You Don't Know Jack
Jack Anderson has spent his journalistic career sniffing out scandal. But has he lost his sense of smell?
Cover Story
Joseph Getty remembers the "King of the Muckrakers," as the Columbia Journalism Review once crowned investigative journalist Jack Anderson, from Anderson's reign in the '70s and early '80s. Back then, Getty was beginning his career in the nation's capital at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And Anderson was the accomplished master of putting official Washington, over and over again, into a tizzy.
Anderson's syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, ran on the comics page in the Washington Post, but the White House hardly considered the muckraker's reporting a joke. After a succession of stinging Anderson columns, Jeb Stuart Magruder, a special assistant to President Richard Nixon, once commented that "the president would sure like to get rid of that guy"--a statement that Nixon staffer G. Gordon Liddy mistakenly interpreted as a directive to snuff out the offending columnist. Or so Anderson bragged in his 1999 memoir, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account.
"I knew the reputation of Jack Anderson as a journalist," says Getty, an attorney who now serves as one of Carroll County's elected representatives in the Maryland House of Delegates. So when Getty received an invitation from fellow lawyer W. Bradley Bauhof to have lunch with Anderson on June 25, 1999, Getty eagerly accepted. The lunch would take place in Westminster--the county seat of Carroll County, about 30 miles northwest of Baltimore--at Cockey's Tavern, a restaurant owned by Bauhof's family.... Continued
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