CHRISTMAS AFTERNOON
Then Woodward says … I Halberstam, now I have to deal with the question of the Post, whether it is going into a decline, and he says this is very private and to go to no one else, that Kay Graham has talked to him, that she is very disturbed about the Post and what’s happened to it.… Her feeling is that it has slipped.…
She also feels that Bradlee has somehow lost his interest, that post Watergate she feels he is being pulled away in part by Sally Quinn and the life style, that his interest is not in the paper, and that Jim Bellows, she has a feeling.… [Jim] Bellows is in the City Room at the Star every day, I have a sense of him right in the middle of that City Room with his sleeves rolled up, I have a feeling that he’s right there. And she doesn’t have that feeling about Bradlee, and she’s very disturbed and she says, you know, she may have to move him out, this is a real concern, that if necessary she will bring someone in like Gene Roberts to edit the paper. And she feels the paper is too much of a club, the national staff is a club … herself said of Howard that his job was somehow to wipe up after Ben.
—David Halberstam’s memo of a private interview with Bob
Woodward, undated but sometime post-1975
In early 1976, Ben received another unsigned memo. Sprawling over nine pages of six-ply paper, it laid out a series of problems at the Style section and then went on to address some of the deeper problems at the paper.
“You’ve got the best staff of any paper in the country,” the author wrote, “but they are floundering. They seem to lack leadership, direction, excitement, and energy.” Editors were too scared of each other, too political, and never took responsibility for themselves. “There are so many little things you don’t know, that are kept from you by your editors. Without reporters and their energy and enthusiasm and respect you can do nothing.” Maybe Ben had been “too nice recently.” Maybe now he would “have to kick ass.”
I know you can, and will. I know you’ve done it for 10 years and you think the challenge is gone. But it isn’t. This is the biggest challenge you’ve ever had. And it should be exciting for you. Just because you won the gold medal and the Olympics once doesn’t mean you can’t try for it again. You are the only person who is capable of doing it. All you have to do is show them that you mean business, shake things up and it will start to turn things around. But you’ve got to do it now.
I love you.
It was, of course, from Sally. In the years since Watergate she had watched, along with everybody else, as the paper had struggled to find its way. She once likened Ben’s state of mind after Nixon resigned to a postnatal depression. Every part of him had been activated, and then it had all been taken away.
In May of 1973, right after the Post had won the Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate reporting, Ben wrote to an admirer that he realized they were all riding high, and that eventually they would have to come down again:
When this wild self-congratulatory ski-jump is over and we hit solid ground once again, it’s the respect of your peers that means a goddam thing, not the TV cables in the city room, not the cover stories, not even the apology of that piss-ant, Ziegler.
The moments I most cherish are those too rare occasions when one is doing just exactly what one was put on this earth to do … not practicing psychiatry without a license, not cost accounting without talent … and that’s what all of us here are doing these days.
At the time of that writing, Ben couldn’t have foreseen just how long the wild, self-congratulatory ski jump would be, or how hard it would be to stick the landing. With Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the publication of Conversations with Kennedy in 1975, and the premiere of All the President’s Men in 1976, Ben had been flying high for nearly three full years.
In the interim, the newspaper had to come out every morning. What was The Washington Post going to be, in the wake of Watergate? As Halberstam wrote, memorably, of Ben, he is “a man by nature geared for big events, not little ones, and the biggest event of all had already come his way.” Many on the paper, notably both Carl and Bob, thought that in the wake of Watergate the Post should have mounted a challenge to The New York Times’s status as the newspaper of record in the United States.
“Ben’s job, it seems to me, was to then take the post-Watergate Washington Post and determine where it was going to go,” Carl told me. “And Bob and I believed it should go national, and I’m sure that Watergate had given it enough of an impetus that it could have done it. Because right then it was a better paper than The New York Times. Because the Style section was at its apogee. Because of what had happened with the Watergate reporting, and that lesson carrying over.” The paper had missed an opportunity, in large part because it enjoyed a local monopoly in D.C. (having effectively eliminated the Star as meaningful competition) and could comfortably occupy its lucrative perch as D.C.’s preeminent paper. “I don’t know how much is conscious or unconscious,” Carl told me, “but clearly it went back to the local model.”
