Anderson, who grew up in the Salt Lake City area, wrote a political column for 32 years that ran in hundreds of newspapers - including The Salt Lake Tribune - and was, in its heyday in the '60s and '70s, the most widely read newspaper column in the country. In it, he exposed corruption among America's powerful, and did it so well that he won a Pulitzer Prize and the loyal following of millions of readers.
The popular former Utahn and devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died Saturday at the age of 83, having retired just three years ago.
It was rightly said that Anderson was a bridge between the muckrakers of a century ago and Vietnam War- and Watergate-era investigative reporters. He considered himself more like the former, and his column, "The Washington Merry-Go-Round," bore him out. He was a crusader who went after politicians with a dogged gusto seldom seen among more polished journalists, a style learned from his predecessor on the column, Drew Pearson, whom he worked for and with for 22 years.
Mark Feldstein, director of journalism at George Washington University and Anderson's biographer, called him "part circus huckster, part guerrilla fighter, part righteous rogue" who single-handedly tore at the walls of secrecy surrounding the nation's government when such tactics had largely fallen out of favor.
His targets hated him - a Nixon aide once ordered his murder by poisoning - but he was beloved by old-school journalists and Utahns who regard him as a favorite son. In his early life, he had worked for both the Deseret News (now Deseret Morning News) and The Salt Lake Tribune.
Anderson uncovered pieces of such stories as the Iran-Contra scandal, the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro and an Iranian connection to the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. At one point about 1,000 newspapers carried his column.
Jack Anderson was one of a kind in his pre-Internet era. Neither journalism nor his home state is likely to see one quite like him again. And we're the poorer for it.
