The Scorpion on the Potomac: Navigating Drew Pearson’s Washington
Donald A. Ritchie’s The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington offers a probing look at one of the most controversial journalists to ever stalk the halls of power.
Donald A. Ritchie, The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). 367 pp., $34.95.
AS A native Washingtonian in a politically aware family—my paternal grandfather was a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, former Tennessee senator Cordell Hull, a frequent target of the columnist Drew Pearson’s invective, and my maternal grandfather was a prominent attorney who was a legal advisor to the formidable socialite “Cissy” Patterson, the proprietor of the Times-Herald, the dominant morning paper in the nation’s capital, but playing second fiddle in those days to the solid, staid, all-too-respectable Evening Star—I was already aware as a child of the competition for the spotlight among the city’s newspapers and the leading role played by Pearson. Placing a feeble third in the journalistic sweepstakes was businessman Eugene Meyer’s modest morning paper, The Washington Post. Most journalistic insiders at the time would have laughed out loud at anyone who predicted that, by century’s end, both the Times-Herald and the Evening Star would be faint memories and the Post a paper of national stature, surpassed only by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. As it happens, Pearson briefly was married to Patterson’s fetching daughter, and the Times-Herald became the first Washington newspaper to carry his column, which later migrated to the Post, where it was relegated to the comic pages. But while it appeared in the Times-Herald, my grandfather, Rudolph Yeatman, would often receive late-night calls asking him to vet a Pearson column—or one of Patterson’s own feverish editorial fulminations—for libel potential just minutes before press time, yet another reason I was aware of Pearson’s impact from early childhood.
It was thus with no small measure of interest that I turned to The Columnist, historian Donald A. Ritchie’s engrossing new biography of Drew Pearson. A muckraking left-wing columnist and radio commentator, Pearson is largely forgotten today. In his lifetime, however, he was arguably the most feared, loathed, and influential American journalist of his generation, unique then and never really equaled since. Perhaps the only thing that Pearson’s fans and detractors could agree on was that he was truly one of a kind, something for which the latter group was probably deeply thankful.
TO THOSE of us old enough to remember some of his baser performances, Drew Pearson was more of a calumnist than columnist, a man who carefully selected the muck he raked and the targets he threw it at, driven by a personal agenda rather than a clear sense of right and wrong. For some mysterious reason, Pearson’s sexual, financial, and legal exposés—both true and false—almost always targeted conservatives and anti-communists while ignoring the same kind of misbehavior at the hands of “progressive” politicians and other personal favorites he tolerated or lavished with praise. Thus, Pearson turned a blind eye to President John F. Kennedy’s scandalous private life and ignored the long record of political and personal corruption surrounding Lyndon B. Johnson. Such was the usually hard-boiled columnist’s susceptibility to LBJ’s manipulative skills that for a time Pearson actually deluded himself into believing that Johnson might make him his secretary of state.
If he had, it would not have been on the basis of two of Johnson’s Democratic predecessors’ opinions. FDR branded Pearson a “chronic liar” while Harry S. Truman simply dismissed him as an “S.O.B.” From across the Atlantic, Winston Churchill joined the chorus and moved the criticism up a notch, calling the columnist “the most colossal liar in the United States.”
Nor did Pearson’s journalistic colleagues rate his integrity very highly. In 1944, Ritchie informs us, “the Washington press corps grudgingly voted him the Washington correspondent who exerted the greatest influence on the nation, giving him twice the votes of Walter Lippmann [the most prestigious, respected national columnist at the time].” In the same poll, however, his colleagues placed Pearson at the bottom of the heap when it came to accuracy and even-handedness.
A case study of his modus operandi helps explain why. In a pre-publication article, Ritchie described how, in 1934,
General Douglas MacArthur sued Pearson for a column that charged him with using his father-in-law’s influence to win promotion to major general over more senior officers. Pearson got that story from MacArthur’s ex-wife, but she would not repeat in court what she had said at dinner. MacArthur only agreed to drop the suit after Pearson obtained the general’s love letters to his mistress.
Exactly what is going on here? Pearson, a Quaker who had avoided service in World War I, takes a cheap shot at MacArthur, who had distinguished himself under fire as chief of staff of the much-decorated “Rainbow Division.” The latter had, indeed, become the youngest major general in the U.S. Army by being promoted over the heads of a number of older mediocrities with greater seniority. But it was on the basis of his outstanding wartime record and a remarkable peacetime career that began with his graduation from West Point at the top of his class and included service as an outstanding superintendent of his alma mater. The cheap shot itself is based on an alleged private conversation with MacArthur’s embittered ex-wife at a dinner party. There is no supporting evidence, and the ex-wife refuses to corroborate Pearson’s story in court. So, Pearson manages to get his hands on private correspondence between MacArthur and an alleged mistress. He then uses the letters, shakedown fashion, to “persuade” MacArthur to drop his libel suit. Not exactly journalism at its finest.