Bob wouldn’t give me the same criticism directly. In one of our interviews, he quoted Tom Ross, who was the old D.C. bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. One night in the wake of Nixon’s resignation—Bob thinks it was in early ’75—Bob had dinner with Ross and the reporter Mort Kondracke, who worked with Ross at the Sun-Times.
“Tom was one of these people who is a very wise commentator on the press,” Bob told me. “And this is all on the record. What he told me, he said, you know, the sadness or the tragedy after Watergate is that the Post had an opportunity to become the great newspaper. The New York Times plus.”
“With personality and flair …” I said.
“And all the kind of ‘cruising speed,’ the phrase Ben uses,” Bob said. “And it didn’t happen. He was very critical of the Grahams and Ben.” (Ben often said of The New York Times that he admired its “cruising speed,” meaning its general and sustained level of excellence. Ben thought that from a standing start the Post could compete with the Times on any given story, but he also admitted that the Post was not as reliable a daily index of what mattered in the world.)
“That’s mostly a Graham decision, is it not?” I asked. “I mean, Ben can’t make that decision.”
“No, no, he could,” Bob said. “He could’ve pushed it. He could’ve said, ‘Let’s reevaluate who we are. What’s the next big play? What’s the next move?’ And that’s not Ben.”
In the wake of Watergate the Post certainly could have undertaken a major challenge to the Times. At one point in the early seventies, 1,600 people applied for the fifteen available summer internships at the Post. There was no problem attracting talent; the problem was figuring out what to do with the talent they already had.
Carl left the paper at the end of 1976, largely for his own reasons but in part because the paper didn’t know where to put him. “One of the reasons I left,” Carl told me, “was [Ben] wanted to offer me a local column that became [Richard] Cohen’s column, and I didn’t want to do that. I was like, ‘Shit, I’ve done Watergate, and now I can’t go to Vietnam again?’ I said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ”
Richard Cohen had been on his way out the door, too.1 “I was sick of The Washington Post,” he told me. With David Broder, he had generated much of the Post’s first-rate coverage on Vice President Spiro Agnew, and after writing a quickie book about Agnew he returned to the Post. “They put me on the city desk as a reporter, and they were just giving me a hard time. I don’t know why I deserved it … The first story they sent me on was a garbage fire. I thought, ‘What is this about?’ …
“Ben could attract such great talent,” Cohen said. “But he also didn’t know what to do with it half the time.” Building the Post in the sixties, adding great reporters in bunches, was a far different enterprise from managing them all once they had made it.
Post reporter Jules Witcover told David Halberstam that “Howard Simons and Ben are really out to lunch in the post-Watergate era.” After Watergate there had been “a lot of talk about staying up there, really turning it on. But Ben really has been playing at being a celebrity. He claims he doesn’t like it but he really does like it, and he liked the kind of glamour that Watergate brought. At the same time he really has no attention span.”
Larry Stern, Ben’s neighbor and one of his best friends on the paper, put it more simply, and maybe more accurately: “Ben is bored now, and that has become a serious problem at the paper.”
These were the knocks on Ben from below, an important constituency but not nearly as important as the one constituency that mattered most: Kay Graham. He served at her pleasure, and by all accounts she was displeased, too. In her memoir, she would describe the period 1976 to 1981 as “the most difficult years I ever lived through,” in part because of the malaise that Sally, Bob, Carl, Cohen, and Witcover had described:
I had some grave concerns about the quality of the paper and of the editing. I felt that the national staff and the metro staff had let down, that we were doing things superficially. Ben didn’t agree with me, but Bob Woodward did, putting it succinctly one day: “The paper is going down the shit hole.” It is to Ben’s great credit that he and I survived the difficult times and all my questioning.…
Not listening to me—and to others—was both Ben’s strength and his weakness. However, as I wrote him at the time of this disagreement about the quality of the paper, “No superficial problems either of us may have at any particular moment matter compared to the basic trust and rapport with each other. Because if that’s there—and it is there as far as I’m concerned—all else flows from it.
