The Scorpion on the Potomac.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson's Washington

Donald A. Ritchie, The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearsons Washington (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). 367 pp., $34.95.

As a native Washingtonian in a politically aware family--my paternal grandfather was a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of state, former Tennessee senator Cordell Hull, a frequent target of the columnist Drew Pearson's invective, and my maternal grandfather was a prominent attorney who was a legal advisor to the formidable socialite "Cissy" Patterson, the proprietor of the Times-Herald, the dominant morning paper in the nation's capital, but playing second fiddle in those days to the solid, staid, all-too-respectable Evening Star--I was already aware as a child of the competition for the spotlight among the city's newspapers and the leading role played by Pearson. Placing a feeble third in the journalistic sweepstakes was businessman Eugene Meyer's modest morning paper, The Washington Post. Most journalistic insiders at the time would have laughed out loud at anyone who predicted that, by century's end, both the Times-Herald and the Evening Star would be faint memories and the Post a paper of national stature, surpassed only by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. As it happens, Pearson briefly was married to Patterson's fetching daughter, and the Times-Herald became the first Washington newspaper to carry his column, which later migrated to the Post, where it was relegated to the comic pages. But while it appeared in the Times-Herald, my grandfather, Rudolph Yeatman, would often receive late-night calls asking him to vet a Pearson column--or one of Patterson's own feverish editorial fulminations--for libel potential just minutes before press time, yet another reason I was aware of Pearson's impact from early childhood.

It was thus with no small measure of interest that I turned to The Columnist, historian Donald A. Ritchie's engrossing new biography of Drew Pearson. A muckraking left-wing columnist and radio commentator, Pearson is largely forgotten today. In his lifetime, however, he was arguably the most feared, loathed, and influential American journalist of his generation, unique then and never really equaled since. Perhaps the only thing that Pearson's fans and detractors could agree on was that he was truly one of a kind, something for which the latter group was probably deeply thankful.

To those of us old enough to remember some of his baser performances, Drew Pearson was more of a calumnist than columnist, a man who carefully selected the muck he raked and the targets he threw it at, driven by a personal agenda rather than a clear sense of right and wrong. For some mysterious reason, Pearson's sexual, financial, and legal exposes--both true and false--almost always targeted conservatives and anti-communists while ignoring the same kind of misbehavior at the hands of "progressive" politicians and other personal favorites he tolerated or lavished with praise. Thus, Pearson turned a blind eye to President John F. Kennedy's scandalous private life and ignored the long record of political and personal corruption surrounding Lyndon B. Johnson. Such was the usually hard-boiled columnist's susceptibility to LBJ'S manipulative skills that for a time Pearson actually deluded himself into believing that Johnson might make him his secretary of state.

If he had, it would not have been on the basis of two of Johnson's Democratic predecessors' opinions, FDR branded Pearson a "chronic liar" while Harry S. Truman simply dismissed him as an "S.O.B." From across the Atlantic, Winston Churchill joined the chorus and moved the criticism up a notch, calling the columnist "the most colossal liar in the United States."

Nor did Pearson's journalistic colleagues rate his integrity very highly. In 1944, Ritchie informs us, "the Washington press corps grudgingly voted him the Washington correspondent who exerted the greatest influence on the nation, giving him twice the votes of Walter Lippmann [the most prestigious, respected national columnist at the time]." In the same poll, however, his colleagues placed Pearson at the bottom of the heap when it came to accuracy and even-handedness.

A case study of his modus operandi helps explain why. In a pre-publication article, Ritchie described how, in 1934,

General Douglas MacArthut sued Pearson for a column that charged him with using his father-in-law's influence to win promotion to major general over more senior officers. Pearson got that story from MacArthur's ex-wife, but she would not repeat in court what she had said at dinner. MacArthur only agreed to drop the suit after Pearson obtained the general's love letters to his mistress...