By the end of 1964, only weeks without Mary, Tony and I were wandering innocently enough toward a crossroads in our personal and professional lives. Two murders had robbed us of significant anchors, who had made our lives meaningful and joyous. Their loss had made us less sure of ourselves, and of each other. Professionally, I still felt no involvement with the activist, inside politics of Lyndon Johnson, and had yet to come to know and respect the brilliant young men around him. If I didn’t compare the Johnson presidency with the Kennedy presidency, Newsweek and others did, and I was the Newsweek Bureau chief. The piece I had written for Newsweek the weekend Kennedy died was published as a book, That Special Grace, by Lippincott in April 1964. The book seemed to brand me as hopelessly pro-Kennedy to the LBJ crowd, to my considerable annoyance. Hugh Sidey of Time magazine told me of a conversation he once had with LBJ on Air Force One. “What about that Georgetown crowd of Rowlie Evans and Ben Bradlee?” Sidey quoted the president. “How come when I say it, it comes out ‘Horse Shit,’ but when they say it, it comes out ‘Chanel Number Five’?”
The Newsweek Bureau was running on automatic pilot. Each week as I made my rounds asking the reporters if I could help them in any way, they seemed to need less and less help. I was coasting, and I’d barely begun to worry about it. Newsweek had asked me twice to move to New York. First as National editor, and later as one of the so-called Wallendas (as in the great trapeze artists, The Flying Wallendas), as the top three editors called themselves. I had filled in a couple of times as National editor, and knew I could not stand the peculiar niche that Newsweek occupied in New York . . . the booze, the generally erratic hours, the impossible hours on Friday and Saturday, never mind an apartment big enough for all those children.
And so when Kay Graham called me for lunch in March 1965, neither of us suspected how susceptible I might be to discussing a change of scenery. She had chosen the F Street Club, a stuffy institution a few blocks from the White House, where the Washington establishment could entertain itself. (Much later I learned that she chose the club because she was worried about how she could arrange to pay for lunch without a scene. Since she was a member, and I wasn’t, only she could pay.)
The lunch started off on the starchy side. I still didn’t really know Kay well, and there was that lingering memory of how she had felt about my not calling on her after Phil’s funeral, though we had gotten comfortable with each other. She wanted to know what I wanted to do when I grew up. She said she had heard that I had turned down two chances to move up the Newsweek ladder, and she seemed impressed both that I had been asked and that I’d said no. I was trying to explain my reasons, when out of the blue she asked if I’d ever given any thought to returning to the Post. I hadn’t, because I hadn’t seen any daylight over there—or looked for any. My Newsweek buddies were quite critical of the Post, and what they felt was its modest aspirations and undistinguished reporting. And they had spoken openly to Kay about their feelings, with no knowledge of the stifling impact of Phil’s illness on the paper’s managers and editors. I shared both feelings, and I thought Newsweek’s Washington reporters were more energetic, more open, and less establishmentarian. But I was in awe of the paper’s immediacy, its incredible impact on the community, and the shadow it cast on the government. A crook could be exposed, wrongs could be righted overnight. A victim could be extricated before a news magazine could make up its mind. And the urge to right wrong was the urge that made us journalists in the first place.
And I loved the Post’s Sports Section.
Anyway, all of a sudden I heard myself say: “If Al Friendly’s job ever opened up, I’d give my left one for it.” I have wondered since if I really would have parted with my left one to be managing editor of The Washington Post. Attached as I am to it—and it to me—probably not, but having gotten that chance . . . if that was the price? In any case, I knew Al Friendly and Kay Graham were really close friends, and I couldn’t believe his job was going to open up any time soon.
Phil Graham had told me that the Washington Bureau chiefs of weekly news magazines should stay put, working their way up to the top levels of the journalistic power structure, I told Kay. And I had gone along because I hadn’t wanted to move to New York. But now with the bee in my bonnet, I could think of nothing else, and tried to pry out of Kay what, if anything, she might have in mind. She was not forthcoming, beyond suggesting that she had wondered if the Post might benefit by an infusion of some sort from outside. She had talked to Walter Lippmann about it, she said, and I felt a tingle of excitement in my arms and legs. Lippmann was my pal.
Lunch was over. Kay signed for the check, gracefully, and just like that I thought another life might be starting. I remember the next few weeks as interminable, waiting for the next signal. Kay remembers the next few weeks as an inquisition by me, pressing her to take the next step, whatever it was.
The next step turned out to be a proposal that I accept the title of Deputy Managing Editor for National and International Affairs, at the same salary ($50,000 a year), with an (unwritten) understanding that I would succeed Al Friendly as managing editor “sometime.” The “sometime” lay there like a mackerel in the moonlight, its presence acknowledged but undefined. Kay had said to me, but to no one else, that sometime meant a year. I felt that one year was the outside limit, that the job of Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief should not be abandoned for a deputy M.E. slot, unless one year was the outside limit. I shared my views with Russ Wiggins, the editor, who like all good administrators wished the problem would disappear. And I shared my views with Al Friendly. In a conversation at his house, I told him that I would give him 110 percent, and couldn’t wait to get started, but I wanted him to know that I felt that a year in the bull pen was long enough. He was thinking more of three years as managing editor, he said. (He was on the ladder to become president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in the third year.) And we left it at that, each of us knowing the unresolved difference between us. I wondered if I should take the job. He surely wondered if it should be offered me. We had never been close friends, but except for an incident early in my first incarnation at the Post, we had never been at odds. In fact, I had forgotten the incident until then.
I had come down out of the woods of New Hampshire at the end of 1948, convinced that Senator Styles Bridges was mixed up in a war surplus liquidation scandal of major proportions. My immediate boss, Ben Gilbert, and Russ Wiggins, had given me two weeks to see what I could do with the story in Washington, despite the fact that I was the lowest of the low city reporters. I paired up with my friend Ed Harris in the Washington Bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for the P. D., and we pooled the few facts that I had with his expertise in Washington. I’ve never worked harder before or since than I worked for those two weeks. Twenty-hour days, one after another. We didn’t tie Bridges to the war surplus scandal, but in checking the list of Bridges’s political contributors, and cross-checking them with the Justice Department’s list of lobbyists, I had come up with two interesting names: Alfred Kohlberg and William Goodman, both ardent supporters of Chiang Kaishek. Kohlberg was a businessman who had made his money shipping Irish linen to be embroidered in China and sold in America as quality handkerchiefs. Goodman was a professional lobbyist and nut case, who had once run for mayor of New York City as the candidate of something called the American Rock Party—off the charts to the far right.
What I did write were the first stories ever written—I think—about the China Lobby, two of them, both on page one. Not the Teapot Dome, maybe, but very important to me, to prove to myself and my editors that I could play in this new league. My problem with Al Friendly came a few weeks later, when I discovered that the lead story in the Outlook Section was a long (and very good) profile of the man I had discovered, Alfred Kohlberg. It was bylined Alfred Friendly, not Benjamin C. Bradlee.
Much has been written about Bradlee and Friendly at this time in our lives. How I “got” him, if the story was written from Friendly’s prism. Or how he was inhibiting the paper’s great leap forward, if my prism was dominant. Al Friendly was a man of intellect, with an arch sense of humor, a wide circle of friends, and a ranging curiosity. He appeared to me from Day One as miscast in the role of managing editor, the job on a daily newspaper where all the thousand details of administration and production have to be coordinated before the paper can be in position to write the great stories. In fact, he had ceded those details to Ben Gilbert, the city editor, and in so doing had lost—or never found—the power to make great things happen.
A few things need to be said bluntly now. First, no one can imagine how difficult it was for the Post’s managers—editors and business types—to cope with Phil Graham’s illness in the last long months of his manic depression. Many of them were fired, then rehired. Many were confronted with decisions taken by Phil—a new bureau here, a new executive there—pursuant to priorities and judgments that were at least erratic. A bunker mentality had understandably gripped the paper’s managers, and a bunker mentality is not conducive to great leaps forward. The men who held the paper together during these trying times—specifically, Russ Wiggins, Al Friendly, and John Sweeterman, the head of the business side—made all future progress possible, and I knew it, and they knew I knew it.
