Mark Feldstein | Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture

Listen to an interview with Feldstein on NPR' Fresh Air.

Peabody Award-winning journalist Mark Feldstein presents his book Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture. It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack Anderson dead. The most famous and feared investigative reporter in the nation has exposed yet another of the president’s dirty secrets, and Nixon’s operatives are ordered to “stop Anderson at all costs”—permanently. Feldstein 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. Dan Rather raves, "Pick it up and you’re not likely to be able to put it down.”