CITY EDITOR of State’s largest newspaper, 27, college graduate, news, feature, slot and make-up experience, will travel anywhere for good job on big daily. Available mid-October. Box 1694, Editor & Publisher.
Thus read my ad under “Situations Wanted” in the September 4, 1948, issue of Editor & Publisher . . . barely within the guidelines for truth in advertising. My title was City Editor, as if a weekly newspaper with an editorial staff of seven needed a city editor. I had been named City Editor only so I could use the title to find another job, not to direct a staff. We didn’t have any full-time copy editors, so my “slot” experience was a bit of a stretch, and my make-up experience had ended abruptly when a union printer named Ike whacked me across the wrist with a column rule when I tried to put a stick of type into a page form.
While I waited for the answers to pour in, I wrote speeches for Dartmouth professor Herb Hill, who was running for governor as a Democrat. Jean and the new baby had moved down to her father’s house in Brookline; we had sold our house for $10,000, but hadn’t closed yet, and I needed the money. Speechwriting is an art form which I found extremely difficult. It was hard enough to figure out what I thought about the various issues of state government, never mind what the tweedy, pipe-smoking professor felt about them. He was a charming man with all sorts of brains, but no useful experience with voters. Sherman Adams, who was to go on to fame—and shame—as President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, won the governorship, going away, and I was out of the Granite State for good.
My “City Editor” ad pulled maybe a dozen replies, most of them from trade publications like Filling Station Daily. Two came from real newspapers—one in Salt Lake City, and the other in Santa Barbara, where a man named Ed Kennedy wrote that he was actually looking for a city editor. My hormones weren’t excited by Utah, but California did interest me, and Kennedy interested me a lot. He had been the AP war correspondent wrongly accused of prematurely breaking the release announcing that the war with Germany was over. History ultimately concluded that to be a bum rap, and he sounded like a young Blagden to me, as I went quietly crazy with my in-laws, a new baby, and no job.
After the 1948 elections wiped out my Dartmouth professor, I started making lists of where I might find work. One of these lists, titled “FUTURE BOOK,” read as follows:
SUPER SERVICE STATION. . . . Want me; don’t want.
NEW ENGLAND RETAIL GROCER. . . . Definite, but will refuse.
WASHINGTON POST. . . . Improbable, but want; working.
COWLES chain: Des Moines, Minneapolis. Good references, would want, possible.
Next two years probably don’t matter geographically, if the job is good and the direction is up. Washington and foreign experiences could wait, and should, maybe.
I had two great letters from family friends—Edward Weeks, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and Christian Archibald Herter, the aristocratic Massachusetts congressman and former governor. Weeks had written an editor he knew at the Baltimore Sun. Herter had written Herbert Elliston, who was the editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page.
Thus modestly armed at the end of November 1948, I withdrew all but a few dollars in my savings account ($825 sticks in my mind), bought a round-trip train ticket from Boston to Baltimore to Washington to Salt Lake City to Santa Barbara, and boarded The Federal at South Station . . . shaking in my boots.
The heavens opened up and it just plain poured as the train neared Baltimore early next morning. That lovely city was not so lovely in the rain. I decided on the spur of the moment to stay on the train until Washington, and start the job search at The Washington Post. I probably would not have gotten a job at the Sun that day, but my world might certainly have changed—and some other people’s worlds—if the sun had been shining that day.
A few hours later, I had checked into my $6-a-night room at the Willard Hotel, crossed 14th Street, and walked nervously up the stairs of the Post Building to keep an appointment with Elliston. Trouble was, he had absolutely nothing to do with the newsroom, and couldn’t have hired me if he had anything like that in mind. He was overtly uninterested in me, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the bust of himself right behind him. Very good likeness, it was. He did send me downstairs for my first encounter with the highly controversial—and able—city editor, Ben Gilbert. It is hard to re-create the fear I felt. This was the city room of a newspaper where every reporter I admired would die to work. The Washington Post was losing money. Everyone knew that. It was the third Washington daily in a field of four, in circulation. It was notoriously stingy with salaries, but it had a wonderful reputation for crusading journalism, fearing no man and no subject. To be specific about it, the true glory of its staff consisted of a powerful editorial page, the great Herb Block as the cartoonist, and the equally great Shirley Povich as the sports editor/columnist. Unmatched in their fields, and warm and generous men to boot. Forty-five years later, as this is written, Herb draws his cartoons at the age of eighty-five with the same bite he has always had. At the age of eighty-nine, when the baseball strike robbed readers of a World Series in 1994, Shirley re-created—from memory—the World Series of 1924, starring the long-gone Washington Senators.
