JACK ANDERSON, REPORTER

American journalism suffered a major loss last week in the death of the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson. He was one of a kind in his single-minded pursuit of the old rule “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” especially the second part of that dictum.

A muckraker is not always likable. In John Bunyan’s 17th-century words, “he cannot look up to heaven because he is so obsessed with the muck of worldly profit.”

But Jack Anderson, a devout Mormon, hated hurting the victims of his investigations, notably Maine’s Sen. Owen Brewster, whom he exposed as having colluded with Pan American Airways to destroy Howard Hughes’ Northwest Airways.

His first scoop, as a 12-year-old schoolboy in Utah, reported unlawful polygamy in the Mormon church. Later, he broke a string of scandals as partner of Drew Pearson in the newspaper column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” and on his own after Mr. Pearson’s death. At its height, it reached 40 million readers in 1,000 newspapers.

Stories he broke included the Eisenhower administration’s Sherman Adams’ acceptance of a vicuna coat from a wealthy New Hampshire industrialist, the Reagan administration’s secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, the Central Intelligence Agency’s enlisting of the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, and the U.S. tilt away from India and toward Pakistan in Bangladesh’s war for independence. That last scoop earned him the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

He sometimes blundered. He had to apologize to Sen. Thomas Eagleton for reporting about drunken driving arrests that he could not later authenticate. And in a long article in Meridian magazine in December 2001, he suggested without any evidence that the Saudi Arabian government had secretly engineered the 9/11 attacks in an effort to destroy the Western free enterprise system.

Mr. Anderson was on the Nixon administration’s “Enemies List,” and a Nixon aide, Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate burglars, plotted to kill him by placing poison tablets in his medicine cabinet.

The FBI often tried to discover who his sources were. The New York Times reported that when G-men staked out his house, several of his nine children went out to take pictures of the agents and let the air out of their tires. While not that all of his methods are recommended, present-day reporters would do well to emulate his dogged pursuit of stories.

Above all, he did a lot of shoe-leather reporting. These days, with Google and e-mail, a reporter can work mostly by sitting at a computer. That can mean missing a lot of good stories.