After my post-Watergate leave was over, I faced some personnel problems that had been too hard to solve while we were all so preoccupied with handling that extraordinary story with its extraordinary denouement. One of these involved the Sports Section. I had been forced to make one change, but my solution had bombed. I had made another change, and that solution was plainly not working. With my reputation for picking the right people about to go up in smoke, I had a really great idea. They say you need only one good idea a day to earn your salary, but in fact you don’t need that many. And a couple of really great ideas should make a career.
My great idea was to make Don Graham the sports editor. With Watergate behind us, Don had returned to Washington from a stint at Newsweek, and he was ready for a new challenge, as he worked his way up the ladder. He was not thrilled about working with numbers on the business side of the Post, where Katharine had penciled him in, nor was Katharine thrilled by my making Don an offer that he clearly preferred. He was not only a sports enthusiast, he was completely knowledgeable about sports. Everyone liked him and admired him, and selfishly, I figured that with Don as sports editor, he would have an identity with the newsroom that would benefit us—and him—forever.
I had first met Don Graham when he was a teenager and I was in Newsweek’s Washington Bureau. On baseball’s Opening Day, various Post types led by Shirley Povich, the great sports columnist, plus me from Newsweek and Don from school, would have a lunch at the Post before going out to Griffith Stadium. I had seen him again at Harvard, with his fabulous girlfriend, Mary Wissler. Don was president of the Harvard Crimson, which was staging some celebration. I had been asked at the last minute to substitute for Bill Moyers as the main dinner speaker. It was not a great success, you could say. In fact, it was a disaster. The Harvards had been celebrating for three days, and most of them were drunk out of their minds. I don’t know what subject might have satisfied them, but I gave some Boy Scout speech about teamwork and loyalty, and before I was through the bread rolls were flying across the dining room toward the head table.
Don was an instant success as sports editor, as he has been at whatever task was before him. In only a few months he calmed everyone down, got them pulling together, and set them free to produce a great Sports Section. And on top of that he tapped George Solomon to be his deputy from the Washington Daily News with an eye to recommending him as his successor whenever the time came. Most of his colleagues think Solomon has a special relationship with Graham when it comes time to dole out new slots and more white space, but all of his colleagues agree that Solomon was the right man, then and now.
I have never been comfortable in or with the labor movement. In 1947, I didn’t understand the great rewards of trade unions—never mind the propriety as a 10 percent stockholder of being first a reluctant member, then the secretary of the smallest local in the history of the American Newspaper Guild in Manchester, New Hampshire. We were making very little money, but for most of us, half our salaries came to us under the GI Bill of Rights, and the paper was so broke it had to scratch for the other half from Day One.
At the Post for my first tour, I followed the path of least resistance and joined the Guild, without any forethought at all. I’m sure the Guild helped get me the few small raises I got in two and a half years. And I do mean small . . . $3 to $5 a week. There was no Guild of any consequence at Newsweek, although there was a small unit in the Washington Bureau, which I discovered when I fired a TWX operator for habitual intoxication without knowing she was the “unit” chairman, the word we used at the time.
When I returned to the Post as part of management, my dealings with the Guild and all other unions lay somewhere between scratchy and hostile.
My all-time scarring experience with the Guild unit came in the spring of 1974, at the very height of Watergate, when the Post and the White House were locked in a struggle for survival. The contract had expired and Guild leadership promised that if there was no contract by 4:00 P.M. one afternoon, all Guild members would walk out of the newsroom on strike—“withdraw our excellence,” in their memorably pompous phrase. A few minutes before four, there being no contract, the unit chairman walked through the newsroom with four fingers of his hand raised (for 4:00 P.M.)—and out they walked meek as lambs. My friends! People I drank with. People like Bud Nossiter, Murrey Marder, Dan Morgan, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Larry Stern, Don Oberdorfer. People who were the engine behind the new Washington Post. People who could not be persuaded by presidents of the United States, FBI directors, Secretaries of State, or prime ministers to say “Hello” to their mothers. But for four fingers they just walked out in silence. Sheepish silence, I thought at first, wishfully, but not realistically.
One of the strikers was Sally, of course, impaled on the horns of a dilemma: cross the picket line and lose all identity except “editor’s girlfriend,” or join colleagues and try to preserve some independence.
It bugged me more than I could stand to realize that we friends had to pretend to go to war before we could achieve a truce, and that meanwhile we were out of business. Since Sally and I had a drink with Stern almost every night, we started talking about the strike the first day. With the permission of John Prescott, the paper’s business chief executive, and very explicitly without committing the management to anything, we talked about ways of stopping the silliness and getting on with our life’s work at what was plainly an historical crossroads.
Stern scheduled a meeting with Bernstein, Marder, and Bernard Nossiter, the Post’s economic correspondent, at his house, and I joined them after a couple of hours as prearranged. But when they later tried to sell the Guild what would have been a solution, they were shouted down. Sometime after the 1975 strike was settled, all four of them were charged as scabs by the Guild and fined for consorting with management, although the striking Miss Quinn went unpunished for sleeping with management.
But if the Newspaper Guild made life miserable for those of us managers trying to make a quantum leap up in editorial quality, the craft unions (with some outstanding exceptions) at that time—printers, pressmen, and mailers especially—made life impossible. Slowdowns of various kinds in all production areas made for late press starts. Sabotaged press runs made for late off times. And late press starts and late press off times screwed up circulation of the paper. Engravings were “lost,” delaying page production. Typesetting could become a joke, and an embarrassment. The dreaded F-word showed up from time to time in classified advertisements.
In the sixties and seventies, control of the production of the newspapers was in the hands of the craft unions, not management. While the Post was gaining on the Star in circulation and advertising, management had been determined to avoid a strike. And therein lay the problem: as long as the unions could close the paper down, and the paper could not print without the unions, the paper was in a no-win position.
In early 1975, ahead of the Star for good in circulation and advertising, the paper was determined to regain control. And step number one, under the Post’s new president, John Prescott, who had succeeded Paul Ignatius, was to develop the capacity to print the paper without union labor. That meant, first, sending news executives to Oklahoma (where newspaper owners had created a “scab school”) to learn to run the giant presses, and next to establish its own training facility in Virginia to teach non-union employees the wonders of cold-type production. In the fall of 1975, the Post was ready: it could produce the paper without union help, under the day-to-day direction of the new young assistant general manager, Don Graham.
The showdown came in the early morning of October 1. Here’s what happened as told five months later in Bob Kaiser’s wonderful recap, “The Strike at The Washington Post,” six full pages in the Outlook Section on February 29, 1976.
Sometime after 4 o’clock in the morning of October I, a small group of pressmen began to vandalize the press room. According to eye-witnesses, several men had lists in their hands and walked around telling others what to do.
What they did, according to the Post, was damage which eventually cost $270,000 to repair: they sliced the cushions on the press cylinders, ripped out electrical wiring, removed key pieces on the folders on almost every press, jammed the cylinders, cut air hoses and sabotaged other parts.
The most serious damage was caused by a fire, apparently started with gasoline on one unit of a new press. Whoever started the fire first partially disabled the automatic fire extinguishers on that press and an adjacent one. The fire melted the lead plates that were left on the cylinders, and spread to the rolls of newsprint in the reel room below. . . .
The damage was systematic. The Post has nine presses, each with eight units. All 72 units were damaged, all within 15-20 minutes.
Minutes before the destructive rampage, the night foreman of the press room, James Hover, had been jumped by several press operators, pinned to the floor for 15 minutes with a screw-driver at his throat, and then severely beaten. It took 12 stitches to close a cut to the bone just above his eye.
“When I got to 15th Street,” Katharine Graham remembered, “I saw fire engines, police cars, red lights flashing. I thought to myself, if I drive in the parking lot they’ll wreck the car. I asked a policeman what to do. He said park it here. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
The sights and sounds were appalling, with angry pressmen now shouting and jeering on a picket line. We all were called and raced back to work, to survey the damage and begin to figure out the next steps. The first thing I did was to tour the press room, and get photographers down there to record all the destruction. The press room looked like the engine room in a burned-out ship’s hulk.
The next five months were the longest five months of all our lives, as everyone in top management worked two jobs, their own and a striker’s. All the craft unions honored the pressmen’s picket line and refused to come to work. Crossing a picket line when your friends are picketing is tough. Crossing this picket line was a pleasure. Sally, by my side this time as we went to work, drew special, vulgar, and noisy attention, and I managed to control myself only by putting my right hand in my pants pocket—except for a conspicuous middle finger wiggling uncontrollably.
The leadership of the Newspaper Guild tried to persuade its members to honor the picket line, but the newsroom voted overwhelmingly to work, and most reporters and editors showed up for the duration. I soon settled into a routine, taking classified ads in the morning, alongside Kay Graham and other editors. I played editor or reporter (sometimes editor and reporter) during the day, and worked two nights a week in the mailroom.
The technical obstacles that had to be overcome before we could print a newspaper were enormous. We now had advertising salesmen and executives who could run presses, but they couldn’t run badly damaged presses. None of us knew whether “winning” was a realistic goal, or even what “winning” might be. Jim Cooper, the tough and able production director, and my pal, bet me that Kay would “cave in” to the unions, because the Post always had caved in in a crunch. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I took the bet for morale purposes. My own morale.
But we began to realize very gradually that we had a lot going for us in this strike.
Except for the die-hard labor skates, reporters and editors were appalled by the pressmen’s rampage, and wanted to work. That meant if we could physically produce any paper, it would eventually be a real newspaper, not just a strike paper.
Washington isn’t, and never was, a labor town, like Boston or New York or Chicago. The people, and especially business owners, supported the Post. When striking pressmen poured crankcase oil over piles of clothing in the department stores, they succeeded only in doubling the businesspeople’s determination to help the Post win by advertising in the paper.
Even the cops supported the Post. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget Police Chief Maurice “Cully” Cullinane, dressed in a sports jacket and gray flannel slacks, wading into a particularly ugly demonstration outside the Post Building. One striking stereotyper was carrying a vulgar, crudely lettered sign that read: “Phil Shot the Wrong Graham.” I watched from a window as Cully walked innocently up to another striker, put his left elbow in the man’s stomach, and then slammed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. The picketer dropped to the sidewalk in agony. And we all cheered.
The owners of other newspapers, in the Middle Atlantic states and everywhere else, ardently supported Katharine Graham, many of them almost gloating in their I-told-you-sos to their liberal colleague, but all of them offering any help we needed. Within fortyeight hours, six newspapers—from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to Charlottesville, Virginia—had offered to print the Post, and we had hired helicopters to fly photographs of each page of the paper—and eventually the lead plates themselves—to the six printing plants. The roof of the 15th Street building began to look like a MASH unit in Vietnam, with choppers coming in and out all day and half the night. Angry picketers on the sidewalks below shook their fists and shouted in vain.
And finally, the Post’s distribution was (and is) handled by independent contractors, not employees, and these contractors wanted no part of unions. That meant if we could get papers out of the press room, they would be widely distributed.
We missed one day entirely, but printed a twenty-four-page paper with no ads on the next day. The paper slowly increased in size, as our in-house skills improved. There was a sense of excitement, and it grew as we started to feel the momentum shift, as we added sections, and added outside printing plants.
On October 7, with the help of non-union machinists who got one press running, we ran off 100,000 copies of a 40-page paper, in two sections. The esprit de corps within the building was sky high. A sign on one press, run by men and women from the Advertising Department, read: “J. PRESS, printing its way into the hearts of thousands.” Meals were catered for the night crews, and served by waiters in tuxedos. Everyone was exhausted, but also exhilarated. One night, there was even music after the last edition was printed, and Advertising’s Lou Limber, with a flower in his mouth, danced the Greek dances he loved so much.
Many staff members slept at the office on cots scattered throughout the building. Some marriages ran aground. At least two new marriages were launched.
George Meany, the venerable head of the AFL-CIO, asked to meet with Katharine Graham in January 1976. They were old friends, and Meany did not hold the pressmen’s union in particularly high regard, according to labor experts. But Meany got nowhere with the lady publisher, whose spine had stiffened every day of the strike. At one point, Meany asked Katharine what she would have done if the pressmen had ever unconditionally offered to return to work. According to Kaiser, she replied, “Slit my throat.”
At one point the Miami Herald was printing some sections of the Sunday paper, and trucking them hundreds of miles to set up remote mailrooms. In early December, the Post advertised for replacements for the striking pressmen. Hundreds responded. The line of applicants stretched almost around the block right through the picket line.
In late December, the paper handlers, a union of predominantly black men who load the huge rolls of newsprint into the presses, and maintain the press room, announced that they were going to settle with the Post. The lily-white pressmen’s union had never done anything for them.
On February 15, 1976, the mailers’ union voted to settle with the Post, and the strike was effectively over. The February 18 issue of the paper was printed in the traditional hot-type manner, and the strike was over in fact—after 139 exhausting days. Eventually, a dozen pressmen were convicted of crimes of violence, or pleaded guilty.
The impact of this strike on The Washington Post has been just enormous. It leveled the playing field, so that excellence in production became an achievable goal, then a goal that was achieved. The “victory” of management gave The Washington Post Company new respect on Wall Street, which I have reluctantly concluded after these many years is a plus for the news side of the newspaper as well as for its shareholders.
This Wall Street respect may elevate some of the mountebanks in the newspaper business, like the self-aggrandizing Al Neuharth of Gannett, to undeserved heights, but it allows the best of the breed, like the Grahams in Washington, the Sulzbergers in New York, the Taylors in Boston, the Chandlers in Los Angeles, and others, to make good newspapers as well as good money.
Sally and I were married on October 20, 1978, in the chambers of my old friend David Bazelon, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, in front of my three children and my brother. Katharine Graham, Ed Williams, and Art Buchwald were our witnesses. We had invited fifty or sixty people to a cocktail party, and they arrived to find themselves guests at a wedding reception. General Quinn, who had been waiting anxiously for a Republican, an Army officer, and anything but a journalist for a son-in-law, was fatalistic about his bad luck. Bette Quinn seemed almost as pleased with me as a son-in-law, as I have always been with her as a mother-in-law.
For whatever reason, the twenty-year disparity in our ages was simply not an issue. It provided me with a slew of new friends, all younger, and after a few months of discomfort, it didn’t cost me any of my older friends. “That’s your problem,” Buchwald had said, as he announced he had asked both Tony and Sally to his annual Easter egg hunt in 1974.
Sally was an engine of change, as she reached out for new friends, new experiences, new places. She changed me by showing me there was a life outside the confines of The Washington Post. There were gatherings of people—to call them parties would be true but misleading—who were bright and irreverent, who took their jobs but not themselves seriously. There were a bunch of young Brits, led by Willie Shawcross, who hung around Larry Stern, and leavened the incestuous diet of politics, national and parochial, inside The Washington Post. We were all vaguely anti-establishment, even as our success would seem to drive us into the arms of the establishment.