The gods that had kept me on the train in Baltimore were still smiling. A reporter had quit unexpectedly the very day before, so there was a vacancy. Gilbert and the managing editor, Russ Wiggins, knew all about the New Hampshire Sunday News, much to my amazement (Gilbert had worked in St. Louis for the Post-Dispatch and for the Star-Times when Blagden was managing editor there), and before I could believe it, they were leading me to hope I was their candidate to fill the vacancy. Except that money was so tight, publisher Phil Graham had to sign off on every hire, in case he wanted to hold the vacancy and save a few thousand bucks. Next day, he didn’t, and believe it or not, I had a job—at $80 a week, starting on Christmas Eve.
Before I actually went to work at the Post, I got a call from Ed Thompson, the managing editor of Life magazine. And damned if he didn’t offer me a job—for almost twice the salary, $150 a week, in Time-Life’s Atlanta Bureau. I could hardly believe that, either. As a Bostonian, I was leery (read ignorant) of the South, and I preferred writing and reporting to setting up photo assignments. Anyway, I had accepted a job, and couldn’t in good conscience quit it before I put in a day’s work.
By Christmas Eve, 1948, we had a small house and garden at 2911 Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown (for $170 a month): a basement kitchen and dining room, one big living room on the street-level floor, and three small bedrooms and one small baby on the second floor. As the newest staffer, I drew the night shift—2:00 to 11:00 P.M.—and had to split my days off with at least one weekend work day.
A week later, on New Year’s Eve, I had to do the obligatory day story, and there it was on the front page, two columns above the fold, my first byline in the big time:
Washingtonians Go All-Out To Welcome the New Year In
Washington said good riddance to 1948 in a multitude of ways last night, and joined the rest of the Nation in welcoming 1949 with open arms and hopeful hearts.
I worked like a dog to make that story readable and I swelled with pride at the results. Eighty bucks a week and a front page byline in a great newspaper? The byline was “By Ben Bradlee, Post Reporter,” which Walter Lippmann soon told me had to go. “That’s a sportswriter’s byline,” he said, with an inflection that suggested I should aim a little bit higher.
Professionally, my first weeks were mostly spent rewriting handouts from civic associations, which ended up as little one-paragraph items scattered throughout the paper, often for make-up purposes only, to fill out a short news column. The very first day, I had handed one in to the night city editor, John Riseling, with Phil Graham’s name misspelled. My first real break came when Russ Wiggins was giving vent to one of his regular tirades against the evil and prevalence of gambling, which he regarded as a sin against common sense, especially among the poor who gambled with grocery money. Why not take the new reporter, he asked Gilbert, and sic him on the bookies and numbers kingpins? No one in town knew me yet, Wiggins figured, and I could poke around unnoticed. I had received my first investigative assignment for the paper.
Not a betting man myself, I knew enough to start looking for the answers in the Sports Department, particularly with my new buddy there, Morris Siegel. Mo was great company, funny, disrespectful, and warm. He was the particular favorite of Sara Bassin, who ran the restaurant next to the Post, cashed our paychecks, and told us to go home before it was too late. When I asked Mo for the names of the ten biggest bookies in Washington, he grabbed a piece of copy paper and started scribbling some names: Snags, who did numbers, too. Gary, who ran the Atlas Club, an after-hours joint upstairs in the building between Bassin’s and the Post. Mo checked with his pals and made one phone call, and gave me a list with ten names, plus addresses and telephone numbers. I didn’t feel I could go back to Russ Wiggins that fast. He had given me the assignment less than half an hour before. So I waited a day, typed the list out on regular Post stationery, and gave it to him two days later.
Wiggins looked at the list, shook his head in apparent admiration, and told Gilbert, “We got a damned good man in this new fellow, Bradlee. I’ve been trying to get that list for years.”
Mo’s kindness got me off rewriting handouts and onto an assignment to Municipal Court, where those on the lowest rung of the Washington ladder landed when they ran afoul of the law. Hookers, bookies, numbers runners, drug addicts, mashers, the victims and the perpetrators of the day’s violence. A Washington institution was Police Lieutenant Roy Blick’s Vice Squad, whose apple-cheeked young officers specialized in men’s rooms. They would stand at public urinals around town—movie theaters, Lafayette Park, and others—wave their tallywhackers around until someone waved back, and bang: arrest for solicitation for immoral purposes. Pretty regularly, the cops would come up with some sad soul who could be described as important, maybe someone who worked for a senator, or maybe the CIA, and the desk would want a story.
