He later worked at Granada TV's World in Action,[3] the UK's first tabloid public affairs program, and following that he wrote the news for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Overseas Service.
Summers became the BBC's youngest Producer at 24, travelling worldwide and sending filmed reports from the United States, across Central and Latin America, and the conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa.
[3][4][5] A main focus, though, was on the momentous events of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States – such as on-the-spot reports, during 1968, on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and on Robert F. Kennedy's bid for the presidency.
He smuggled cameras into the then Soviet Union to obtain the only TV interview with dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov – when he was under house arrest, having just won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
He has also written biographies of celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra, and investigations of Britain's Profumo Affair and the 2007 disappearance in Portugal of the British child, Madeleine McCann.
[13] In a comparison that must surely have pleased the authors, The Toronto Sun rated the book's "superlative investigative reporting that makes Woodward and Bernstein seem like beginners.
"[14] In the late 1970s Summers was working on a documentary for Panorama about the recently released report from the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations.
"[21] The New York Times' Christopher Lehmann Haupt wrote that the book made for "extraordinary reading...the ghost of Marilyn Monroe cries out in these pages."
[23] In April 2022, Netflix premiered a feature-length documentary film, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, based on the Goddess book, directed by Emma Cooper.
[32] There was such widespread press coverage of the controversial cross-dressing allegation that Bill Clinton, President at the time of the book's publication, joked to reporters that he was having a problem filling the post of FBI director.
"[36] After describing the book as "a muckraking, gossipy biography that goes well beyond any previous one-sided assaults against [Nixon]", historian Melvin Small concluded: "What we get with Summers is a juicy story of scandal, mental illness, and evil.
"[42] According to The Daily Telegraph's Toby Harnden, the authors' "principal criticisms are that the Bush administration was asleep at the switch on 9/11; that vital intelligence was ignored; that the FBI and CIA did not share information; and that Saudi Arabia was intimately connected to al-Qaeda and is sometimes overindulged by the US.
"[20] Harnden took the view that there was "no real evidence" for Summers' and Swan's claims that the CIA negotiated with Osama bin Laden prior to those attacks, nor of their attempt to recruit two of the hijackers as agents.
[20] While criticizing the authors for a lack of original research, failure to interview major figures within the Bush administration, and "habit of posing portentous questions without answering", he noted that their depiction of the "horrors inside the World Trade Center" and the bravery of the Flight 93 passengers was "well written and moving".
Published to mark the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Summers' and Swan's A Matter of Honor considered the circumstances in which Admiral Husband Kimmel, then the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, had been blamed, accused of dereliction of duty, and publicly disgraced.
They published new documentary evidence and found that Admiral Kimmel had been unjustly blamed and that President Roosevelt - contrary to charges made over the years - had not known in advance that the attack was imminent.
[47] During his career at the BBC, Anthony Summers sent reports on subjects as varied as: The Eleventh Day was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History and it won the Golden Dagger, the Crime Writers' Association's top non-fiction award.