Drew Pearson -- Washington Merry-Go-Round

 

Andrew Russell Pearson (December 13, 1897 – September 1, 1969) was an American columnist, noted for his syndicated newspaper column "Washington Merry-Go-Round". He also had a program on NBC Radio titled Drew Pearson Comments. He was known for his approach towards high level politicians, such as senators, cabinet members, generals and American presidents.  

Pearson was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Quaker parents Paul Martin Pearson, an English professor at Northwestern University, and Edna Rachel Wolfe Pearson. When Pearson was 6 years old, his father joined the faculty of Swarthmore College as professor of public speaking, and the family moved to Pennsylvania, joining the Society of Friends, with which the college was then affiliated. After being educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Pearson attended Swarthmore from 1915 until 1919, where he edited its student newspaper, The Phoenix.

From 1919 to 1921, Pearson served with the American Friends Service Committee, directing postwar rebuilding operations in Peć, which at that time was part of Serbia. From 1921 to 1922, he lectured in geography at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1923 Pearson traveled to Japan, China, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Serbia, and 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 to 1928, Pearson continued reporting on international events, including strikes in China, the Geneva Naval Conference, the Pan-American Conference in Havana, and the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in Paris.

In 1929 he became the Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. However, in 1931 and 1932, with Robert S. Allen, he anonymously published a book called Washington Merry-Go-Round and its sequel. When the Sun discovered Pearson had co-authored these books, he was promptly fired. Late in 1932, Pearson and 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 November 17, 1932. But as World War II escalated in Europe, Pearson's strong support of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in opposition to Patterson and the Herald's isolationist position, led to an acrimonious termination of Pearson's and Allen's contract with the Herald. In 1941 The Washington Post picked up the contract for the "Washington Merry-Go-Round". 

From 1935 to 1936, Allen and Pearson broadcast a 15-minute program twice a week on the Mutual Broadcasting System. They continued with a 30-minute music and news show, Listen America, in 1939–1940, ending this partnership in 1941. They also wrote a comic strip, Hap Hopper, Washington Correspondent, which was drawn from 1939 to 1943 by Jack Sparling, and from 1943 onward by Al Plastino.

Pearson continued alone on NBC with Drew Pearson Comments from 1941 to 1953 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 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still and RKO's 1945 propaganda movie Betrayal from the East.

In the former film, Pearson (playing himself) is the only journalist who urges calm and restraint (versus the fear and paranoia evoked by his colleagues) while Washington is panicked by the escape of the alien visitor Klaatu.

In the latter movie, Pearson referred to an exposé that accused Japanese Americans of being part of a Japanese conspiracy to engage in acts of terrorism and 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. Furthermore, Pearson appeared as himself in City Across the River (1949).

In 1952 and 1953, Pearson hosted The Drew Pearson Show on the ABC and DuMont Television networks. 

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 and forced to resign their positions, Pearson and 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, and starring Lee Tracy and Constance Cummings.^[4]

According to his one-time partner, Jack Anderson, Pearson saw journalism as a means to challenge those he thought to be working against the public interest.^[5] He himself had the reputation of a person who put principles over profit. Refusing to carry libel insurance or having an agreement with his syndicate to finance libel judgments against him, his journalistic engagement resulted in more than 120 actions for libel, only in one case he had to pay a settlement.^[6]

During World War II, Pearson's column not only revealed embarrassing news items, but expanded to criticize the Roosevelt administration's conduct of the war, in particular U.S. foreign policy regarding Joseph Stalin and 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, and other State Department officials, whom Pearson accused of hating Soviet Russia. After one of Pearson's more virulent columns accused Secretary of State Hull and his deputies of a conscious policy to "bleed Russia white", President Roosevelt convened a press conference in which he angrily accused Pearson of printing statements that were a lie "from beginning to end", jeopardizing United Nations unity, and 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 General George S. Patton's slapping of soldier Charles Kuhl. It was the first of two slapping-incidents, when General Patton, who denied the medical condition of combat stress reaction, struck and badly abused soldiers whom he had met during their evaluation at evacuation hospitals. Allied Headquarters 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 and sent home soon arose in Congress as well as in newspaper articles and editorials across the country. However, public opinion was largely favorable to Patton. While Patton was later reassigned and his career advancement slowed, he was not relieved, but continued to serve in the European theater, where he would later command the U.S. Third Army. Pearson's broadcast and subsequent article on Patton's alleged behavior sufficiently raised the suspicions of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that he requested Army General Joseph T. McNarney to "put an inspector on the War Department to see who has been leaking out information. Pearson's articles are about three-quarters false but there's just a germ of truth in them that someone must have given him."

