 |
 |
Jack Anderson ends syndicated column Scripps Howard News Service July 23, 2004 - Prize-winning investigative reporter Jack Anderson, 81, is ending his syndicated column immediately because he is seriously ill with Parkinson's disease that was first diagnosed in 1986. Anderson has worked on "Washington Merry-Go-Round" since 1947. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Nixon administration's tilt toward Pakistan in its war with India. Those columns and others that told of secret grand-jury investigations into Watergate won him a place high on President Richard Nixon's "Enemies List." "Maybe it was alphabetical," the self-described muckraker liked to quip of an attack he clearly considered an honor. Anderson and associate Dale Van Atta also won the Society of Professional Journalists award for 1987 "Merry-Go-Round" columns that broke open Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration's secret sale of arms to Iran in return for cash to finance Nicaraguan rebels. The column, begun by Drew Pearson in 1932, appeared in 1,000 newspapers at its peak and now has 150 clients. "This is truly the end of an era," said Lisa Klem Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of United Media, a division of The E.W. Scripps Co., which has syndicated the column since 1972. Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post media critic and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," was one of the many young associates Anderson tutored over the years. He said: "Jack Anderson was into investigative reporting before investigative reporting was cool. There was a time when he was one of the few journalists digging behind the scenes, getting internal memos and developing a network of sources when that was the exception rather than the rule." Kurtz also called Anderson "an incredibly nice man who loved to develop young talent and whose soft-spoken style belied the ferocity of his journalistic efforts." Anderson began his newspaper career at age 12 when he was hired by the Murray Eagle in his home state of Utah, where the Mormon youngster initially covered scouting activity and community fairs. His first investigative scoop came in exposing unlawful polygamy in his church, he wrote in his autobiography, "Peace, War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account." He was a civilian war correspondent in World War II and was assigned to the Shanghai edition of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper after he later joined the Army. Arriving in Washington in 1947, he went to Pearson's office in search of a job and became his right-hand man. Anderson inherited the column on Pearson's death in 1969 and continued to embarrass the capital's powers-that-be. Anderson and the column also fought McCarthyism and exposed the CIA's clandestine hiring of Mafia members to try to assassinate Fidel Castro, and he published secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury. His pieces on the mob so infuriated the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Hoover called Anderson "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures." (Hoover insisted there was no such thing as the Mafia.) Anderson's last column, written with associate Douglas Cohn, was released Thursday, the same day the 9/11 commission's report came out. The column said the report's call for a national intelligence director is "an easy fix" that could cause more problems than it solves. "The last thing we should do is centralize power in one person," Anderson and Cohn wrote. "We tried that with ... Hoover, who as the longest-serving head of the FBI had such control over internal security at the federal level that he could use what he knew to keep himself in power. He literally had the goods on his bosses." Anderson also has written more than a dozen books, including his autobiography. United Media will provide clients with retrospective columns of "Washington Merry-Go-Round" the next four weeks, including new observations from Anderson, Wilson said. Anderson took his 1986 diagnosis in stride for years, telling an audience in 1999 that "doctors tell me it's Parkinson's. I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it." http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=JACKANDERSON-07-23-04&cat=AN ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn