Word: anderson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many of Pearson's methods wouldn't be tolerated today. He really went after people. He taught Anderson to look "first for those personal weaknesses ... to cher ish in an adversary: overweening vanity, bumbling pomposity, addiction to creature comforts, a tendency to alcoholic indiscretion, the heedless pursuit of venery." Opponents were destroyed not by reasoned argument but by a recital of their peccadilloes, endlessly repeated. When Ander son objected to such "scraps and chaff," his boss replied: "Once you catch one of these birds at anything, and you're sure of your facts, never worry about doing...
What first impelled Pearson to pursue J. Parnell Thomas, head of the House Un-American Affairs Committee? The belief, according to Anderson, that the "Americanism that went in for public inquisitions into the politcal notions of movie actors was bound to attract the dishonest man, the cheat looking for a patriotic cover." So Pearson learned that Thomas was romancing a young woman in his office; a jealous older secretary's testimony about the Congressman's payroll padding sent Thomas to jail, and a grateful Pearson put her on his payroll for 15 years. In Pearson's eagerness...
...McCarthy story is more complicated. Pearson, says Anderson, had an early tip on Alger Hiss's Communist connection but, unable to substantiate it, had turned it over to the Government. And when McCarthy needed evidence to support his wild charges of Reds in Government, Anderson gave him an unsubstantiated tip about one of Truman's speechwriters; a & amp;quot;burn of shame singed through me," he says, when McCarthy denounced the man in the Senate. In time, McCarthy turned on Pearson, who had never been a big fan of the Senator's anyway. Calling Pearson an agent...
...Anderson still admires Pearson the man and the reporter, but not some of his tactics. "The accumulation of these tragedies, to which I was a direct contributor," Anderson says, raised a question: "Were these stories...worth the lives or sanity of people and the incalculable destruction wreaked upon their innocent families?" Confess Anderson; "There are seasons when it seems a close call." Muckrakers find themselves scorned by those Anderson calls "the tone setters of our profession." Having won a Pulitzer, as Pearson never did, Anderson now heads a successful journalistic cottage industry employing 17 reporters. He is seen five times...
...Anderson's muckrating tale is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable means. Pearson was a Quaker, Anderson is a Mormon, but the Christianity that sustained them both often seems in their professional lives more evident in righteousness than in charity. It is harder to tell the black hats from the white hats when white hats become soiled...