One of the new friends Sally quickly added to my life was Norman Lear. She had met Norman at a party in L.A., while she was on a promotional tour for her CBS book We’re Going to Make You a Star. She called me up late that night, and announced, “Boy, did I meet someone you’re going to love.” And boy, was she right. I don’t think I ever met anyone I liked so much, and so fast. The man is warm and smart and funny and generous, and loyal and kind. And the more you see him or talk to him, the more you want to see him and talk to him. And hug him. My friend Norman is an All-Pro hugger. A talk on the telephone with Norman Lear should be bottled and consumed regularly, and every shrink in the world would go out of business.
I had known—and admired—Dick Cohen and Walter Pincus for years, but Sally turned them into closest friends. I think Dick Cohen writes the best column in the country—the most thoughtful, most interesting, boldest, funniest—if Bill Safire doesn’t. Walter’s analytical powers as an investigative reporter are the answer to an editor’s prayers. I’ve never known a reporter harder to shake than Pincus when he has the bit in his teeth.
Larry Stern played a key role in our lives, Sally’s and my first, shared friend. We drove him to and from work every day. We had at least drinks together almost every night, and when Nora Pouillon and her pals, the Damato brothers, needed a little cash for sheetrock to finish the walls of their new restaurant around the corner, Larry persuaded us to invest $5,000 in Nora’s Restaurant. And we started eating there more often than not. When working days begin at eight-thirty and end at eight-thirty, you find no joy in cooking.
When we weren’t eating at Nora’s Restaurant, we did some very modest entertaining in our dining room-kitchen near Dupont Circle. One night, we were sitting around the kitchen table with Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, who had suggested we have supper together—lobsters—at our house. They had married soon after Watergate propelled Carl onto the “scene,” but I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary about the evening until Nora—more than a little pregnant with their second child—asked, maybe a little ominously, if we had any red wine. We had been drinking white with the lobsters, but I saw no flashing lights, and opened a nice new bottle of red. Nora looked at it for a few seconds, then rose and moved to a position behind Carl’s chair, and slowly poured the whole goddamn bottle gurgle-gurgle-gurgle over him—head to face to shirt to toe.
I mumbled something inane about “We all go through troubled times,” and the party was over. Twenty minutes later, the telephone rang, and it was Nora, asking Sally if she wanted to know what that was all about. As a matter of fact, she did, and Nora returned to report that it was about an affair Carl was having with Margaret Jay, the wife of the British ambassador, unbeknownst to any of us, and to Nora until a very short time before.
Nora included this scene, substituting a pie-in-the-face for the wine-pouring, in Heartburn, the best-selling book (and movie) she wrote about her marriage to Carl.
Without the strike and the turmoil that went with it, I would have been starting a new life, really. A life that almost assuredly would never include events as important historically as the Kennedy presidency, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate had been. Events in which I would almost assuredly never play as critical, or as public, a role. With the strike settled, that new life began, a new act in some long drama whose resolution was unknown. But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That’s part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good, aggressive newspaper will become part of that something. Maybe not another “third-rate burglary,” but something that will monopolize all the energy and wisdom at my disposal.
Like the bunch of Croatians who hijacked a plane en route from Chicago to New York in September 1976, and threatened to kill all the passengers, unless the editors of five major newspapers, including me, printed a couple of thousand words of their propaganda. On page one.
The idea of anyone—President of the United States, FBI director, storeowner, wife, or irate reader—telling me that I had to run something in the paper that I didn’t want to run, much less that I had to run it on page one, was inconceivable to me on its face.
Yet I followed their instructions meek as a lamb. Once. I’m not sure I’d do it twice.
The TWA 727 was hijacked by a group of Croatian nationalists, who took the plane to Montreal, Newfoundland, Iceland, and finally landed in Paris with some sixty hostages, having freed close to thirty of the original ninety-four hostages on the way. The hijackers radioed police that their demands and complete instructions would be found in a Grand Central Station hiding place. When the cops found the hiding place, they also found a concealed bomb, which exploded and killed one of them.
The instructions were specific—and unprecedented: the five newspapers (The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the International Herald Tribune in Paris) would have to print two political screeds demanding Croatian independence from Yugoslavia . . . or else! Or else another bomb would go off somewhere, or would the remaining hostages be killed? we wondered.
The hijacking took place on a Friday morning. The first bomb exploded that afternoon, and the first hint of demands hit the city room right on first edition deadline. The first two decisions were easy: Let the first edition presses roll on time, and call up Katharine Graham, and Don, who was then the paper’s executive vice president and general manager. The Grahams were especially keen on being in on the takeoff of a story, if there was a real chance there might be a crash landing. I didn’t know how tough I was going to dare to be or wanted to be, but a crash landing looked like a real possibility.
