PEACE, WAR, AND POLITICS: An Eyewitness Account.

• Author: Feldstein, Mark
• Position: Review

PEACE, WAR, AND POLITICS: An Eyewitness Account

By Jack Anderson and Daryl Gibson Forge, $27.95

YEARS BEFORE WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN, there was Pearson and Anderson. When the legendary Watergate reporting team was still practically in diapers, columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson were striking terror throughout official Washington, virtually inventing modern investigative reporting in the nation's capital, beginning when Harry Truman was in the White House.

Pearson is now long dead, Anderson ailing from Parkinson's disease. But the surviving granddaddy of muckraking takes one last ride around the Washington merry-go-round in an engaging, often hilarious look back on a lifetime devoted to poking the eye of the powerful and the pompous. Anderson's memoir is also a light and entertaining survey of scandal m post-World War 11 Washington, and a history of two Beltway reporters who weren't afraid to get their hands sullied as long as they felt it was on behalf of the public. Indeed, they spirited off classified documents, eavesdropped on private conversations, and crusaded openly and joyously without regard for more conventional notions of journalistic objectivity. In recent years, Anderson has faded into obscurity. His sources have dried up, retired, or died, while a younger generation of reporters has largely pushed him aside. To Washington's power elite, Anderson was always an object of derision, an uncouth gossip-monger and self-promoter whose hyped-up prose and shoot-from-the-hip style were considered ungentlemanly in the snobbish drawing rooms of the nation's capital.

Yet whatever his faults, Jack Anderson was a critically important check on governmental power during a time when few other reporters even tried to hold officials accountable. Indeed, Anderson's old-fashioned muckraking exploits provide a telling contrast to the current corporate climate in today's ever-consolidating media world. Anderson was one of the last of a dying breed of independent journalists who answered only to his own personal sense of right and wrong, not to any publisher maneuvering for marketing position.

Anderson's righteous sense of morality was honed early, in the tight-knit Mormon community where he grew up outside Salt Lake City during the Depression. Anderson was molded by the Mormon philosophy that life is a struggle between good and evil, but he was also rebellious, chafing at his dour father and longing instead for adventure beyond his strict world.

He soon found his escape as a reporter, first infiltrating polygamous sects at home, then traveling to China, where he became a...