This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Washington • His White House years behind him and a presidential pardon in his pocket, Richard Nixon still could not let go of his absolute hatred for one journalist.
Jack Anderson, who grew up in Salt Lake City, had "slandered and libeled me for 25 years," Nixon said in grand jury testimony released this week for the first time.
"The [Washington] Post, incidentally, to its credit, put Mr. Anderson on the page with the funny papers," the former president said in 1975, a year after resigning as commander in chief and still reeling from the repercussions of the Watergate scandal.
Anderson, who early in his career worked at The Salt Lake Tribune and later was a reporter for the Deseret News, had skewered Nixon for years and is credited with helping to bring down his reign. Anderson made the president's famous enemies list and at one point was the subject of an assassination plot.
"I consider him to be so totally unreliable that we wouldn't bother to get involved with a Jack Anderson column," Nixon said in testimony when asked if his administration had cooperated with the author of the "Washington Merry Go Round" columnist. "Most of it is untrue."
Anderson had earned the wrath of many of the power players of the day.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said Anderson was "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."
Nixon's comments, released this week after his presidential library was forced to open up the grand jury testimony, don't surprise Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and author of Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture.
"This shows how deeply Nixon held onto his grudge of Jack Anderson," Feldstein says. "Even after a pardon and when he was grappling with his own demons, he was still haunted by Anderson's ghost."
In the grand jury testimony — released after a lawsuit by Public Citizen in which Feldstein argued for its release — Nixon was asked about columns by Anderson, a question that brought a quick rebuke.
"I have never dignified anything they have said," Nixon said. "If you have questions about this, you ask me questions, but I am not going to respond to an Anderson column."
Anderson, according to Feldstein, felt about the same way about Nixon.
"The feelings were reciprocated by Anderson," Feldstein says. "Anderson thought Nixon was a crook, dishonest, a bad man and needed to be exposed."
Nixon died in 1994; Anderson in 2005.