Querulous Quaker
(See Cover)
Threading its way through Washington's crawling traffic, a black Buick convertible with red leather seats glided along the capital's stately avenues and slummy byways. Its driver, a man with a kindly but slightly worried expression, was as inconspicuous as his car was flashy. He looked like any slightly battered citizen going about his slightly battered business. And so he was. Columnist Drew Pearson was on the prowl for news.
At the Pentagon, he quizzed Chief of Staff Omar Bradley about a caustic letter from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (an Army source informed Pearson) complaining about the Army's "slipshod" training program. ("As a result," said Pearson, "Bradley has called in four 'top-ranking generals and raised hell.") Over lunch at the Mayflower hotel, War Crimes Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan, just back from Tokyo, fed Pearson an "inside" story that Emperor Hirohito wants a military alliance with the U.S. An anonymous telephone call brought a chance to throw a dart at a favorite target, Senator Owen Brewster, for taking free rides on Government planes.
Round & Round. This week all these items were tossed in the firebox of Drew Pearson's clangorous Washington Merry-Go-Round. Such fuel, some chestnut-sized, some no bigger than pea coal, and every now & then a nugget as big as a man's hand, has kept the carrousel spinning for 16 years. Next week, the column and its author will share a milestone: on Dec. 13, Pearson's 51st birthday, the Merry-Go-Round will start its 17th year. Under a newly signed contract, Pearson can be pretty sure of four more years as the world's second-best-paid newsman, and its second-most-widely-syndicated columnist. (The yip-yippity-yip of his frenetic friend Walter Winchell has 200 more outlets, and pays about $140,000 a year better.) His fellow journalists measure Pearson by a different yardstick. In 1944 Washington correspondents rated him at the top of the list in national influence. But in terms of "reliability, fairness, ability to analyze the news," they rated him tenth.
Pearson's Merry-Go-Round appears in 600 newspapers with 20 million circulation. (Estimated income to Pearson: $2,000 a week.) Then there's the radio. On Sunday nights he talks over ABC to 10 million people, for a weekly wage of $5,000 plus all the Lee hats (his sponsor) that he wants. His sponsors claim 77% accuracy for the predictions which, along with his disclosures, are his stock in trade. The batting average means little: "We can always boost it," a staffer explains candidly, "by predicting things like tomorrow will be Monday."
In all, Pearson takes in about $350,000 a year, and, after taxes and necessarily heavy expenses (including a cut for Robert S. Allen, no longer his partner but still part owner of the column), keeps about a tenth of it.
Quick, the Needle. Pearson does not earn his pay by writing beautiful prose; his paragraphs read like jottings on an envelope in a lurching taxicab. His favorite leads are such old boob-catchers as "Although it will be denied . . ."; "Here's the inside story of . . ." It's not how he says it, but what he says: a brand of ruthless, theatrical, crusading, high-voltage, hypodermic journalism that has made him the most intensely feared and hated man in Washington. It is the kind of journalistic vigilance that keeps small men honest, and forces bigger men to work in an atmosphere of caution that frequently cramps their style. Many an official lives in constant fear of having the more delicate operations of diplomacy upset by Pearson's premature or partial disclosures.
Washington and Pearson were made for each other. Nowhere else could he operate as effectively, because nowhere else are there so many feudists out to get the , people higher up, or those of different political faith. Often the stories the schemers give him are true. Pearson, to his credit, prints them (unlike many fainter-hearted correspondents), regardless of whom the truth will hurt. But he has also written stories which are both untrue and damaging. Like oldtime Muckrakers Lincoln Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell, Pearson hates wickedness. But those reformers had more time to draw a bead on it, and never needed, or thought they needed, seven sensations a week to stay in business.
Unlike Winchell, who spits epithets like an angry alley cat when he is out to claw somebody, Pearson never stoops to name-calling. He simply presents his case and lets readers draw the obvious and epithetical conclusion.