After Pearson reported that General 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 February 1946, Pearson revealed the existence of a Canadian ring of Soviet spies who had given away secret information about the atomic bomb, and he hinted that the espionage scandal might extend to America as well. The government 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 government 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 and later convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government 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 Senator Joseph McCarthy and other attempts by Congress to investigate Soviet and communist influence in government and the media, and eagerly denounced the allegations by Senator McCarthy and the House Committee.

In 1950, Pearson began the first in a series of columns attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy declared that he had a list of 205 people in the State Department that were members of the American Communist Party. Ironically, Pearson, through his associate Jack Anderson, had been using McCarthy as a confidential source for information on other politicians. Pearson used McCarthy's revelations in his columns with one exception – material on suspected Communists working in the U.S. government that McCarthy and 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, Senator McCarthy referred to Pearson's one-time assistant David Karr, born Katz, as "Pearson's 'KGB controller' and charged that 'Pearson's all-important job, which he did for the Party without fail, under the direction of David Karr, was to lead the character assassination of an man who was a threat to international communism. 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 had only joined the Daily Worker because he had 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 NSA's VENONA decrypt of June 1944 revealed that Karr was an informational source for the NKVD. 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 December 1950 McCarthy and 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 and 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 October, 1953, Senator McCarthy began investigating communist infiltration into the military. McCarthy's attempts to discredit Robert Stevens, the Secretary of the Army, infuriated President Dwight Eisenhower, who instructed the Department of the Army to release information detrimental to McCarthy to journalists who were known to be opposed to him. On December 15, 1952, Pearson, working with Eisenhower's staff, published a column using the information on McCarthy, dealing him a significant blow. 

On October 19, 1964 Pearson published an article, with the title of "Homosexuality Bipartisan Problem Facing Washington". Here he presented several cases when members of the Washington administration and their sons were blackmailed, threatened and eased out of office on the basis of rumors that they were homosexuals. Arthur Vandenberg Jr., a talented Republican government official from Michigan, had lost the prospect of becoming President  Eisenhower's number one assistant; Senator Lester Hunt, Democrat of Wyoming, had taken his own life after Republican senators Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Herman Welker of Idaho had threatened that they would reveal how his son had been arrested on a moral charge by Washington police. Pearson's article was a reaction to the political elimination of Walter Jenkins, longtime top aide and personal friend to Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife Lady Bird Johnson. On October 7, 1964, a month before the presidential election, Jenkins, a "stout Catholic", husband and father of six children, had been arrested and charged with "disorderly conduct" with another man. The scandal was promoted to the press by members of the Republican party, who exploited the scandal in their own interests. Pearson, who called the "history of homosexuality in Washington" "a tragic one", was aware of the current political atmosphere, where the destruction of the careers of political opponents on the basis of accusations of homosexual behavior had become commonplace. In his 1964 defense of Walter Jenkins, he argued in the line of Lady Bird Johnson, who had thought about de-escalating the situation by attributing the purported offense to the exhaustion of a man who had temporarily overworked himself in the challenging time before the election. In advance of the FBI's investigation of the case, Pearson followed several leads that apparently proved that Jenkins had been framed. 

In October 1967, Drew Pearson once more exposed the hypocrisy of the allegations that had led to the removal of Walter Jenkins and other well experienced public servants. This time, it was two members of Governor of California Ronald Reagan's staff who had participated in an eight-man "sex orgy" at Lake Tahoe. Governor Reagan, who had been critical in the case of Walter Jenkins, hadn't taken action until six months later, when the "most able and highly qualified" men were fired: "He [Ronald Reagan] campaigned on the proposition that while he did not know much about Government he would surround himself with experts who did. Two of these experts have now turned out to be involved in conduct which society does not condone. Despite this, they were kept in the Governor's office for approximately six months and reportedly were only dropped when Reagan's right-wing backers demanded that they be fired, not because of their sex behavior, but because they were too moderate for the right wing."

In Pearson's view, the firing of the two members of Reagan's team on a pretext was part of a strategy to present the Governor and his actions in a more determined and impartial light: "The presence of homos in Government was first raised as an issue by a well known Republican, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who claimed the State Department was riddled with them. Though he was not able to prove his claims, it remains a fact that a homosexual in the Defense or State Departments is automatically fired as a security risk. He can too easily be blackmailed. The reason why Reagan's press secretary is now belatedly explaining the facts behind the dropping of his two assistants may well be the desire to show that Ronnie acted quickly - which he did not do." Wikipedia