“Drew Pearson gained his power playing by pre-modern rules of journalism that we would now find reprehensible, New York Times reviewer Richard J. Tofel
Reviewers have had high praise for Donald Ritchie’s meticulously researched new book “The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel: Drew Pearson’s Washington.” Once a household name, the self-professed “keyhole peeper” whose syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” once appeared in over 600 newspapers, is far less well-known than Dallas Cowboys Hall of Famer Drew Pearson, recipient of Roger Staubach’s playoff game-winning “Hail Mary” pass. Born into an Illinois Quaker family in 1897, Pearson attended Swarthmore College and married the daughter of Washington Times-Herald owner Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson. His controversial column and radio program were famous for so-called “scoops,” combining outrage, sarcasm, and gallows humor delivered in a spirit of muckraking moral indignation. He exposed foes’ sexual peccadilloes, such as that General Douglas MacArthur had an 18-year-old filipina mistress. Between 1932 and 1969 he broke stories about FDR’s court-packing plans, General George Patton slapping a soldier, the mental instability of Harry S Truman’s Defense secretary James Forrestal, Truman’s 1950 meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island, Senator Joseph McCarthy soliciting favors for Private G. David Schine, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr.
Pearson was sued more than 150 times and lost only once – to a high-powered lobbyist. The FBI tapped his phone, opened his mail, and employed spies against him, compiling thousands of pages for Director J. Edgar Hoover’s benefit, to which Ritchie gained access. Richard Tofel noted that when Pearson dropped dead of a heart attack in 1969, the New York Times editorialized about his “pugnacity, vindictiveness, and irresponsibility” but also praised his “fearless dedication to the belief that the independent and resourceful reporter is the indispensable guardian of good-government.” Echoing that sentiment, Ritchie concluded: “The evidence confirms that he performed a public service by revealing how politicians and government really worked.”
The June 2021 Journal of American History contains a review of the “American Masters” documentary “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip.” Like Pearson now almost forgotten and born, as was Pearson, in 1897 to Russian-born Jews, Winchell grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and was a tap dancer in vaudeville, a naval officer during World War, and as a newspaper columnist and radio personality regarded journalism as entertainment. Syndicated in 2,000 newspapers and familiar to radio audiences for a staccato delivery, he began shows by saying, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.” For background effect, he employed the sound of a telegraph key.
Winchell’s coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping vaulted him into prominence as more than a gossip columnist, and during the Franklin Roosevelt administration he was an avid supporter of the New Deal, preparedness, the FBI, and civil rights. There was a nasty, thin-skinned side to Winchell, however, and he was a philanderer who welcomed feuds with the likes of Ed Sullivan and “Tonight”show host Jack Paar. With a fedora on his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was a familiar sight at Table 50 of Manhattan’s Stork Club, where he never paid and hobnobbed with those he wrote about. He fell for demagogue Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist posturings, and his popularity was waning when selected in 1959 to narrate “The Untouchables” TV series. In 1963 the New York Daily Mirror folded during a newspaper strike at a time when his hysterical style was rapidly going out of favor, leaving him begging for work. According to Professor Michael J. Socolow, before succumbing to prostate cancer in 1973, Winchell’s final years was spent as a recluse at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, pathetically “typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner.”
While Pearson and Winchell’s generation of frenetic newsmen was replaced by a group of professionals who came of age during World War II, their tabloid style has never gone away. The PBS documentary compares their popularity and conservative populist style to the “Drudge Report” and in our age of social media acknowledges the temptation for news producers to cater to sensationalism and, in short, the lowest common denominator.
Ray Smock, like Ritchie a fellow University of Marylnd grad student during the late 1960s and diector of the Robert C. Byrd Center, wrote : “I first encountered Drew Pearson when I was ten years old and he had a cameo appearance in my all time favorite movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is Pearson who announces that a flying saucer had landed on the Mall in DC! How’s this for movie trivia?” Smock recently hosted a zoom lecture by Ritchie on “The Columnist.” Progressice Era historian H. Samuel Merrill, author of “The Republican Command,” was Ritchie and my academic adviser, and Smock’s was Louis Harlan, acclaimed biographer of African-American educator Booker T. Washington.
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