Opinion: Hands off! Even from the grave, journalistic pitbull Jack Anderson still ready to rumble
April 20, 2006 | For more than half a century, Jack Anderson reveled in the rough-and-tumble that is high-stakes journalism and politics of Washington, DC. Even now, four months after his death at 83 in December, the journalistic icon who covered and harried a covey of presidents and scores more political poseurs is still seen as a threat to the powerful.
In the past week, word has come that the FBI wants to cull some 180 boxes of the Pulitzer Prize-winner columnist’s papers for possible breaches of national security and classified information. Nothing could be better designed to bring Anderson back to life than the thought of federal agents pawing through his papers.
Anderson, a Utah native whose syndicated “Washington Merry-Go Round” column began in 1969 and ran in some 400 U.S. newspapers, died of complications of Parkinson’s disease in December. His papers are archived at Brigham Young University, though they have not yet been opened to the scrutiny of historians and the public.
That, apparently, is what the FBI wants to head off….