Last May, George Stephanopoulos disclosed that, while working at ABC News, he had donated seventy-five thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation, headed by his former boss. For a couple of news cycles, political operatives and journalists argued about whatever line might have been crossed, furrowing their brows over the well-established migratory patterns of their two species.
While a few individuals, like David Gergen, move between the professions in a sort of commute, more frequently a short career in politics now leads to a longer, permanent one on television, as with Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Stephanopoulos himself. Rarer—if one discounts newspeople who become Presidential press secretaries (Pierre Salinger, Tony Snow)—are those who depart journalism for the top inner precincts of the political realm they used to cover. In his memoir “The Clinton Wars” (2003), Sidney Blumenthal, once this magazine’s Washington editor, describes with boyish wonder how it felt to leave The New Yorker for the West Wing. “The decisive moment had arrived when I could become a wholehearted political participant,” he wrote, adding, “Being on the outside in whatever capacity was never the same as being in.” The satisfactions of “access” can never quite equal the thrill of agency.
The day-to-day porosity between politics and journalism has closed up in recent decades. Arthur Krock, who from F.D.R.’s era to L.B.J.’s wrote the Times’ In the Nation column, worried in his “Memoirs” (1968) about whether he might have been compromised by orbiting the Kennedy family for decades. He had written glowingly of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.; helped polish for publication the senior thesis of young John F. Kennedy; and, later, even recommended the man who became the President’s valet. He spends a stretch of his book trying to assure readers, and himself, that he was able to maintain his detachment when writing about the Kennedy White House.
Robert Novak, known as “the Prince of Darkness,” records in his autobiography of the same name how the social connections of his writing partner, Rowland Evans, sometimes put their column in the tank for J.F.K. Things got even more complicated with the President’s brother Robert. In 1966, unbeknownst to Novak, Evans, over lunch at the Sans Souci, helped New York’s junior senator draft a statement calling for a coalition government in Vietnam. When the proposal was issued, Novak wrote a column attacking it—in keeping with the policy position that he and Evans had already established. Evans let the column run with only a little softening and then headed to Hickory Hill to apologize to Bobby. The little affair nearly ended the Evans-Novak double byline.
The power of individual Washington commentators has contracted radically in recent decades. A general contempt for the press may still be the Presidential norm, but mid-twentieth-century Chief Executives especially hated having to curry favor with a small handful of syndicated pundits. Even so, in their heyday, the influence sought by columnists and newspaper publishers with American Presidents tended to be incidental, unprompted by ideological zeal. When Arthur Krock privately suggested to Kennedy how he might get a better handle on the C.I.A., he was operating in a manner similar to that of Philip Graham, the co-owner of the Washington Post, who recommended Douglas Dillon to Kennedy for Secretary of the Treasury. Each piece of advice was a chance to participate directly in the game, to feel modestly helpful and somewhat important. Joseph Alsop, the Post’s owlish, irascible, and closeted columnist, also recommended Dillon to Kennedy, but, as the years went on, his advice developed a particular doctrinal urgency. According to his biographer, Robert W. Merry, Alsop eventually “aimed the column directly at a single person,” Lyndon Johnson, in the hope that he would adopt a Vietnam policy that was even more hawkish than the one he was carrying out.
From the thirties through the sixties, no one crossed the journo-politico line in search of real policy impact with greater fervor than Drew Pearson, the author of the syndicated newspaper column Washington Merry-Go-Round. Accompanied by Pearson’s mustachioed thumbnail image, it ran so widely and for so long that its purveyor became a figure in the popular culture. A volume of Pearson’s diaries from the nineteen-fifties, published more than forty years ago, added context to his public exploits and exposés. These included being choked by Joe McCarthy in the coatroom of Washington’s Sulgrave Club (the newly elected Senator Richard Nixon, Pearson’s fellow-Quaker and an object of his special loathing, broke things up); and, with access to an official investigator’s hidden microphone, helping to get President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, fired for accepting a businessman’s gift of a vicuña coat. Only now are we getting a second volume of diaries, “Washington Merry-Go-Round” (Potomac), edited by Peter Hannaford. It runs from 1960 nearly up to Pearson’s death, in 1969, seven months into Nixon’s long-delayed Presidency. This new installment shows even more convincingly the extent of Pearson’s direct involvement in politics, often at the Presidential level, and the degree to which it derived not just from standard elements of ego and competitiveness but also from an emotionally committed world view.
