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David Karr was the Zelig of twentieth-century American life. He popped up at key moments and important places, next to such significant figures as Alan Cranston, Drew Pearson, Armand Hammer, John Tunney, and Sargent Shriver. He preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover, and hobnobbed with Aristotle Onassis, Henry Wallace, and political movers and shakers in France and Russia. His sister, who admitted “very intense” positive and negative feelings about him, thought he had an “uncanny yearning to be an insider because he was an outsider.”

To more suspicious observers, Karr was a Svengali who bewitched and corrupted those who were sometimes naïve, sometimes greedy, who worked at newspapers, in public relations, or in government propaganda agencies. In this narrative, Karr later decided he could do more damage to American interests as a capitalist and used his access to business tycoons to weaken American companies and benefit the Soviet Union. Westbrook Pegler, the acerbic conservative newsman, devoted dozens of columns to denouncing his machinations, complaining that “planting plugs, intimidating Government officials by threats” and surveilling the unsuspecting were his “vocation.”

To still others, his life epitomizes a peculiarly American journey—that of constant reinvention of self, a young man on the make, ever alert for the main chance, and careless about the roadkill left behind in his meteoric, unprincipled rise from obscurity. Jack Anderson, who succeeded him as Drew Pearson’s chief “legman,” insisted that Karr was the model for How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, the hit Broadway show that celebrated the astonishing rise of a window-washer up the corporate ladder to boss.

Some who knew Karr swore by his probity. Hervé Alphand, a French statesman, thought he was “always very nice and very kind. I never saw him offend anyone.” Arnold Forster, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, called him “o