It is entirely possible that MacArthur did, indeed, have a mistress. I can remember my late father, a second-generation Washingtonian, talking about a rather louche Washington apartment building on 16th Street where senior military brass who had acquired “exotic” oriental mistresses during service in the Philippines between the world wars housed their paramours. Built in 1920, the building’s official name was “The Chastleton,” but it was popularly referred to in those days as “The Riding Academy”—and Douglas MacArthur was rumored to be one of the riders. But even if this was the case, the use Pearson made of purloined or purchased personal correspondence to dodge a libel action was reprehensible at best, outright blackmail at worst. For Pearson, however, it was pretty much business as usual.
Ritchie explains, “Though Pearson aimed for the truth, the pressure of daily deadlines meant sometimes settling for less than the whole truth. When challenged, he occasionally found he could not substantiate a claim…” One is reminded of the humorous tag attached to the title of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s postwar memoir emphasizing his role as a pioneer NASA space scientist and downplaying his work developing the Nazi flying rocket bombs: “I Aim for the Stars … But Sometimes I Hit London.”
AN EVEN more glaring case of journalistic abuse took place a generation after the MacArthur episode. In 2010, Mark Feldstein published a book entitled Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture. In a National Public Radio interview touting his book, Feldstein described how, after Nixon was elected vice president in 1952, Pearson and Anderson, his chief “leg man” and later co-writer,
...published a false story based on a forged document that claimed that Nixon was getting payoffs from Union Oil, one of the biggest oil companies, now Chevron, and it turned out to have been a fraudulent document, distributed by the Democratic National Committee.
And Pearson and Anderson didn’t just base their story on this pre-Trumpian “phony dossier,” Feldstein continued. They also “worked behind the scenes, hand-in-glove with Democrats, to orchestrate congressional hearings to try to keep Nixon from being seated as vice president.” Feldstein concluded,
Nixon’s paranoia goes back to the very beginning, and the paranoia that would ultimately bring his destruction in Watergate had some basis in fact. And it goes back to, among other things, this forged memo that Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson publicized.
In the same interview, Feldstein recounted a 1958 bugging operation that Anderson engaged in on behalf of the column. It reads like a virtual mini-Watergate incident, but it took place fourteen years before the actual Watergate break-in and the perpetrator got off Scot-free: “…in 1958, Anderson was caught red-handed with a Democratic congressional investigator, bugging [the premises of a wheeler-dealer suspected of corrupt influence peddling].”
Anderson managed to beat the rap
...[b]ecause he was with a congressional investigator [and] he argued that he was just there as a reporter covering the story. In fact, behind the scenes, he was really the principal mover and shaker. And, indeed, they could have nailed him on perjury because he did, in fact, perjure himself when asked under oath where he got the bugging equipment. He feigned amnesia, as he later admitted … in some oral history interviews.
Ritchie’s biography is conscientious, informative, fast-moving, and generally well-researched, and he makes a serious attempt to place his subject in historical perspective. But, too often, he is either incredibly naïve or willfully suspends disbelief when it comes to his hero. Time and again, he simply takes Pearson at his very dubious word, ignoring or downplaying his subject’s flagrant disregard for the truth. The reason for this may be revealed—wittingly or unwittingly—in the opening sentence of the opening section of his book when the author begins his “Acknowledgments” with the following words:
I first became aware of [Pearson’s] “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column when I attended graduate school at the University of Maryland in 1967 and began reading the Washington Post. None of the papers I grew up reading in New York City had carried it. I followed the column during Drew Pearson’s last two years, until I was drafted – unexpectedly into the Marine Corps – three months before he died. When I returned to graduate school in 1971, Jack Anderson had charge of the column, which I followed compulsively through Watergate…
In other words, Pearson entered Ritchie’s consciousness as an aging legend most of whose achievements—for better or worse—were behind him, and just before some admirers were beginning to hail him as founding father of the anonymously-sourced, rumor-driven, take-no-prisoners genre of investigative reporting that came into full flower with Watergate.