The most recent of Pearson's victims was Congressman J. Parnell Thomas. While Thomas' Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing moviemen, high Democratic politicos and lesser mortals, Pearson took Thomas on singlehanded, and got him indicted on charges of payroll kickbacks (TIME, Nov. 15). The evidence in the Merry-Go-Round could only have come out of the Congressman's letter files. As Pearson presumably does not go around lifting files from the House Office Building, someone obviously did it for him. He scoffs at the press corps rumor that the evidence cost him a $1,500 bribe. He rarely needs to tip his tipsters, he says; they are satisfied to see justice done, or an enemy done in. He believes that "if any two guys in town know a secret, we'll find it out."
Once, at a Cabinet meeting, Defense (then Navy) Secretary Forrestal glared around the table and gritted: "Are we talking for this room, or for Pearson?" The remark was reported to Pearson in due course, and started a Pearson-Forrestal feud.
Man of Distinction. Though Pearson has scored beat after beat, he has won no Pulitzer prizes nor Peabody radio awards. But he has had his accolades. One of the most respected Washington columnists has called him "a public servant of the very best kind." He holds two honorary degrees, Norway's Medal of St. Olaf, the French Legion of Honor, and the Star of Italian Solidarity. He was named Father of the Year 1948, has had a comic strip (Hap Hopper) created in his image, and is chairman of National Cat Week.
He has also been called more kinds of liar--usually from the sanctuary of Congress, a sounding board shielded from libel suits--than any man alive. Some printable samples:
P: Cordell Hull (after Pearson reported, in midwar, that the Secretary of State wanted Russia "bled white"): "[a teller of] monstrous and diabolical falsehoods."
P: F.D.R. (sympathizing with Hull): "A chronic liar."
P: Senator Tydings: "In the last war the only powder . . . this scoundrel . . . ever smelled was in the presence of ladies who might have adorned the windward side of the parade ground ... A perpetual, chronic, revolving liar."
P: President Truman (reported by Pearson to have made an anti-Semitic remark) : "I had thought I wouldn't have to add another liar's star to that fellow's crown, but I will have to do it . . ."
P: Senator McKellar (attacked by Pearson for his reprehensible spoilsman's practices): "An ignorant liar, a pusillanimous liar, a peewee liar ... a paid liar ... a natural-born liar ... a liar by profession, a liar for a living ... a liar in the daytime and a liar in the nighttime . . . this 'revolving,' constitutional, unmitigated, infamous liar [and] scoundrel . . ." (And so on, for 30 minutes, while the Senator put off going to the bathroom. When he finally got there, fainting, he needed a doctor.)
Who, Me? The object of all this billingsgate is a devoutly religious--and highly litigious--Quaker who has never been known to fire a shot, lift his fist, or even raise his soft voice in anger. Andrew Russell Pearson is a tall, tweedy, disarmingly mild-mannered fellow, with thinning light brown hair, a sparse mustache and earnest mien; he looks like a shy, quizzical cow college professor--except for his wary blue eyes. The mild manner camouflages a tough, diamond-hard core. And his casual clothes, his innocuously small-town look serve him well in Washington's lower echelons, where many of his tipsters work.
Though more conservative newsmen. have tried to laugh him off as a superficial, snap-brimmed Fearless Fosdick of journalism, none can match his hard work or his arm-long record of newsbeats.
Follow That Nose. How does he get his news? Pearson's methods are essentially those of any crack reporter--with certain subtle refinements. "Good news," he says--using the term in its purely technical sense--"comes in two ways: 1) by accurate tips, diligently followed up; 2) by doping out a story for yourself, then confronting some knowing source with it to see if you're on the right track. Generally I just operate with a sense of smell: if something smells wrong, I go to work."
For example, Pearson's charges that Democratic Senator Elmer Thomas was speculating in commodity markets with inside government information finally got Republican Senator Homer Ferguson's investigating committee after Thomas. When Ferguson suddenly stopped investigating, Pearson's nose twitched, and off he went on the scent. Finally, last September, he sniffed out the story. The Merry-Go-Round ran an eye-opening letter from Thomas to Ferguson, threatening to denounce the Michigander for taking favors from big automen, unless he called off his investigation. Since neither Senator would want the note made public, where did Pearson get it? Apparently from. Tom Clark's Department of Justice.
