Anderson's Brass Ring

Columnist Jack Anderson, Washington's most persistent sensationalist, thrives on contention. His column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, gives his audience frequent scoops, but many of his fellow newsmen regard as frivolous his uneven mixture of muckraking and kiss-and-tell gossip. Last week, however, Anderson was basking in more serious attention, after his Merry-Go-Round grabbed off something of a brass ring. In four columns, he disclosed private policy discussions of the Washington Security Action Group, composed of experts from the National Security Council, State Department and Pentagon, concerning Administration action in the India-Pakistan war (see THE NATION). Both the New York Times and Washington Post asked Anderson's permission to print in full some of the documents on which the columns were based. He delightedly complied.

The affair raised three basic questions: 1) What did the papers prove about U.S. policy? 2) What did they prove about the Administration's information practices? 3) How did Anderson get them?

Overstatement. In fact, the papers did not add much to what was already known about President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's strong pro-Pakistan, anti-Indian attitude. Anderson's charges notwithstanding, he did not catch the Administration in a gross deception. The Pentagon papers, dealing with more distant but more momentous events, showed the Government in a far more questionable light. But Anderson did provide fascinating detail about the Administration's decision-making processes as well as the tone and turn of its thinking.

As to information policy, Anderson exaggerated his accomplishment by trying to make it seem a victory of the free press over official censorship. Said he: "It is a secret now if a third-rate bureaucrat blows his nose. The security stamp is being used as promiscuously as a stapling machine." True enough, in general. But the Government obviously has a right to try to keep its consultations private.* The press, on the other hand, also has a right--and a responsibility--to print whatever inside information it can get, provided it does not violate military secrets or damage the national security. As to how Anderson got the goods, he suggests that he simply did a lot of hard digging to pry the documents out of a reluctant security establishment. Just how reluctant is far from clear.

Anderson will not, of course, identify his suppliers. "These are the same sources who have been giving me access to classified material for some time," he says. "The difference is that until now they have been very wary of letting me quote directly. But they became gravely concerned about what seemed to them a colossal moral blunder in the India-Pakistan situation." There is suspicion that the leak happened in the Defense Department. Anderson says that his sources at first would tell him only the general content of the documents, then consented to let him quote from them. When he insisted, "I must document this; you have to go all the way," they turned over copies of "dozens" of papers.

Legman. The columnist's desire for hard proof to support his articles is understandable, particularly because some of his previous revelations had been questioned or generally ignored. While he was still the legman and collaborator of the late Drew Pearson in 1964, Anderson cast doubt on the Johnson Administration's official version of the Tonkin Gulf incident. If he had been able to quote verbatim from Government papers, he says now, that story would have received the attention it deserved. Last year, nine months before the U.S. conducted its recent heavy "protective reaction" raids against North Viet Nam, Anderson revealed plans for just such air strikes, to last from three to ten days.

Not all of his exclusives hit important nails so squarely. It is impossible to come up with seven exposes a week, and occasionally he takes cheap shots, like his recent opus about a minor official who may have taken his secretary on a business trip for unofficial reasons. The Anderson reconstruction of the Chappaquiddick incident, accusing Edward Kennedy of asking a cousin to take the blame, is regarded as largely fictional. But sometimes Anderson columns draw blanket denials and then turn out to be true. It was Anderson who in 1966 exposed the misuse of campaign funds by the late Senator Thomas Dodd.

Since inheriting the column from Pearson in 1969, Anderson has added about 75 new clients, raising his syndication outlets to more than 700. Anderson employs two legmen of his own now, along with three secretaries, but still does plenty of personal spadework. He is rarely seen at press conferences or open events. Rather, he cultivates sources that other newsmen ignore and each week receives tips by the hundreds from bureaucrats and ordinary citizens who think that they have discovered wrongs that need exposure. He does not hesitate to deal in purloined papers; in the Dodd case, the Senator's aides filched office records. Anderson has even had J. Edgar Hoover's garbage cans ransacked, establishing for the record that Hoover serves Chivas Regal Scotch and takes pills to relieve stomach gas. His motive, he says, was to parody an FBI investigative technique.

He can be both puckish and staid.

Last year, to illustrate an article about him in Washingtonian, he happily posed with a live snake slithering from under a rock--supposedly a symbol of his detection of evil. In his personal life, he is anything but flamboyant. A onetime Mormon missionary who attends church regularly, Anderson, 49, avoids Washington night life the way he avoids alcohol and tobacco. The father of nine, Anderson does much of his writing at home in Bethesda, Md., so that he can spend more time with his family.

Anderson may now be taken a little more seriously in Washington. His industriousness and courage have never been questioned, and the latest series of columns prove that his information pipelines indeed run deep. "Jack's right there on the cutting edge," says Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who runs the column on the comics page. Several years ago the Post moved the Merry-Go-Round to a more prestigious place in the paper, but a wave of reader protest forced it back among the funnies.

* The documents were classified secret-sensitive, a designation that falls between the official designations of secret and top secret.

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