Anderson’s relentless investigations of the capital’s elite and privileged earned him both the admiration of his faithful readers and the ire of those caught in his crosshairs. Politicians regarded Anderson with anything from grudging respect to outright hostility, and treated him accordingly.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was Anderson’s friend during his early reporting days in Washington, even attending Anderson’s wedding in 1949. By 1953, that friendship had dissolved completely, as Anderson and Drew Pearson published columns railing against the Wisconsin senator’s accusations of rampant Communist sentiment within the federal government.
To FBI founder and director J. Edgar Hoover, Anderson was a “flea-ridden dog” for exposing the scope and power of the American Mafia, whose very existence Hoover had long denied. Hoover’s retaliatory attempts to investigate and discredit Anderson lasted until the director’s death in 1972.
Anderson’s genuine like of Jimmy Carter and his respect for the President’s religious convictions did not prevent the Merry-Go-Round’s criticism of the Carter administration’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Billy Carter’s Libyan connections. Carter bitterly quipped “Jack Anderson is the one columnist in America who habitually lies.”
Anderson topped Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” for years. His 1970s reporting of the administration’s Watergate and Indo-Pakistani foreign policy were the latest of nearly two decades’ worth of close scrutiny on Nixon. Infamous White House “Plumbers” Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt discussed the possibility of assassinating Anderson.
Mu’ammar Gadhafi, slighted by Anderson’s 1979 Parade article listing the Libyan President among the “most reckless leaders in the world,” invited Anderson to Libya for a personal interview in March of that year. Anderson later characterized the president’s grandiose philosophies as “the same self-indulgent blather that all potentates use.”
The Collection contains a wealth of letters written to Anderson from around the nation, written to alternately praise or condemn him, suggesting story leads, alerting him to perceived travesties of justice, or simply asking for his autograph.
The Collection contains a wealth of letters written to Anderson from around the nation, written to alternately praise or condemn him, suggesting story leads, alerting him to perceived travesties of justice, or simply asking for his autograph.
