Word: pearson
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...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...
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...
...rearranging the furniture and taking over the education of the children. His passion for showing people how to do things extended to his biographers ("The best authority on Shaw is Shaw," he told Archibald Henderson), and he insisted on writing a good part of his biographies by Henderson, Hesketh Pearson and Frank Harris. He simply could not bear to see anyone doing something he could do better...
Columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson became the first to publish a widely circulated notion that Kennedy, immediately after the accident, had Joe Gargan, his cousin, agree to "admit to driving the car." The columnists said that Ted Kennedy, Markham and Gargan returned to the Dike Bridge "to make certain that Gargan would be totally familiar with the circumstances surrounding 'his' unfortunate accident." But "in the cold light of dawn," say Pearson and Anderson, the Senator "decided to face the consequences himself." Whatever its implausibilities, the story would explain why Kennedy might have wished to establish an alibi...
McCarthy ordered his staff to deny that he was seeking a divorce, but he did not repudiate Pearson's report that the Senator's marriage was "on the rocks." The McCarthys have been married 24 years, have four children, and are practicing Roman Catholics. (At one time he was a Benedictine novice, and he still has a carved visage of St. Benedict in his Senate office...