boy Scout page of Utah's Deseret News in 1937 to foreshadow Anderson the persistent muckraker. Except diligence. Attending school in the morning, newspapering during his off-hours, Anderson wound up making more money--at 150 for each column inch that he got into print--than some of the full-time reporters. By the time he was 18, he was a full-fledged reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune. Two years of missionary preaching (customary among young Mormons) through Georgia, Alabama and Florida, followed by a tour as a war correspondent in China, gave him a view of the world. But it was still a shy and polite young man of 24 who walked uninvited into Pearson's office one morning in 1947 to ask for a job. He got it, Pearson no doubt sensing in Anderson the virtues he most revered in himself: industry, uprightness, zeal.

The greatest of these was zeal. For ten years, Anderson's name rarely appeared in or on the column despite the long hours and endless investigation that he contributed. Finally in 1957, he told Pearson he had had it and threatened to quit. Pearson promised him more bylines and greater recognition. The column, Pearson added, would some day be his. Anderson returned to work.

Recognition of a sort did indeed follow. In 1958, Anderson was caught in a hotel room with a federal investigator eavesdropping on Bernard Goldfine, the generous industrialist whose relationship with Sherman Adams became a major Eisenhower Administration scandal.

Less publicized but more significant were the Anderson investigative skills that put punch in columns on such figures as the "Five Percenters" of the Truman Administration, the "Kickback Congressmen" of the late '40s and early '50s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, FCC Commissioner Richard Mack and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. It was also Anderson who persuaded office workers for Senator Thomas Dodd to turn over the Connecticut Democrat's incriminating files. Of the more than 100 Pearson-Anderson columns devoted to the Dodd affair, all but two were written by the junior partner.

As his name became better known in Washington, Anderson branched out, supplementing his Pearson income with speaking engagements, books and articles, particularly for Parade magazine (he has been its Washington correspondent since 1954). For twelve years, he collaborated with Pearson on a radio news-commentary program; on television, he conducts a weekly political forecast of the highly predictable. A last-week sample: "Teddy will fight back."

Wastebasket Facts. The column will stay pretty much the same, though it will be "less personal"--Anderson's respectful way of saying that he won't play favorites. Pearson, the charmer, was susceptible to social graces in others. But Anderson, a nondrinking, nonsmoking family man (nine children), avoids the Washington social whirl. If anything, the column can be expected to get tougher.

It could also get more accurate. Though aggressive reporting is the "Merry-Go-Round" hallmark, the column is only slightly less well known for its sacrifice of fact to fancy when the crusading spirit is upon it. As recently as seven weeks ago, Pearson was caught with his facts in the wastebasket when he charged that President Nixon had tried to dictate a starring role for himself in the Apollo moon-flight ceremonies. Anderson's reconstruction of the tragedy at Chappaquiddick also struck many as more supposition than substance. The columnist wrote that Kennedy at first persuaded his cousin Joseph Gargan to take the blame for Mary Jo Kopechne's death, then changed his mind during the night. Anderson insists that he pried the information, thread by thread, from Kennedy intimates.

Anderson has lost none of his zeal--and none of his Boy Scout piety. "We get 200 to 300 letters a day from little people who have lost faith in the possibility of seeing justice done through the normal processes," he says. And he vows "to keep the column what Drew made it--a voice for the voiceless."

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