President Richard M. Nixon, is shown at his desk in the White House in this Feb. 16, 1969, file photo. AP When a thin-skinned, vindictive, and egomaniacal president starts to get nasty ideas about the press, things in America can go a long way in the wrong direction.

In 1972, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, they very nearly got deadly.

“Nixon’s administration wiretapped journalists, put them on enemies lists, audited their tax returns, censored their newspapers, and moved to revoke their broadcasting licenses,” writes Mark Feldstein in his book Poisoning the Press.

There was one journalist in particular that Nixon loathed: Jack Anderson, who’d been digging up dirt on Nixon since well before he stepped foot in the Oval Office. At the time, Anderson co-authored a daily column syndicated in nearly a thousand newspapers, reaching almost 70 million people.

He was “part freedom fighter, part carnival huckster, part righteous rogue….Anderson’s exposés — acquired by eavesdropping, rifling through garbage, and swiping classified documents — sent politicians to prison and led targets to commit suicide.”

There were few people Nixon hated more. So in 1972, his infamous henchmen — the “plumbers” — conspired to have Anderson killed.

Nixon’s dislike of Anderson stretched back 20 years. In fact, it was a story of Anderson’s, about Nixon using money from special-interest donors for his personal purposes, that occasioned the famous 1952 “Checkers” speech.

Those early dealings with Anderson, Nixon admitted, “permanently and powerfully affected my attitude toward the press,” leaving “a deep scar which was never to heal completely.”

After he became President in 1968, Nixon instructed his staff to never, ever speak to Anderson.

But soon, a disgruntled staffer broke rank. It should be said here that both Nixon and Anderson were extremely homophobic — a fact that White House staffer Murray Chotiner knew well, and decided to exploit. He told Anderson of a “gay sex ring” among White House staffers. Anderson alerted the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover himself called to warn Nixon of the alleged homosexual activity among his staffers. Nixon’s homophobia and paranoia kicked into high gear, sending his administration into disarray before the rumors were quelled and Nixon finally realized Anderson had pulled one over on him.

Anderson’s power came from being an outsider, essentially persona non gratain D.C., an ally to no one. “He would rather go to a movie than a state dinner,” noted The New York Times, “which was fortunate because he was never invited to any.” Still, if anyone in D.C. wanted to stir up trouble, they knew exactly who to call.

“After two decades of combat with Anderson,” writes Feldstein, Nixon and his people “realized that the newsman was only as good as his sources and that leaking to him might be a more effective way to control him than attacking him.” In 1970, at Nixon’s request, the president’s aides successfully used Anderson to undermine Alabama Governor and Nixon adversary George Wallace. And the way they did it was illegal: they leaked classified tax documents to the journalist.

Syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson in Washington, D.C., March 31, 1972. AP Anderson knew Nixon was using him, but wanted the scoop. This rare moment of collaboration between Anderson and Nixon struck the latter as a sign of reconciliation. Anderson, meanwhile, was operating under the assumption “that our association, like a treaty between governments, would last only so long as it did not conflict with our larger interests.”

In 1971, after the Wallace story broke, Anderson went on television and said, “I can assure you that if the President knew who was leaking, he would be fired tomorrow.”

It sounded to the public like a defense of the president. But Anderson had meant it as a threat, since the leak was Nixon himself.

The Wallace takedown helped Nixon win the 1972 presidential election, but now Anderson had something on him, an impeachable offense.

At the beginning of his second term — on the heels of this betrayal by Anderson, and rattled by the raging anti-war protests — Nixon was growing increasingly paranoid, vengeful and erratic.

Nixon’s people willingly joined in his anti-press crusade. His press secretary declared all the television news networks “anti-Nixon.” His vice president Spiro Agnew said, “The day when the network commentators and even gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a form of diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism of what they said — that day is over.” His advisor Charles Colson told CBS News that the White House would “bring you to your knees” and “break your network.” Nixon even had his friend’s business partner file papers challenging a license held by the Washington Post.