—Clipped comic from Saturday, October 19, 1974, saved in Kay Graham’s private files, with her handwriting at the top
There is no relationship that has mattered more to Ben’s life than his relationship with Kay Graham. Sally has played a vital role since 1973, but without Kay Graham there is no Sally—first because Kay picked Ben as her editor, and then later, in 1973, because she accepted Sally’s role as Ben’s partner even though it violated her sense of propriety.
Sally knows this as well as anybody. “I know I’ve told you this before,” she wrote to Kay in December of 1978, shortly after she and Ben were married, “but I want to impress upon you again how grateful I shall always be for the way you received me and us after we got together.”
It made so much difference in the way we were accepted not only at the paper but in the community and if anyone is responsible for the fact that our relationship worked out it has to be you—I know how hard it must have been for you and how generous an act it was.
After Kay died in 2001, Sally wrote a column for the Style section. “Kay and Ben had worked so closely together before we were together that she often seemed like a very welcome third person in our marriage,” she wrote. “[A] favorite aunt, a wise confidante, a pal. When Ben was invited by President Ford to a White House dinner, he took Kay instead of me, with my approval.”
Is there such a thing as a welcome third person in a marriage? I suppose there might be. That Sally could write something like that illustrates what was so transformative about Ben’s relationship with Kay, a powerful man working for an even more powerful woman in an era where there wasn’t much precedent for that kind of relationship.
“When I put you there and you related to me,” Kay told Ben in the interviews for her memoir, “it was a whole different ballgame.” All of the editors and businesspeople that she had inherited from the Phil days had been condescending to her, showing her the ropes while never quite believing she could master them. “I don’t mean they were really condescending, I guess,” she said, “but at the same time they didn’t think of me as a boss. And I don’t mean you did in any …”
“Yes, I did,” Ben interrupted her. “I really did.”
Kay was always, irrevocably, the boss. That was the only reason Sally would have tolerated anybody else as a “welcome third person” in her marriage. Kay and the Graham family owned the A shares of Washington Post Company stock, the voting portion, and as Ben likes to put it, “one of the lessons I learned in journalism is that you don’t argue with the A shares.”
Ben has often said that his most important job as editor of the Post was “managing the Grahams.” For the bigger moments of his career, including the doldrums of 1975–1976 and beyond, that meant managing Kay. She didn’t much like the idea that Ben managed her—he largely had her convinced that she was one of the boys—but from their letters to each other it’s quite clear that he did.
“Dear Ben,” Kay wrote back the next day, “That’s the nicest Christmas present I have—and you are so great throughout the year that I have to send the news right back.”
Thus began a tradition of Christmas letters between Ben and Kay, what they would later refer to as their “Mutual Admiration Society.” At the end of each year, they both sat down to collect their thoughts about each other, and about the paper, and then they sent them along. Aside from Kay’s extraordinary letter at Christmas of 1974, describing her recollections of how Watergate could ever have happened, the letters follow a predictable pattern: a brief reference or two to recent events, followed by encomia to how wonderful it is to work together.
But as the malaise at the Post set in, in 1975, the letters begin to change:
Christmas Eve 1975
For Christmas, I want you to understand how valuable and strong and gutsy you have been at a time when the future of this great newspaper hung in the balance. You will never do anything more difficult, and you will never do anything with more grace and courage.
For New Year’s, I want the turmoil ended, so that we can return to our task of putting out the best paper in the world without compromise and without menace.
And for all of 1976 you should remember that down here in uncommon delight and constant anticipation sits your friend.
B
Dear Ben,
You have been a wonderful colleague, friend, support & pillar throughout these many years but especially this one. The great thing you do for the paper and for me is to be a critical voice of a gentle kind—an independent spirit but a collaborator extraordinaire, and a serious ear with a relievingly humorous tongue—& a refuge for me in a storm—
I know how hard the last 3 months have been on you. It’s not what you are & should be about. It’s the contrary. Whereas I have been living most of the hours with people who were all together, you have been living each day with people who were all over the lot but who had to be—for essential reasons—calmed & hand held by you & Howie.
