AP Correspondent Remembers Jack Anderson

By: John Roderick, Associated Press Writer I met Jack Anderson 60 years ago in Chungking, China.

The scene: The U.S. Army clothing depot.

The time: October 1945.

I was turning in my uniform after three years' military service, part of it in China, and he was receiving his (it was too big) as he began his unplanned, unexpected three years in the postwar Army. The circumstances show that even then it was dangerous to cross the military brass.

In 1945, Jack was in his 20s but already modestly famous as a very young and highly competent war correspondent.

The war had ended in August 1945 but the military spokesman in China, a colonel, continued to brief correspondents on events there.

After one of these briefings, off the record, Jack judged that it was newsworthy and contained no censorable military information. So despite warnings, he sent it to his paper.

Angered at this defiance, the colonel had the last word, Jack told me. Despite the fact Jack had served as a war correspondent under fire, the colonel had him drafted for peacetime military service on the eve of his planned return to civilian life in the United States.

We became friends after meeting in the military clothing line and continued to see each other when he and I moved to Shanghai, he as a reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes; I as a new AP correspondent.

Soon after the war, Jack became partner of the columnist-investigator Drew Pearson, then went on after Pearson's death to a brilliant career of his own as a national muckraker.

We kept in occasional touch after that. In 1971, after I went to China with the American pingpong team, he accepted my National Headliners award in Washington on my behalf. I was in Tokyo.

I thought Jack a great and compassionate American reporter.

Though he could not avoid doing so, he hated hurting his victims, among them Sen. Owen Brewster of my native state of Maine.

Jack uncovered Brewster's collusion with Pan American airways to destroy Howard Hughes' Northwest Airways, an episode dramatized in "The Aviator," the recent movie on Hughes.

John Roderick covered China for The Associated Press between 1945 and 1984.