The Circulation Department loved me in those days, first because our circulation was not that strong, maybe 160,000 (“and maybe some water in that,” according to some experts), and because we had an early bulldog edition, which at that time had to have an eight-column banner every night, to attract buyers among the movie crowd. Harry Gladstein, the circulation chief, took to coming into the city room about six every night, wandering over to my desk to see what salacious junk I was working on, and then going over to Russ Wiggins just before story conference to report: “Bradlee’s got a blind one picked up in Lafayette Park, works for the CIA.” Sensitivity training was still a generation away. An eight-column banner in the bulldog might boil down to a few paragraphs inside in later editions, when the size of the headline reflected the judgment of the editors about the importance of the news, not the importance of street stand sales.
The best part of the Municipal Court beat was that I was in the paper with three or four stories a day, learning how to write tightly and I hoped with some flair. Unlike today, editors were stingy with bylines then. You started writing your stories only a couple of inches from the bottom of the copy paper to provide space for the copy editors to write the headline. We all became adept at leaving enough space for a headline and a byline, but the bylines were few and far between.
The real bonus of my Municipal Court experience came the very first day I was down there, when I was looking over the cast of characters for someone to have lunch with. A tall, muscular man with wavy hair and a rogue’s grin stood out from the others like a preacher in a den of thieves. He was Edward Bennett Williams on his first day of legal practice under his own shingle, after years of trying damage cases for a large firm. We had lunch at some greasy spoon. We talked aimlessly, a little about New Hampshire, where his wife’s family had a summer place, a little about the notorious Fifth Street Bar Association, an informal club of pretty much run-of-the-mill criminal lawyers. You wouldn’t go to one if you were in real trouble, but they knew the cops, and the clerks and the judges . . . and thus, the stories. Ed and I would be best buddies for the rest of our lives.
Socially, our crowd consisted of young couples, around thirty years old, with young kids, being raised without help by their mothers, and without many financial resources. The Janneys—Mary and Wistar, who worked for the CIA; the Winships—Liebe and Tom, who worked for Senator Lev Saltonstall of Massachusetts; Sue and Nick Nikoloric, who worked for Abe Fortas’s law firm; Scotty and Jack Lanahan—she was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, and he, too, was a lawyer; Tony and Steuart Pittman, another lawyer. The men were mostly working at the lower levels of government, journalism, or law. We ate with each other at night, bringing the babies and one dish, or one gallon of Almaden Mountain Red or White at three bucks a gallon. We all had interesting jobs, or we thought we did. We were all involved one way or another with the events taking place in the sleepy southern town that World War II had made the capital of the free world, to quote Phil Graham. We had a confidence in ourselves and in each other that seems to have disappeared a half century later. We knew we were going to make a difference, and have a good time doing it.
We shared big-shot friends with each other. Ours were Walter Lippmann and his wife. They were our hidden assets as we started out in Washington. They would ask Jean and me to their famous cocktail parties three or four times a year, where we could rub elbows with everyone who had been or was going to be on page one. They all seemed extremely surprised to see The Washington Post’s latest cub reporter in such heady company. Once or twice a year Lippmann would come to dinner, and a bunch of us would sit on the floor (Rowlie Evans, Phil Geyelin, or Bob Lee) and ask him questions about national and international affairs, searching for the historical perspective that he mixed with his insider knowledge. Lippmann was the star journalist of his time, a teacher, a student of the philosopher Santayana, a disciple of Colonel House, Wilson’s éminence grise in the White House during and after World War I, and at the postwar peace conferences. Only a handful of newspapers could afford reporters who had anything like his expertise, and so for much of the newspaper-reading world, and for all of Washington, he was the foreign expert.
On one of these big-shot-sharing evenings we all ended up in the Bethesda house of Nick and Sue Nikoloric. He was a secondgeneration Yugoslav, who worked with the blue-ribbon law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter. Nick had been on the cover of Life magazine during World War II, illustrating an article on PT boats in Pacific combat. His big shot was Owen Lattimore, a State Department Far East Asian expert, then regularly on page one being bludgeoned by red-baiting Joe McCarthy as a Commie or a Comsymp. Lattimore was Abe Fortas’s client, and Nick was Abe Fortas’s ace assistant. That particular night Lattimore had brought along a Mongolian priest in flowing robes, who looked like the Dalai Lama or the Dalai Lama’s cousin, In any case we peppered both of them with questions and Mountain Red, when Tom Winship surprised us all by asking the Dalai Lama (or his cousin) if he would sing us a Mongolian song. The wine had dissipated what had seemed unbreachable inhibitions, and suddenly he was singing in the high, whining monotone of Asian music. We were all amazed and grateful, until Tom told the priest he should learn some American songs, and much to our surprise—since Tom is completely tone-deaf—started singing a few bars of “Fair Harvard,” and urging him to follow along, which he did.