Whereas I have been hoping for 8 years to turn this part of the building around—it’s constrained what you’ve been working to do for 10—& added to the post-Watergate problems too. And yet you’ve put your very understandable & deep worries aside to help us do this incredibly tough thing.
Ben—I know it’s going to be good—better than you think from every point of view. I pray it’s over before too long but it would be fatal to try to push it faster than it can go—It was not looked for but was so desperately needed—In an odd sense it’s a business side Watergate that fell on our heads but then had to be pursued—
One great thing is we’ve always believed & trusted each other—no matter how tough the going—& had fun too. So my end of the year letter to you is to thank you for this great gift & to send you my love.
The “business side Watergate” was the pressmen’s strike, which began in October of 1975 and didn’t end until February of 1976. The strike was an inflection point in the history of the Post, and in Kay Graham’s ownership of it.2 Since taking the Post Company public in 1971, Kay had sought ways to make the operation more self-sufficient, and more profitable. Many in management felt that the craft unions at the Post, the people who actually fabricated the paper, stood in the way of those goals. The unions had gotten away with a series of sweetheart deals in the sixties and seventies because they could effectively close the paper down if they refused to work. (When composing-room workers were unhappy, they sometimes slipped phrases like “This paper is edited by rats” into the final edition of the Post, which drove Ben up the wall.) While the Post was still competing so heavily with the Star, the Post brass couldn’t afford to alienate anybody.
But in the wake of Watergate, Kay and the corporate side of the company had the upper hand, and in essence they crushed the unions. The business side sent news executives and others out to a “scab school” in Oklahoma, where they learned how to run the presses and other basics of newspaper production. When the pressmen eventually walked out, on October 1, 1975—after doing an extensive but much-disputed amount of damage to several of the printing presses—those news executives stepped in and produced the paper themselves. Nearly all of the reporters at the Post crossed the picket lines to help put out the paper.
John Hanrahan was a notable exception in all of this, a reporter who refused to cross the picket lines and who eventually left the paper as a result. He thought that the Post’s ruthlessness with the unions wasn’t merited purely because some pressmen had damaged the printing presses. “I was sympathetic to the pressmen with missing fingers and breathing crap in their lungs all the time,” he told me. He bore Ben no ill will, but he thought that most of the people who crossed the picket lines were hypocrites. “It’s very easy to take a liberal position when it’s happening someplace else,” he said. “If this were happening at some other place, all these reporters would be saying, ‘Boy, that’s terrible.’ ”
During the roughly four months of the strike, everybody on the paper had to work two jobs. People slept in their offices. Management brought in catered food, and Ben and Kay both did stints taking classified advertising requests, with entertaining results:
K: … One day everybody was really busy and this Mercedes dealer called in and he had six cars and therefore he had to go through, I said, listen, I’m new here, so please go slowly.… [P]eople weren’t aware that we were on strike. And so I didn’t wish to point out that I was replacing this person, so I just said, please go slowly because I’m new here and so I kept making him repeat, you know, because it goes a-c-d-c and all this stuff and then there were abbreviations for air conditioning.…
I was writing away and he obviously thought I was retarded. And so he said, I think you’d better read that over. And so I read it over very fast and obviously accurately because at least I could take down what he was telling me. So he said, you sound over-qualified. He said, “You could be anybody, you could be Katharine Graham.” And I said, well, I mean, I’m so stunned, that I said, “As a matter of fact, I am.”
When the strike ended, the Post Company was on significantly more profitable footing. And though the strike had been “crushed with methods and with a severity that are not usually accepted in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century,” as Henry Fairlie noted in The New Republic in 1977, the paper somehow managed to win the public relations battle, too.
