Drew Pearson (journalist), Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Drew Pearson (journalist), Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andrew Russell Pearson (1897–1969) was one of the best-known American
columnists of his day, noted for his syndicated newspaper column
"Washington Merry-Go-Round," in which he criticized various public
persons. He also had a program on NBC Radio titled Drew Pearson
Comments.

Early life and career

Pearson was born in Evanston IL to Paul Martin Pearson, an English
professor at Northwestern Univ, & Edna Wolfe. When Pearson was 6 years
of age, his father joined the faculty of Swarthmore College as prof of
public speaking, & the family moved to PA, joining the Society of
Friends, with which the college was then affiliated. After being
educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Pearson attended Swarthmore from
1915-19, where he edited its student newspaper, The Phoenix.

From 1919-21, Pearson served with the American Friends Service
Committee, directing postwar rebuilding operations in Pec, which at
that time was part of Serbia. From 1921-22, he lectured in geography
at UPenn.

In 1923 Pearson traveled to Japan, China, New Zealand, Australia,
India, & Serbia, & persuaded several newspapers to buy articles about
his travels. He was also commissioned by the American "Around the
World Syndicate" to produce a set of interviews entitled "Europe’s
Twelve Greatest Men."

In 1924, he taught industrial geography at Columbia University.

From 1925-28, Pearson continued reporting on international events,
including strikes in China, the Geneva Naval Conference, the
Pan-American Conference in Havana, & the signing of the Kellogg-Briand
Pact in Paris.

In 1929 he became the Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun.
However, in 1931-32, with Robert S. Allen, he anonymously published a
book called Washington Merry-Go-Round & its sequel. When the Sun
discovered Pearson had co-authored these books, he was promptly fired.
Late in 1932, Pearson & Allen secured a contract with the
Scripps–Howard syndicate, United Features, to syndicate a column
called "Washington Merry-Go-Round." It first appeared in Eleanor
"Cissy" Patterson’s Washington Herald on Nov 17, 1932. But as WWII
escalated in Europe, Pearson’s strong support of FDR, in opposition to
Patterson & the Herald’s isolationist position, led to an acrimonious
termination of Pearson’s & Allen’s contract with the Herald. In 1941
The Washington Post picked up the contract for the "Washington
Merry-Go-Round."

Radio, film, and other media

From 1935-36, Allen & Pearson broadcast a 15-min program twice a week
on the Mutual Broadcasting System. They continued with a 30-minute
music & news show, Listen America, in 1939–40, ending this partnership
in 1941. They also wrote a comic strip, Hap Hopper, Washington
Correspondent, which was drawn from 1939-43 by Jack Sparling, & from
1943 onward by Al Plastino.

Pearson continued alone on NBC with Drew Pearson Comments from 1941-53
for a variety of sponsors (Serutan, Nutrex, Lee Hats, Adam Hats). His
commentary was broadcast through 1968 on the now-defunct Intermountain
Network.

In addition to radio, Pearson appeared in a number of Hollywood
movies, such as the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still &
RKO's 1945's Betrayal from the East, a WWII propaganda movie. In the
former film, Pearson (playing himself) is the only journalist who
urges calm & restraint (vs the fear & paranoia evoked by his
colleagues) while Washington is panicked by the escape of the alien
visitor Klaatu. In the latter movie, Pearson narrated, in his "now it
can be told" style, an alleged exposé that accused Japanese Americans
of being part of a Japanese conspiracy to engage in acts of terrorism
& espionage. The movie was based on the 1943 best-selling book
Betrayal from the East: The Inside Story of Japanese Spies in America
by Alan Hynd. Pearson also appeared as himself in City Across the
River (1949).

In 1952-53, Pearson hosted The Drew Pearson Show on the ABC & DuMont
networks.

