Jack N. Anderson

Jack N. Anderson, 83, "a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who for years was America's most widely read newspaper columnist," died December 17, 2005, at his Bethesda, Maryland, home, as a result of Parkinson's disease. 

"The number of scoops that he had a hand in was amazing: the Keating Five congressional ethics scandal; revelations in the Iran-Contra scandal; the U.S. government's tilt away from India toward Pakistan, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972; the ITT-Dita Beard affair, which linked the settlement of a federal antitrust suit against International Telephone & Telegraph to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican National Convention; the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro; the final days of Howard Hughes; U.S. attempts to undermine the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende; allegations about a possible Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the pope; an Iranian connection to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut." 

"He relished being called 'the Paul Revere of journalism' for his knack for uncovering major stories first almost as much as he enjoyed being at the top of President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list," Douglas Martin wrote in the December 18, 2005, New York Times. "Not only was Mr. Anderson on Nixon's notorious list, but G. Gordon Liddy, a Watergate burglar, plotted his murder."

"He liked to say that he and his staff of eager investigators did daily what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal," Martin wrote.