“The vote went against us, as I expected, but we polled twelve,” Pearson writes on January 31, 1962, sounding more like a senator than like a reporter as he expresses disappointment over the confirmation of a C.I.A. director. “Senator Case of South Dakota switched his vote and opposed McCone. This means that I will have to support him for re-election.” The speeches and the private memorandums that Pearson wrote for senators sometimes consumed more of his energies than the column. He maneuvered and whipped legislators as if he were in the leadership: “I telephoned [the Missouri senator] Tom Hennings and told him that if he could filibuster for a day on his [liberalizing] southern primaries amendment, I could probably pick up twenty-five votes for him,” he writes at the beginning of 1960. The strategy succeeded.
Jack Anderson, Pearson’s collaborator and the inheritor of his column, wrote, in “Confessions of a Muckraker” (1979), that his boss “was as much the political activist as the reporter” and that he himself didn’t always enjoy being Pearson’s “ward heeler.” According to Anderson, Hubert Humphrey, a Pearson favorite, may have had “a firmer grasp on journalistic propriety than Drew,” whose methods sometimes left Anderson feeling queasy. (Not that Anderson was shy in the investigative department. It was he who listened to the gleanings of that hidden microphone during the Sherman Adams affair, and became such a thorn in Nixon’s side that G. Gordon Liddy volunteered to kill him.) What Anderson finds most remarkable about his boss is the way Pearson took “infinite pains to inculcate his convictions on the moral objectives of the newspaper column and the just society.” Pearson was particularly outspoken on behalf of civil rights, and spent twelve years directing the Big Brothers of Washington, D.C. “You’re so much pleasanter in person than in print,” McGeorge Bundy, the national-security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, once told him.
Pearson had thought of becoming a diplomat before arriving in Washington at the end of the Coolidge years. For the rest of his life, he offered himself as a sort of freelance envoy, organizing a post-Second World War “Friendship Train” of relief supplies to hungry Allied populations and later dispatching “Freedom Balloons” full of wholesome propaganda into the Eastern Bloc skies. Certain that he knew more than the ambassadors the U.S. sent to Moscow, he grasped any chance to serve as a back channel to the Soviets. He hosted Russian editors and students, and appears to have dined with the longtime Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, more often than with any high-ranking U.S. official. He visited Khrushchev at his dacha and described him, in Mrs. Thatcher’s later, famous words about Gorbachev, as someone “we can do business with.” As a gentleman farmer back home in the States, Pearson was pleased to urge the General Secretary to try “sorghum instead of corn for the more arid areas of the Soviet Union.”
He took credit for a slight softening of American public opinion toward the Russians, but his accommodationist writings and activities got him picketed in anti-Castro Miami and attacked by Senator Strom Thurmond. Assaults from the other side were welcomed. “Radio Moscow has taken a crack at me—thank God,” Pearson writes in the diary on April 4, 1962, before recalling a promise made to him by Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, “to write some critical stories.” A year earlier, Pearson had asked Pierre Salinger for a domestic version of the same: “I suggested that when the going got tough and I got too much hell from Republican editors, I would ask Kennedy a favor—namely, that he do to me what Harry Truman did: blast me. This would really set me up with the press. Salinger said that when the time was desperate to call on him.”
Pearson arrived in the capital too late for Teapot Dome and departed life too early for Watergate, but he covered nearly every smaller scandal in between. His generally straitlaced nature allowed him little tolerance for even lovable rogues. “There is a streak of insanity in the Long family,” he writes in the diary, unwilling to give a pass to either Huey’s son or brother, the bibulous Senator Russell and the randy Governor Earl. For all his championing of civil rights, he withheld full approval of Martin Luther King because of what he knew about King’s extramarital affairs, though by the courtesies of the time, sex, like drinking, was more a matter for the diary than for the column. Pearson noted, first for himself and then for posterity, that J. Edgar Hoover and the newest husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post were “in the same category” as Walter Jenkins, the aide to Lyndon Johnson who was arrested in a Y.M.C.A. men’s room during the 1964 campaign. He privately records Lady Bird Johnson’s expression of annoyance at the departure of her husband’s most recent mistress: “What does Mary Margaret mean by leaving without breaking in someone to take her place?”
