Inderjit Badhwar's Blog: Badhwar's Years With Iconic Jack Anderson in Views On News/IndiaLegal mag

Watergate and the years with Anderson

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4 hours ago

Retrospective-INDERJIT BADHWAR recalls some defining moments in his career

By Inderjit Badhwar

Perhaps the greatest badge of honor I cherish in the more than 35 years that I have been a journalist actually hangs between the covers of the widely-acclaimed book Peace, War and Politics, America’s legendary investigative journalist Jack Anderson’s magnum opus about his over 50-year-long newspaper crusade against injustice, bullies, dictators, fraud, waste and corruption in high places. In this book, published in 2000, my name figures in a list of Jack’s “dirty dozen” muckrakers whom he calls his “fellow travelers whom I met by the roadside carrying signs saying, WE WILL WORK FOR THE SHEER LOVE OF IT… I am proud and humbled as I review the accomplishments of those who joined my ride on the Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

“Washington Merry-Go-Round” was the name of Jack’s investigative column that he inherited from his mentor, the suave and swashbuckling Drew Pearson in the late 1960s. Pearson was a great scooper whose stories, usually leaked to him by Washington’s Bold and Beautiful,
including presidents and judges, whom he entertained lavishly, F Scott Fitzgerald-style at his palatial Washington residence, mesmerized the capital’s establishment. Jack lacked Pearson’s social charisma. He was essentially a country boy, a conservative Mormon from Utah, innocent of Washington’s social graces. He had cut his reportorial teeth when he was barely 20 years of age as a war correspondent that included a stint in China during World War II. In the US, his sources were government whistleblowers, ex-convicts, mid-level federal employees, con-men, beat cops, private detectives, and volunteers who worked in the hospice movement. His stories rattled presidents, Congressmen, big business and, asNewsweek put it, “mercilessly catapulted half a dozen national figures to their ruin.”

I joined Jack’s team as his senior associate in 1978, after having done a long stint with the Washington-based Army Times group of newspapers covering the federal bureaucracy and the Pentagon. In 1975, I was awarded “The National Civil Service League Award for Government Service Reporting” for my series of exposes on how, as part of the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon had politicized the American federal bureaucracy and civil service through the strong-arm tactics of his Watergate musclemen and dirty tricksters like Gordon Liddy.

Nixon hated Anderson’s guts for his Watergate investigations showing massive abuse of executive power and constitutional improprieties. I was a minor cog in a large wheel of investigative reporters, including The Washington Post’s Woodward and Bernstein who unraveled different parts of the Watergate scam.

At that time Jack was already larger than life in his own lifetime. He had won a Pulitzer in 1972 for exposing the Nixon-Kissinger tilt towards Pakistan during the Bangladesh war. He was on top of Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List” during Watergate in the mid-1970s, and had survived the efforts of White House undercover operatives to poison him. Earlier, when Drew Pearson was his boss, Jack had direct access to reclusive billionaire aviator Howard Hughes and had actually coached him on how to expose before a Senate investigations committee the machinations of Senator Bill Brewster who was being secretly bankrolled by Pan Am to derail the entry of Trans World Air-lines (TWA) into international routes. In the 1970s, Jack’s top reporter Les Whitten faced a prison sentence for stealing papers from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs to expose injustices to native American Indians. Another reporter and my investigative partner for many years, Jack “Mitch” Mitchell had transported ransom money worth $250,000 (raised by Jack through a private philanthropist) into Bogota to secure the release of Richard Starr, a Peace Corps volunteer held hostage by Columbian terrorists.

So, one day the phone rings in my Army Times office and it’s Jack on my direct line. Even as he said, “Hello, is this Indy (my American name)?”, I could recognize that stentorian, booming voice I had heard so often on the radio and on his television show on ABC’s Good Morning America. “This is Jack.” I refused to be deceived by reality. “Jack who?” “Jack Anderson.” Silence. “Do you have a couple of minutes to come and see me this evening?” That’s how it started. I saw him that evening and he told me he had been following some of the work I’d done and that he’d like to take me on board to replace Brit Hume, one of his stalwarts who had migrated to ABC-TV in a top position. We did not even discuss salary. Who needed to?

