THE COLUMNIST

Biography of a significant voice in 20th-century journalism.

When newspapers were the primary source of news, nearly everyone read Drew Pearson (1897-1969), whose daily column and weekly radio broadcasts expressed strong opinions and revealed government secrets. Though they were often scurrilous and occasionally wrong, they were never ignored. Recent historians have been less than kind, but Ritchie, historian emeritus of the U.S. Senate, draws a more favorable portrait than any during Pearson’s lifetime and brings to life one of the golden ages of investigative journalism. The bestseller Washington-Merry-Go-Round, a spicy political exposé written by Pearson and a colleague, appeared in 1931, and both veteran reporters were fired. Already aggressive self-promoters, they sold the idea of a daily column, which debuted in 1932 as “a mix of important news, amusing events, brisk style, realistic reporting, and crusading spirit.” Before long, the “Washington-Merry-Go-Round” column was a massive success. Until Pearson’s sudden death from a heart attack, the column’s combination of rumor, punditry, and scandal made him a household name. As the author notes, “the columnist took credit for the indictment, imprisonment, censure, and expulsion of a half dozen members of Congress, and the defeat of many more.” A small army of loyal leg men trolled for dirt, but Pearson’s massive audience proved irresistible to elected officials and even presidents, who leaked information even as they denounced him in public. Although generally liberal, he was despised by FDR, Truman, and Kennedy no less than Eisenhower and Nixon. The column continued with his younger collaborator, Jack Anderson, before fading at the end of the century with the rise of the internet. Readers may weary of Ritchie’s relentless stream of half-forgotten scandals, but they will be intrigued by his portrait of a time when muckrakers raked whatever muck they found. Today, with politics polarized into near immobility, commentators still attack government malfeasance, but hard evidence is increasingly irrelevant to their audience, to whom truth is whatever conforms to their ideology.

An entertaining and mostly admiring life of the legendary columnist.