Washington Merry-Go-Round

The "Merry-Go-Round" column started as a result of the Pearson's
anonymous publication in 1931 of the book, Washington Merry-Go-Round,
co-written with Robert Allen, the Washington bureau chief for The
Christian Science Monitor. The book was a collection of muckraking
news items concerning key figures in public life that challenged the
journalistic code of the day. In 1932 it was followed by a second
book, More Merry-Go-Round. Although they were exposed as the
publishers & forced to resign their positions, Pearson & Allen were
successful enough in their books to become co-authors of the
syndicated column, the "Merry-Go-Round," that same year. Also in 1932,
the original book was made into a film of the same name by Columbia
Pictures, directed by James Cruze, & starring Lee Tracy & Constance
Cummings.

According to his one-time partner, Jack Anderson, Pearson saw
journalism as a weapon to be used against those he judged to be
working against the public interest. When forced to choose between a
story's accuracy & Pearson's desire to pursue a person whose views he
disliked, Pearson had no qualms about publishing the story anyway.

In relating his disclosures on Washington pols, newsmakers, & the
politically connected, Pearson frequently resorted to a pattern of
combining factual or corroborated leaked news items together with
fabricated or unsubstantiated details, the latter designed to
emphasize & sensationalize the basic story. Pearson's method included
paying waiters & chauffeurs to eavesdrop on their charges, gleaning
info on pols from political enemies, bribing a navy clerk to reveal
classified data, or even ordering a subordinate to break into the desk
of a prominent Washington attorney. A favorite Pearson tactic was to
reveal salacious details of a subject's sexual proclivities for the
purpose of embarrassment or intimidation.

During WWII, Pearson's column not only revealed embarrassing news
items, but expanded to criticize the Roosevelt admin's conduct of the
war, in particular U.S. foreign policy regarding Joseph Stalin & the
Soviet Union. As a supporter of the Soviet Union's struggle against
Nazi Germany, Pearson demanded that the Allied Command create a second
front in Europe in 1943 to assist the Soviets. When Pearson's demands
were not met, he began to openly criticize Secretary of State Cordell
Hull, James Dunn, & other State Dept officials, whom Pearson accused
of hating Soviet Russia. After one of Pearson's more virulent columns
accused Sec'y of State Hull & his deputies of a conscious policy to
"bleed Russia white," Pres. Roosevelt convened a press conference in
which he angrily accused Pearson of printing statements that were a
lie "from beginning to end", jeopardizing U.N. unity, & committing an
act of bad faith towards his own nation. The president concluded his
statement by calling Pearson "a chronic liar."

Pearson was the first to report the 1943 incident of Gen. Patton's
slapping of soldier Charles Kuhl. Pearson, whose rep had been severely
damaged after FDR had publicly called him a "chronic liar", wanted to
settle scores with the Roosevelt admin. Ernest Cuneo, a friend of
Pearson & an official of the OSS, suggested to Pearson that a
sensational, exclusive news story would make people forget Roosevelt's
criticism. Cuneo offered Pearson details of Patton's slapping of a
private soldier, Charles Kuhl, which he had learned from others in the
War Dept. In typical Pearson style, the columnist’s version of the
slapping incident bore little relation to that of the actual event,
conflated the details of two separate incidents involving Patton, &
falsely claimed that Patton would "not be used in important combat
anymore." Allied HQ denied that Patton had received either an official
reprimand or a relief from combat duty, but confirmed that Patton had
slapped a soldier with his gloves. Demands for Patton to be recalled &
sent home soon arose in Congress as well as in newspaper articles &
editorials across the country. However, public opinion was largely
favorable to Patton. While Patton was later reassigned & his career
advancement slowed, he was not relieved, but continued to serve in the
European theater, where he would later command the famous U.S. Third
Army. Pearson's broadcast & subsequent article on Patton's alleged
behavior sufficiently raised the suspicions of Sec'y of War Henry L.
Stimson that he requested Army General Joseph T. McNarney to "put an
inspector on the War Dept to see who has been leaking out info.
Pearson’s articles are about 3/4 false but there’s just a germ of
truth in them that someone must have given him."