Lattimore was the quintessential old China hand, many of whom had lived in China as children of American missionaries. Now they were charged by the McCarthyites with losing China. Several of them had already been run out of town. Lattimore would not talk about the fix he was in, nor did he crack a smile when his Mongolian friend tried to bend his vocal cords around “Fair Harvard.”
In the summer of 1949, I graduated from Municipal Court to general assignment, the best reporting job on any newspaper, because you never really know what you will end up doing before the day is over. I was still concentrating on people in trouble, many of them on trial or on their way to the courthouse. Axis Sally, a cold fish from Maine who had broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to the Allies en route to Berlin. Judith Coplon, a low-level Justice Department employee who fell in love with a Soviet spy, Valentin Gubitchev, and slipped him a few secrets every so often. And then there was the great Bernice Franklin, the prototypical waitress with a heart of gold and dyed red hair at the People’s Drug Store fountain on Thomas Circle, who was the star witness in the government’s case against a major gambling operation.
Bernice had six children in various foster homes around Washington, and yet she was still joyous, cheerful, pretty, and when I met her, in love with a crippled newsstand operator named Till Acalotti. Just after midnight, one night, Bernice looked out the drugstore window and watched two police detectives beat the living daylights out of her boyfriend, leaving him unconscious on the sidewalk. Bernice knew Acalotti took numbers and horse bets on the side, and she knew he had to pay off the cops to stay in business at that choice location, but this was too much for her. Sometime after she got off work, she went down to the FBI and told her story to two agents, Downey Rice and Daniel O’Conor. The Fibbies poked around for a week, wondered whether it was big enough for J. Edgar Hoover’s ego, and came to the Post newsroom for help.
Russ Wiggins was beside himself. This was the case that would crack big-time gambling once and for all, and embarrass the Post’s very own bête noire, Chief of Police Robert Barrett, who epitomized the essentially racist and selective law enforcement the Post was trying to change. Wiggins called for his newly discovered expert on bookmaking, and teamed me with Dick Morris, also known as the fastest typist in the newspaper business, and a future vice president of the Ford Motor Company. We interviewed Bernice Franklin, taking down her story from the time she was born. When we started hearing about bookmaking and numbers bets and paying off cops, we trotted her upstairs to Phil Graham’s office. His secretary, DeVee Fisher, was a notary public, and she typed out Bernice’s story as we dragged it out of her, put her under oath, and got her to sign it. Morris and I could then write her story, and source it “according to a sworn deposition received by The Washington Post.” That sounded more bulletproof than it probably was, but it had enough authority to drive both the cops and the other newspapers crazy, especially The Washington Times-Herald, a jazzy, scrappy, and right-wing daily, owned by Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson, a cousin of the legendary Colonel Robert McCormick of the staunchly right-wing, isolationist Chicago Tribune.
Morris or I checked in with Bernice once a day, whether or not we were doing a story. The U.S. Attorney had convened a grand jury, and the jurors heard Bernice’s story with interest. Indictments based largely on her testimony were expected momentarily, when all of a sudden our star witness turned up missing. No rendezvous with Morris or Bradlee was kept, no one answered her phone. She wasn’t living in Acalotti’s apartment any more. She had vanished, and one day we found out why.
“. . . Star Girl Witness About Faces, Unfolds New Version of Gaming Probe”: McCormick’s Times-Herald’s eight-column banner announced, in two lines of 86-point type, that they had Bernice.
Wiggins, Gilbert, and everyone at the Post went ballistic. Morris and I were accused of carelessness, at the least, maybe more. Had either of us showed more than a professional interest in Miss Franklin, we were asked. I hadn’t, thank God. Neither had Morris, he said. Anyway, we were told to get the hell out of the city room and find her. And bring her back alive, ready to sing her song once more for Post readers. We scoured the city without success. All her old haunts. She wasn’t at People’s. Acalotti was a no-show at the newsstand. The Washington cops were rooting for the Herald, against the hated Post. We prowled the District’s after-hours clubs, where Bernice had hung out. Nothing. Finally the FBI found her. We sweet-talked her back to DeVee Fisher in Graham’s office. She really did like us better, she assured us, but we had paid her nothing, only bought her dinner a couple of nights. The Times-Herald had done more for her, she said, but provided no specifics. Anyway, the crisis was over. Wiggins was back in his chair, smiling. Indictments came down. Her testimony forced the defendants to give up in midtrial and plead guilty. And the caravan moved on.