Pearson also counts on the common failing of Congressmen: they can't help talking. "I often tell a friend or two to keep their ears open at a closed-door meeting," says Pearson. During the war, the Merry-Go-Round spilled the news that F.D.R. had irritably snubbed General de Gaulle. "One of the Congressmen who heard it took a few notes," Pearson recalls.
Lone Wolf Pearson rarely attends press conferences. "I'm criticized so much for running off-the-record stuff," he explains mildly, "that I'd rather not even hear it." But he makes it a practice to pump other newsmen and print what they heard. Last week he broadcast a partly accurate, partly distorted version of Secretary Marshall's views on China, which had been given in confidence to reporters in a Statler hotel room. (A Pearson legman had bragged in advance that he would find out what Marshall said.) To some extent Pearson is thus endangering the whole system of off-the-record conferences that help newsmen interpret the news. But Pearson argues, with considerable cogency, that most of the information should not be off the record in the first place.
Peek Up a Rope. If necessary, he will twist an arm. Last year he called John Sonnett, who was taking over the Justice Department's anti-trust division, to point out that he was accustomed to getting anti-trust scoops. Retorted Sonnett: "Aw, go peek up a rope." Sonnett was punished with rough rides on the Merry-Go-Round. The column is equally open about rewarding those who do cooperate: some newsmen spot Pearson's sources simply by seeing who gets his backpats.
Operation Pearson proceeds in a supercharged atmosphere of tapped wires, shadowed cars, anonymous phone calls and secret files--and he glories in it. The GHQ, his combined home and office, is a cluster of yellow brick buildings on a quiet corner in Georgetown. Its head man, "DP" in the office lingo, is up at 6:30 a.m. in bathrobe and slippers, to tinker with a first draft of The Column. Precisely at 8 he shaves, turning the bathroom radio to an NBC news roundup that often brings the voice of his brother Leon, a commentator, from Paris.
After breakfast (orange juice, two eggs, and milk, but no coffee), he has another go at the Merry-Go-Round, on the trusty Corona his father gave him in 1922. He scans the Washington Post and the New York Times, the only papers he reads. Then he goes through the mail, checks with his staff (five secretaries and three legmen, Tom McNamara, Jack Anderson, Fred Blumenthal), and by late morning starts making the rounds in his Buick, bearing District license K-13. (He is sometimes tailed, he says, by Army, Navy or FBI cars.)
He drops in on such favorites as Senators Barkley, O'Mahoney and Bridges, Speaker Joe Martin and Speaker-to-be Sam Rayburn. He never bothers to visit Treasury Secretary John Snyder or Forrestal; they are on his long list of "enemies." Lunch is usually with politicos at his regular corner table at the Mayflower.
Back at the office in the afternoon, he goes over The Column, double-checking for libel, while Cinder, his black cat, sits on his desk. When the Merry-Go-Round, written three days in advance, is ready, it is teletyped to Manhattan and Pearson goes on his rounds again.
Call Michigan 4321. He drops in at cocktail parties, then heads back home for dinner with his blonde second wife, the former Luvie Moore. At home, Pearson uses "thee" and "thy" with his relatives, and at strictly family dinners, everybody joins hands while grace is said. The Pearsons also give many small champagne dinner parties. At other parties, the yawning Pearson often slips away to get his sleep--or pore over his files--leaving Luvie to come home later.
All day and far into the night, calls keep coming into the ten telephones at Michigan 4321. Sometimes at night Pearson imitates his Negro butler's voice on the phone until he is sure he wants to talk to the caller.
Pearson, who thrives on leaks from other offices, wants none from his own, and his $2,000-a-week payroll, including big salaries and fat expense accounts for his loyal staff, helps to keep it incorruptible. He suspects that his office wires are tapped. Sometimes, gags a legman, the line "has so many taps on it that we're thinking of selling spot announcements."
When they can, the Pearsons and Tyler Abell, Luvie's 16-year-old son, retreat to a 280-acre Maryland farm, 17 miles up the Potomac. The farm boasts a modernistic farmhouse, a rustic swimming pool, a 49-stall cowbarn, riding horses, and a Holstein bullock named Harry S. Truman. A prize Hampshire boar, Edward R. Stettinius, gets the pick of the garbage from the Georgetown house; Pearson takes it out with him in the car.
