Howie and Jack
Howard Kurtz, who started his professional journalism career with columnist Jack Anderson penned a tribute to the late investigator over the weekend.
“Anderson, who died yesterday at 83, was the most feared investigative reporter of his day, but in person Jack was the gentlest of men. He was patient and avuncular with the young and ambitious wannabes who rotated through his small office…. He was a wonderful storyteller, a good listener and a devoted father of nine kids who was happy spending summer weekends at a big beach house in Rehoboth. He would begin even routine phone conversations with ‘Good to hear your voice.’ He once told me that the best way to develop a source was to be inconvenienced together at some distant airport.”
Here’s the section on Howie and Anderson’s shop from July’s Washingtonian profile of Kurtz:
“The dozen or so reporters and interns who did the grunt work for the column worked alongside Anderson and [Les Whitten] on the top two floors of a Victorian mansion on 16th Street in Northwest DC. They were a crew of half-shaven cub reporters in secondhand sport coats and casual shirts gathering dirt on the nation’s powerful people and institutions, making calls over the clattering of a dozen typewriters, and running off to meet sources under suspicious circumstances.
“Once Kurtz was dispatched to a street corner in Queens as part of an Anderson investigation into a counterfeiting ring. The source was to identify Kurtz by the red umbrella he was to carry, which Kurtz borrowed from his mother.
“Even in an ambitious group, Kurtz stood out by producing story after story, scoop after scoop. His colleagues remember Kurtz always pressing his sources for more. He’d talk a mile a minute, finishing conversations in his rapid-fire speaking style: ‘Is that all you got for me? You don’t have anything else?’”
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