Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture » (First Edition)

Mark Feldstein, who teaches media and public affairs at George Washington University, was an investigative correspondent for CNN, ABC, and other news outlets for two decades, earning dozens of journalism awards, including an Edward R. Murrow Broadcasting Award, an Alfred I. Dupont–Columbia University Award, and two George Foster Peabody Awards. He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina.

It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack Anderson dead.

The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the most famous and feared investigative reporter in the nation, has exposed yet another of the President’s dirty secrets. Nixon’s operatives are ordered to “stop Anderson at all costs”—permanently. Across the street from the White House, they huddle in a hotel basement to conspire. Should they try “Aspirin Roulette” and break into Anderson’s home to plant a poisoned pill in one of his medicine bottles? Could they smear LSD on the journalist’s steering wheel, so that he would absorb it through his skin, lose control of his car, and crash? Or stage a routine-looking mugging, making Anderson appear to be one more fatal victim of Washington’s notorious street crime?

Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture recounts not only the disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era’s most embattled politician and its most reviled newsman. The struggle between Nixon and Anderson included bribery, blackmail, forgery, spying, and burglary as well as the White House murder plot. Their vendetta symbolized and accelerated the growing conflict between the government and the press, a clash that would long outlive both men.

Mark Feldstein traces the arc of this confrontation between a vindictive president and a flamboyant, crusading muckraker who rifled through garbage and swiped classified papers in pursuit of his prey—stoking the paranoia in Nixon that would ultimately lead to his ruin. The White House plot to poison Anderson, Feldstein argues, is a metaphor for the poisoned political atmosphere that would follow, and the toxic sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse.

Melding history and biography, Poisoning the Press unearths significant new information from more than two hundred interviews and thousands of declassified documents and tapes. This is a chronicle of political intrigue and the true price of power for politicians and journalists alike. The result—Washington’s modern scandal culture—was Richard Nixon’s ultimate revenge.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

There's a great deal of high comedy in Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein's meticulous recounting of Anderson's life and times…At the same time [it] is one of the grimmest, most Hobbesian books I've ever read, a master class in gutter politics…It comes fearsomely alive…in its depiction of Nixon and Anderson as the King Kong and Godzilla of sleaze, paranoia and dirty tricks.

Prologue 3

Part I Beginnings

1 The Quaker and the Mormon 13

Part II Rise to Power

2 Washington Whirl 33

3 Bugging and Burglary 56

4 Comeback 75

Part III Power

5 The President and the Columnist 105

6 Revenge 128

7 Vietnam 141

8 The Anderson Papers 155

9 Sex, Spies, Blackmail 175

10 Cat and Mouse 199

11 Brothers 214

12 "Destroy This" 225

13 From Burlesque to Grotesque 249

14 "Kill Him" 268

15 Watergate 291

16 Disgrace 313

Part IV Endings

17 Final Years 337

Epilogue 359

Notes 369

Bibliography 429

Acknowledgments 441

Index 445