After Pearson reported that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was actively
campaigning for his own promotion, MacArthur sued Pearson for
defamation, but dropped the suit after Pearson threatened to publish
love letters from MacArthur to his Eurasian paramour, Isabel Rosario
Cooper.

In 1943 Pearson hired David Karr, a disgraced former employee of the
Office of War Information as his chief aide. That year, a U.S. Civil
Service Commission hearing had concluded that Karr was both untruthful
& unreliable. Karr earned a rep as an unscrupulous investigative
reporter who misrepresented himself to sources. In 1944, Karr, a
supporter of far left political causes & a former employee of the
Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, became active in Vice President
Henry Wallace's effort to remain on the presidential ticket. Karr once
obtained a confidential State Dept report to FDR on Joseph Stalin by
claiming to be on Vice President Wallace's staff, & was the subject of
two separate FBI espionage & loyalty investigations during the war.

In 1945, Pearson hired Jack Anderson for the staff of the
"Merry-Go-Round", which Anderson renamed, The Washington
Merry-Go-Round after Pearson's death.

Post-war activities

Following WWII, Pearson was largely responsible for the "Friendship
Train" which raised over $40 million in aid for war-torn Europe. On
Dec 18, 1947 the much-needed food, medicine, & supplies arrived in
France.

In Feb 1946, Pearson revealed the existence of a Canadian ring of
Soviet spies who had given away secret info about the A-bomb, & he
hinted that the espionage scandal might extend to America as well. The
govt had kept the news under wraps for several months until Pearson
broke the news in a series of radio broadcasts. It is possible that he
was tipped off by a govt official who wanted to turn American opinion
against the Soviets, possibly even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover,
according to historian Amy Knight.

He had a role in the downfall of U.S. Congressman John Parnell Thomas,
Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in 1948.
After revelations in Pearson's column, Thomas was investigated & later
convicted of conspiracy to defraud the govt for hiring friends who
never worked for him, then depositing their paychecks into his
personal accounts. Pearson was a staunch opponent of the actions of
Sen. Joseph McCarthy & other attempts by Congress to investigate
Soviet & communist influence in govt & the media, & eagerly denounced
the allegations by Sen. McCarthy & the House Committee.

In May 1948, Pearson leaked news in the Washington Post that the U.S.
SEC & Justice Dept were talking to Preston Thomas Tucker of the Tucker
Corpo, an auto company in Chicago.[citation needed] Pearson stated
that the agencies would uncover financial crimes at the
company.[citation needed] Tucker stock dropped from $5 to $2 based on
Pearson's charges.[citation needed] The SEC and Justice later found
Tucker & his company innocent of any wrongdoing, but the damage was
done.[citation needed] The Tucker Corp was never able to recover &
went out of business.

James Forrestal

In the 1940s, Pearson made several allegations against the Sec'y of
Defense James V. Forrestal, who served under both Presidents Roosevelt
& Truman. Although Forrestal was admired for his efficiency & hard
work, he was despised for his Wall Street background & strong
anti-communist views by some in the media, particularly Pearson, who
began attacking Forrestal while Roosevelt was in office. Pearson told
his associate Jack Anderson that he (Pearson) believed Forrestal was
"the most dangerous man in America" & claimed that if he was not
removed from office he would "cause another world war". Pearson also
insinuated that Forrestal was guilty of corruption, though he was
completely unable to prove any wrongdoing. The lowest blow came in Jan
1949, when Pearson related that Forrestal's wife had been the victim
of a holdup back in 1937 & falsely suggested that Forrestal had run
away, leaving his wife defenseless.

After Truman took office, Forrestal attempted to moderate Truman's
policy of large-scale defense economization, which was radically
reducing the size of the U.S. armed forces at a time of increased Cold
War tensions. The policy had infuriated the U.S. armed forces chiefs,
& Pearson, sensing an opportunity, began to publish info he had
received from Pentagon sources on Forrestal's mental condition.
Pearson unrelentingly continued his attacks on Forrestal in his
columns & radio broadcasts, openly berating Truman for not firing
Forrestal. Truman asked for Forrestal's resignation, replacing him
with Louis A. Johnson.