Sometime during my first six months at the Post, our distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning White House correspondent Eddie Folliard (“Mr. Folliard” to me) asked me if I would like to visit the White House some day, preferably Saturday, as his guest. I showed up that morning, excited and nervous. I’d never been in the White House, and I’d never met a president.
FDR was the first president I ever saw, only briefly and from quite a distance. It was a cold, rotten, misting fall day in October 1944, at the Back Bay Station in Boston. I was on leave from the Philip which was being repaired in Oakland, after getting sprayed by shore batteries in Saipan. The president was in Boston, campaigning for his fourth term, and I just happened to see him as he was being handed down the step of a Pullman car in his wheelchair onto the station platform. Manhandled down the step. I remember being shocked to see how handicapped he was, since I, along with most of America, had never seen him in his wheelchair. His upper body careened from side to side, awkwardly. His face looked gray, although I was too far away to be sure. In five months he would be dead.
At the White House, Mr. Folliard and I were going slowly from room to room in the office space, when it became obvious from everyone bustling around that something unusual was going on. Apparently the president was about to receive a delegation of French big shots, led by the president of the French Senate, Gaston Monnerville, and no one could find the translator. Suddenly I heard Folliard tell someone that “young Mr. Bradlee here speaks French,” and I was being asked if I would serve as the translator for Mr. Truman. I was much surer that I would serve than I was that I could serve. But in for a nickel, in for a dime. I figured some of the French politicians probably spoke some English, but I drew confidence from the conviction that none of the people around President Truman spoke any French. I made do, and we were out of there in less than fifteen minutes, and I felt wonderfully lucky.
The fact is, I was lucky. I was on a roll being in the right place at the right time, a luck that has stayed with me.
Luck was with me on one sunny afternoon in June 1949, as I came out of Bassin’s restaurant and looked up at the Willard Hotel across 14th Street. I saw a soldier climb slowly over the rail on the ninth floor, grab it with both hands behind him, slowly getting ready to dive 110 feet down into the intersection of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks east of the White House and half a block west of the Washington Post Building. Without thinking really, I counted up from street level to the iron railing, and rushed across 14th Street into the hotel. Luck again when I saw an open window at the end of the hall, as the elevator stopped. I still find it hard to believe, but I crawled out on the ledge, between the building and the railing, and inched my way maybe 100 feet west toward Private First Class Paul J. McDuff, nineteen, from Bolling Air Force Base. For once, I had copy paper and a pencil with me, and as I got close, I could hear a voice talking slowly and carefully to him from a window around the corner, and I could see the cops, one floor up, getting ready to try to lasso him. I hadn’t gone to shorthand school yet, but I filled every scrap of paper I had with the dramatic conversations, from start to finish.
“Let’s talk it over, Mac. We got a lot to talk about. . . just talk it over with me for two minutes. That’s all. . . . Don’t jump now, Mac. You’ve got your whole life to go. . . . Hey, son, don’t jump now . . . you know that’s a long way down there. . . . What would your mother think of you now? Me, I got no mother, but if I had I wouldn’t hurt her for anything in the world.” The voice belonged to Police Private L.A. Wallace.
Then suddenly another policeman sprang from a low crouch under a horizontal bar, wrapped his right arm around McDuff, and wrestled him back over the rail to safety as the gathering crowd cheered nine floors below.
As I crept backward on the two-foot-wide ledge to the window which I had climbed through, I knew I had one hell of a story, barely pausing to realize I had been a damn fool. Never mind the danger of falling myself, or scaring the GI into some act he never really meant to commit, but I could have interfered with the rescue attempt had the cops chosen to come my way after him, and found me between them and their target. But they didn’t, the window was still open, and I had my page-one story. Hughie Miller, the legendary photo director of the Post—he was legendary because he was so tight he gave the photographers only a few exposures of 35mm film, not an entire roll—even snapped a picture of the whole thing from the roof of the Post Building, which ran 14 inches deep and four columns wide on page one. Only I could positively identify that figure crouched in the shadows behind the railing.
In June 1949, I covered the race riots in Anacostia with Jack London (named after the great novelist), who went to law school during the day and reported for the Post at night. Only the Post didn’t call them race riots. Over the dead bodies of Bradlee and London, we called them “incidents,” or “disturbances,” or “demonstrations.” The fight was over who could swim in what public pools. There were six such pools in the District of Columbia, all of them under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Three of the pools were for whites only (including the pool at Anacostia), and three of the pools were for Negroes only. My first encounter with “de facto” segregation. In Washington, the Star and the News still used the term “colored” to describe all blacks, whether or not race was germane to a story. At the Post, the rule was: never describe a person’s race unless a description was necessary to make the story understandable. We used the term “Negro” then; the terms “black” or “African American” had not yet been born.