Skunk Trapper. The farm is Drew Pearson's only hobby--except for an incurable love of circuses. (Last spring he did a one-night turn as a clown with Ringling Bros.) When Pearson was a boy at Swarthmore, Pa., he had another (and perhaps prophetic hobby): trapping skunks. His father, a Methodist minister turned Quaker, was a speech professor at Swarthmore College. Drew and his brother Leon made their first pocket money trapping skunks in a patch of woods called Whiskey Run, then became door-to-door butter-&-egg men. Shy Drew always made Leon go up to the door and do the selling.
At Phillips Exeter Academy, Drew babysat for 25-c- an hour to eke out a scholarship. At Swarthmore, he made Phi Beta Kappa, edited the college newspaper, Phoenix, and was in an Officers' Training Corps as World War I ended. In 1919 his father got him an overseas job with the American Friends Service Committee, at $6 a month. He spent two years rebuilding devastated Balkan villages; one was gratefully renamed Pearsonavatz.
At 24, after a fling at teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he wanted to get in the newspaper game "halfway up the ladder, instead of at the bottom." Shipping out of Seattle, he worked his way around the world as a seaman, lecturer and correspondent for a few U.S. and Australian papers. A day out of Suez, he got a request from an obscure syndicate to interview Europe's "twelve greatest men." For the $2,000 expense money, he trotted around to the dozen greats (Mussolini to Lord Balfour), and came home in style on the Aquitania. His series got him a job in Washington, where he wound up on the Baltimore Sun.
Tales Out of School. Midway in the lean Hoover years, an anonymous book called Washington Merry-Go-Round hit the dowager city on the Potomac like mud in the face. It brutally ridiculed almost everybody in town. A conspicuous few were spared. Among them: redheaded, short-tempered Robert Sharon Allen, young boss of the "competent conscientious" Christian Science Monitor bureau--and Drew Pearson. The book said: "[Pearson] has the reputation of knowing more about the State Department than most of the people who run it ... Because of his independence he is either loved or hated; there is no middle ground of affection where Pearson is concerned."
The puffs gave the authors away. Allen was fired by the Monitor. When More Merry-Go-Round, (also anonymous) came out, Pearson lost his job with the Sun, chiefly, he believes, because the book portrayed Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley as "the Cotillion Leader," who rehearsed his drawing-room entrances & exits with his wife, in fron of a mirror.
The books sold 185,000 copies and convinced Pearson & Allen that there was a market for their kind of impudent reporting. Roy Howard's United Feature Syndicate started their Merry-Go-Round column on Dec. 12, 1932. New Dealers Pearson & Allen began at $25 a week apiece, were soon cozy enough with the Democrats to call the turn of New Deal cards. By the end of 1933, 225 newspapers had clambered aboard the Merry-Go-Round. As it whirled it shook Washington journalism out of its easygoing way of reporting the news by handout.
Brass Rings & Knuckles. In the hardhitting team, profane and truculent Bob Allen was the mailed fist. Polite, mild-mannered Drew Pearson was the silk glove that came around next day to stroke the bruises--and pick up any information Allen had missed. Between them they piled up an enviable list of scoops (F.D.R.'s court-packing plan, the destroyers-for-bases deal, the 1939 Louisiana scandals, etc.).
After Allen went off to war in 1942, some of the steam went out of the Merry-Go-Round, but it never broke down. Pearson got many a beat like the General George Patton* slapping story merely by printing what other newsmen knew, but had kept to themselves from feelings of patriotism or a foggy sense of newspaper ethics. He also made many a wild forecast --among them, that Marshal Tito would be assassinated in 1947 and, along with almost every pundit, that Truman would be beaten in 1948. He has not yet lived down his 1946 "disclosure" that U.S. troops had sired 14,000 Japanese bastards--though the G.I.s had been in Japan only six months. Such bobbles did little harm. But his campaign to bring the boys home in 1945 was more serious. Insofar as it succeeded, it weakened the hand of the State Department around the world.