Jack’s news empire was at its pinnacle in 1978. Our column appeared in more than 1,000 papers, including the Washington Post, and LA Times, everyday reaching some 40 million readers. We had a TV show, a national magazine, radio broadcasts, and you name it. And before and after my sojourn with Jack we had an embarrassment of riches in this genre that the Washington Post dutifully recalled after his death: the Keating Five congressional ethics scandal; revelations in the Iran-contra scandal; the US government’s tilt away from India toward Pakistan; the ITT-Dita Beard affair, which linked the settlement of a federal anti-trust suit against International Telephone & Telegraph to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican National Convention; the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro; the final days of Howard Hughes; US attempts to undermine the government of Chi-lean President Salvador Allende; allegations about a possible Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the pope; an Iranian connection to the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut; exposure of the Shah of Iran’s brutal Savak secret police’s links with the CIA ; the Richard Starr rescue…

Whistleblowers to Jack were like heralding angels. And our column stood by them as a fortress to repel official retaliation. It was largely because of our stories—and Jack encouraged me to write dozens of them—that America’s iconic whistleblower E Ernest Fitzgerald, a senior Pentagon cost analyst who exposed the Lockheed Corporation’s hand-in-glove cost-overrun fraud with the Defense establishment in the production of the C-5A transport aircraft remained protected from bodily harm even though he was regarded by Nixon as America’s Enemy Number One. Consumer activist Ralph Nader and his activists were some of our best sources for stories about corporate fraud, boardroom tax cheaters.

Unabashedly, Jack encouraged us to steal government documents. He had no guilt. He said: “ All information belongs to the people and we are simply returning it to them. Governments hide information under the cloak of national security. Strip them naked and you’ll see that they’re simply covering up their own misdeeds.” He encouraged us to use hidden cameras, to bug government officials and middlemen. And we often used the service of Washington’s greatest private detective, Dick Bast, to wiretap officials engaged in criminal conspiracies. I worked closely with Bast, whose assistant, incidentally, was Mike Hershman (who wiretapped some FBI agents for me), the head of the Fairfax agency that was used in India in the St Kitts forgery scandal!

Jack insisted that when we went after somebody, it should never be hit and run but hit and chase. “Never wound them,” he once told me. “If you’re going for the big guy go for the jugular. If you wound him he’s dangerous.” That was his homely way of saying: Be accurate and incisive in your reporting. Follow up constantly. That is why when we did stories we did dozens of follow-ups, even if it meant repeating ourselves. “Journalists light fires and then go on to the next one without dealing with the first one,” Jack often said.

My first story for his column was on the neglect of precious historical documents at the National Archives. It was based on powerful on-the-record interview with a senior archivist, who spoke at the risk of his own job. Jack loved the story, ran it but said it was not enough, that I’d actually put the man’s career in jeopardy. How do I protect him? I asked. They’ll cover up and hang him, Jack said. What next? He said simply: “Steal some of those damaged documents.” I was aghast. Steal documents from the National Archives? Yes, he said, and copy them so you have the evidence, and don’t let up.

Through sources we purloined the documents that included as a prize catch the original Declaration of Independence. And we did a half a dozen stories that led to a Congressional investigation. Our supporters called these stories “hits.” When they were published, our readers would call and say, “Great hit man. Keep the artillery going.”

This is not a chronicle of the stories I broke for Jack. Only an indication of what the column was all about and how Jack taught us to go out there and be counted and never to be afraid to fight for someone whose liberty vested interests were about to snuff out. Never hurt the innocent, he warned us. Use your instincts. Do not entrap anybody who does not have a predilection to crime. Otherwise you’re no different from the government you’re trying to expose.

It was in keeping with a razor-thin line of ethics that Jack performed one of his greatest about-faces on a story that was getting him huge publicity. In 1979-80, just about the time I joined him, he had broken the ABSCAM story. My colleague Gary “Mad Dog” Cohn, a huge gun with the Wall Street Journal (he wrote the stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual harassment escapades when he was running for California governor), had obtained blockbusting videotapes of the first sting operation carried out by the FBI against members of Congress and the Senate. The tapes showed them taking cash bribes from an undercover FBI agent posing as an Arab Sheikh wanting to invest in their states.

Even as Jack’s column was basking in the glory of this scoop, I turned the story on its head. I was able to convince Jack that several members of Congress had been deliberately targeted at the behest of FBI Director William Webster because they were pro-Kennedy Democrats who had opposed President Jimmy Carter during the primaries. Yes, they were shown taking bribes. But the FBI had enticed and pursued them—even though many of them did not have a predilection to crime—over a long period. Does the government have the right to create criminals by baiting human frailty?

