Drew Pearson was born on December 13, 1897 in Evanston, Cook County, Illinois, United States. He was the son of Paul Martin Pearson, a professor of speech and English at Northwestern University, and Edna Wolfe. When Pearson was six years old, his father accepted a position in Pennsylvania at Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution, and the entire family became Quakers.
Drew Pearson attended preparatory school in Swarthmore, with a final year (1914 - 1915) at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. From 1915 to 1919 he attended Swarthmore College, graduating with a B. A.
From 1919 to 1921 Drew Pearson worked with the British Red Cross in the Balkans. He then briefly taught geography at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and toured Asia and Europe extensively as a foreign correspondent for several newspapers. Pearson and his former mother-in-law maintained a journalistic and social relationship, sometimes tempestuous, for some years. In 1926, Pearson became foreign editor of the United States Daily, the predecessor of U. S. News and World Report magazine. His duties were to cover international conferences, and he witnessed the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928. A year later he became diplomatic correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.
In 1931, Pearson and Robert S. Allen, the Washington bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, coauthored anonymously Washington Merry-Go-Round, a book containing Washington social gossip and attacks on President Herbert Hoover and Congress. A best-seller, the book was followed by More Merry-Go-Round (1932), with indictments of General Douglas MacArthur and the Supreme Court and accounts of the risqué social life of Cissy Patterson. These books displayed for the first time Pearson's unique style of slashing and partisan political observation mixed with titillating revelations about the private lives of Washington higher-ups. Pearson and Allen were fired when their respective employers learned they had written the books.
In 1932 they began "Washington Merry-Go-Round, " which became the most widely read daily newspaper column in the United States. By 1942, when Allen left to join the military, the column was syndicated in 350 newspapers. Thereafter, Pearson continued the column alone, and by the time of his death, 650 papers carried it. From 1938 until 1955 Pearson had a weekly radio program on the American Broadcasting Company. After the staid political journalism of the 1920's, Pearson's aggressive and irreverent reportorial style captured the loyalty of millions of readers and roused the intense hatred of others, usually his targets. He was aided by a staff of dedicated, if underpaid and overworked, associates and by information and confidential tips from hundreds of sources in and out of government.
After Drew Pearson interviewed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 and 1963, his subsequent columns, unlike those of many in the establishment press, stressed Khrushchev's overtures for peaceful coexistence. Pearson's major efforts were aimed at exposing corruption and incompetence in government and the private lives of public figures. He was the first to reveal that Germany was about to invade Russia in 1941, that General George Patton had slapped a soldier, and that advisers to President Franklin Roosevelt believed Great Britain would have to give up India following World War II. He broke the story of Igor Gouzenko, the Russian code clerk who had defected and revealed the existence of Soviet spy rings in the United States and Canada.
Pearson attacked corruption in the Truman administration and reported that President Dwight Eisenhower's aide Sherman Adams had accepted a vicuña coat from the Boston financier Bernard Goldfine. Pearson's muckraking in the area of fiscal corruption led to the retirement of numerous public officials, including Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York and Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, and to the jailing of others. Two of Pearson's major targets were General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Pearson criticized MacArthur's heavy-handed dispersal of the 1932 "Bonus Army" of unemployed veterans in Washington, revealed his disobedience of orders during the Korean War, and disclosed his secret 1950 Wake Island conference with President Truman, at which MacArthur erroneously predicted American victory in the war within two months. Pearson exposed Senator McCarthy's unimpressive war record, his income tax evasion, and his unsubstantiated charges of Communism against government employees.
Drew Pearson was sued for libel scores of times and took great pride in having lost only one lawsuit. Indeed, he carefully cultivated a reputation for legal invincibility. One of the largest suits against him, by General MacArthur for $1. 75 million, was dropped in 1934, because Pearson threatened to make public the existence of MacArthur's mistress. After Pearson died in Washington, D. C. on September 1, 1969, his column was continued by his longtime associate Jack Anderson.
Drew Pearson was one of the most influential newspaper columnists in the United States. He was a newspaper and radio journalist noted for his syndicated newspaper column "Washington Merry-Go-Round" for over five decades. He also had a program on NBC Radio titled Drew Pearson Comments. There is a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in his honor.
Drew Pearson's politics were liberal and left of center, although he was far from uncritical of Democratic administrations. He also encouraged closer relations with the Soviet Union.
Drew Pearson attacked racism, militarism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, religious intolerance, and oppression of the poor, and supported welfare programs, Medicare, civil rights, and foreign aid.
Quotations:
"The press always becomes disenchanted with every President. This was not Johnson's fault entirely a little bit his fault. They became very disenchanted with Kennedy. They became very disenchanted with Roosevelt. The only fellow they didn't really become disenchanted with was Eisenhower and he never said anything or gave them a chance really. "
"I just operate with a sense of smell: if something smells wrong, I go to work. "
Quotes from others about the person
"His ill-considered falsehoods have come to the point where he is doing much harm to his own Government and to other nations. It is a pity that anyone anywhere believes anything he writes. " - President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On March 12, 1925, Drew Pearson married Felicia Gizycka, the daughter of the imperious Eleanor Medill ("Cissy") Patterson, a scion of the McCormick family, which owned the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald. They had one child before the marriage ended in divorce three years later. In July 1936, Pearson married Luvie Moore Abell, who had a son by a previous marriage.
Drew Pearson was close throughout his life to his stepson.