Sometime after 10:00 P.M., the AP wire carried the demands, including the text of the two documents, plus demands that at least one third of each text had to appear on page one, and all “jumps” had to be in the first section of the newspaper. If we acceded to the first demand, two thirds of the front page would be devoted to the Croatians, and that seemed unacceptable.
I checked in with Abe Rosenthal and Bill Thomas, my opposite numbers in New York and Los Angeles, and found them sore as hell, but ready, however reluctantly, to publish the documents. The truth is that none of us had any stomach for reading a headline in the next day’s paper that went something like this: “HIJACKERS KILL 62 AMERICANS AFTER U.S. EDITORS REFUSE TO PUBLISH DOCUMENTS.” I hit on three ideas which I figured, however unrealistically, might make the decision more palatable.
First, I felt we needed an appeal from some authority that it would be in the public interest to accede to the hijackers’ demands—from government authorities that we often felt free to ignore. The FBI was glad to oblige.
Second, since nothing had been said about how many copies of the Post had to contain the story, we didn’t have to include the story until the final minutes of the final edition.
And third, since nothing had been said about what size type had to be used, we would print it in agate type, the size used for box scores and classified ads, and so minimize both the story’s impact and our own chagrin.
With this bold-as-a-lion rationalization, we printed the story. And slunk home.
The hostages were released in Paris. The crisis was over as quickly as it had started. No one ever threatened to kill anyone unless we ran some screed ever again.
Right after the hijackers crawled back into the woodwork, I got my first job offer.
I don’t know how common this is, but I can honestly say that I never in twenty-seven years for one second contemplated leaving The Washington Post. Not that I had been given many opportunities. Blair Clark had me screen-tested for Howard K. Smith’s job as CBS Bureau Chief, but all by itself the makeup process quelled that job offer. And I slunk back to Newsweek.
Once on the telephone, a Chicago head hunter described his client only as a Fortune 500 communications company looking to widen its portfolio and improve its image. Just the words scared me, and I told the man I was married to my job and not interested in divorce. He persisted. I persisted. Finally, I was intrigued enough that I told him if he understood my zero interest in changing jobs, and he wanted to talk to me face to face, he could buy me lunch.
At lunch, he played me like a trout for ten minutes, before revealing that his client was Playboy, and that they were looking for a president CEO, not an editor, and I’m afraid I laughed. Probably to cover up a superfast fantasy of me and Hef swimming in the Playboy grotto with a couple of centerfolds. Lunch was effectively over.
For some reason, Roone Arledge thought I had “can’t miss” written all over me as a TV type. In its early days, I had appeared on David Brinkley’s “This Week,” until I figured out that they wanted me on the show primarily as a liberal foil for George Will, a role for which I had neither interest nor talent. Like all non-CBS TV executives, Roone was looking for a weekly magazine show to do battle with the legendarily successful “60 Minutes.” He thought he had the show in “20/20,” and he sent former Esquire editor Harold Hayes to talk to me about being the host—the name of Barbara Walters was never mentioned, never mind the name of Hugh Downs. After Sally’s debacle I was never tempted by television.
This time the salary was well into six figures, and for a minute I wondered how they might be right when they said I could do the job in effect on my days off. Work five days at the Post, rush up to New York and write for one day, perform the next day, and rush back to real job that night. No fantasies this time. Just thoughts of nervous breakdowns.
Editors choose.
That’s what they do for a living. People first, then subjects, then words. And choosing whether to print anything is often the toughest decision of them all.
In matters of national security, the question quickly boils down to this: Is the security of the nation really at stake, just because someone in authority says it is? The Pentagon Papers, for instance. I learned the answer the hard way: Almost never.
In matters of privacy, the question is this: Is there some sacred public right to know that overcomes an equally sacred right to privacy? There is no easy answer to that one.
Take national security first, two cases where the claim of national security was made. One claim was made by President Jimmy Carter himself, and we printed the story. Another claim was actually made by us, reporters and editors of the Post, and we never printed the story.
One morning in November 1976, Bob Woodward reported to me that although he had only one source, it looked as if a Middle East head of state was on the CIA payroll. In my book, that’s close to a perfect way to start a day . . . with the promise of an important, exclusive, and vital story, and the prospect of some tough work before it was ready to print—or not to print. At this point, Woodward didn’t know which head of which state was on the CIA payroll for how much, although there seemed no lack of candidates. I asked him for a full court press, and it took him two weeks to come up with the name: King Hussein of Jordan; the dollar amount: about a $1 million a year for twenty years; and some further details. The money was “walking-around” money, not connected either to economic or military aid, which Jordan received regularly. The operation was called “NO/BEEF” inside the CIA. The money had been used variously . . . including to procure women, when Hussein was little more than a teenager, and to pay for bodyguards for his children when they were old enough to go to boarding school in the United States.
What we needed now was a second source. Woodward called Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, told him everything he knew, and asked for White House comment. Less than a month in office as the spokesman for the President of the United States, Powell replied, “No shit.” Next day, someone from the White House (Woodward remembers it to have been Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Council director, and I remember it as Jody Powell) called to ask me whether “it would help you make up your mind [to print or not to print the story], if you could talk to the President?”
