Word: pearsons
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...ancient days, before Watergate made Woodward and Bernstein household words, investigative reporting meant Drew Pearson. He was, as TIME said then, "the most in tensely feared and hated man in Washington." From the '30s to the '60s, scoops in his syndicated column ("Wash ington Merry-Go-Round") or on his Sunday radio broad casts became headlines: the Roosevelt court-packing plan, F.D.R.'s destroyers-for-bases swap with Churchill, the Patton soldier-slapping incident, Sherman Adams' vicuna coat and many other tales, worthy and less worthy...
...book, Confessions of a Muckraker (Random House; $12.95), the late columnist's protege and successor, Jack Anderson (writing with James Boyd), acknowledges that Pearson's "success and power rested in large measure in the practiced impugning of others." The book is a lively recall of triumphs that brought down the mighty, but it gains unexpected depth from Anderson's confession of troubled self-doubts. It is no great distortion of the book's message to say that investigative reporting, as its critics and victims have long insisted, often produces sordid victories...
...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...