“Jack Anderson was like Ahab chasing after Richard Nixon, this great white whale, and he plagued Nixon from the very beginning of his career,” says Feldstein, a veteran journalist and former “Dateline NBC” producer who has spent years researching the life and career of Anderson, once one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in the country.įeldstein’s book does not paint Anderson as a journalistic white knight. The speech was widely credited with saving Nixon from being dumped as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952. That discovery led to Nixon’s nationally televised “Checkers” speech, in which he vowed to keep the new cocker spaniel he had bought for his daughters. While the aborted scheme to murder Anderson has been reported - and disputed - before, Feldstein found new corroboration: A confession before his death by ex-White House “plumber” Howard Hunt.Īs Feldstein writes, the plot was the culmination of a 40-year feud that dated back to the early 1950s, when Anderson uncovered a secret slush fund that wealthy backers had set up to financially support Nixon. The book relies in part on newly unearthed tapes from the National Archives that document how Nixon’s aides plotted to destroy Anderson by planting forged evidence with him and spreading false rumors about his sex life and that of one of his associates.įeldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a “massive dose” of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car.
The White House obsession with Anderson - whose "Washington Merry Go-Round" column was the WikiLeaks of its day - is detailed in a new book being published this month, “Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture,” by journalism professor Mark Feldstein.