We were there the next morning for an interview I’ll never forget. To be in the Oval Office of the White House with the President of the United States will always blow my mind. Carter had been president for less than a month, but looked totally comfortable, poised, friendly and hospitable. He was dressed in a pinstriped gray suit, and smiling. First, the president said, the story was true. (There was our second source.) Next, he said he had been briefed several times by the outgoing Secretary of State (Henry Kissinger), and the outgoing director of the CIA (George Bush), but neither had mentioned that we had a king on our payroll. Third, he had ordered the payments stopped. And fourth, he said he couldn’t make the case that others of his staff were making that the national security was involved.
We had our story.
But, the president added gently, Jordan was vital to the Middle East settlement he had made a priority. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance was actually in the Middle East, scheduled to see Hussein within the next forty-eight hours. The president said he would prefer the story not be published, but added, “I can’t tell you how to run your business.” If we were going to publish the story, he would like twenty-four hours’ notice. On the spot, I promised that we would not run the story that night, and would give him at least a day’s notice, if we decided to run it. The president talked about the importance of trust. He said he wanted Woodward and me to believe in him. He said he hoped that I would come to see him on “anything.” And then he ended the interview, saying, “This is your country and mine.”
Back in the office, we agonized. On the one hand, the president had been so straight, so decent, that it seemed almost impolite to print anything he did not want printed. On the other hand, newspapering isn’t about being polite or grateful. It’s about deciding where the public interest lies. In this case, could we involve ourselves effectively in a Middle East settlement without our negotiators—never mind the public—knowing we “owned” a key participant in that settlement?
We had developed a policy at the Post to help decision making on matters of national security. We automatically delayed publication for twenty-four hours as soon as any responsible official invoked national security. Simultaneously, we reached a tentative decision to publish (so that we could arrange for the extra space normally required on a big story), and we appointed a group of reporters expert in the field at issue to talk us out of publishing the story.
We finally came down on the side of publishing. Because the story was true . . . we did have a king on our payroll, unknown to the public, and until very recently, unknown to the president and to the Secretary of State. Because the former CIA director and the former Secretary of State had failed to tell the new president despite hours of briefings. Because the current president would not say that national security was involved. And because effective oversight of the CIA lay somewhere between ludicrous and nonexistent. No one really knew what the spooks were up to.
The day after the story ran, I got this note from President Carter, handwritten on embossed White House stationery:
To Ben Bradlee,
I think your publication of the CIA story as the Secretary of State was on his Middle East mission and about to arrive in Jordan was irresponsible.
This is offered by way of editorial comment.
Jimmy
I could understand why the president was upset. So was I. I felt we had gone the last mile to be responsible.
When Powell told Carter that I was upset by his letter, the president replied, “Well, fuck him.”
And I could understand that, too.
There were no repercussions to our publication of this story, diplomatic or journalistic. Vance never mentioned it to me. President Carter never mentioned it again.
Newspaper people spend much of their life in some kind of defensive crouch. This is ultimately deforming unless diagnosed and treated.
A clear exclusive plastered all over page one of the New York Times could put an otherwise outstanding Washington Post reporter into a defensive crouch automatically. “We had that,” he would respond instinctively, within seconds. And when challenged, he would disappear into the library for an hour or so, before returning quasi-triumphantly waving a clip. Sometimes, if the reporter was lucky, there would be some vague reference in paragraph 30 to a minor bit of evidence in the exclusive.
Once in frustration at hearing “We had that” for the umpteenth time, I offered to eat any clip offered in proof, if a jury of the reporter’s peers agreed that we in fact had run the same story. I never had to pay off, but the words haunt city rooms across the land.
At my request, a young Post artist, Steve Mendelson, came up with a marvelous drawing of a journalist deep in a Defensive Crouch, which we awarded from time to time to grievous offenders.
In the olden days, press criticism was a fairly esoteric subject. President Roosevelt once gave New York Daily News columnist John O’Donnell a mock Nazi medal, during World War II, to express his criticism of O’Donnell’s stories about FDR’s war preparations. Fifty years ago the great New Yorker critic A. J. Liebling periodically skewered the press in his wonderful “Annals of the Press” articles, although his target was generally hype rather than bias. Ike had decried “sensation-seeking columnists” at the 1964 convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace. In a fit of pique, Jack Kennedy canceled the White House orders for twenty-four copies of the New York Herald Tribune. Agnew’s feelings about the press were notorious. But today everyone is a press critic. All politicians, virtually all public figures, most business leaders, and most readers.
Newspapers even have their own staff press critics, including The Washington Post with its own Ombudsman since 1969. They are the independent monitors of fairness, accuracy, and relevance. And there are now scores of journalism reviews devoted exclusively to scanning the press (and TV) for sins of commission or omission.