Before I took the job as deputy managing editor with no commitments from anyone, only thoughts, I discussed it at length with Tony, knowing that the decision would change her life, too. I felt a new obsession coming on. I knew it would take thousands of extra hours just to learn enough to begin to know what to do—hours spent at The Washington Post, not at home. She knew I was aching to do it, and figured there was no point in objecting.
And so on Monday, August 2, 1965, I came home to The Washington Post, after an absence of fourteen years and six weeks, once again skipping my four-week vacation. My “office” was an 8-by-12-foot cubbyhole off the city room, tiled from floor to ceiling in Men’s Room beige, in what once had been part of a photo studio.
However much I had, or had not, been badgering Kay Graham about getting on with it, I had not been exactly goofing off. From early May, I had been talking separately to two remarkable Washington Post reporters, Larry Stern and Howard Simons, both friends (though strangely never with each other), who felt that the Post was not living up to its potential. I pumped each of them dry about who on the staff was good, who was okay, and who had to be replaced if we were determined to have the best reporters on the key beats. Kay had kept her word, that five vacancies that she had kept frozen were mine to fill (not Friendly’s), and I had a priority list of people to fill those vacancies. There was so much I didn’t know—about presses, about composing rooms, about budgets—that I had decided to concentrate on the one thing I did know about: good reporters. And there was a bumper crop of them out there.
• Ward Just, who came over from Newsweek with me, bright, full of ideas and energy, and a wonderful writer, and the paper had plenty of room for those particular qualities.
• Bart Rowen, one of the very best business and financial reporters ever, who came over from Newsweek early in 1966. At that time, the Post’s business and financial staff consisted of S. Oliver Goodman alone, plus a part-time copy boy to handle the agate.
• Dick Harwood, of the Louisville Courier Journal and Times, one of the great reporters and editors of his generation. He was on some fellowship in New York, but when he heard I was back at the Post, he called to say he wanted in. And it didn’t take a genius to want him in your foxhole. I had known Harwood when we had adjoining offices in the National Press Club.
• David Broder, of the New York Times, well on his way to being the greatest pure political reporter of his generation. I had tried to hire him for Newsweek, but Malcolm Muir, Jr., was put off by David’s wardrobe . . . brown shoes with blue slacks.
• Don Oberdorfer, then of the Knight Bureau, and a mortal lock to become what he became, a foreign affairs expert who could and did peg even with the very best foreign affairs experts.
• George Wilson, a future twenty-year Pentagon gold mine, then working for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine. George succeeded the Post’s Pentagon reporter, whose nickname was “Black Sheet” (as in carbon paper), and who was paid by the Navy, while he was our correspondent (as a Naval Reserve captain).
• Stanley Karnow, an old Paris colleague, working for Time-Life. He was our expert on China—just ripe to open a Post Bureau in Hong Kong, and start the quality coverage of China for which he became so widely known and admired.
That was real firepower, and it was just the first wave! All in place within the first months of the new regime. The impact of these hires—on the outside world, as well as on the paper—cannot be overstated. Especially Broder, who was the first top rank reporter ever to quit the Times for the Post. The traffic had all been the other way. I romanced him like he’s never been romanced—in coffeeshops, not fancy French restaurants, because Broder was a coffeeshop kind of man: straightforward, no frills, all business. I told him we had determined to get the best there was for every beat, that politics was the quintessential Washington Post story, and we wanted him. And we got him.
A quarter of a century later, in the easy remove of racial and sexual diversity, the hires seem awfully white and awfully male. Like totally white and totally male. The Post had pioneered in hiring any black journalists. Simeon Booker, in 1952, was the first black reporter on a white newspaper in Washington. More followed—slowly—but most of them, like Luther Jackson and Wallace Terry, moved on after comparatively short stays on the horns of their own painful dilemmas. Treated suspiciously by black activists, and denied the years of training and experience which would have made them truly competitive, Booker resigned in June 1953, and said later: “God knows I tried to succeed at the Post. I struggled so hard that friends thought I was dying, I looked so fatigued. After a year and a half I had to give up. Trying to cover news in a city where even animal cemeteries were segregated overwhelmed me.”
In the summer of 1965, black reporters on the Post staff included only Bill Raspberry, the columnist and later a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Jesse Lewis, later a foreign correspondent and then a CIA officer in the Middle East. Dorothy Gilliam, a former assistant city editor and later a columnist, was on leave. As a Newsweek reporter and bureau chief, I had prided myself on knowing the best young reporters in the country, but none was black.
Women reporters had taken their place in city rooms during World War II, as the male reporters went off to war. Many of them excelled, but the majority had to leave because of the law that guaranteed returning veterans the same jobs they held when they went to war. News magazines were siphoning off good young talent, males and females, much as television had done in the decade from 1955 to 1965. This is an explanation, not an excuse. I was not sensitive to racism or sexism, to understate the matter. The newsroom was racist. Overtly racist, in a few isolated cases; passively racist in many places where reporters and editors were insensitive and unsensitized. This racism would slowly and painfully subside, if not vanish, over the next ten years.
But at the time, such racism at the Post (and other papers) stood in the way of excellence. Ten days after I arrived as deputy managing editor for national and international affairs, on August 11, 1965, the race riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles broke out. No Washington Post reporter was sent to L.A. for five days (there was no L.A. Bureau), and the first riot byline—the ubiquitous Chal Roberts, The Washington Post’s one-man band who could and did cover any story in the paper—plus the first mood stories from the riot scene from Bill Raspberry didn’t appear in the paper until August 17. The delay was inexcusable for a newspaper which aspired to be judged as great. And I couldn’t make anything happen, yet.
The trouble was threefold: the Post wasn’t fast out of the box, period; the mind-set of the Post made editors ask how much an assignment cost, instead of how much the paper needed the story; and the Post’s black reporters had had no chance to be tested under fire.
After scouting and signing new players, I spent all of my first few months trying to discover the secret of Ben Gilbert’s power. He was one of the most interesting of my new colleagues, bright, able, extremely hardworking . . . but not appreciated by a remarkable number of reporters. Several of them sidled up to me early on to ask, almost hopefully, if it was true that I had decked Gilbert once in some fight we were supposed to have had back in the late forties. It was not true. In fact, he had hired me back in 1948, and given me way more than my share of his time and expertise. But my return put an end to his aspiration to succeed Friendly and Wiggins. He was still more than generous to me with his inside knowledge of where the power lay and what buttons to push to control the paper’s inside politics. A considerable hunk of the power lay with him, because—it was soon clear—he did all the scut work that bored Al Friendly (with some justification): salary administration, scheduling, production coordination, deadlines, vacations, overtime, plus most of the assigning.
I decided to give myself a crash course in all that good stuff, especially production, about which I knew least. Every night, for one year, I would go home for a drink and dinner with Tony and homework with six children, and then come back down to the Post to watch the first, second, and third editions clear the composing room and then the press room. I’d get back home about 1:00 A.M., appalled by how complicated it was to bring everything together from typewriter to newspaper, and appalled by the power of the printers, engravers, stereotypers, and pressmen to bail the newsroom out when they wanted to cooperate, and to screw us to smithereens whenever they wanted to do that. “Bogus” type was explained to me twenty times before I understood what it meant, and I still can’t believe it.
Bogus type (also known as “repro”) was material set in type somewhere else—another newspaper, for instance. The Post was free to use this material, but under the existing labor contract, the Post had to pay its printers what they would have earned if they had set the type in the first place, even though the reset type would never be used. When this practice was eventually bargained away in the mid-1970s, more than 42,000 newspaper pages of bogus type, worth millions of dollars, were on the union’s books.
My ignorance spilled out far beyond the premises at 1513-21 L Street, Northwest, with special emphasis on blacks. To be blunt about it, I didn’t know anything about blacks, or the black experience, and I was about to become involved in the leadership of the number-one newspaper in a city that was 70 percent black, and a readership that was 25 percent black. I had had no black friends growing up. There were no blacks in my boarding school, only three blacks in my class at college, none of whom I knew at all. I had only one black friend as a grown-up . . . my Newsweek colleague, Lionel Durand, in Paris. He was Haitian and French, and he didn’t know all that much about American blacks. At Newsweek I had known a handful of black leaders, like Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Louis Martin, but I knew no ordinary black people.