A bunch of young Wobblies from the Philadelphia and New York City branches of what was left of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party had decided that the integration of Washington’s public swimming pools would be a worthy summer project. And thus they started to show up in the sweltering summer heat with young black kids in tow during the last two weeks in June. Once six black kids managed to get into the water briefly at one of the white pools, until they were booed and splashed out by about fifty whites. Lifeguards were asking to be relieved of duty, fearing disturbances they would be unable to handle. Crowds were getting bigger and emotions were getting hotter. And newspapers—the Post included—were scared to death of the story. Scared of telling the truth, and almost surely starting riots; scared of not telling the truth at a cost to their honor and reputations.
Washington was segregated halfway into the twentieth century. Restaurants could legally deny blacks service, and they routinely did. The black community was barely covered, even by the Post, which under Russ Wiggins and Ben Gilbert pioneered in this controversial area. Incidents were routinely not covered because they involved blacks. I remember listening to the police radio describe a crime soon after I came to work, and asking the night city editor if he wanted me to go out on it. “Naw,” he answered, “that’s black.” A prize possession of one Post photographer of the time showed him sitting on his heels with the Capitol dome in the background holding the head of a black man, who had just committed suicide by throwing himself under a trolley. It had been taken by another city photographer. No story ever appeared about the man’s death, which occurred in broad daylight on Pennsylvania Avenue.
At 3:00 P.M. on June 28, the police radio broadcast a “trouble call” in Anacostia, and London and I raced to respond. For the next six hours, we watched a pitched battle between whites and blacks in the field surrounding the swimming pool. Mounted park police rode their horses up and down the no-man’s-land between the warring factions. Both sides were armed with homemade clubs, some of the clubs with nails sticking out of them. Waves of whites would periodically break out of the crowd to chase those whites they believed to be responsible for trying to integrate the pools, or to corner blacks. Blacks would go after isolated whites, wherever they could find them. In all, about four hundred persons were involved, equally divided by race. At least twenty cops were in the middle of the riots, with more in ready reserve.
London and I ran with each group. We covered it like war correspondents, close as skin to the action. We filed to the desk—the day city editor and the rewrite people—by telephone every half hour. When night fell, and the crowds dispersed, we headed back to the office, knowing we had a hell of a story, and knowing we had covered the hell out of it. In the cab, we wondered if anything else in the world had happened which might prevent us from leading the paper, at least in the bulldog edition.
We grabbed the bulldog edition as it came up from the press room. Our story wasn’t on page one. Un-fucking-believable! Nothing in the rest of the A section. On the split page, the front page of the second section, usually the local or Metro Section in those days, still nothing. Not a goddamn word, and we started seething out loud. Things got worse when we finally found “it” inside the local section. Except that the story was not about the race riot we had just covered. The headline read: “G.S.I. [Government Services, Inc., overseen by the Interior Department] Will Run McKinley Pool/As District Board Withdraws.” The first mention of Anacostia in the story was in paragraph 8: “No incident occurred at the Anacostia pool during the morning swimming period. . . .” The words “melee,” “fracas,” and “scuffle” showed up in paragraphs 9-11. And the events of the afternoon and evening were described as an “incident” near the end of the story.
Almost forty-three years later, Ben Gilbert wrote about the “incident” in a report on race relations at the Post, commissioned by publisher Don Graham, entitled “Lifting the Veil from the Secret City . . . The Washington Post and the Racial Revolution”:
John Riseling, the night city editor, telephoned this writer [i.e., Gilbert himself, then the city editor] at home to brief him about what had happened to suggest that the day desk follow it the next day. Riseling related the complaints by Bradlee and London, saying they were “doing a rain dance” in the city room.
And that’s exactly what we had done, full of indignation about how the great liberal Washington Post was scared to tell the truth, how the editors were so much a part of the establishment that we didn’t dare talk about race unless we were running some sappy story about a black achiever, or some safe story about a white bigot. London was going to be a lawyer, so he wasn’t worried about his newspaper career, but I had been at the Post only seven months and had nowhere else to go. But we were steamed, and let everyone know it.
Suddenly I felt this tap on my shoulder, and wheeled around to find myself facing Phil Graham, the publisher, in a tuxedo. “All right, Buster,” he said, “come on up with me.” He took me upstairs to his office on the fifth floor of the old Post Building. There—I couldn’t believe my eyes—was Julius “Cap” Krug, the Secretary of the Interior, who was ultimately responsible for the city pools, his Under Secretary, Oscar Chapman, and representing the White House, President Truman’s special counselor, Clark Clifford. All of them were in tuxedos, as I remember it.