Nixon enlisted Hoover and his ghouls at the FBI to dig up dirt on reporters, advising them in particular to look for homosexual activity. Nixon approved illegal wiretaps on reporters who were critical of his administration and ordered his people to break into journalists’ homes and steal or copy their notes. He told his aides to “pick the twenty most vicious Washington reporters” and destroy their reputations by any means necessary. Anderson was the first name on that list.

Former Nixon adviser Charles Colson. Bob Daugherty/AP Before Nixon’s reelection, Anderson had published a number of stories warning that the president was secretly escalating the military conflict in Southeast Asia, but to his great dismay, no one was interested in his foreign policy intel at first.

In 1971, the New York Times finally latched onto the story, and began publishing what would later be known as the Pentagon Papers. Anderson wasn’t involved. But the Pentagon Papers “stoked both Nixonian rage and media righteousness,” writes Feldstein, “helping lay the foundation for the Watergate scandal that would force the President from office three years later.”

The Pentagon Papers portended leaks in the Nixon administration. In response, Nixon hired two men: a former CIA agent named E. Howard Hunt and a former FBI agent named G. Gordon Liddy. He called them his “plumbers,” because their job was to find the leaks and patch them up. Nixon didn’t care how.

Emboldened by the Pentagon Papers, Anderson ramped up his own foreign policy coverage. His intel was accurate, extensive, and beyond alarming to the Nixon administration. Donald Stewart, an investigator for the Pentagon, recalled that Anderson would “flaunt stolen classified material in his possession on television, exhibiting classified stamps and reading excerpts from the material in an effort to ridicule the classified subject matter.”

Jack Anderson appeared on TV in January 1972 holding documents which he said described key White House strategy sessions during the India-Pakistan war. HWG/AP The Pentagon Papers leak had already been identified as military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. “I didn’t get my information out of a Daniel Ellsberg, who belonged to another Administration and has been out of government two years,” said Anderson haughtily. “I got my information from some of Nixon’s own boys.”

Several scandals loomed, and Anderson was well-positioned to break any number of devastating stories.

Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell railed, “I would like to get ahold of this Anderson and hang him.”

“Goddammit, yes,” the president agreed.

InMarch of 1972, Nixon advisor Charles Colson approached E. Howard Hunt. Feldstein describes what transpired:

“Colson had apparently ‘just come from a meeting with President Nixon,’ whose hideaway office was next door, and seemed uncharacteristically ‘nervous’ and ‘agitated’ about the message he had to deliver. Colson told Hunt that Nixon ‘was incensed over Jack Anderson’s frequent publication of leaks,’ that the ‘son of a bitch’ columnist ‘had become a great thorn in the side of the President,’ and that it was imperative to ‘stop Anderson at all costs.’ Hunt stated that Colson proposed assassinating Anderson in a manner that would appear accidental, perhaps by using a special poison that could not be detected during an autopsy. Colson suggested various specific ways to get rid of Anderson, Hunt said, and ‘asked me if I could explore the matter with the CIA,’ where Hunt had previously worked as a spy. According to Hunt, Colson explained that neutralizing Anderson was ‘very important’ to the White House and Hunt was ‘authorized to do whatever was necessary’ to eliminate the investigative reporter.”

The Nixon administration was plotting to kill a journalist.

Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy brainstormed. They could run Anderson’s car off the road into a strategically placed obstacle. They could break into his home and put a tab of poison in his medicine bottle, a method they called “Aspirin roulette”. They could smear LSD on his steering wheel, causing him to die in a hallucination-induced car wreck.

They even spoke with a CIA physician about the best possible options for chemical assassination. “Of course, there’s always the old simple method of simply dropping a pill in a guy’s cocktail,” the doctor said. That wouldn’t work: Anderson was a Mormon and never drank. They discussed the possibility that Anderson would fall victim to a “random” street crime, his wallet and watch stolen after a fatal attack.

Liddy recalls that they paid the physician a hundred dollars out of Nixon’s re-election fund. “In the real world,” he justified his actions later, “you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating.”

However, Anderson was spared. And the reason Hunt and Liddy didn’t follow through on their plan? Days later they were assigned another task: bugging the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building.