The most flagrant dalliances belong, of course, to John F. Kennedy, who is “laying every girl in sight.” On March 4, 1961, the journalist Ernest Cuneo and his wife come to Drew and Luvie Pearson’s for dinner: “We spent most of the evening discussing the favorite topic of conversation: the sex life of the president of the United States.” Yet no one reports on it. Even now, this new volume of diaries carries a dramatis personae but no footnotes, and some half-told stories require a bit of digging by the reader interested in their completion. “Kennedy shacked up with the female singer who had entertained the [White House Correspondents’ Association]. He had never met her before but sent for her.” Newspapers from February, 1961, provide, alas, less than conclusive information. It was probably Julie London but could also have been Dorothy Provine.
Financial corruption, which could be publicly exposed, repelled Pearson even more than canoodling and boozing did. If Sherman Adams was his biggest catch of the fifties, a decade later the Connecticut senator Thomas J. Dodd presented himself as a kind of iniquitous twofer, a man sometimes too drunk to accept delivery of his bribes. Pearson was following the money long before Woodward and Bernstein, conducting green-eyeshaded examinations of documents questionably obtained. In pursuing the Dodd case, he faced a civil suit (he won it) as well as a possible indictment (he avoided it). As a frequent defendant in libel trials, Pearson learned to confuse juries by gratefully shaking the hand of whatever witness had just testified against him.
Had he lived to see it, Pearson, like Nixon, would have loved the Internet; he believed that nearly all human behavior, public and private, could be explained by tracing the links in every chain of friendship and enmity. Here is how he spells out, on April 20, 1965, the way a tax bill beneficial to DuPont came to pass in the late fifties:
The column certainly made no mention of Frear’s approach.
Pearson didn’t enrich himself—a year before he died he was still hustling along the lecture circuit to pay his bills—but he kept track of every kind of currency he was owed. For all that Strauss’s treatment of Oppenheimer may have bothered him, so did Oppenheimer’s ingratitude: “After I had gone to bat day in and day out when Oppenheimer was on trial, he turned me down for a TV interview and went on Ed Murrow’s program instead.” Pearson regarded the Kennedys as especially ungrateful to everyone, including him, but he remained friendly enough toward J.F.K. to contemplate helping him during his first live press conference: “I had planned a question about the Free University of Cuba but couldn’t get hold of Salinger to coach Kennedy in advance.” Seven years later, when NBC airs three showings of a Bobby Kennedy press conference, Pearson can only “wonder what Bobby had on NBC.” The knowledge that everybody has something on somebody creates an informational barter economy and a reputational balance of terror, a small-scale version of the Doomsday-avoidance mechanism being used by the U.S. and the Soviets. The “gimlet-eyed cold young man” who serves as his brother’s Attorney General calls off an investigation of New Hampshire’s corrupt Senator Styles Bridges after “a very high Republican” threatens to expose the President’s sexual infidelities.
By 1968, Pearson disliked R.F.K. so much that the diary pays him the highest anti-compliment possible: “If Bobby were nominated, I might well vote for Nixon.” In the event, Pearson voted for Humphrey and held back one of the biggest items he ever had, news that Nixon had received psychotherapy from a New York doctor named Arnold Hutschnecker. He killed the story himself a week before the election: “I wasn’t sure Hutschnecker was telling me the truth, and I have [in the past] had such hell from editors that I decided to play it safe.”