Graham asked me to tell my story to these members in such good standing of the Washington power structure. Nervous at first, I turned myself on as I talked. When I was done, I was dismissed with a “Thanks a lot,” and that was that. The story on page B2 did not change between editions, but the next day, it moved to the front page: “Anacostia Pool Is Closed/Until Further Notice.” The story included the names of those wounded and those arrested, the number of police (100), and the number in the crowd (450). It was still referred to as a “disturbance.”
Not until much later did I learn what went on in Graham’s office. The publisher cut himself quite a deal with the big shots: Close the Anacostia pool immediately, and promise that all six pools will operate the following year on a totally integrated basis, or Bradlee’s story runs on page one tomorrow. Krug and company had made the deal on the spot, despite the fact that meant one pool would be closed for the two hottest months in a sweltering city still largely without air conditioning.
That’s a deal that no publisher would dare make today. First, blacks wouldn’t stand for it. The days of whites making decisions involving blacks without their participation are long gone, and good riddance. Second, the deal could never be kept secret, and the deal depended on secrecy. Reporters would talk. Whistleblowers would blow their whistles. Journalism reviews would publish all the details. Time and Newsweek’s Press departments would put on a full-court press. Newsroom outrage, that new flowering of American democracy, would erupt.
But tell me how the world would be better if that deal had not been made? We would surely have had some kind of race riot that summer or the next. Instead, we had nothing like a race riot for nineteen years, until 1968, when riots were triggered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination.
I am instinctively pro sunshine, against closed doors, pro let-it-all-hang-out, anti smoke-filled rooms. I believe that truth sets man free. I hate to yield even an inch of this high ground, but I am less sure today than I was when Phil Graham made his secret deal that the public is best served by knowing everything the second an incident happens.
After the riots were over, I returned to a steady diet of the abnormal, relishing the good stories, but beginning to chafe at the minor shadow these stories cast on the great issues of the day . . . like Senator Joe McCarthy, for instance, who was just starting down his infamous, Red-baiting path, never mind the rebuilding of Europe, and the Korean War. But for days at a time, dreams of replacing Walter Lippmann dissolved in that greatest of all joys: a good story.
I was on a trolley car going past the White House one November day in 1950, when two Puerto Rican extremists, Oscar Collazo and his confederate, Griselio Torresola, opened fire on Blair House, where President Truman and his family were staying while the White House was being repaired. And thus I was the first reporter on the scene of that crazy assassination attempt, as I crawled on my stomach in plain sunlight east on Pennsylvania Avenue, with the body of White House Police Private Leslie Coffelt on my left, near the Blair House steps, and a body in front of me, the dead Griselio Torresola. That got me a page-one eyewitness story.
And there were others. Reuben Revens, a forty-one-year-old Army psychological warfare “expert,” moonlighted as a sex therapist. He went to trial on charges of assault involving an attractive forty-eight-year-old woman who was having trouble in bed with her Veterans Administration husband. Revens’s “treatment” was viewed by the government as assault: He had grabbed her head and forced her to fellate him in front of her husband. I couldn’t figure out a way to describe this assault in a family newspaper, so I had to write two stories every night, after I got back from the courthouse. One for the paper, and one for the devotees of this genre of journalism—led by Phil Graham, who would check into the city room to read the latest Revens installment before he went home.
There was a disturbed young man who took his wife and baby on a picnic one sunny day, split the wife in two with an ax as she squatted to relieve herself, then buried the baby alive. I simply had no frame of reference to understand that kind of behavior, and I called a psychiatrist Jean and I had been seeing for guidance. Julius Schreiber was more interested in my weirdo criminals than he was in Jean and me, I think, but he told me to try to get into this chap’s house. I talked his mother into letting me into the house and then upstairs into his bedroom. It was as strange as he was. Everything caked with dust, literally up to a quarter of an inch thick. He had forbidden his mother to enter the bedroom. Five dead goldfish lay in the upper left drawer of his bureau.
* * *
Jean and I had started seeing Julius Schreiber because our marriage had stalled. Ever since the war, the newspaper business had consumed me. I loved it. I was in love with it, I guess, and there was nothing comparable in Jean’s life. The war had stopped in its tracks the discovery process, where young friends are supposed to mature into lovers, and where shared experiences are supposed to grow into common interests and common passions. We never really got much past being young friends. We were both so sexually inexperienced and culturally unadventuresome in that department, we never found ourselves as lovers. It depressed me to read that men reached their peak sexually at age eighteen. Since reaching eighteen I had been forced to abstain by war almost longer than I had been able to perform in peace.
