About this item
It is March 1972, and the Nixon White House wants Jack Anderson dead. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the most famous and feared investigative reporter in the nation, has exposed yet another of the President's dirty secrets. Nixon's operatives are ordered to "stop Anderson at all costs" - permanently. Across the street from the White House, they huddle in a hotel basement to conspire. Should they try "Aspirin Roulette" and break into Anderson's home to plant a poisoned pill in one of his medicine bottles? Could they smear LSD on the journalist's steering wheel, so that he would absorb it through his skin, lose control of his car, and crash? Or stage a routine-looking mugging, making Anderson appear to be one more fatal victim of Washington's notorious street crime?Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture recounts not only the disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era's most embattled politician and its most reviled newsman.
About the Author
Mark Feldstein is the Richard Eaton Professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland.For two decades, he worked as an investigative reporter for newspapers, magazines, and television, including as an on-air correspondent at CNN and ABC News.On assignment, Feldstein was beaten up in the U.S., censored in Egypt, and escorted out of Haiti under armed guard, earning dozens of journalism's top honors, from the Edward R. Murrow broadcasting prize to two George Foster Peabody medallions.A graduate of Harvard who received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Feldstein has also won awards for his scholarship from the American Journalism Historians Association and other academic organizations.He is widely quoted as a media analyst by leading news outlets in the United States and abroad, and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues in court cases and before Congress.