And then there are the ideological critics—people who disagree with how a newspaper covers a story as much as they disagree with what stories we cover. The chief ideological critic is an organization called AIM, for Accuracy in Media, a particular pain in the ass to the Post, the Times, the networks . . . what are generally regarded to be best of American journalism. AIM was started by a Federal Reserve Board economist named Reed Irvine, in what he claimed was his spare time, until his mom-and-pop press criticism caught the eye of some really moneyed right-wing ideologues like Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh.
With money in his kick, Irvine started burying reporters, editors, and owners under long screeds about their failure to cover obscure press conferences starring one of Irvine’s protégés. About why we used the word “execution” instead of the word “massacre” to describe some horror event. Or asking why we played a story on page A8 instead of on the front page. Or why we failed to print any of his hundreds of letters to the editor. He and his cohorts started monopolizing stockholders’ meetings, and then complaining when we didn’t cover his contorted performances. And he often asked his readers to write letters to the Post which he dictated in his newsletter.
Finally, in the spring of 1978, I hit the wall, and to my everlasting regret, I put Irvine on the map for good—and helped him raise hundreds of thousands of dollars he would never have otherwise raised—by writing him a letter I never should have mailed. After some particularly offensive and tendentious criticism of the Post by Irvine, I wrote him a short letter, which included this sentence:
You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante, and I for one am sick of wasting my time communicating with you.
God knows where I found “retromingent,” but it was the perfect word for the occasion, describing that subspecies of ants (and other animals) which urinate backwards.
His supporters were outraged—Santa Barbara dentists, retired admirals, small business men lounging in the Phoenix sun—but Irvine loved the letter, and he used it for years in his annual appeals for funds from the faithful. I got a couple of hundred form postcards from AIM supporters taking me to task, but by far the most satisfying letter came from Larry Laystall in Wye, Maryland. He was having crabs and beer when he chanced to read William Buckley’s column about my use of “retromingent” in the Washington Star, which was serving as his tablecloth.
“One of the fellows at our table was ‘Big Hans,’” he wrote.
After a couple of pitchers of beer, we all went out to the parking lot to find out whether “Big Hans” was retromingent. Hans . . . bet quite a bit of money on himself, borrowed a waitress’ mirror, got himself in a funny position, and retromingented.
We think that big words might be lost on Mr. Irvine anyway, since we’re told he couldn’t pour the end product out of a boot no matter what you called it.
Senseless critics of the press reveal their bias quickly. “Why do you Commie bastards always give away our national secrets?” for instance. That kind of stuff can be safely ignored, although every so often I would get one outrageous enough to be worth answering.
Like the charming letter in 1985 to Katharine Graham from one T. J. Malone, of 444 West Wood Street, Decatur, Illinois, as follows: “Say, Cath, heard you and Ben B. were recently seen at a wild coke party, and someone noticed you both had a hammer and sickle tattooed on your butts.”
I answered him as follows: “I have a hissing snake tattooed on my butt. * And I don’t have a clue what Mrs. Graham has tattooed on hers.” Since my frat mate at college, Bill Barnes, had risen to eminence in Decatur, I added: “The president of the bank in Decatur, Illinois, is an old classmate and friend of mine. I think I’ll ask him to foreclose on your mortgage.”
Childish, no doubt, until you realize that the polls so often cited to show public trust in the press declining include the views of T. J. Malone, and thousands of other nut cases.
There is a need for serious criticism of the press; when it is thoughtful and measured, it is vitally important to society, particularly to the press and to readers of the press. It was not enough for President Ronald Reagan to start off press conference answers with that polished grin as he told reporters, “You guys never get it right.” Or defense lawyers, or political candidates—many of them people who have mastered the ability to use and abuse the press at the same time. Or at least it is not enough for me to take that kind of grandstanding criticism seriously.
There is so much to criticize about the press, but not before recognizing a ringing truth: the best of the American press is an extraordinary daily example of industry, honesty, conscience, and courage, driven by a desire to inform and interest readers.
We journalists have thin skins because we are so often criticized. Often enough, we have it coming, because we make mistakes. Lots of them, and our mistakes hang out there for the world to see for at least twenty-four hours and frequently longer. And I’m not talking about the small, irritating mistakes, essentially involving wrong names, addresses, dates, and times. Those can be first minimized, then corrected (and routinely are corrected in good newspapers).
The best newspapers now are comfortable in the confessional, generally collecting the day’s errata on page one or three. If a mistake is so important that it must run on page one, it is never called a “correction” or any other euphemism suggesting wrongdoing. It is simply presented as a story, and the reader must be smart enough to know that the record is being awkwardly set straight.
Corrections are more fun to read than make. On the wall in front of my computer I have Scotch-taped the following front-page “story” from the Sunday Times of London, July 13, 1986, as an example of one editor’s nightmare:
Today’s Magazine profile [of a company called Control Risks] . . . contains statements which are untrue. Contrary to what is stated, at no time has CR paid, or been an agent for paying £2 million to the IRA, nor any sum to any terrorist organization; nor was CR involved in, or aware of, the alleged attempt to smuggle £300,000 into Ireland.
