A chance to investigate journalism, with the master
WASHINGTON -- Jack Anderson, the famed investigative reporter-columnist who died on Saturday, was near the top of that fame when I arrived as an intern in 1978 at his office in a Victorian red-brick mansion near the White House. I was 20 years old, with a year to go before finishing college, and agreed to work for free.
It was an eccentric, exhilarating house of journalism. Anderson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning, muckraking style had laid the foundation for the Woodward-Bernstein era of investigative journalism, was widely feared in the hallways of Washington's power centers.
With Watergate still a vivid memory, the lure of investigative reporting in Washington was irresistible, especially to a Washington native like me who grew up reading Anderson's ''Washington Merry-Go-Round" columns, which were oddly run on the comics page of The
One of my assignments amounted to an offshoot of the ITT saga. I still have the faded clip, which said the Justice Department had a ''soft spot for ITT" and was ignoring requests for an investigation into whether a takeover of a smaller company violated antitrust laws. I could only wonder if ITT had been quaking at the thought of an Anderson inquiry, unaware that the person he described in his column as ''our reporter, Michael Kranish" was actually a newly arrived intern.
Anderson had a top-flight staff, including his heir apparent, Les Whitten; Howie Kurtz, who became the media reporter at the Post; and Brit Hume, who went on to work for the Fox television network. The office was especially rich with mentors.
We interns, meanwhile, felt like Oz behind the great doors of the ornate 16th Street office. Squirreled away in a warren of workspaces down the hall from Anderson's suite, we worked on a constant flow of tips. Sometimes it seemed like a separate staffer was needed just to collate the endless conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy. But a steady flow of legitimate tips also arrived, and we learned that nearly everyone returned calls made by an Anderson associate.
Some things about the operation rankled me. Schooled in the importance of nailing down every fact and source, I was sometimes put off by the stylistic demands. I once went to great lengths to get a senior government official to speak on the record for a story, and proudly presented my accomplishment. But an editor thought the title took up too much space and insisted it would sound better if the person was described as an unnamed source.
Anderson also had some famous missteps. He once reported, incorrectly, that he had located documents showing that 1972 Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton had been arrested for drunken driving. (Eagleton wound up exiting the race for a different reason, acknowledging he had been hospitalized for mental health problems.) Anderson later admitted he had not located the documents. The incident so haunted Anderson that he wrote in his autobiography that when he faced death, the memory about Eagleton would be one of those moments ''that roll before my eyes."
But the Eagleton matter was a distant event when I arrived, and the work was so enlightening that I delayed my return to college for a semester to continue the free education Anderson and his staff were giving me. What became clear was that Anderson was as proud of producing reporters as of producing columns.
Michael Kranish is a reporter in the Globe's Washington bureau. 
