True Drew

By Michael Demarest

DREW PEARSON: DIARIES 1949-1959

Edited by TYLER ABELL

592 pages. Holt, Rinehart& Winston. $15.

He was, according to a Senator from Tennessee, "an ignorant liar, a pusillanimous liar, a peewee liar, a natural-born liar, a liar for a living." F.D.R. concurred. Joe McCarthy kicked him in the groin. Harry Truman ranked him among his top s.o.b.s. In fact, Columnist Drew Pearson was often misinformed and vindictive in the pursuit of his foes, but he was never intentionally mendacious. A courtly Quaker gentleman, he raked muck with a silver hoe--he married money and made $7,000 a week in his heyday--and set a pattern of investigative reporting and permanently emboldened American journalism.

Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round--it was seldom very merry--ran at its peak seven days a week in 600 newspapers. As he makes clear in his Diaries, he was immensely proud of his eminence and influence. Clearly, too, as he dictated almost daily entries in this personal journal, he considered them footnotes to history, not merely private ruminations. And in a way they are. Pearson confided no major revelations to the diaries; scoops, after all, were his daily bread and butter, and he appears to have expended them all as he found them. But the diaries do reflect in a detail that could not appear in his column the man's exhaustive knowledge of what went on in Washington: Joe McCarthy's bruited homosexuality and alcoholism; the acceptance of gifts by Truman five-percenters; the venality of sundry Congressmen. The column, along with Pearson's radio and TV programs, helped send four to jail, forced the resignations of several other malfeasant officials and, he claimed, was instrumental in at least one suicide: Defense Secretary James Forrestal, who killed himself after Pearson repeatedly charged that he was insane.

Withal, Merry-Go-Round was not so much reportage as an impassioned projection of Drewidic causes and crusades. Many were admirable. He invented and indefatigably promoted "the Friendship Train " which in 1947 collected from private American citizens 700 carloads of food --$40 million worth--for the postwar hungry of France and Italy. His diaries record and recall that he championed the cause of European unity long before the Common Market came into being, warned that the U.S. would face an energy crisis if it did not deal more evenhandedly with the Arab nations, and decried Dulles' brinkmanship, arguing cogently for detente with the Soviet Union and against U.S. involvement in Indochina.

White House Buffoon.

It was Pearson--as he proudly notes--who first reported such things as General Patton's notorious slapping incident, Richard Nixon's questionable finances (in 1957), and the ruthless tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee. As, in Pearson's words, "a voice for the voiceless," the column at its best was a kind of national ombudsman, most notably during World War II, when it exposed instances of brass-hat bungling.

At the same time, as the salty, often petulant diaries recall, the column's gentle, sensitive author pitilessly pilloried the drinking and wenching habits of his foes, while ignoring the public and private peccadilloes of the men who fed him information. Pearson was often egregiously wrong too. In his diary, he called Harry Truman "the buffoon in the White House," falsely charged that Jack Kennedy's Pulitzer-prizewinning Profiles in Courage had been ghostwritten, and tossed out many other reckless accusations that landed him in some 50 libel suits. (He lost only one, a $50,000 award to a Truman Administration official whom he accused of lobbying for the Polish government.) Pearson was persistently wrongheaded in his political prognostications: the diaries gravely underrated Lyndon Johnson's political clout, dismissed the power of the Kennedy clan, and greatly exaggerated the potency of Estes Kefauver as a presidential candidate.

Pearson's diaries, edited by his stepson, are chiefly valuable as a kind of layer in the archaeology of American journalism. Drew Pearson waged a personal karate with the body politic that was often unfair, egotistical and quixotic, but generally made its mark. The diaries show that he spent an inordinate amount of time, for example, preparing press releases and speeches for Senators and Congressmen who were sympathetic to his causes--a practice that today would probably get a Washington correspondent fired forthwith from any newspaper or magazine. Yet for all his vanities and vendettas, Andrew Russell Pearson was a valuable man. "I should be a lobbyist," he once complained to his diary. In good ways and bad, he was.

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