Paul Moore, then the suffragan bishop of Washington, and a friend since I was nine, decided that it was his civic duty to expose me to Washington’s black community before I became managing editor. And so he arranged with Father Bill Wendt, who was white but resolutely integrationist, and the rector of the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, that I become the only white member of the Upper Cardozo Men’s Council, an eclectic group of blacks—some former criminals, some solid citizens—who met Tuesday nights in Bill Wendt’s church to talk about what was going on in the neighborhood, and what could be done about it. While Tony was teaching pottery to unwed teenage mothers in the basement, I spent almost fifteen months listening and learning upstairs. They dubbed me “the Hawk,” because I pounced on their stories, investigated them, and got them in the paper whenever they checked out.
In the city room at night I bugged everyone for answers to a thousand questions. How come the night managing editor went home at 9:00 P.M.? Because he felt there was nothing to do after the first edition closed. How come we had an eight-column banner automatically, on the first and final edition front pages, whether or not the news justified such play? Because Harry Gladstein, the circulation chief, wanted one. How come the front page of the second, third, and fourth editions always had three or four small, one-paragraph stories, under headlines like “30 Missing in Ecuador Mud Slide”? To replace the space taken up by the eight-column banners in the first and final editions. How come we didn’t cover fires or crimes in the city’s black neighborhoods? Because the night city editors treated black and white victims differently. How come the production chiefs automatically approved our requests for pageone color photos if it involved the pope? Because the powers-that-be on the business side were all Catholics.
I remember only a few fights. A couple with Dick Thornburg, the night managing editor, who felt I was usurping his role. He was right, and he left after a few months. One, a small one, with Al Friendly. I had decided to put some light story about Senator Bill Proxmire on page one of the city edition. Prox had called Friendly to complain. And Friendly had overruled me, which was certainly his prerogative. But I was down there six nights a week, way more than anyone else, and I was learning fast.
Out of the blue in the middle of October, less than three months after I had come back to the paper, Al Friendly went to Kay Graham and told her Bradlee could handle the M.E. job, and he was ready to do something else: the new ideas beat, which Al had dreamed up but could never find the right person to take over. Or an overseas assignment. Al had served the paper with distinction for more than twenty-seven years. He could and did write his own ticket. First, the new ideas beat, and later as European correspondent/London Bureau chief, in which capacity he proceeded to win himself (and us) a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Six-Day War in Israel, in 1967. He eventually retired on his sixtieth birthday, as he had announced he would do years before.
Kay asked Wiggins if he thought I could do it, and when he said he thought I could, I became the managing editor.
And so, with the place barely energized, I was the managing editor. I had accomplished very little, beyond a few hires, and a good lead on a few more. There was not yet a steady diet of good stories. The paper still was hard to read. Production quality was a disgrace, with typos galore, with color so bad that the people in pictures regularly had four eyes and two sets of teeth. The design was just plain ugly, dominated by an Advertising Department more interested in the advertising revenue than the newspaper itself. Ink smudges, “see-through” (where ads were printed in such dark ink they could be read on the reverse page), were on every other page. I still knew barely more than my ass from left field about production. The staff was still small—303 people in the newsroom—and the newsroom budget was inadequate to say the least, around $4 million a year, versus close to $20 million for the New York Times, against which the world judged us, and against which I hungered to be judged.
To make matters worse, the budget for 1966 was incubating. Russ Wiggins had left budgeting to me, and I had been forced to lean heavily on Ben Gilbert, who knew everything, but had no stomach for the kind of fights we had to fight to make things better—and more expensive. The day finally came when the News Department had to appear before publisher John Sweeterman to justify its budget requests for 1966. John knew I had Kay Graham’s support, but he wasn’t about to turn over sincere money to the new boy on the block without making me explain what every dime was for. It was against his religion, and this religion had finally made the Post profitable after losing more than $1 million a year for twenty years. I couldn’t believe it when he led me through every line of the newsroom budget requests, asking me why we needed however many thousands of dollars for everything from new positions to stationery. I didn’t even know enough to say “product improvement,” which is every editor’s last-ditch justification.
And so in my first “clash” with the bean counters, in my first act of leadership, I got clobbered, not to put too fine a point on it. And I will always be grateful to John Sweeterman for that lesson. Never again did I go into a budget session knowing less than the holder of the pursestrings. My father had always told me to move carefully when talking to someone who knew more than I did, if I couldn’t or wouldn’t shut up. But moving carefully or shutting up doesn’t always work with publishers.
As managing editor, I started running the two story conferences: the first, at two-thirty in the afternoon when the section editors talk about their page-one stories in progress; and the second about seven, or whenever the night managing editor had produced the page-one dummy, or mock-up. That alone gave me a sense of responsibility for the paper that I had never known before, plus a sense of fear. Everyone in the newspaper business knew about the editor who had played the first atomic bomb as a small story inside along with the truss ads, and I was fearful of doing the same thing. I think that’s what lies behind a lifelong encouragement of second-guessers, and a willingness to change my mind. Story conferences became the place to talk ideas, to express enthusiasms, to encourage initiative, to have some fun, to take chances, and generally to create the sense of excitement that seemed to be missing.
When the first wave of new hires showed up, a handful of real pros were already on board, of course, eager as I was for new blood. Men like Larry Stern. The one and only Howard Simons, eventually the managing editor, but before that the eclectic leader of the team he christened SMERSH, which stood for Science, Medicine, Education, Religion, and all that SHit. Pete Silberman, the soft-spoken genius who became an assistant managing editor of almost every department in the newsroom. The incomparable Carroll Kilpatrick at the White House, the most unflappable professional I ever met. Murrey Marder on the diplomatic beat, who had won his spurs covering Senator Joe McCarthy and gone on to be the Post’s first, and for a long time only, foreign correspondent. Chalmers Roberts, an all pro whatever the assignment; sometimes the assignment process seemed to work best when Chal came to work, read the papers, and then decided on which story he wanted to do—local, national, or foreign. And of course the real pros like Herblock, simply the greatest cartoonist of his era; Shirley Povich, the nonpareil of American sportswriters; and Bill Gold, the local columnist, whose folksy prose ran six days a week on the comics page for over thirty-four years. Those disparate men, plus Herbert Elliston’s editorial page, had been the main reasons to read The Washington Post for many, many years. And there was a serious young reporter named Leonard Downie—prematurely mature, they said, with a reputation as one hell of an investigative reporter. He was twenty-three years old then, nicknamed “Land Grant Len” because he was fresh out of Ohio State. He is the executive editor of The Washington Post today.
My first months were spent trying to be sure I didn’t fall on my face. Russ Wiggins saved his thoughts for me personally, during private talks at the end of his day, when he would give me my nightly reading assignments. Literally. Had I read this book or that book? Well, I better read them, and let’s talk about them tomorrow, he would say. I often ended up with three books to read, and it took me months before I dared remind him about all those children and their homework, and what used to be a private life.
The news was dominated by Vietnam, in a way that is hard to imagine today. Vietnam, and the many, many descendants of Vietnam, owned page one, it seemed, for years. Our correspondent in Vietnam was John Maffre, a solid journeyman reporter who had been chosen primarily because he was single and therefore thought to be capable of prolonged absences. The Post had no one in Vietnam for too long, and when Maffre got there he covered the war the way von Clausewitz might have covered it—as if there were armies facing each other across well-defined front lines.
But reporters like Neil Sheehan for the United Press, Peter Arnett for the Associated Press, and David Halberstam of the New York Times had written with perception and bravery and energy about the new realities of the war, where our allies were less committed than our enemy, and our soldiers were fighting a cause that increasingly lacked public support. I wanted a new Hemingway who could write like an angel, and who could explain the drama we were seeing on our TV screens in terms of the young soldiers who were sent off to change Vietnam, but in fact were changing America in the most fundamental ways.