As 1950 became 1951, I was feeling more and more frustrated by my assignments, gamey and entertaining as they were. My salary hovered on the wrong side of $100 a week. The Washington Post was still losing $1 million a year, and there was nothing on the horizon that looked like an expansion large enough to put me on the National staff, where I wanted to be. (The Post had no international staff in those years.) I felt appreciated, and my writing ability was improving, but there were two or three or four reporters on the city staff with skills and seniority greater than mine. Our friends were moving up in their law firms, or in the CIA, or on the various government staffs, and I felt impatient.
Just at this time, I got offered a job. This had never happened to me before. The offer came from Frank Pace, then Secretary of the Army, former Budget Bureau Director, and later the young president of General Dynamics. He had never heard of me, but he was married to Wistar Janney’s sister, and one night at the Janneys’ he mentioned he was looking for a personal assistant/press person, who would travel with him, write speeches, and generally spread the gospel according to Pace. One afternoon, I found myself in the Pentagon walking into the biggest office I had ever seen, with blue plush carpet as high as my loafers, for an interview with the Secretary. Pace had his back to me. He was hunched over, elbows on his knees, talking into a tape recorder hidden somewhere in what looked like a Magnavox record player. His message was cornball, inspirational, and I got the feeling this might have been the outline of a speech he would want someone to write for him. When he finally turned around, he did his best to put me at ease. The job would entail quite a lot of traveling, he said. (The first trip would have been to accompany President Truman and Pace to Wake Island, where the president was going to confer with General Douglas MacArthur six months before firing him for making persistent public demands for a bigger war against Red China, which was contrary to U.S. and U.N. policy, but of course I knew nothing about that.)
The money was good—almost twice what I was making as a reporter. And the idea of some travel was a plus (I had been as far as Pittsburgh once for the Post, covering a great train robbery), but I couldn’t conceive of being someone else’s alter ego. And so I turned it down.
One night I was sent over to the Statler Hotel, where Joe McCarthy was preaching to some group of the converted, not to cover his speech but to ask him a specific question, which I have long since forgotten. McCarthy’s answer would be an insert in another reporter’s page-one story, and I felt I was being told something important about my place in the pecking order. Anyway, I asked him the question. He answered by asking me if I minded revealing what newspaper I represented. I told him, and the whole room broke out in snickers, led by the snickering senator himself. I felt unarmed, unable to defend the paper or myself, playing too small a role to make a difference.
Just then, I got a letter from my old buddy Elias McQuaid in Paris. When the New Hampshire Sunday News had been sold to Loeb—and Bernie McQuaid had hired on to edit it—Elias had quit to work on a paper in Boston briefly, and then had joined the Foreign Service. By some miracle he had ended up as press attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, close enough to the boulevardier he had dreamed of becoming. He was going to be transferred in about six months, and he was writing to ask if I had any interest in coming over first as his assistant, and then as his successor—if he and his mentor at the State Department could arrange it.
I had zero interest in becoming a career diplomat. What little I knew about the Foreign Service suggested that the cover-your-ass crowd frowned on balls and initiative, especially at the lower levels. But the State Department was experimenting with journalists who spoke the appropriate foreign language to be press attachés. I hated to leave the Post, which had given me everything I wanted except assignments that touched on the great issues, or even an important issue. I was in irons. Jean hadn’t really wanted to go to New Hampshire or Washington, and even though she spoke a little French, she was not at all keen on moving to Paris.
The whole question almost became moot when I flunked the oral exams, given by the United States Information Service (USIS). Press attachés were reserve Foreign Service officers, but administratively they were part of USIS. When I was asked if I was ready to serve as press attaché anywhere in the world, I said I was going to serve as press attaché in Paris. And that was the wrong answer, even though there was no way I was going to quit the Post to be the press attaché in Antarctica. That was straightened out when I got a second crack at the orals through the good offices of McQuaid’s mentor, the Embassy administrative officer, Graham Martin. The same Graham Martin who became U.S. Ambassador to Thailand and Vietnam. The same Graham Martin who was to become the bane of liberals, as he fled Saigon from the roof of the American Embassy in April of 1975. I was ready to say I was panting to be the press attaché in Antarctica, but was not asked the question this time.
The USIS then offered me the job, and I had to decide. My salary was to be $5,400 a year, plus a modest housing allowance. Finally, I persuaded Jean—and myself—that this was still a time to be adventuresome. When and how would we ever get a chance to live abroad again? We could never get as good a place to live as Paris.