In the foreword to the 2015 book Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969, the historian Richard Norton Smith writes, "His name is largely forgotten today, but for the middle third of the twentieth century, from Herbert Hoover and the Bonus Army to Richard Nixon's Silent Majority, Drew Pearson enjoyed unrivaled journalistic influence and visibility. As many as 60 million Americans began their day with his "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column, a readership far outstripping that of the Olympian Walter Lippmann or gossipy Walter Winchell." Similarly, a blurb from the University of Nebraska Press, the book's publisher, plainly states: "For most of three decades, Drew Pearson was the most well-known journalist in the United States." However, for those coming of age today, even among professional journalists, Pearson's name likely barely even rings a bell, as obscure now as that of the British businessman Samuel Pearson, Canadian Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Lester Pearson, or anyone else who happened once to bear that surname.
The Shelf Life of Journalists
