If the headline when a journalist is dies is “Who Angered the Powerful”, then the journalist's legacy is secure. I wonder how many of the current crop of sycophants and ring-kissers who masquerade as journalists will merit such praise?
Jack Anderson, Investigative Journalist Who Angered the Powerful, Dies at 83
Jack Anderson, whose investigative column once appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers with 40 million readers, won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted J. Edgar Hoover to call him “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures,” died Saturday. He was 83.
...
Mr. Anderson was a flamboyant bridge between the muckrakers of the early decades of the 20th century and the battalions of investigative reporters unleashed by news organizations following Watergate. He relished being called “the Paul Revere of journalism” for his knack for uncovering major stories first almost as much as he enjoyed being at the top of Nixon's enemies list.His journalistic reach extended to radio, television and magazines, and his scoops were legion. They included the United States' tilt away from India toward Pakistan during Bangladesh's war for independence, which won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1972.
Another was his linking of the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT by the Justice Department to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican convention. Still another was revealing the Reagan administration's efforts to illegally sell arms to Iran and funnel the proceeds to anti-Communist forces in Central America.
In what was the nation's most widely read, longest-running political column, Mr. Anderson broke stories that included the Central Intelligence Agency's enlisting of the Mafia to kill Castro, the savings and loan scandal, Senator Thomas J. Dodd's loose ethics, and the mystery surrounding Howard Hughes's death.
He liked to say that he and his staff of eager investigators daily did what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal.
Update - Murray Waas writes:
whatever already!
By way of disclosure, he was my first boss in journalism. He put me to work for him between my freshman and sophmore years in college. I was eighteen at the time. The power of his column was so great that I could get a Congressman or Deputy Secretary of Defense on the phone in ten minutes, the person I was calling always anxious as to why someone from Jack's office was phoning. The phone was always better than visiting in person: When I went out for interviews, the subjects often took one look at me and just laughed out loud. I may have been eighteen, but I was one of those kids who was eighteen looking like fifteen. The cherub, however, always got the last laugh in over 1,000 newspapers.