The reason the strike is an inflection point in the history of the paper is less due to the particulars of its handling than to the indication it provided that Kay Graham’s mission was changing, her own sense of purpose. They had scaled the journalistic heights, and now—by her own admission—she wanted to scale the corporate heights. The greatest publisher in the world coveted the title of “greatest businesswoman,” and so a business side Watergate was just what she had hoped for. The defeat of the unions improved the Post’s standing on Wall Street, but it also changed the cast of the company. During some of the Post’s formative years, Kay Graham, like her father before her, had been willing to sustain major losses in advertising and a lower profit margin in order to produce the journalism that had changed the course of history.3 Now her focus was different, and you can see it in the Christmas letters:
December 1977
When the real history of this paper is written, I think a definite, post-Watergate dimension will emerge—not doldrums, as we thought, but digestion. Our new notoriety had to be digested, then the strike had to be fought and won, all at the same time. Now, 1977 was the first time that these two processes were completed and life returned to something like normal.
According to the notations of one of her researchers, she kept the original copy of this letter of Ben’s in her desk drawer, apart from the others.
As kind as Ben’s letter might have been, this was a moment at which there were significant strains on their relationship, and on the paper. These were the tough years that Kay spoke of in her memoir, the years when Ben and Howard and the others were “out to lunch,” or at least perceived to be, the years when Kay considered moving Ben out. In her memoir, Kay makes only vague references to her dissatisfactions, but in a confidential memo to Ben in June of 1977, she lays some of them out quite plainly:
Ben, we all make mistakes in choosing people for promotions, and I am the one who can write a very long book about it. But we have to learn from mistakes, what is wrong with the process which led to them. With the best process you are still going to go wrong at times.…
Superb as is your record and your net effect, it has been despite the decision-making process which has led us to things like Bagdikian, Rosenfeld,4 Patterson.… This is not to discount the many right decisions.…
I have to say something personal in closing. When I send down the mail, the complaints, or even my own views when Howard is away, I do not feel that people’s views or even my views are truly listened to before being rejected. I do not feel legitimate requests are followed up, or that I get an answer whether it has or whether it hasn’t.…
You are right that I would never do what Joe Allbritton did—just order something killed or changed. It’s not the way to do things most productively for the paper, and obviously you wouldn’t work that way from your point of view.
But in order for our system to work, both sides have to listen to each other.
For another thing, if I don’t feel I get a hearing, I wonder what people under all of you feel?
That’s the ominous dangling end of the memo, reminiscent of Kay’s displeasure during the early days of the Style section. In her Christmas letter at the end of that same year, she would refer again to the finger Ben had told her to keep out of his eye:
At times—& recently—I can get in periods where I come on like a dentist drill & am a trial to people around me & to myself I must say.…
I have a feeling that this year has been a particularly hard one for you & that my finger may have loomed larger or different because of other pressures.
If that is so nothing is more important than for you to know—really to know—how central & how essential you are to this paper, to the people on it all over, not just the 5th floor—& to this person on the 8th.
Ben says that he never for one second had the thought that Kay was going to move him out. But it’s clear from the confidential memo, and then from Kay’s letter afterward, that she had been upset with some of his management decisions and ultimately felt that she needed to reassure him about his importance to the paper and to her. Most of the other letters have pat references to their closeness, but this letter stands out because the reassurance feels so real, as if Ben actually needed it:
If the year has been tough on you for whatever reasons, I sure want to help & not be part of the problem. It’s what we’ve always done for each other. That way we’ve come an incredibly long way & we have a long way to go. The all important thing is to continue to have fun en route. I send you a big hug, a kiss & a goose.
At Kay’s funeral in July of 2001, Ben’s was the only speech to receive an ovation—spontaneous, long, and loud. In it, he mentioned how Kay had closed this letter to him as evidence of what fun she had been to work with. Ben doesn’t tend to remember unimportant things. Though the big hug, the kiss, and the goose were certainly a playful expression of the dynamic that they shared, it seems likely to me that he remembered this letter so favorably because it had come at a time of uncertainty for him—whether he knew it or not.
