Robert Allen, Pearson's longtime partner, Wikipedia:
"In 1933, Allen worked as a Soviet agent (Sh/147) for $100 a month.[5] According to John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev in their 2009 book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America,[2][6] this was legal for Allen to do, being prior to the passage of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, and his motivation is unknown.
In the early forties he co-wrote the newspaper strip Hap Hopper with Drew Pearson. The strip was drawn by Jack Sparling.[7]
He served on General Patton's staff in World War II.
Why not gather these remarks below in one place, out of context though they are. One can read the entire posts at one's leisure.
DK on Pearson:
"...I have been rereading one of my favorite books, the diaries of Drew Pearson, Anderson’s onetime boss and later collaborator, who wrote a daily column, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, from 1932 to his death in 1969. Forgotten today, Pearson, whom I have already quoted with respect to Herbert Hoover, was one of the most extraordinary journalists in American history—a type whom we desperately need, but do not have, today....Pearson’s diary and the books he wrote with his original collaborator Robert Allen (mainly in the 1930s) are extraordinary today because of the intense interest they take in the lives and careers of public officials." DK
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Drew Pearson, the sequel
"In 2006, I did a long piece here about one of my favorite books, the diaries of newspaper columnist Drew Pearson from 1949 through 1959. Pearson was probably the single most famous and influential journalist of the middle third of the twentieth century. He and his one time partner, Robert Allen, created a sensation in 1932 with their anonymous book, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, which combined a scathing portrayal of the federal government in general and the Hoover administration in particular with a great deal of high-level Washington gossip. (Pearson at the time was related by marriage to the Patterson family, which owned the Washington Post.).........DK
Friday, June 07, 2013
Pearson and Assange
"Nearly eight years ago, I wrote a post on the career of Drew Pearson, the muckraker who with his collaborators Robert Allen and Jack Anderson infuriated Administrations from Roosevelt to Nixon, and who successfully defended all but one of many dozens of libel suits along the way. I concluded that post with a lament that there was no one remotely like Pearson writing today, either for newspapers (he was a syndicated columnist) or in the blogosphere. Last weekend I saw We Steal Secrets, a very well-balanced documentary about Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Wikileaks, and I left the theater thinking about the similarities and differences between Assange and Pearson, and between Pearson's time and ours
Neither Pearson nor Assange had, or have, any respect for government serecy regulations per se. Pearson published lots of classified information and was repeatedly investigated for doing so. ......DK
Sunday, October 16, 2005
"Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became national figures in 1972-3 by exposing the secrets of the Nixon Administration—secrets willingly leaked to them by lower-level figures in the Nixon campaign, and confirmed, as we know, by Mark Felt. They treated the higher officials of the Nixon Administration as officials should be treated—as adversaries. “Governments,” the late I. F. Stone liked to remark, “are run by liars,” and while that may be a slight exaggeration, the demands of governing almost always tempt those in charge to stretch, or deny, the truth. That, as Woodward and Bernstein eventually helped to prove, was what the Nixon Administration was doing....
Instead of the intrepid investigator cultivating low-level sources to expose the higher-ups—like Drew Pearson, whose diaries from the years 1946-59 should be required reading for every aspiring journalist..." DK
Saturday, September 17, 2005
.......Like the SDS inside universities 35 years ago, the Administration is too committed to its goals to worry about their impact. George W. Bush differs in many ways from Herbert Hoover, but they have some things in common--as revealed by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in the midst of the Depression in the book that made them famous, The Washington Merry-Go-Round.
Hoover, the two men wrote in 1931, had built up a reputation as a miracle-worker in business and government before becoming President, and had apparently come to believe it. As a result, he routinely exaggerated the achievements of his Administration, especially in areas like cutting expenditures and keeping the depression-era deficit low, by large amounts-confident that the press and public would not notice the truth. In those days of a more adversarial press, this brought him to grief.
How did Hoover get this way? To understand "why he does not get along with people, and why he has surrounded himself with yes-men," they argued, one must look to his earlier career. "All of that period of his life during which a man's character and mental process are molded was spent far from the field of politics in isolated parts of the world. Months and years spent on the edge of the Australian desert or in the interior of China rob any man of that contact with his fellowmen so essential if he is to inspire leadership. Especially true is this when the people with whom he is surrounded on the edge of that desert or in the interior of China remain there subject to his whim and pleasure.
"It was in these circumstances that Herbert Hoover developed the habits of autocracy which have so handicapped him in the White House. Because he had the power to command, he never developed the power to lead."
And here is their comment about Hoover's response to the Depression.
"It in the long and tragic travail of the economic depression, the most tragic thing was the President's fear of admitting that a great disaster had befallen the country. For months, while gloom, unemployment, and deflation settled on the land, he refused to admit their reality or do anything fundamental about the situation. His approach to the problem was wholly that of the boomer [sic], the bull-market operator, concerned only with his own political interests and willing to resort to any device or misrepresentation to further them.
"Facts, statistics, plan organization--there have been none, and when proposed by others have been rejected and stifled, secretly when possible, openly when that was impossible.
"One policy alone has dominated his course: not to do or say anything that would reveal the truth about the great catastrophe. Suppression and inaction have been his unshaken role."
No further comment, I think, is necessary.....DK
Saturday, February 26, 2011
"....I cannot resist one more story from Caro's book. In early 1956, Johnson was pushing hard for a bill to deregulate the price of natural gas--a bill worth tens of millions of dollars to George and Herman Brown and other Texas oil men. Liberals, including the columnist Drew Pearson, were fighting the bill hard....DK
Friday, July 04, 2014
"....Of the two eras, sad to say, the Gilded Age looks much more similar to this one than the New Deal era. The Nine Old Men, as Drew Pearson and Robert Allen named them, were fighting a rear-guard action against progress....DK
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