And I found Ward Just, who came with me from Newsweek to the Post. The son of an Illinois publisher, Ward Just is one hell of a novel writer today. Then, he was just a wonderful young reporter/writer, who found drama everywhere he looked—the drama that turned details into truth and isolated events into history. Sometimes Just would get a single quote that would tell an entire story. We spread one of those quotes, from a frightened GI surrounded by his enemies, eight columns over the top of the front page: “Ain’t Nobody Here but Charlie Cong,” as in Viet Cong. Sometime later, Charlie Cong threw a grenade in the general vicinity of Ward Just, spraying his head, back, and legs with shrapnel.
Under Russ, the editorial page was strongly for resisting tyranny wherever it ruled, and pursuing the fight against communism in Vietnam. President Johnson once thanked Wiggins for his support, saying that the Post’s editorials were worth two divisions to him. Many of the reporters—and a lot of their wives—thought the paper’s editorial support of the war was morally wrong. I concentrated on trying to discover what was going on in Vietnam, on trying to determine who was telling the truth about Vietnam, before it occurred to me to find out where I stood myself. Tony Bradlee was marching in the streets with one of the many anti-Vietnam protest groups while I was trying to figure out who was organizing the protests, and how well—or poorly—they were reflecting American opinion.
At that time the Op-Ed page came under the jurisdiction of the managing editor, and at least theoretically that gave me a chance to run columns by writers who expressed my own views. But my own views were essentially non-political, and my theoretical power went unexercised. I was more interested in facts and people than in any one person’s opinion about those facts. I was more interested in the press conference than in anyone’s analysis of the press conference. And I still am. Early on I persuaded Joe Kraft—without the slightest difficulty, let me say quickly—to move his column from the Star to the Post. Joe was neither a bleeder nor a basher, just a thoughtful, hardworking intellectual, and a friend. But it was the friend part of the Op-Ed equation which made its supervision thankless. Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop owned the top-left and the top-right spots on the Op-Ed page when they wrote. Who took their place on their days off, and who took the complaints when Kraft topped Rowlie Evans, or Evans topped Mark Childs? And how did you move some of the old-timers, like Roscoe Drummond or J. A. Livingston, a Philadelphia business columnist, up and out to bring in some new blood?
The solution, of course, is to have different persons editing the news columns and the opinion columns. When Russ Wiggins retired, his title had been Editor. When I succeeded him in 1968, I became Executive Editor, in charge of all non-advertising matters in the paper except the editorial and Op-Ed pages. My old pal Phil Geyelin took them over with the title of Editorial Page Editor.
I had been trying to get Phil Geyelin, even when I was with Newsweek, to leave the Wall Street Journal and join our modest crusade in some capacity. He fancied writing editorials, but I had nothing to do with the editorial page, where Russ Wiggins’s intellect was in charge. They finally got together, and Phil joined up in February 1967 to write editorials for six months. If everyone still loved each other, Phil would take over as the editorial page editor, reporting to Wiggins, as I did. Six months later it happened, and almost the first thing Phil did was to hire Meg Greenfield, who was at liberty because Max Ascoli had folded the Reporter magazine. Mary Ellen Greenfield was one smart lady, with an irresistible sense of humor. I used to walk back to her office and schmooze until she laughed. That laugh would lift whatever was bowing my mind, and refresh my soul.
The hunt for talent on a newspaper never stops. The more we found, the hungrier we got. And as the newsroom budget increased slowly, and then not so slowly, this search for the best writers and the best reporters became an obsession. I was determined that a Washington Post reporter would be the best in town on every beat. We had a long way to go.
The second wave of stars brought us Jim Hoagland from the New York Times, first as a city side reporter, then as a Pulitzer Prizewinning foreign correspondent, foreign editor, assistant managing editor, and eventually primo columnist on foreign affairs. Nick von Hoffman from the Chicago Daily News, by way of the Chicago stockyards and activist Saul Alinsky’s staff, was an irreverent intellectual who wrote like a dream. Peter Milius was the first of the Kentucky mafia, already lured from the Louisville papers by the time I arrived in August 1965. Nothing was too arcane for Milius. He could—and regularly did—make sense out of the federal budget. Milius was followed some years later by Bill Greider; although we were prodded by Harwood, we had been trying to get Greider for some time before we landed him. Greider had one of those attractive, restless, and inquisitive minds that led him easily from strip mining to the Federal Reserve Board. He had an open mind and a sense of humor. Everyone wanted to work with him or for him. Jonathan Randal quit the New York Times as its Warsaw correspondent to join Phil Foisie’s fast-growing foreign staff. Randal is the last of the great foreign correspondents, glamorous in their storied trench coats, at home anywhere in the world. He could—and regularly did—file intelligent stories within hours of landing in a country he had never seen before.
Mike Getler joined up in 1970 and made it in leaps and bounds all the way up the ladder to deputy managing editor—an extraordinary reporter, and one of those editors whose people touch is perfect. Lou Cannon, the great political reporter and authority on Ronald Reagan, joined us later from the San Jose Mercury News, heavily backed by Harwood. Dick described him as the best political reporter in the country after Broder, and he was right.
Roger Wilkins, who had been an assistant attorney general in the Kennedy administration, had become an interesting, in-your-face, delightful, and useful friend. He never worked for me, but with my enthusiastic encouragement he worked for Geyelin on the editorial page during Watergate. He was quick to criticize me, but he convinced me that his criticism was an act of friendship and faith.
We never stopped recruiting.
The first wire service flashes from Memphis: “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot outside a Memphis hotel Thursday afternoon. His condition was not immediately known.” It was 7:00 P.M., April 4, 1968. We had just approved the front page for the first edition when the newsroom came alive with that powerful buzz that precedes, then blends into, the disasters of history. The worst was soon confirmed: “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed late Thursday as he stood alone in the balcony of his hotel.”
The very process of reacting to news like King’s assassination spares journalists a lot of the immediate personal agony such events would normally inspire, as I had experienced when JFK was shot. At least initially, there is simply too much to do. Get reporters to the primary scene . . . that meant planes to Memphis. Throw out the page-one dummy . . . that meant finding another place in the paper for the stories that were not going on page one, or killing them outright. Get more space . . . that meant killing ads and stories. Tell the composing room—and the Circulation Department—that the first edition was going to be late . . . that meant holding trucks, rescheduling deliveries. Speak to the proprietors. . . it’s their paper. Assign the sidebars. . . that meant a King obit, a story on what lay ahead for the civil rights movement, a profile of who shot him, for starters, plus local reaction. . . and that meant working the phones and fanning reporters across the city.
Outside, the streets of Washington were exploding in anger. Fires were set in downtown stores—mostly in the black sections of town. Looting started almost immediately and reached within a few blocks of the White House.
From the roof of the Post Building late that night, one could see the fires that pockmarked the northeast quadrant of the city. Smoke spiraled into the warm spring air, and sirens pierced the night. Sirens and the sound of breaking glass, as the looting began. I don’t remember going home, hypnotized as the dimensions of the riot unfolded slowly, while an increasingly creative and adaptable staff of reporters went about the complicated task of separating fact from rumor, and harnessing their own emotions to the search for truth.
For the next ten days Washington lived under a curfew, and more than twelve thousand federal troops enforced it. More than a hundred reporters, editors, and photographers from the Post worked around the clock, including twenty-four reporters and photographers assigned only to the streets, reporting from the Advertising Department’s radio cars. Fire and looting spread from the 7th Street corridor—ten blocks from the White House—across the city. Barricades blocked off whole sections of the city. Tear gas penetrated skin, and clothes. A dozen people were dead, close to four thousand arrested. Never mind the kid stuff I had written about almost twenty years earlier, this was an honest-to-God race riot, born of anger and frustration, dedicated to a demand for attention.
The stars of the show were the black reporters and photographers, now more than a dozen. They instinctively shied away from covering only “black” news. They knew they would be branded by black leaders and rioters as Uncle Toms, but they had already faced that nastiness. The black photographers, particularly, showed great courage, for they were collecting “evidence” as they shot their stunning pictures of the looting, and the rioters knew it. *
The star of stars was Robert Maynard from the York (Pa.) Gazette and Daily, who went on to a precedent-setting career as the first black editor, and then publisher of a major American newspaper, the Oakland Tribune.
