The Press: Knight v. Eagleton

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In the uproar that followed Eagleton's disclosure, Columnist Jack Anderson raised additional charges. "We have now located photostats of half a dozen arrests for drunken and reckless driving," he declared on a Mutual Network radio broadcast. Eagleton promptly called the charge "a damnable lie." When newsmen asked to see the documentation, Anderson started backing down; he had "traced but not seen photostats of Eagleton's traffic records." Finally the columnist produced a "reliable source" who said he had been given "nine, ten or eleven" photostats of traffic citations from a man claiming to be a Missouri state trooper. The source turned out to be W. True Davis, 52, a Washington, D.C., banker, former ambassador to Switzerland and ex-Under Secretary of the Treasury. Davis is a wealthy Democratic wheelhorse from St. Joseph, Mo., who ran against Eagleton in a three-way 1968 Democratic primary race for the Senate seat of Missouri's Edward V. Long. Where were the photostats? Davis said he "tore all that stuff up." Could they have involved someone other than Eagleton? "I doubt it." Could they have been falsified? "There's always that possibility."

Anderson said he had tried to reach Eagleton for 24 hours without success before making the charge on the radio, and had withheld it from his widely read column because he could not "authenticate the traffic citations personally." He conceded that "I wouldn't normally and I shouldn't have" used the information before getting documentation, but insisted that "I knew there were a dozen reporters going after this. That's why I used it on the radio, to cover myself." Anderson promised a full apology to Eagleton if the charge proved unfounded. Altogether it was a poor piece of journalism by a Pulitzer prizewinner who should have known better.