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WASHINGTON - Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday (Dec. 17, 2005.) He was 83.
Mr. Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said his daughter Laurie Anderson-Bruch.
Mr. Anderson gave up his syndicated "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column at age 81 in July 2004 after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.
The column broke a string of big scandals, from White House aide Sherman Adams taking a vicuna coat and other gifts from a wealthy industrialist in 1958 to the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1986.
The column appeared in some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday. Mr. Anderson took it over after Pearson's death in 1969, working with a changing cast of co-authors and staff over the years.
A devout Mormon, Mr. Anderson often said he looked upon journalism as a calling. Considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, he was renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.
"He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate," said Mark Feldstein, Mr. Anderson's biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University. "He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power."
Mr. Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India. He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.
Such scoops earned him a spot on President Richard Nixon's "enemies list." Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Mr. Anderson - such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash - but the White House rejected the idea.
Mr. Anderson's biggest misstep also took place in 1972, when he incorrectly reported that Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri - at the time the Democratic nominee for vice president - had a history of arrests for drunken and reckless driving. Mr. Anderson later acknowledged that his sourcing was faulty and apologized to Eagleton, who eventually dropped out of the race after revelations of treatment for mental illness.
Over the years, Mr. Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by numerous government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks. In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.
Mr. Anderson also was praised for personal kindness. His son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.
"I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all," Mr. Anderson said in 1972. "But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."
Mr. Anderson was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1986. In a speech a decade later, he made light of the uncontrollable shaking the disease caused.
"The doctors tell me it's Parkinson's," he said. "I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it."
Mr. Anderson is survived by his wife, Olivia, and nine children.
Other obituaries of noteROBERT F. NEWMYER, 49, a prolific independent film producer whose credits include Training Day and The Santa Clause, died Monday of a heart attack while he was working out in Toronto, friends said. He and Jeffrey Silver formed Outlaw Productions in the late 1980s and hit it big with sex, lies and videotape in 1989.
ERNEST SCHWIEBERT, 74, an architect and planner who wrote influential books on fishing, died Dec. 10 in Princeton, N.J. His piece de resistanc e was the 1,745-page Trout, which weighs in at 7 pounds, 5 ounces, and has a bibliography listing 999 sources. It traces the sport to the ancient Greeks and Chinese.
CARROLL CAMPBELL JR., 65, a former governor who helped turn South Carolina into a Republican stronghold and recruited big-name industries, died Dec. 7 in Columbia, S.C. He was a four-term congressman before he took office in 1987 as the second Republican governor since Reconstruction.
DEVAN NAIR, 82, president of Singapore from 1981 to 1985 and a leader in Singapore's fight for independence from Britain, died Dec. 6 in Hamilton, Ontario, where he lived, a friend said. He resigned as president amid claims by then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew that he was seeking treatment for alcoholism.
KAARE KRISTIANSEN, 85, a politician who quit the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in 1994 rather than support an award that included Yasser Arafat, died Dec. 3, according to the Christian Democratic Party in Oslo, Norway. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, shared the prize with then-Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
LIU BINYAN, 80, a leading Chinese dissident writer who spent the last 17 years in exile, died Dec. 6 in Trenton, N.J. Lauded as "China's conscience," he attended Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow in 1988, but was unable to return home after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and government crackdown on the prodemocracy movement.