When you read these letters, you come away with the feeling that there was slightly more to the relationship than either of them lets on. They were both pursuing agendas, each in their own ways. Kay was focused on the growth of the Post Company and seemed intent on finding a way to voice her displeasure about the direction of the paper without upsetting Ben or pushing him away. And Ben, whatever he says about it, was plainly trying to stay in her good graces. He has insisted at various points that the reason he survived Kay’s capriciousness as an executive was that he wasn’t afraid of her, that he was willing to call her on things, that he didn’t kiss ass. True, up to a point, but it has to be said that Ben really did kiss ass—it’s just that only Kay saw it:
December 21, 1978
This year a particular kindness from you to me needs memorializing: your treatment of Sister Quinn & her social life. In a real way it was your acceptance of us that made our life together as OK as it was & thus as fine as it is. Thank you for that.…
There is something so warm and comfortable about the sight of you striding pridefully across the city room of your paper.
For it really is your paper, Katharine. It bears your mark, as it bears no other. You were a better publisher than Phil; you know that. And I suspect better than your father—because you brought less baggage to the job, less mindset. I don’t worry five minutes about Don, but don’t you forget for five minutes that you did all this, you got us here and gave us such a wonderful time en route.
Remember that, dear friend, if the blahs should rear their ugly head at some dreary, winter time.
Love
High praise, and an admittedly deserved benediction: 1978 was Kay’s last year as publisher of the Post. Earlier that year, she had decided to step aside and to move Don in to succeed her, starting officially in January of 1979.5 But there’s still some undeniable ass kissing going on here. Note also that they have covered some distance since the previous year’s troubles: “The first thing to say this time is that there will be a next time …” He had survived.
I told him a story about my first trip to Grey Gardens, in the summer of 2007. After too much wine, I had made the mistake of saying in front of Sally and Ben and some friends that I didn’t see how Kay could have avoided having a crush on Ben. Sally lit up. “Of course she was in love with him!” she cried, and as she launched into her theory about it I glanced over at Ben. He looked visibly uncomfortable for a moment or two, and then he stood up from the table without saying anything and walked upstairs. It was the only time in all my experience with him that anything like this ever happened.
“That is truly odd to me,” Hoagland said. “Because, look, Kay developed crushes. This was, I think, probably the most serious one, ever. Except for Phil, and stories I don’t know about. So I’m surprised at Ben’s reaction.”
The record of Ben’s life is littered with uncomfortable answers to questions about Kay. “Do you find Kay Graham attractive?” an interviewer once asked him.
Ben was smart enough to realize, and then to respond, “That’s a no-win question.”
“They’ve gone through about five publishers at The Washington Post, endless editors at Newsweek, but Ben Bradlee and only Ben Bradlee has survived,” Robert Kaiser told David Halberstam in the late seventies:
And [Kaiser] thinks it is almost sexual. And he says it’s very important that Ben was the person who said to Kay about Phil in that traumatic moment—let him have the divorce. A kind of honesty there. And he says of Ben Bradlee, he is the person who brought Kay into the modern world, and literally and figuratively taught her to say “fuck.” He was wonderful at playing her, no one could play her better. He plays her perfectly, he plays her yet he seems to be outside her reach.
“Everybody does think she loved you, but that’s okay,” I said to Ben in his office one afternoon, revisiting the same topic I’d brought up with him so many times before.
“I think she loved me in the most platonic way,” he said. “We loved each other. It’s hard to say it, because people would take that as an admission of all the terrible things that they think.”
I told him people had often said things to me about her being in love with him, but I’d never heard anybody allege that he would have or could have reciprocated.
“I’ve never felt that I had to defend myself in that,” he said.
From Ben’s perspective I think that even factual statements about Kay’s obvious fondness for him demean their relationship, reduce it to its lowest common denominator. To him, and to history, the most important aspect of their relationship isn’t whether Kay was always, semisecretly, a little bit in love with him; it’s what they were able to accomplish at the newspaper. Those of us who stand on the outside of that relationship naturally have some curiosity about Kay’s feelings, and about Ben’s, but the truth is that only the two of them really know what kind of bargain they struck. What matters is that it worked.
In 1995, when Ben’s memoir came out, Kay threw a book party for him. In its aftermath, Ben realized that he hadn’t thanked her for the party, and also that he hadn’t ever given her a “properly dedicated” copy of the book. He wrote her a letter to apologize, and this is how it ends:
Click here to view a plain text version.
That’s it, all of it. You can call it whatever you want to.