After Forrestal's death in May 1949 (caused by a fall from a
16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hosp), Pearson stated in his
column that Forrestal suffered from "paranoia" & had attempted suicide
on four previous occasions. Pearson's claim of paranoia & previous
suicide attempts by Forrestal was completely contradicted by the
testimony of Forrestal's attending physicians at Bethesda & is not
corroborated by the doctors' reports, Forrestal's medical file or the
official Navy investigative report of his death. Pearson's own
protege, Jack Anderson, later asserted that Pearson "hounded Jim
Forrestal with dirty aspersions & insinuations until at last,
exhausted & his nerves unstrung, one of the finest servants that the
Republic ever had died of suicide."

Speaking out against Senator McCarthy

In 1950, Pearson began the first in a series of columns attacking Sen.
Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy declared that he had a list of 205
people in the State Dept that were members of the American Communist
Party. Ironically, Pearson, through his associate Jack Anderson, had
been using McCarthy as a confidential source for info on other pols.
Pearson used McCarthy's revelations in his columns with one exception
– material on suspected Communists working in the U.S. govt that
McCarthy & his staff had uncovered. Over the next two months McCarthy
made seven Senate speeches on Drew Pearson, calling for a "patriotic
boycott" of his radio show which cost Pearson the sponsor of his radio
show. Twelve newspapers cancelled their contract with Pearson.

In response, Sen. McCarthy referred to Pearson's associate David Karr
as Pearson's "KGB handler". Karr had been exposed by the House
Un-American Activities Committee in 1943 as having worked for two
years on the staff of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker. In
response, Pearson claimed that Karr only joined the Daily Worker
because he wanted to get into baseball games for free. Karr ostensibly
covered home Yankee games for the Daily Worker, a paper not known for
its sports readership, but his other activities remained unknown at
the time. Years later, however, the release of the FBI's Venona
decrypt of June 1944 revealed that Karr was an informational source
for the NKVD. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Soviet
investigative journalist Yevgenia Albats published an article in
Izvestia quoting documents from KGB archives that Karr was "a
competent KGB source" who "submitted info to the KGB on the tech
capabilities of the U.S. & other capitalist countries". Another member
of Pearson's staff, Andrew Older, along with his wife, was identified
in 1951 as a Communist Party member in testimony before the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee. Older's sister, Julia Older, was also
suspected of having spied for the Soviet Union.

In Dec 1950 McCarthy & Pearson were involved in a public brawl at the
Sulgrave Club in Washington, D.C. Pearson later sued McCarthy for
injuries he allegedly received in the fight, which Pearson stated
resulted from being "grabbed by the neck & kicked in the groin." The
following month, McCarthy delivered a speech in the Senate in which he
referred to Pearson as a "communist tool".

In Oct, 1953, Sen. McCarthy began investigating communist infiltration
into the military. McCarthy's attempts to discredit Robert Stevens,
the Sec'y of the Army, infuriated President Eisenhower, who instructed
the Dept of the Army to release info detrimental to McCarthy to
journalists who were known to be opposed to him. On Dec 15, 1952,
Pearson, working with Eisenhower's staff, published a column using the
info on McCarthy, dealing him a significant blow.

Later years

By the mid-1950s, Pearson's appetite for championing liberal &
populist causes had waned considerably. In a column attacking Calif
Gov. Ronald Reagan released on Oct 31, 1967, Pearson claimed that a
"homosexual ring has been operating in his (Reagan's) office",
including a claim that a tape recording existed of "a sex orgy which
had taken place at a cabin near Lake Tahoe, leased by two members of
Reagan's staff. Eight men were involved." Later press reports claimed
that the alleged tape that Pearson had mentioned in his column did not
exist.

