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Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2010
On Sale: September 28, 2010
480 pages ISBN: 0374235309 EAN: 9780374235307 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack
Anderson dead. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the most famous and
feared investigative reporter in the nation, has exposed yet
another of the President’s dirty secrets. Nixon’s operatives
are ordered to “stop Anderson at all costs”—permanently.
Across the street from the White House, they huddle in a
hotel basement to conspire. Should they try “Aspirin
Roulette” and break into Anderson’s home to plant a poisoned
pill in one of his medicine bottles? Could they smear LSD on
the journalist’s steering wheel, so that he would absorb it
through his skin, lose control of his car, and crash? Or
stage a routine-looking mugging, making Anderson appear to
be one more fatal victim of Washington’s notorious street crime? Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the
Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture recounts not only the
disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy
to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the
bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era’s most
embattled politician and its most reviled newsman. The
struggle between Nixon and Anderson included bribery,
blackmail, forgery, spying, and burglary as well as the
White House murder plot. Their vendetta symbolized and
accelerated the growing conflict between the government and
the press, a clash that would long outlive both men. Mark Feldstein traces the arc of this confrontation between
a vindictive president and a flamboyant, crusading muckraker
who rifled through garbage and swiped classified papers in
pursuit of his prey—stoking the paranoia in Nixon that would
ultimately lead to his ruin. The White House plot to poison
Anderson, Feldstein argues, is a metaphor for the poisoned
political atmosphere that would follow, and the toxic
sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse. Melding history and biography, Poisoning the Press unearths
significant new information from more than two hundred
interviews and thousands of declassified documents and
tapes. This is a chronicle of political intrigue and the
true price of power for politicians and journalists alike.
The result—Washington’s modern scandal culture—was Richard
Nixon’s ultimate revenge.
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