The first time I ever laid eyes on Bob Maynard had been a few years earlier, when he came to Washington for a week with the Nieman Fellows. They were hot-shot journalists in midcareer spending a year at Harvard studying anything they wanted to study. They had asked me to tell them what I was up to at The Washington Post.
He stood out in that crowd, not only because he was black in a profession where there were damn few blacks, but because he was confrontational, argumentative, mean, and skeptical, verging on the obnoxious. Much of my ninety minutes with the Niemans was spent arguing with Maynard.
As I walked back to the Post from George Washington University, where we had met, I wondered about him and what the hell it would take to impress him, or even interest him. I doubted that I could impress him.
But there he was sitting in my outer office when I got back to work. He said he thought he might like to work at the Post much to my surprise. He would have to return to his paper in York, Pennsylvania, because he had promised to return for one year after the fellowship, but he wondered if we might be interested in him after that.
We damn well would be interested, and I told him so.
One year later to the week, he was back, and it wasn’t long before he was the talk of the town, literally. He was a Metro reporter then, and a key building block in the Post’s belated commitment to attract high-quality black journalists to the newsroom. Bob Maynard had many qualities (he would be a national reporter, an editorial writer, an assistant managing editor, and the Ombudsman before he left the paper), but one of his most distinctive qualities was the rich, sonorous timbre of his voice. He spoke in pear-shaped tones, and by the second day of the riots he was in a radio car, crouched in the front seat, broadcasting back to the city room whatever he saw.
We all stood around the city desk radio bank as Bob “filed”:
The flames are now rising, six, eight, now fifteen feet high. The entire store is being engulfed, while looters, mostly children, race in and out of the burning buildings, strangely unaware of the danger. . . .
My car is now being surrounded by four gentlemen, all of them apparently hostile. Now there are eight of them, bouncing the car up and down. I shall leave the air, momentarily, until things settle down. . . .
There are four policemen ducking for cover right beside my car. . . . They are down on one knee behind the hood and the trunk . . . with their guns drawn and cocked . . . aiming over the car at the roof above us. . . . I am now getting onto the floor under the dashboard as fast as I can. . . . Over and out. *
The city desk would ask for the exact address. A copy boy, taking it all down on a typewriter, would add the time, and we would all cheer. NBC heard about Maynard’s bravura performances, and asked if they could send someone over to watch. We said, “Sure,” and the network stayed to cover the riots by covering Maynard and his gang. Same for the United Press.
A couple of days into the riots, I gathered up Howard Simons and David Broder for a firsthand look at what was going on in what we liked to call the capital of the free world. We ended up, about 3:00 P.M., in front of a big, burning warehouse in an overwhelmingly black section of the city. It was the biggest fire I’d seen since Manchester, New Hampshire, when a whole block of Elm Street went up in flames.
We were joined by two different groups of blacks, also sightseeing, and we all talked unself-consciously about the fire and the riots in general. None of us felt the slightest bit threatened. Until we were joined by a local TV crew, which took its time setting up and shooting the fire. When they turned their cameras on us bystanders, the blacks immediately started yelling at us, trashing us, even shaking their fists at us, creating enough of a disturbance to attract the cops, and the next thing we knew tear-gas guns were going off and the little aluminum canisters were rolling around the street. Broder had apparently not seen or smelled tear gas before, and wanted a better look, or smell. He walked over and bent down just as one of the canisters popped, and he became a full-fledged expert in a matter of seconds. The TV cameras shot great stuff, full of action. Black versus white, cops versus blacks, those slowly arcing tear-gas canisters, all against a raging fire. It didn’t tell much about the truth, it just made good television.
It was three in the morning, less than two months later, when the violence that was at once so incomprehensible and so routine struck again with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. We were all still in the newsroom, waiting for the final edition of June 5, 1968, to come upstairs from the composing room, headlining Bobby Kennedy’s victory over Eugene McCarthy in the California primary. I heard those dreadful words, “Kennedy’s been shot,” just seconds before I watched Larry Stern pick up the telephone, blanch, and say, “I got Harwood.”
Harwood was calling from the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, only seconds after he had stared into the vacant, bloody face of the dying Bobby Kennedy. Dick Harwood, primitive in his search for the truth, impossible to deceive, and without peer in his ability to write a declarative sentence, had been assigned to cover Bobby Kennedy exactly because he was skeptical of Kennedy, and almost despite himself had grown to like Kennedy, then respect him, and finally to feel close to him.
The phone Harwood found was being used by a middle-aged woman who was trying to describe the chaotic scene to a friend. Harwood started to excuse himself, explaining why he felt his need was greater than hers. When she showed no interest in helping him, he helped himself. We told Dick what we knew, what the wires had said, and he told us what he knew. He had been by Bobby’s side when Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets struck. We told him we had stopped the presses and were going for an extra. He was to call us back with everything he had in thirty minutes.
In fact, I had already shouted, “Stop the presses!” (for the first and only time in my life), electrifying everyone in the newsroom, including myself. But the presses had not stopped. The emergency bell installed for just this purpose had been disconnected (by whom? we suspected the bean counters), and it took several minutes for the word to drift down to an indifferent press room that Bradlee really meant it.
Television shines its brightest in the first few hours after actions that are vivid and dramatic, when truths are hard to find and pictures give only clues. In these moments television doesn’t have the time to sort out fact from rumor, nor the information to place events in context. That’s the newspaper’s vital role. What we can’t achieve with immediacy, we provide with background and comprehensiveness. So, “extras” may not serve much purpose in the age of television, but we were determined to put out an extra anyway, maybe because the effort would keep us from facing the ugliness and the tragedy that was dogging this family. But also because there was news to be reported and we were newspaper reporters. The bean counters were slightly less enthusiastic, as they drifted into the newsroom asking, “What’s all this about an extra?” and thinking of all that overtime money.
But we were determined. Katharine Graham was on the premises, and she wasn’t telling us no, and before long Harwood was back on the phone to Stern. Together, they crafted the lead story, talking, listening, questioning. We added sidebars from the wire service, plus photos, rejiggered the whole A section of the paper, and finally hit the streets with our extra close to 6:00 A.M. It wasn’t great, but we had been doing what we had been put on this earth to do, and we felt good about that.
And then I went home in the morning’s early light, sat down at the kitchen table, and cried uncontrollably for an hour. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak.
I was surprised at the intensity of my feeling. Bobby and I had seen each other socially from time to time, but not all that often. I had valued Bobby Kennedy as a source during the 1960 campaign. He was the hardest worker I have ever seen. But I felt he resented the access JFK and Jackie gave to Tony and me, and I had had one four-star battle with him in July 1964, when I was still working for Newsweek.
What role, if any, Bobby would play in the 1964 election had been a matter of great interest to everyone in town, including Bobby. President Johnson was saying different things to different people on the subject, and I had arranged to spend a long day with Bobby in the fall of 1964, starting at 6:00 A.M. at his home, Hickory Hill, for a trip to Kansas City, and Chicago, winding up after midnight in New York City. During the day, we flew commercial, and I probably spent four or five hours sitting next to the restless Kennedy, taking notes all the way, on a large, lined yellow pad. We spent two hours at the dedication of a Catholic Home for the Aged in Kansas City. Almost half of that time Bobby spent upstairs (away from TV cameras and other reporters) in a ward for the terminally ill, sitting alone at the bedside of a woman whose eyes were tight shut, whose death rattle was the only sign that life still existed in her frail body. I watched with tears in my eyes as the “ruthless” Bobby Kennedy stroked this unknown woman’s hand, and spoke to her in a near whisper.
Later, en route to Chicago and New York, I asked him about the campaign, and about his interest in the vice presidency. He made no secret of his desire for the job, but was realistic about his chances: LBJ would never let him have it. My story for Newsweek stressed this particular revelation:
“Actually,” [Kennedy said], “I should think I’d be the last man in the world he would want. . . because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson Administration with no Kennedys in it, because we travel different paths, because I suppose some businessmen would object, and because I’d cost them a few votes in the South . . . I don’t think as many as some say, but some.”