Although indelibly linked to Pearson in public memory, the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” was almost certainly the brainchild of another rising young journalist, Robert Allen. A short, ginger-haired Kentuckian, Bob Allen was everything that Drew Pearson was not, and vice versa. Born a year after Pearson in 1900, Allen had lied about his age to join the U.S. Cavalry, serving on the Mexican border and then in France in World War I after America joined the Allies. Unlike Pearson, Allen’s journalistic ethics were not selective. He despised liars, frauds, and charlatans of every stripe, foreign and domestic, Left or Right. He never played favorites. As Washington correspondent for the sedate Christian Science Monitor, Allen’s opportunities as a nonpartisan muckraker were severely constrained, so he began to write (anonymously) witty, caustic Washington profile pieces for H.L. Mencken’s sophisticated and thoroughly irreverent magazine, The American Mercury. Allen’s profiles were so well received that Mencken urged him to expand them into a book. One of the leading “cutting edge” publishers of the day, Horace Liveright and Company, bought the idea but suggested that Allen acquire a coauthor who could contribute some trivial gossip content to give the book more commercial appeal. Allen recruited Pearson, by then the State Department correspondent for the well-regarded Baltimore Sun, to handle the rumor mill material. Washington Merry-Go-Round sold so well and garnered such good reviews the two men used the same title to launch a new syndicated column.
It was a partnership, but there is no question that, at the outset, Allen was the senior partner. As Allen would tell an interviewer many years later, “I originated and conceived the idea of the Washington Merry-Go-Round book from which the column grew, and I conceived that idea, too … I wrote about 60–65 percent of the first book.” Throughout the 1930s, the column was a great success with little change to the pecking order.
All that changed after Pearl Harbor. According to his New York Times obituary, Allen “ended his partnership with Drew Pearson in 1942, when he rejoined the army.” He served with distinction, working in military intelligence and seeing combat with General George Patton’s Third Army. In some of the last heavy fighting in the European theater, Colonel (as he then was) Robert S. Allen lost his right arm during the Third Army’s push into Germany. Meanwhile, Pearson was strengthening his foothold as a columnist in Washington, sitting out World War II as he had World War I. By the time his erstwhile partner returned to town, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round” had irreversibly morphed into a vehicle by, of, and for Pearson.
Their friendship was never quite the same again, and would end in total estrangement. As a fellow member of the National Press Club, I had occasional contacts with “Colonel Allen,” as everyone then called him, in his later years. (Here I feel obliged to note that Ritchie, whose grasp of details is generally pretty firm, seems to have trouble distinguishing between the National Press Club and the National Press Building, referring to Colonel Allen as occupying an office in “the National Press Club.” While the old gentleman spent a fair amount of leisure time on the Press Club premises on the 13th floor of the National Press Building, his office was in the building, not in the club itself.)
The colonel could be brusque and brutally honest, but he never oozed the faux bonhomie of his erstwhile partner. And he was respected by all who knew him, which was certainly not the case with his more famous alter ego. After losing his devoted wife in 1979, he had to retire from journalism due to terminal cancer two years later. Allen spent his last hours in the Georgetown home that he and his wife had shared for so many years. After putting what remained of his affairs in order, he loaded his shotgun and ended what had been a long and honorable life. He outlived Pearson by more than a decade.
COLUMNS ASIDE, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, television was still in its infancy and the only truly national live medium was radio. Elmer Davis, Henry J. Taylor, Fulton Lewis Jr., Gabriel Heater, Lowell Thomas, and Walter Winchell all had their mass audiences for daily or weekly broadcasts. Each man had his distinctive delivery style, carefully honed since it was voice and voice alone that bonded these early electronic pundits with their audience of invisible ears.
Pearson’s radio voice was unforgettable—confident to the point of smugness, occasionally accompanied by a slightly smarmy chuckle as he laughed at one of his own jokes while dispensing his distinctive brand of exposés, innuendos, and “predictions of things to come” to his listeners. Most of the accurate “predictions” were of things that had already happened or already been decided on, passed on to Pearson by his vast network of informants. Vapid stuff for the most part, it still contributed to the columnist’s image as all-knowing and all-seeing in the minds of the folks back home. One Pearson “exclusive” informed the great American public that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin slept in his underwear, the ultimate in undercover journalism.
Perhaps the most theatrical moment in Pearson’s career took place out of print and off-mike. Involving two Quakers and one drunken Irishman, it just might have ended in Pearson’s death if the second Quaker hadn’t come to the rescue of the first one.
It happened on the evening of December 12, 1950, at a fashionable dinner party in the Sulgrave Club, a Dupont Circle landmark and society mecca. The Irish lush was Senator Joe McCarthy, the first Quaker was Drew Pearson, and the second Quaker was a newly-minted U.S. senator (and former congressman) from California named Richard Milhous Nixon.
The mischievous hostess had decided to seat Joe McCarthy and his arch-nemesis, Drew Pearson, at the same table. The results were unedifying but predictable. Pearson and McCarthy exchanged escalating insults. Then, as recounted by Nixon biographer Roger Morris,
Joe McCarthy lunged across to grab and gouge Pearson at the back of the neck, yelling, “You come out, we’ll settle this.” Innocently sitting between them, Congressman Charles Bennett rose to stop the assault. But the Florida politician, partially crippled by childhood polio, was upended in the scuffle and fell helplessly and heavily to the ballroom floor. As McCarthy turned to pick up the crumpled Bennett, an obviously shaken Pearson quickly walked away. The incident seemed over.
