From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Jack Anderson, Outsider
Finding a Nazi war criminal? That seemed doable to this journalist.
It was 1984, and I was in the throes of researching a story on Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death" who had eluded capture since World War II. When the chance came along for me to go to Paraguay--thought to be the Nazi's hideout--naturally I took it. But before I left, my boss gave me marching orders: "I want you to penetrate Nazi circles in South America," he told me in a hushed, solemn voice. "I want you to find Dr. Mengele."
My boss was Jack Anderson, the syndicated columnist who died Saturday. I had joined his staff as a young intern and then continued as a junior muckraker. Only years later, when I'd regale dinner-party guests with my Paraguay directive and they'd burst out laughing, did I realize how preposterous it all had been.
But that was Jack Anderson. It's hard to imagine a modern newspaper boss who would dare to give a reporter such a tall order. But Jack's office was no ordinary journalistic experience. His nationally syndicated column was carried in nearly 1,000 papers, including the Washington Post. His enterprise also included a radio show, magazine articles and regular appearances on "Good Morning America." Staff members were expected to contribute to each of these outlets. There were scores of writers who passed through that quirky Washington merry-go-round, including Howard Kurtz, the current media reporter for the Post, James Grady, the author of "Six Days of the Condor," and Leslie Whitten Jr., the novelist and investigative reporter extraordinaire.
Jack--we never called him Mr. Anderson--probably gave impossible assignments because he was such a great journalist himself. He figured that finding a Nazi war criminal was eminently doable. So there I was, in my 20s with no experience as a foreign correspondent and only a semester of Vassar Spanish, wandering around Asuncion, Paraguay's capital, asking total strangers, "¿Donde está el señor Mengele?"
To a young reporter, working for Jack was both thrilling and verging on the ridiculous. He was obsessed with secret documents. My beat was the State Department, though I didn't attend the daily briefings. Jack just wanted me to persuade Foreign Service officers to leak me top-secret cables. Diplomats are notoriously tight-lipped--but Jack never relented. (I heard of colleagues who begged their sources on Capitol Hill to stamp some ordinary document "confidential" so they could go back and tell Jack they'd snared an internal file.)
The voice of the column was barely controlled outrage. A State Department diplomat was a "Foggy Bottom poohbah" or a "cookie pusher," the government was "Uncle Sugar" and any Latin American leader was--what else?--a "tinhorn dictator of a banana republic."
At a moment when the press is accused of being far too chummy with the officials they're covering, it is nice to know that, once upon a time, there was a journalist who enshrined the need for reporters to remain strictly outsiders. Maybe that's why Jack was oddly lonely, despite his fame and fortune. A Mormon from Utah, he was a bit too bombastic for his peers. But he didn't seem to mind. Jack liked to break news, and he despised the current breed of pundit who cranked out opinion pieces without a stitch of reporting.
By some standards, working for Jack had scant rewards. He always got the byline. The salary was modest, and conditions were Spartan. Many of us came to long for the respectability of a "real" daily. Still, the job carried enough cachet to guarantee access to various government officials. I have particularly fond memories of a meeting with the exiled opposition leader of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino, just before his assassination in 1983.
Aquino was an extraordinary gossip, and he understood the value of the column's 40 million readers. I still laugh at an item he passed on to me about Richard Nixon joining in the Tinikling, the traditional Philippine dance with bamboo sticks, at a soiree held by Imelda Marcos in New York. I thought that it would make good filler for the column. But Jack saw a greater opportunity. "Could I get a bit more on the Nixonian dance?" He had instantly grasped what a wonderful story it was, Nixon of the awkward body movements gamely trying to jump between shifting bamboo sticks.
Jack may have been a big shot when I worked for him, but he was accessible to anyone with a scoop. He began most days early, and I would tiptoe into his office, shyly asking if he had a moment. He'd point me toward a chair in front of his enormous desk and hear me out as I shared tantalizing leads and described the wonderful sources I was cultivating.
The news of Jack's death made me incredibly sad. I hope he's gotten hold of some heavenly secret documents intended for God and his angels only.
Ms. Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is working on a memoir of her Egyptian-Jewish father for Ecco/HarperCollins.