The story was picked up by the wires, and other papers, and then inexplicably denied categorically by Kennedy and his aide, Ed Guthman, who were by then traveling in Poland. No such conversation ever occurred, went the first denial. After I provided enough details to disprove that, Kennedy and Co. came back with the explanation that the whole conversation was “off the record.” This, too, was a lie, and I resented it. Such claims are tough for reporters to refute. There is no written record that can settle the disagreement. And the public is left at least in some confusion.
But that was four years before his death, and in the intervening years I had been slowly coming to sense this man’s passion, his building rage at the persistent inequalities that plagued America, his readiness to embrace the hopeless and enlist in their cause. Vietnam was tearing America apart. Race was tearing America apart. Inequality was tearing America apart, and Bobby Kennedy’s almost romantic determination to make a difference had deeply impressed me. There was no need to compare him with JFK; they were so different, except for that last name and that father. JFK was more intellectual, urbane, sophisticated, witty. RFK was more passionate, more daring, more radical.
And now, impossibly, they were both gone. What other country assassinates its leaders the way America does?
The journalist’s reputation for being hard-boiled and cynical describes a self-defense mechanism. Without the pressure of the next deadline, a reporter could—and would—indulge his or her emotions. Sorrow, rage, despair, whatever. But with the next deadlines—five of them every day—journalists must move on. We moved our energies on to, among other things, a problem that had been bugging us all for months: where in the paper were we going to cover the revolution in how people were living? Where and how would we cover what real people were doing, rather than criminals murdering or leaders leading?
There was no feature section, really. No regular place for profiles of interesting people. No place for wit or humor. No place for a look at social trends beyond the seasonal changes of fashion. And given the alleged imperatives of a cost-conscious Production Department, no one place in the paper where society’s leisure activities could be explored. We covered television the way we covered congressional hearings, long on process, short on people, judgment, and motive. Our book and movie reviews jumped from one section of the paper to another, often ending up in different sections.
We did have a section called “for and about Women” (written in exaggerated, cursive type with a small “a” and a small “f”) or the “women’s section,” as it was known. There, we covered fashions, parties involving embassies especially, and the wives of cabinet officials. A photo of Mrs. Dean Rusk, attending some country’s birthday—with the ambassador often in native dress—was one of our specialties. We covered parties as if we catered them, but only if they were given by Gwendolyn Cafritz, or Perle Mesta, or maybe top military brass. We didn’t cover parties as political happenings, with political as well as social purposes. We ran sewing patterns, and we ran recipes. My God, did we run recipes, few if any of which had ever been tested by us, and most of which required some mixture of hamburger (hot) and aspic (cold).
We did have a gossip columnist, the wondrous Maxine Cheshire, or “The Blue Max,” as she was known in the city room. Maxine was the daughter of a Harlan County, Kentucky, coal mine manager, and she feared nobody. She was once described admiringly by one of her Harlan County editors as “pound for pound the toughest woman reporter I ever saw.” The trouble with Maxine, if it was trouble, lay in her total involvement with investigative reporting. She would rather write about the foreign businessman’s financial irregularities than his social behavior. I probably spent more time dousing fires ignited by Maxine than any other journalist except those that Woodward and Bernstein would ignite in 1972. But she was fun to work with and awesome to watch once she sank her teeth into someone’s flank. “I’ll get him,” she’d say quietly. “I’ll get him.” And she usually did.
But the internal culture of “for and about Women” made me feel uncomfortable. Women were treated exclusively as shoppers, partygoers, cooks, hostesses, and mothers, and men were ignored. We began thinking of a section that would deal with how men and women lived—together and apart—what they liked and what they were like, what they did when they were not at the office. We wanted profiles, but “new journalism” profiles that went way beyond the bare bones of biography. We wanted to look at the culture of America as it was changing in front of our eyes. The sexual revolution, the drug culture, the women’s movement. And we wanted it to be interesting, exciting, different.
By September 1968, we had all pretty much agreed on the concept, but it took us another three months to come up with the name. I would have opted for “Private Lives” if Noel Coward hadn’t copyrighted those words, and if I could have brought myself to say, “Can I have the Private Lives Section?” I thought “Lifestyle” was a bogus word, suggesting the worst of Madison Avenue. “Living” was too passive, and essentially meaningless as a section title, like “Scene,” “Panorama,” “Trends,” “Spectrum,” or even “You.” I liked the word “Style.” I like people with style, with flair, with signature qualities, provided they have more than style and flair and signature qualities. And so three weeks before kick-off, Style it was.
The team that created the Style Section was an extraordinary group of journalists. The boss was David Laventhol, who went on to become managing editor, editor, and publisher of Newsday, and publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times and its parent company, Times-Mirror. With him worked Jim Truitt, who was trying to ensure we were thinking radically enough (Truitt once sat in front of a typewriter for 47 hours, making a list of more than 1,000 story ideas after I had asked casually, “Where the hell are all the ideas?”); David Lawrence, Jr., then on loan from the news desk, and later top gun at the Palm Beach Post, Philadelphia Daily News, and Detroit Free Press, before settling down as publisher and board chairman of the Miami Herald; Ben Cason, who wound up as senior vice president of United Press International and now runs a newspaper group in Ohio. And finally Elsie Carper, who brought grace and dignity to every job she ever held during her half century at the Post. Elsie wound up as women’s editor, because we were scared we would forget all about women in creating something to replace “for and about Women.”
We gave Nick von Hoffman the title of Culture Editor, for some unremembered reason. He took life much too lightly to be an editor, but he was a gifted, iconoclastic, and brainy reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and I had hired him as an investigative reporter after reading his stuff, especially a brave and perceptive series on the Catholic Church. A disciple of Saul Alinsky, the labor reform activist, Nick had worked in the Chicago stockyards, but had never been to college. He was a perfect hire for someone who was trying haphazardly to bring new excitements, new depths, new range to Washington reporting. He had written a stunning series for us in October 1967 about the drug scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District. A series so good that the San Francisco Chronicle had run all sixteen pieces on its front page. Nick had gone out there on an assignment from Larry Stern, then the national editor, and I used to listen to Nick’s nightly telephone reports on the Hippie otherworld. I finally couldn’t stand it, and flew out to San Francisco to see for myself—three of the most extraordinary days and nights of my life. It was as strange and unfamiliar to me as the war had been, watching those children—and adults—crashing after LSD trips, screaming from methamphetamines, and just mooning around under the influence of marijuana. Their domination by drugs and the need to get money for drugs was fascinating and frightening to me—as a man, as a father, as a citizen.
If we made a mistake in creating the Style Section, it was to steal too much talent from other sections and thus leave them feature-free, top-heavy with straight news. We had Phil Casey from the Metro Section, a quiet, warmly funny rewrite man who played the typewriter like a violin. We had Mike Kernan, another poet in newspaperman’s clothing. And we had B. J. Phillips, who looked like a waif and wrote like some tough new kind of angel. She came to us from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, hired by Gene Patterson soon after he became managing editor, in the vanguard of the new journalists, who looked at news with a novelist’s eyes and a sociologist’s insights.
BJ wrote the lead story in the first edition of Style on January 6, 1969. “Wanted by the FBI,” a story about a twenty-six-year-old female kidnapper, was about as far removed as we could get from a normal “for and about Women” front page. We had debated amongst ourselves about how fast we should change the section, and as so often happens, had never really made that decision. BJ made the decision for us. An FBI Wanted poster of a young woman charged with kidnapping announced a major change. And some of the old-timers started griping. “Ben? Where are you hiding the Women’s Section?” asked the headline in the local city magazine, The Washingtonian. Ladies in the locker room of one of the local golf clubs took us apart, and one of them told her husband, who just happened to be a top advertising wheel at the Post. It was Topic A at the next so-called vice presidents’ meeting. Even Katharine Graham, who was an enthusiastic participant in many of the brainstorming sessions that created the section, voiced some concern. In fact, she voiced enough concern to lead to the only “fight” she and I have ever had. The only time we ever raised voices at each other.