On the other hand, Pearson's showmanship and love of spectacles combined with his Quaker faith to produce the Friendship Train. He first voiced the idea, and spent thousands of dollars to get it rolling across the U.S. last year, gathering up 700 carloads of food (worth $40 million) for France and Italy. It was not only potent propaganda for the U.S. in the East-West battle, but a memorable and characteristically Quaker act. Said the Christian Science Monitor's Roscoe Drummond, of the Friendship Train: "One of the greatest projects ever born of American journalism." Next month, as a Gallic gesture of gratitude, a "Merci, America" train of 49 French boxcars will be shipped across the Atlantic, with such gifts for the 48 states and Hawaii as Sevres vases from President Vincent Auriol and bronze school bells from Caen.
Take That. For a mild man, and the begetter of Friendship Trains, Drew Pearson has had more drawn-out feuds than an Irishman could shake a shillelagh at. The loudest was the one with Maryland's Senator Millard Tydings, which started when Tydings called for. a Senate investigation of father Paul Pearson's regime as governor of the Virgin Islands.
In Pearson's long feud with the late "Cissy" Patterson, he learned that you can't win an argument with mother-in-law (TIME, May 18, 1942 et seq.). Cissy and Pearson had continued to get along fine even after Drew and Cissy's daughter Felicia got a friendly divorce. ("He wanted me to be too domestic," says Felicia. "I'm not much for pressing pants." Grandfather Pearson still dotes on their daughter Ellen and her year-old son Drew.) Cissy and Pearson split over politics: Pearson & Allen became too New Dealish for Cissy's taste. Mrs. Patterson not only threw the column out of her Times-Herald, but fired Movie Reviewer Luvie Pearson out of spite.
The feuding and crusading has erupted into some whopping libel suits. All told, Pearson has been sued eight times for a total of $23,500,000. But cagey Drew Pearson, a match for most libel lawyers, brags that he has not yet paid a judgment (though his attorneys' fees are huge). He will work for hours to make an item libel-proof, or to tone down the libel until it is not worth suing over. Editors seldom ask Pearson for his proof. They know he will fight the case for them if they are sued. It is not altruism on his part. He cannot afford to lose many suits and stay in business. "But when someone shows me I'm wrong," he says, "I retract in a hurry." If he is sure he is right, he stands pat against threats and legal action.
When he exposed Lobbyist John P Monroe's ill-famed "red house on R Street," where high officials were wined and duped, Monroe sued for $1,000,000. So Pearson got a young mutual friend to get better acquainted with Monroe. "I don't put servants in people's houses," explains Pearson, "or plant people around town. But in this case I was fighting for a million bucks." The young man dug up enough dirt to put Monroe in jail--and the libel suit was dismissed.
A Kiss & a: Kick. The Merry-Go-Round's complex and contradictory pilot regards himself as a man with a mission; he thinks of himself as the conscience of government, a Vigilante riding herd on Washington.
Many newsmen agree with him. "For the moment," said one bureau chief last week, 'Tearson is the one investigatory journalist in Washington, and we could use more like him. The rest are all pundits and deadpan reporters. If he laid off those predictions, he'd be a better journalist--and, I suppose, a poorer-paid one." There is no doubt that Pearson has had a healthy effect on Washington. When George C. Marshall was chief of staff, a general, worried over Army leaks to Pearson, went to the chief and urged that Pearson be bottled up by strict censorship. No, said Marshall: "Pearson is one of my best inspectors general."
But is a "conscience" that is not invariably right a reliable conscience? Pearson's detractors would say no; his admirers would say yes. The majority on the sidelines would agree with his admirers--or how else, they would say, can we have freedom of the press? But editors--and the public--could wish that Pearson, and his fellow hip-shooting columnists, show more care in getting it right, rather than getting it first--and a greater sense of responsibility in deciding what is legitimate public news and what is mere troublemaking gossip.
*This brought Pearson his closest brush with physical violence. In the House restaurant, Texas' Congressman Nat Patton (no kin to the general) beerily waved a knife under Pearson's nose until Maury Maverick interceded and eased Pearson out of harm's way.
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