Lyndon Johnson, the President with whom Pearson had the longest, closest, and most complicated relationship, is the one who kept him tied in ethical knots. Back in 1956, Johnson agreed to support the Presidential hopes of Pearson’s preferred candidate, the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, if Pearson backed off from investigating the tax advantage Johnson had secured for a Texas construction company. By 1964, Tyler Abell, Pearson’s stepson, was working in Johnson’s White House, while Pearson’s daughter-in-law, Bess Abell, served as Lady Bird Johnson’s social secretary; Pearson himself was asked to help write the State of the Union address.
Pearson had to rationalize all these things as being part of his service to the greater progressive good; in 1968, L.B.J. told him that the Administration’s Fair Housing Act would never have passed without his public drumbeat on its behalf. The column may have taken shots at the Administration, but some were in the nature of that Russian criticism of Pearson: camouflage for an alliance. According to the diaries, Leonard Marks, the head of the United States Information Agency, tells Johnson that Pearson “has to needle you occasionally to keep his impartiality,” and then assures Pearson that “the president agreed.”
He had good reason to. On November 13, 1967, Pearson records being told by Johnson, “You might write a paragraph showing what Wilbur Mills and Jerry Ford are doing to the country. They entered a conspiracy to prevent new taxes until there was a cut in spending. I only asked for $4 billion in new taxes this year to help pay for the war and head off inflation, but they are adamant.” It took Pearson nine days to comply. A search of his columns turns up, on November 22nd, a paragraph reporting the “inside fact” that “the President was sore as blazes” at Mills and Ford “for conspiring together to block the President’s request for a tax increase.” Newspaper readers didn’t get to see how L.B.J. urged the information on the columnist, just as they weren’t privy to a diarized record of Pearson’s reaction to a Johnson TV appearance: “Lyndon did fairly well at his press conference, though I can see why the country is turning against him. He drawls along in a ponderous manner like a hick farmer standing in a pulpit pretending to be God.”
As with most diaries, the greatest pleasures to be had from Pearson’s tend to be fast, peripheral ones occasioned by minor characters who are out the door a moment after they’ve arrived. Oh, look, it’s Nancy Pelosi’s father—“Tommy D’Alesandro, who put across the Kennedy blitz in Maryland, was his usual backslapping self”—and, a page later, there’s the first Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, revolted by her husband’s recent surrender to his rival: “ ‘Nelson has just come into the room wearing a big Nixon button, and I could throw up.’ ”
The diaries also contain one or two unexpected antipathies, motifs of contempt that are never really explained. Pearson is much harsher on Jacqueline Kennedy than on her philandering husband, describing her, variously, as “pretty tough and conceited,” “a cold gal who deep down doesn’t have much sympathy for the aims of her husband and wouldn’t know a social reform when she saw one,” and “just plain lazy.” During the last days of 1963, at the height of the widowed First Lady’s public deification, Pearson writes, with more wishfulness than evidence, that “resentment against Jackie is mounting” among Washington ladies who lunch.
Apart from the more cerebral Walter Lippmann, the only columnist more famous than Pearson was the other Walter—Winchell, whom Pearson spotted at the 1964 Democratic Convention “manufacturing big items out of trivia.” But Pearson never lost the conviction that his own items were purposeful and history-making. On every page of the diary one senses how much it all matters to him. Jack Anderson says that, two weeks before his death, his boss told a friend, “We’ve got to live a long time. We’ve got so much to do.”
Of course, the reading of any diary distorts the life being chronicled. Each small entry becomes, for the latter-day reader, an accelerated particle in a narrative now moving faster than the speed of life. The form can cut the most portentous diarist down to size, and it may be especially brutal to politicians and journalists, who, as they circle and use and become one another, only rarely exchange their habitual sense of emergency for the longer, calmer view. In 1861, William Howard Russell, the London Times’ American correspondent, found himself playing cards with the New York Times’ Henry J. Raymond and Secretary of State William Seward. When Abraham Lincoln entered the room, Seward genially urged the President to seize an opportunity: “Here, Mr. President, we have got the two Times—of New York and of London—if they would only do what is right and what we want, all will go well.” Lincoln, looking for a moment beyond the endless dance of pols and pressmen, merely replied, “If the bad Times would go where we want them, good Times would be sure to follow.” ♦