“Damn it, Katharine,” I heard myself say after one more expression of concern than I was programmed to take that day, “get your finger out of my eye. Give us six weeks to get it right, and then if you don’t like it, we’ll talk.” It came out more harshly than I had intended, but it worked. We got our six weeks. In fact, we got twenty-five years, the best twenty-five years an editor ever had with an owner.
Style became a great hit in Washington, and widely imitated in the trade.
For a good part of 1969, a considerable part of my spare time was spent embroiled in a fight between Art Buchwald and Joe Alsop—unlikely combatants any way you cut it.
Buchwald has always been able to write his column in a couple of hours. Normally, he has his column idea before he has finished the front section of the paper, writes his column, and is looking for lunch partners by 11:00 A.M. He had already written umpteen books; he had his speeches down on 3 by 5 cards and could talk for three hours, easy. Now he wanted to try the theater; he wanted to write a play, and he damned well did. Sheep on the Runway was a farce about an arrogant, elitist Washington columnist, visiting an Asian country so small that sheep grazed on the only airport’s only runway, totally disrupting the embassy, the ambassador, and the foreign country, while turning a minor dispute into a major war.
In the play, the arrogant, elitist Washington correspondent was named Joseph Mayflower, a wicked spoof on Joe Alsop, and the town was divided into two camps. For a while I tried without success to make peace between the two, but when Alsop forbade his friends from going to the opening night in New York, I wanted to be with Artie, and I was, for a splendid opening and a party afterwards at Sardi’s. Sheep on the Runway ran for three months in New York, and then on the night that four people were killed on the campus of Kent State, the play opened in Washington—to a lousy review by the Post, of course. All my friends got lousy reviews in the Post. That was a given.
Anyway, Alsop never talked to Buchwald again, but of course, he never talked much to him before.
Actually, Alsop started talking less to me, too, about this time as he started measuring people and events on a scale that was calibrated solely to his feelings on Vietnam. Alsop thought that the Vietnam reporting from the Post’s young war correspondents, like Ward Just, was anti-war, and I was to blame.
Buchwald was on my side of that fight, and during many other moments of need in my life. He was even at my father’s funeral in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts—maybe not the first or last Jew in that little enclave of WASP supremacy, but surely on that day the most welcome.
My father had died without warning or fuss in the spring of 1970, at age seventy-seven. In one of our regular weekly telephone calls, he told me he felt lousy, and thought he might even check into the Beverly Hospital for a day or so. He never complained about his health, so I told him I’d take the first plane up the next morning, but he died in his sleep of an aneurysm before I saw him again. I would have liked to put my head on that big chest one more time and tell him goodbye. Never a flashy man, and after his football heroics were behind him, never even a successful man the way success is measured by historians. He was a good and quiet man, though, filled with common sense and humor.
Every newspaperman worth his pad and pencil had mourned the passing of the New York Herald Tribune in 1966. Wherever they worked, journalists envied the Trib’s style, its flair, its design, its fine writing, its esprit de corps. No better sportswriter ever lived than Red Smith. Its columnists, from Walter Lippmann to Art Buchwald, from Dorothy Thompson to Jimmy Breslin, from Joe Alsop to John Crosby, were vital, original, top of the line. And its owner Jock Whitney was a gentle, graceful, and wealthy man, who loved newspaper people—the trait that newspaper people find most attractive in others, especially owners.
After the Trib folded, Jock kept the Paris edition alive because he loved it . . . the stylish, slightly eccentric Paris Trib, full of character and characters. It didn’t make any money, didn’t even try very hard to make money, but it had the kind of cachet that Jock Whitney loved and exemplified. But the New York Times had started its own full-fledged international edition in 1960. The European edition of the Times never made money, but its aggressive presence (and quality) in Europe was enough to push the Paris Trib into the red, and to force Whitney Communications into some serious thinking about survival.
Their solution: sell 45 percent of the Paris Trib—for less than $2 million—to The Washington Post, run Washington Post stories from the L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service, and put the Post’s newspaper infrastructure behind the Trib, which currently had no supporting newspaper behind it. I knew (and cared) little about the quality of the investment as an investment, but I relished being asked to participate in a mano-a-mano battle with the New York Times. I mean, the Los Angeles Times wasn’t being asked to join Whitney. Neither was Le Monde. Nor the Manchester Guardian. We were.
So we went mano a mano, and both papers started losing important money. The same desire to compete with the New York Times kept us from suggesting that we stop losing money and join forces. It was left to Sydney Gruson, the publisher of the international edition of the Times, to pull that off. I had been attracted to Gruson, mostly because of his newspaper talents and because he looked so much like my brother, but I was leery of him. He had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the Times; his then wife, Flora Lewis, was a distinguished foreign correspondent for major newspapers and magazines. Together they knew everyone in the power structures of New York, Washington, London, and Paris, and I didn’t. I knew young Arthur Sulzberger, Punch, who had been propelled to the top of the New York Times ladder by the sudden death of his brother-in-law, Orvil Dryfoos. Punch and I had been fellow reporters, and buddies, in Paris in the fifties, but I had trouble believing the mighty Times was going to give the Post anything like a fair shake in any merged enterprise.
I was wrong, of course, about the Times, and about Gruson. He became one of the delights of my life, funny, smart, not pompous, and a man who did not take himself too seriously (a quality which has always attracted me). Sydney wanted to be publisher of the merged newspaper, but the Post was scared of being gobbled up. Instead, he and I were put on the board of directors as editorial overseers of the paper,* and the new publisher was Bob MacDonald, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant and New York Herald Tribune general manager.
The new International Herald Tribune was a journalistic triumph, if not a financial success, and soon enough we began to consider an Asian edition. We felt we needed an Asian partner in a part of the world where none of us had any business experience. This presented us with our first potential conflict of interest, since the logical partners were either Asahi Shimbun or Yomiuri, the giant Japanese dailies, each with financially unsuccessful English-language editions. With its modest 10. I million circulation in 1971, Asahi was the most valued client of the New York Times’s News Service, and the Times felt obligated to broach our idea of a joint venture to Asahi first. With a paltry 9.2 million circulation, Yomiuri was the most valued client of the L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service.
Gruson said it was Asahi first or nothing, and I had to yield, gracefully I’m sure.
If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget the four days we spent “negotiating” with Asahi, Bob MacDonald, Sydney Gruson, and Takashi Oka, the New York Times’s Tokyo Bureau chief, who served as our translator, on one side of an enormous polished boardroom table, and fifteen of the meanest-looking gentlemen I have ever seen on the other. (“Jesus,” Gruson whispered to me early on, “they all look like that guy you rescued in your destroyer off Corregidor.”) I had been told repeatedly, by Gruson and others, about the Japanese penchant for ritual and ceremony, and I had been told specifically not to bring up the question of Asahi becoming our partner, which after all was why we had traveled across the Pacific Ocean. In fact, no one, repeat no one, brought up the subject for the first three days. Instead, we bowed to each other a lot, while we talked about the Japanese newspaper situation, about the New York newspaper situation, about the Washington newspaper situation.
By day.
By night, our new Japanese friends took us out to a series of geisha establishments, each more elaborate than the last. I didn’t have a clue what to expect, and felt relieved when I realized that the issue of sex was not going to rear its complicating head. The geisha “girls” were in fact of a certain age, tasked only to keep our glasses full and our plates overflowing—glasses of warm saké and plates of indescribable foods. Every now and then a different geisha would stand up, go to one end of a bare room, and perform, playing a one-stringed musical instrument I had never seen before, or singing a song unlike any song I had heard before. Our hosts would applaud, and I tried desperately not to look at Gruson. At no time during the geisha dinners was any business discussed.