All Jack said was: “Go ahead, Indy.” In the teeth of opposition from the national press, as well as Jack’s former associates including the revered Les Whitten, I did a series of stories for a year that actually proved my thesis. More than that we discovered that the people conducting the FBI sting operation were extorting their targets for bribes. We hacked at the FBI with such outrage that Director Bill Webster (later CIA Chief) called me and Jack to make a truce.

But the denouement of the series of stories was that a brave whistleblower came forward. She was Marie Weinberg, wife of the FBI stingman, ex-con Mel Weinberg, who had posed as the Arab Sheikh. She gave me proof of the extortions and agreed to testify before a Senate committee. Two days before she was to testify she was found strangled in her Florida home. The news of her death came to me over a phone call from her teen-age son during a late evening in Jack’s office. I broke down. Jack saw me weeping. He was calm. Sturdy. “Jack, it’s my fault,” I said. “I killed an innocent woman for a story.” Jack put his hand on my shoulder and replied: “You did your job as a reporter. We can’t save everybody. Tomorrow, the whole press is going to be calling you. Be prepared to defend the truth.”

Marie died. But our ABSCAM series led to a massive Congressional investigation of the conduct of the FBI in entrapment and the ethics of sting operations. When Jack faltered or strayed, we, his writers and reporters, attacked him. Openly and without fear. We held him up to his own standards of fairness and human values when he took a gratuitous pro-Israel tilt when Israel attacked Lebanon in the 1980s. We attacked him when we found him cozying up to Ronald Reagan. Our protests were posted on a bulletin board right opposite his private office.
He never retaliated. If he did, all of us would have walked out in sack cloth and ashes. We saw America and the world through Jack’s eyes and he saw them through ours. It was his gut that determined his point of view and his gut was inspired by his love for liberty. He had no time for Pakistan. He told me in the 1980s that it would become a haven for terrorists and American Presidents were wooing Pakistan at their own peril. And that one day America would suffer a tremendous blow. That was way, way before 9/11.

I left Jack in 1985 after a power struggle for succession in which he chose Dale Van Atta, a fellow Mormon as his co-columnist and successor. My last project with Jack was during that same year—we made a documentary together called “Rajiv’s India” that was aired on PBS in the US and was nominated for an Emmy but was censored in India because it contained an intimate interview with Ramnath Goenka who was projected as a champion of India’s free press during the Emergency and who said “Indira Gandhi had gone berserk.” Jack loved that quote. Perhaps he saw a lot of Goenka in himself.

The last I saw Jack was in December 2003 (he died on December 17, 2005). I knew he was dying and I said my final farewell to him at his Bethesda (Kachina Place) home on New Year ’s Eve. He was drooling like a baby, hardly able to move his tongue in speech but with that indefatigable twinkle in his Paul Newman blue eyes. I pulled out my handkerchief and dapped up the spittle that streamed down from his lower lip to his chin and chest. With great effort, clenching his pen in his fist like a knife, he scrawled a barely legible note for me on his book Peace, War And Politics. His wife, Libby, was sick in bed upstairs but she knew I was visiting and asked her daughter Tanya to make sure I was fed my favorite pastrami sandwich with “lots” of mustard and mayo.

He turned over pages in his book to show me several pages he had devoted to my escapades especially my meetings with William Webster, and we both laughed at the memories, tears streaming down. We parted with a huge hug. Jack couldn’t stand up so I hugged him sitting down. He blew me a kiss as I started to walk out the door, and we saw each other weeping a little. His daughter Tanya drove me to the metro and told me he had both Parkinson’s as well as bone cancer and she said she prayed that Parkinson’s would get him before the cancer did because the latter would be a more painful end. I think her prayers were answered.

PS: This is what he scribbled in my book, still barely legible: “To Indy, one of my star reporters, who introduced our brand of journalism in India.
Affectionately, Jack.”
Me to Jack: I tried in my own little way.

(Inderjit Badhwar is an award-winning novelist, columnist, and former TV anchor/producer. He is Editor-in-Chief of India Legal. You can follow him on Twitter @indybad. For your feedback, write to us at editor@viewsonnewsonline.com )

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