Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson -- let's bring back the good old days

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Sun Nov 11, 2018, 05:04 PM - Edit history (1)

Uh, maybe not.

I was cleaning out old newspapers when I ran across this. The article appeared on page C1 of the Tuesday, September 14, 2010, print edition.

So far, we haven't heard that Trump is trying to have Jim Acosta killed. It just goes to show you how toxic things were in the Nixon era.

Edited: I guess a link would help.

Media Notes
by Howard Kurtz

By Howard Kurtz | September 13, 2010; 10:00 PM ET

Jack Anderson's Nixonian tactics

There was a time in Washington when Jack Anderson was a hero, the columnist who kept unearthing Richard Nixon's dark secrets, a Pulitzer winner who revealed the administration's secret tilt toward Pakistan in its war against India. ... But Anderson's reputation would have been shredded had anyone learned that he paid off the source who slipped him the classified documents on Pakistan. Here's how it went down: Anderson bought some undeveloped California land from Navy yeoman Charles Radford, using an old high school friend as a middleman to disguise the transaction. "It was really a payoff," Anderson acknowledged a few months before his death.

Anderson made the admission to author Mark Feldstein, an associate professor at George Washington University. When Feldstein worked as an Anderson intern in the 1970s, he says, "I looked up to him and admired him. He certainly had his warts, God knows. I certainly realized that his later career turned embarrassing. Any of us who worked for him knew the tactics he used were not the ones I teach in journalism school." ... But, he says, "the blackmail and bribery came as a shock."

Feldstein's new book "Poisoning the Press"stunned me, another former Anderson reporter from that era, and may transform the muckraker's image as well. While detailing Nixon's utter obsession with Anderson -- to the point that 16 CIA operatives once kept him under surveillance and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy plotted to kill him -- the author makes the case that each side employed equally ruthless methods against the other.
....

Homophobic surveillance

One of the book's most striking themes is the blatant homophobia of that era, as revealed by Feldstein's archival sleuthing. Weeks after Nixon took office, a White House aide gave Anderson a ludicrously false tip that the president's top assistants, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, were gay lovers. Anderson had a staffer conduct surveillance outside Haldeman's Watergate residence and later told the FBI's No. 2 man that he had learned of a gay sex ring in the White House.

Cat-and-mouse game
....



Anderson in Washington March 31, 1972. (Associated Press)

The cat-and-mouse game turned more serious when two Nixon campaign operatives, Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, began plotting to murder Anderson. They considered breaking into his Bethesda home and slipping poison into one of his medicines, putting LSD on his steering wheel or ramming into his car. Finally, Liddy decided on knifing or strangling Anderson, which he called "justifiable homicide." Feldstein questions how serious the plots were, but notes that Liddy and Hunt both admitted their involvement; Liddy wrote about the plot in his autobiography.
....

Here's the first comment:

Comments

This article states that the $205,000 loan made by Hughes to Donald Nixon was a "gift" because it was not repaid. That is incorrect. The loan was secured by a valuable piece of real estate on Whittier Boulevard in Whittier, California, and there was a foreclosure on the property. I personally took to the Los Angeles County Recorders office the deed conveying the property to the Hughes Tool Company. I worked for many years as personal secretary to Mr. Hughes and I had just graduated from USC Law School, so I was given the assignment of having the deed recorded. It must have been 1969 or 1970.

Posted by: imzgr81 | September 13, 2010 10:41 PM