This went on and on, interrupted only once on a late afternoon, when Gruson and I visited some “baths” where we were bathed, and massaged within an inch of our lives, by professional bathers and massagers. At the end of these three days, we still had not uttered the words “Asian Edition” to our Japanese friends. I was en route to my first adventure in Vietnam, and ready to get started, and so we decided to bite the bullet next morning. Gruson brought it up early on the fourth day. Our hosts acted appropriately surprised, asked for a short recess, and returned quickly to tell us that such a merger would not be possible. I tried later that day with my associates at Yomiuri, came to the point quickly (much too quickly, I’m sure), and got the same answer. Sayonara.
After the collapse of our Japanese scheme, I flew on to Saigon for my first look at Vietnam, the impossible war that was scarring America. (I had come within days of going there in the mid-fifties for Newsweek to cover the Guerre d’Indochine, which was then ruining France.) I landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport in February 1971, uncommitted politically as usual, a day ahead of schedule, an accident that saved Peter Osnos’s life. Peter, who was part of our two-man Saigon Bureau, had planned to fly by chopper with Newsweek correspondent François Sully to take a look at the Cambodian border. He changed plans at the last minute so he could meet me at the airport. Sully’s chopper had a bomb in it and blew up a few feet off the ground, killing all on board.
By instinct and habit, I was more interested in the whatness of the war than in the rightness or wrongness. I hated the idea that an authoritarian country like North Vietnam could wipe out a peaceful neighbor. But I didn’t much like the idea that a corrupt country like South Vietnam in one hemisphere could be persuaded to ask the United States of America and millions of its citizen soldiers to come to its rescue, with never even an attempt to enact a declaration of war. I hated what the Vietnam War was doing to America, wasting our national energy and inflating our economy, dividing us between young and old, between rich and poor, black and white, generally alienating us all. But I had bought into the myth that America had a mission to come to the help of the weak, against the oppressors. I had tried too long to equate Vietnam with what I had seen as the justice of World War II, and I desperately wanted to see for myself, before I switched to the other side.
My guides were Osnos and the other Post correspondent in Saigon, Peter Jay, later a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. Our plan called for a week in Saigon and a week in the Mekong Delta, not exactly safe for the over-fifty set which I was about to join, but safer than some hellhole in I Corps. I saw as many of the players as would cram me into their schedules, including General Creighton Abrams, who was the commander of more than 500,000 troops in the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam; Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker; and a few Vietnamese leaders. I went to the “Five O’Clock Follies,” where the correspondents were spoon-fed the information that the military wanted them to have that day, and where the correspondents expressed their distaste for this diet in a colorful but essentially meaningless ritual. I interviewed—and ate and drank with—other correspondents, particularly the spectacular Gloria Emerson of the New York Times, Kevin Buckley and Maynard Parker from Newsweek, and Peter Kann of the Wall Street Journal. And I walked the crowded streets. I am uncomfortable when I have no idea what’s going on in the minds of people I see and talk to. And I was as uncomfortable in Saigon as I had been in Algiers.
My guide for a two-day trip to III Corps was Bill Colby, later director of the CIA, but then serving as director of CORDS (Civilian Operations and Revolutionary—later changed to Rural—Development Support, a CIA operation), the program which tried to identify Viet Cong agents who masqueraded in the Vietnam villages and persuade them to defect, or if they would not, get them killed. Colby impressed me as quietly confident, but a bit scholarly for such a blood-thirsty job. We flew down to III Corps in Colby’s chopper, over seemingly peaceful, deep green land, but Colby quoted his pilot as saying we were shot at twice. Couldn’t have proved it by me. We ate a remarkably good meal with the local ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) commander in the back room of a village house. Colby asked questions about how things were going, for my benefit as much as his own, I felt, and the ARVN commander answered with controlled enthusiasm—also for my benefit as much as Colby’s. I felt like a sponge absorbing largely what others wanted me to absorb, but some of my own impressions were beginning to command attention. Like how well journalists and soldiers get along in the field, away from the politics of Washington. I never met a reporter who left Vietnam with anything but the greatest respect for the military—not the commanders of the Follies, but the guys in the field. God knows, the military saved our asses often enough.
The next day, General John Cushman took me on a kind of sampan, powered by the ever present Briggs & Stratton engine—just like the one on your average Roto-tiller—through a series of canals defining the rice fields. No action. Not even much movement among the natives. Our goal was an outpost manned by two young Army officers, both American, where I spent the night. Scared shitless. The two men weren’t exactly scared, but they were preoccupied. This was a dark night, and darkness concentrated their minds. The VC knew exactly how many people were in this outpost, and our guys wouldn’t have a chance if anyone else fired first. No one fired at all.
I was choppered back to Tan Son Nhut the following day, and flew west, toward Afghanistan, to spend a few days with my oldest son Ben, and his wife Cathie, Peace Corps volunteers, who were teaching English as a foreign language in Kabul. (When the Afghan students went on strike for three months, Ben volunteered as reporter/editor on the Kabul Times.)
I envied these two, starting out their lives together in this strange land, clear blue sky, brown land, and (in February) white snow blanketing the mountains. The concept of national service, especially the Peace Corps, seemed good for America, and better for those who served.
It took me another couple of weeks to get home, most of it spent in Israel, where I received the standard booster shot from Israeli friends, who wished to be sure that all American journalists were regularly exposed to their precarious condition and their valiant pursuit of independence. A few days of up at five in the morning to visit the Golan Heights, or the kibbutz on the Lebanon border, or the standard eighteen-hour tour of the West Bank, always guided by an Israeli citizen/warrior, marvelously convincing and just a bit condescending.
After an absence of almost six weeks, I dared hope that my return would have eased the personal strains that had been plaguing Tony and me. I distributed lush bolts of silk from Bangkok to the women in my family, while I filled the silence with one colorful anecdote after another from my trip. But I could see soon enough that presents were not going to be enough to wipe the slate clean. And before the night was over Tony had stunned me by revealing that she had wished I had stayed away. And I couldn’t cope with that revelation.
My heart sank as I had a flash of what lay ahead: another failure, another agony. After I had returned to the Post, and devoted myself to it the way a man should devote himself to a woman—hours of shared commitment and excitement in the joyful pursuit of common goals—we came slowly and silently to realize that each of us was no longer the other’s reason for being. Jack Kennedy and Mary Meyer had been murdered out of our lives, out of our reservoir of shared experience, and we had both changed in coping with their loss.
For Tony, the Post filled no need. What had once seemed like the promise of a fulfilling and exciting life, she now saw as a life dominated by a random series of more or less interesting headlines, unconnected to each other or to any meaningful philosophy. She was more comfortable with artists than with journalists or politicians, and she started studying sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art. She concentrated on developing skills in highly individualized pieces, which involved casting cement into various unique, womblike, hollow shapes. Through her friendship with Anne Truitt, Jim’s wife, she became first interested in, and later absorbed by, something called “The Work.”
The Work is a self-awareness movement founded by a Russianborn philosopher/guru named Gurdjieff, and his disciple, Ouspensky, another Russian mystic.
The Washington group was led by a Gurdjieff disciple named Hugh Ripman, an Englishman who was the World Bank’s director of administration. Ripman believed that people were sleepwalking through life. “We are prisoners of our own past,” he said before his death in 1980. “Our conscious state is semi-hypnotic sleep. Our attention is not under control. Our sense of self is constantly lost in all kinds of different things. . . . You’ve got to set up a silent witness in yourself, not judgmental, just aware. . . . We have different ‘I’s,’ and they are contradictory.”
And just as Tony was unable to find any fulfillment in my life at the Post, I was unable to find any place for myself in The Work. Our common ground was a small space, filled with children, somewhere between the two things that interested each of us most. Sex, which had been overwhelming, became incidental, even accidental. And my six-week absence and a few bolts of silk were not going to change any of that.
At this point, I had no interest in falling in love with anyone else, even when some months later I found someone who made me laugh, and who liked sex—with me.
That relationship was satisfying, if aimless, but it pretty much ended during the winter of 1973, when Tony and I were seeing a shrink. The shrink was an asshole. A child psychiatrist we had consulted about some child’s problem, or about our problem with some child. For the life of me, I can’t remember a single insightful observation he ever made about any child, or about us, and I have no idea why we settled on him to lead us out of the darkness which was surrounding us. He wasn’t close to being up to the task.