CR is not “persona non grata” with the Home Office and the police. The statement that CR’s activities often bring it into direct conflict with local police is also untrue. We accept that CR always cooperates with the police and enjoys their confidence around the world.
We are glad to make it clear that any action contemplated by the Home Secretary concerning kidnapping and ransom insurance is unrelated to CR’s activities. . . .
We unreservedly apologise to CR for the above errors, and have agreed to pay a substantial sum in damages to charities of its choice.
That is a front three-and-a-half grovel, with full twist . . . to be avoided at all costs by editors who believe in job security.
Every once in a while, the watchful reader will run into the very rare correction of a correction, and once in a lifetime you run into something like this: apparently the very rare correction of a correction of a correction . . . from the New York Times in April 1994.
A caption in the Evening Hours pages last Sunday, about an opening at the American Craft Museum, confused the identities of several people because of a picture substitution during a production process.
The picture showed from the left, Shimoda; Dubaka Leigh; and Janet Kardon, the museum’s director. (Kate Carmel and Marcella Welch were not pictured.)
Corrections in the main news section last Sunday and again on Tuesday repeated the confusion of Ms. Kardon with Ms. Carmel. In addition, the correction last Sunday referred incorrectly to Dubaka Leigh. He is a man.
Our most serious mistakes occur when we relay misinformation given us by others—presidents, spin doctors, or ignoramuses. And here lies the heart of our dilemma: we write only the rough draft of history, in the vivid words of Phil Graham. We claim to print the truth. We have led our readers to expect the truth. We have trouble with Albert Camus’s realization that “there is no truth; only truths.” We don’t cope with the reality that the truth often escapes us.
Because our sources lie. Because our sources are themselves ill-informed, misinformed, or incompletely informed. Because deadlines force us to stop reporting, and start writing, before the truth has emerged out of the maelstrom of conflicting eyewitness accounts, clashing spin doctors, and the angers of partisan politics.
We are unable to admit any of this publicly, as I once found out, for as soon as we admit that we don’t always print the truth, someone will immediately pounce on the admission and say, “See. I told you so. The press lies. Even Ben Bradlee says newspapers don’t tell the truth.” As former President Nixon did in his book, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. Nixon wrote about “rumor journalism, some true, some false, some a mixture of truth and fiction, all prejudicial,” at a time when the Watergate story was gathering its fatal steam. Nixon went on:
“That it was a dangerous form of journalism should have been understood by the Post, whose editor, Ben Bradlee, has since observed: ‘We don’t print the truth. We print what we know, what people tell us. So we print lies.’ “
The fact is that the truth does emerge, and its emergence is a normal, and vital, process of democracy. If readers are generally too impatient to wait for the truth to emerge, that is a problem. It is our problem in the press. It is far easier and more comfortable for them to accept as truth whatever fact fits their own particular bias, and dismiss whatever facts misfit their biases. It is impossible to underestimate the importance of reader bias in any serious study of press criticism.
What was the truth of the Battle of Tonkin Gulf? At the time—August 4, 1964—the Johnson administration said the truth was that North Vietnamese PT boats attacked two American destroyers, and LBJ used the attack to force passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It passed the House with no opposition and passed the Senate with only two votes against, and then was used to justify the American pursuit of the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of words were written about that battle and that resolution, but were they the truth?
Twenty years later—twenty years!—Admiral Jim Stockdale revealed in his book Love and War that to the best of his knowledge there never was a Battle of Tonkin Gulf. His truth was that there were no North Vietnamese PT boats, and therefore no battle. He was in a position to know. On the night in question he was in a Sabre Jet fighter flying cover over the two American destroyers at the time of the “battle.” He wrote that he was as sure as a man can be, after scouring the sea for more than two hours, that the destroyers were firing at phantom radar blips, not enemy PT boats. (Stockdale was shot down right after the incident, was a prisoner of war for more than seven years, and returned briefly to the limelight in 1992 as presidential candidate Ross Perot’s running mate.)
What was the truth in the Pentagon Papers case, where the government tried to prevent newspapers from publishing a story for the first time in the history of the republic? In June 1971, the U.S. Solicitor General, Erwin N. Griswold, argued before the Supreme Court of the United States that publication of the Pentagon Papers would seriously threaten the national security. Almost twenty years later, Griswold described the government’s case against the Times and the Post as a “mirage.”
Of course the press makes other mistakes, all easier to correct:
• We do such a poor job of sourcing our information, when the source is critical to any intelligent reader, that it amounts to a mistake. “According to sources”—those three words by themselves just aren’t good enough. They should be banned. Readers think we aren’t coming clean here, and they are more often right than wrong.
• We can improve our sourcing 100 percent with very little effort. What kind of sources? Friends or foes? Men or women? Army or Navy? Republicans or Democrats? Young or old? Lawyers or clients? Gays or straights? Doctors or patients? In government or out? Incumbents or aspirants?
There are also, alas, the whoppers: mistakes in stories that live far longer than the stories themselves.
Such a whopper was the darkest chapter of my newspaper life, an error of judgment that put the story’s byline on a special shelf of horrors.