But the real fun was just beginning. Dinner guests, including Nixon, “watched with fascination as McCarthy strode out after Pearson, catching [him] … in the cloakroom.”
“Well, Drew,” the senator said, clapping him roughly on the back, “a pleasant evening, wasn’t it?” The journalist nervously thrust into his jacket for the coat check. “Don’t you reach into your pocket like that,” McCarthy said dramatically, grabbing Pearson’s arms, kneeing him twice in the groin … Now, as the columnist bent over in pain, he gasped, “When are they going to put you into the booby hatch?” At that, McCarthy slapped him back and forth, “movie-villain fashion,” said one account.
The slapping continued and Pearson was knocked to the floor when the Angel of Mercy entered the cloakroom in the unlikely form of Nixon. “Let a Quaker stop this fight,” Nixon said in a loud voice and then, more softly, “Let’s go Joe.” But McCarthy was having none of it. “I won’t turn my back on the son of a bitch. He’s got to go first.”
After Pearson limped out of the room, Morris reports, Nixon walked McCarthy out of the club and the two of them spent the next half hour “trying to find the parking place Joe was seemingly too drunk or agitated to remember.” In subsequent accounts to friends, Nixon would say that he’d never seen anybody slapped so hard before and that, “If I hadn’t pulled McCarthy away, he might have killed Pearson.”
All of which suggests that in Washington, as elsewhere, good deeds seldom go unpunished.
RITCHIE POINTS to the fact that, over a span of forty years, Pearson succeeded in exposing the occasional Congressional grafter, grifter, and petty cheat. He prided himself on sinking the political careers of legislative ciphers like Ernest Bramblett, Parnell Thomas, Adam Clayton Powell, Andrew May, and Rob E. Jones—some of whom ended up in jail while others were simply driven from office and into even greater obscurity. Fine and dandy as far as it goes, but not much to write home about and scarcely a political game-changer one way or the other. Richie also makes much of Pearson’s opposition to McCarthy, which was genuine enough. After a brief political flirtation when Pearson used McCarthy as a source, he was, indeed, an outspoken foe of the Wisconsin demagogue. But this may have been a case of Pearson doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Although a fierce hawk in his opposition to European fascism, Pearson seems to have been blind to both the monumental evil of communism and the repressive threat it represented to a vulnerable postwar Europe.
Perhaps the greatest stain on Pearson’s professional record and personal honor was his flagitious persecution of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. Forrestal was a brilliant military planner and organizer and a patriot who recognized the evil—and the threat—of Soviet communism as well as that of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s one-time partner in European plunder. He discerned the looming threat of the USSR long before the Iron Curtain fell over most of Eastern and Central Europe and he was a tireless voice for postwar military preparedness at a time when people like Pearson and “progressives” and fellow travelers like Henry Wallace were pitching appeasement. He was responsible, among other things, for ensuring that George F. Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” was widely distributed both in the Truman administration and in Congress.
As the first secretary of defense of the newly merged departments of the U.S. Army and Navy, and the most effective voice for a sound national security policy in the Truman administration, Forrestal became Pearson’s prime target. In column after column, and broadcast after broadcast, Pearson led a sordid campaign against Forrestal, impugning his integrity, questioning his character and courage, and subjecting him to groundless slander. In later years, even his junior partner, Jack Anderson, would acknowledge that Pearson “hectored Forrestal with innuendos and false accusations,” which helped to bring on a nervous collapse and ultimately drove him to suicide.
Time magazine devoted a stinging rebuke to his calumnies:
As James V. Forrestal was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s press reflected on the vitriolic attacks made on the nation’s first Secretary of National Defense. Commentators Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, who had jabbed away at Forrestal for relentless months in syndicated columns and Sunday-night broadcasts, found themselves the attacked instead of the attackers. In the Pearson and Winchell assaults on Forrestal, one thing was clear: both had overstepped the bounds of decency, both had strayed far from their responsibilities as journalists.
None of which seems to have made the least impression on Pearson, a journalistic bottom feeder who had risen to the top. More surprisingly, it all seems to have been glossed over by reviewers of Richie’s flawed but worthwhile biography. Fergus Bordewich, writing in The Wall Street Journal, even went so far as to describe Pearson as a “man of intense moral force.” Showman, propagandist, inspired snoop, tireless self-promoter, and gifted character assassin, yes. But a moral force? Hogwash.
Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan and has been widely published here and overseas on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.