In other writing, Pearson referred to homosexuality as a "bipartisan
problem" in Washington & a "disease".

At the time of Pearson's death of a heart attack in 1969 in
Washington, D.C., the column was syndicated to more than 650
newspapers, more than twice as many as any other, with an estimated 60
million readers, & was famous for its investigative style of
journalism. A Harris Poll commissioned by TIME Magazine at that time
showed that Pearson was America's best-known newspaper columnist at
the time of his death. The column was continued by Jack Anderson &
then by Douglas Cohn & Eleanor Clift, who combine commentary with
historical perspectives. It is the longest-running syndicated column
in America.

Personal life and death

Pearson had one daughter, Ellen Cameron Pearson (1926–2010), in a
short marriage (1925–28) to Felicia Gizycka, daughter of the newspaper
heiress Cissy Patterson & Count Joseph Gizycky of Poland. Thereafter,
Pearson maintained a strained relationship with his former
mother-in-law, & they frequently exchanged barbed comments in
print.[citation needed] His second wife was Luvie Moore Abell (a
cousin of Edith Kermit Carow), whom he married in 1936; through that
union he had a step son, Tyler Abell, to whom he was close throughout
his life. Abell later became Chief of Protocol under L.B.J.

Pearson died on Sept 1, 1969 at the age of 71 from the effects of a
heart attack he had suffered a few days before. Jack Anderson took
over as writer of the Washington Merry-Go-Round. An obit in Time
magazine declared that over the years the disclosures in Pearson's
column sent four U.S. Congressmen to jail and led to the resignation
of Eisenhower's chief of staff, Sherman Adams. Douglas Cohn continued
the column after Anderson's death in 2005, and it remains the
longest-running column in American history.[citation needed]

Criticism

During his career, Pearson had many critics, both inside & outside
Washington. His style of combining factual reporting with
rumormongering & innuendo contributed to mixed opinions about his work
from others in the press, who often sympathized with his goals when
railing against political opponents or corrupt businessmen, but found
themselves conflicted over Pearson's capricious choice of villains for
his columns, as well as his tactics in collecting & reporting
salacious personal info. Throughout his career, Pearson used details
of scandalous sexual liaisons to attack his personal & political
opponents.[citation needed]

In a book review published more than forty years after Pearson's
death, journalist Jack Shafer called Pearson "one of the skuzziest
journalists to ever write a story."

William F. Buckley Jr. declared himself "the founder of The National
Committee to Horsewhip Drew Pearson".

Published works

Washington Merry-Go-Round (New York: Horace Liveright, 1931).
More Merry-Go-Round (1932)
The American Diplomatic Game (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935)
U.S.A.: Second Class Power? (1958),
The Case Against Congress: a Compelling Indictment of Corruption on
Capitol Hill (1958)
The Senator Doubleday (1968)
The President Doubleday (1970)
Diaries, 1949–1959 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974),
Nine Old Men (American Constitutional and Legal History) with Robert
Allen, (1974) ISBN 0-306-70609-1 The Nine Old Men, Drew Pearson and
Robert S. Allen, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1937
Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969, by
Drew Pearson (Author), Peter Hannaford (Editor), Richard Norton Smith
(Foreword), September 15, 2015 ISBN 978-1612346939, University of
Nebraska Press

Awards and recognition

Pearson was awarded Norway's Medal of St. Olav, the French Legion of
Honour, the Star of Italian Solidarity, & two honorary degrees. He
also was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for "The Drew
Pearson Show", an early program of current events.

Character actor Robert F. Simon played Pearson in the 1977 NBC TV
movie Tail Gunner Joe, a biopic of U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of
Wisconsin.

Quotes

"I just operate with a sense of smell: if something smells wrong, I go
to work."

"His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is
doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a
pity that anyone anywhere believes anything he writes."—Pres.
Roosevelt on Pearson, in letter to Gen. Hurley, Aug 30, 1943, cited in
Patrick J. Hurley, a bio by Don Lohbeck, 1956.