radio station. After his stint in the Army, Anderson was hired by Drew Pearson for the staff of his column, the "Merry-Go-Round". When Pearson died in 1969, Anderson inherited responsibility for this column and gave his own name to it – Washington Merry-go-Round. In its heyday, Anderson's column was the most influential and widely read in the U.S.; published in nearly a thousand newspapers, he reached an audience of 40 million people. He co-founded Citizens Against Government Waste with J. Peter Grace in 1984. Muckraker Anderson feuded with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, when he exposed the scope of the Mafia, a threat that Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment lasted into the 1970s. Hoover once described Anderson as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures." Anderson told his staff, "Let's do to Hoover what he does to others," and he instructed them to go through Hoover's garbage, a tactic the FBI used in its surveillance of political dissidents. Anderson's revelations about Hoover tipped the attitudes of the public and the press towards the FBI director. Anderson grew close to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the two exchanged information from sources. When Pearson went after McCarthy, Anderson reluctantly followed at first, then actively assisted with the eventual downfall of his onetime friend. In the mid-1960s Anderson exposed the corruption of Senator Thomas J. Dodd and unearthed a memo by an ITT executive admitting the company made large donations to Richard Nixon's campaign to so that Nixon would stymie anti-trust prosecution. His reporting on Nixon-ITT corruption earned him a place on the Master list of Nixon's political opponents. Anderson collaborated with Pearson on The Case Against Congress, published in 1968. According to the Family Jewels Central Intelligence Agency documents, in 1971, during the Indo-Pakistani War, the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, had a wiretap put on Anderson's phones. Other topics that Anderson covered included organized crime, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Ted Kennedy's role in the drowning death of a staffer at the Chappaquiddick incident, the Watergate scandal, the 1970 meeting between Elvis Presley and President Nixon, fugitive Nazis, the white supremacist organization the Liberty Lobby and other far-right organizations, the death of Howard Hughes, the ABSCAM public corruption investigation, the investigation into fugitive financier Robert Vesco, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the activities of numerous Washington agencies, elected officials, and bureaucrats. Retractions Anderson's column occasionally