July
25, 2001
She Needed
Fewer Friends
The High Life
of Katharine Graham
Joe Pulitzer famously said, "A
newspaper has no friends." Looking at the massed ranks of
America's elites attending Katharine Graham's funeral in Washington
last Monday, it's maybe churlish to recall that phrase, but it's
true. At least in political terms Mrs Graham had way too many
friends. Her newspaper had its hour when she had real enemies,
when Nixon's attorney general was screaming his famous threat
and when Nixon was threatening to pull her company's Florida
tv licenses.
The twin decisions, concerning
the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, that made Mrs Graham's name
as a courageous publisher, came at precisely the moment when,
in biographical terms, she was best equipped to handle pressure.
She'd had eight years to overcome the initial timidities that
bore down on her after Phil Graham's suicide left her with a
newspaper she resolved to run herself. But the amiable but essentially
conservative bipartisanship that had the notables of each incoming
administrations palavering happily in her dining room hadn't
yet numbed the spinal nerve of the Post as any sort of spirited
journalistic enterprise.
Mrs Graham sustained her fatal
fall during an annual confab of the nation's biggest media and
e-billionaires, organized by the investment banker Herb Allen
and held in Sun Valley, Idaho. In truth it was a richly symbolic
setting for Mrs Graham's exit. Sun Valley was developed as a
resort by the Harrimans, starting with that ruthless nineteenthc
c ntury railroad king, E.H. Harriman. That quintessential insider,
Averell Harriman, was often to be seen at Mrs Graham's house
in Georgetown, and it was Averell who once furnished a reminder
of the journalistic facts of life so trenchant that every reporter
and editor should have it tacked to their walls.
Writing in 1943 to his friend
James Lovett at the War Department, Harriman rasped his fury
that Newsweek had dared question the efficiency of daylight bombing
of Germany, a tactic devised by Lovett: "Tell Roland [Averell's
brother, then a director of Newsweek, owned by Vincent Astor,
who later sold it to Phil Graham] that I am in dead earnest and
will brook no compromise. I have not supported Newsweek for ten
years through its grave difficulties to allow our hired men to
use the magazine to express their narrow, uninformed or insidious
ideas Roland has my full authority to use any strong-arm measures
he considers necessary the other directors can be asked to resign
if they do not go along."
Did Mrs Graham privately strong-arm
her staff in this fashion? We doubt it. But editors and reporters
are not slow to pick up clues as to the disposition of the person
who pays the wages, and Mrs Graham sent out plenty of those.
In late 1974, after Nixon had
been tumbled, Mrs Graham addressed the Magazine Publishers' Association
and issued a warning: "The press these days should be rather
careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies
about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better
not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war
and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."
She called for a return to basics. Journalists should "stop
trying to be sleuths." In other words: The party's over,
boys and girls! It's not our business to rock the boat.
She repeated the message in
1988 in a speech to CIA recruits titled "Secrecy and the
Press": "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There
are some things the general public does not need to know, and
shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government
can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press
can decide whether to print what it knows."
Mrs Graham had plenty of reasons,
material and spiritual, to find excessive boat-rocking distasteful.
The family fortune, and the capital that bought and nourished
the Post, was founded in part on Allied Chemical, the company
run by her father Eugene Meyer. Perhaps because rabble-rousers
had derisively taunted her as "Kepone Kate" after a
bad Allied Chemical spill in the James River, we remember a hard
edge in her voice when she deplored "those fucking environmentalists."
Yes, privately her language was agreeably salty.
By the early 1980s the leftish
liberal Kay Graham of the late 1930s who would amiably associate
as a tyro reporter with the red longshoreman leader, Harry Bridges,
on the Oakland docks was very long gone. For one thing, there
had been the ferocious pressmen's strike in 1975, and the ultimately
successful lockout. Rhetorically at least Mrs Graham would not
later make the gaffe of equating the sabotage of her plant by
the Pressmen's Union with the overall disposition of the AFL-CIO,
but she never forgave labor and that strike helped set Mrs Graham
and her newspaper on its sedately conservative course.
In the early 1980s she associated
increasingly with Warren Buffett, the Nebraska investor who bought
13 per cent of the Post's B stock and who was then riding high
as America's most venerated stock player, and imperishably hailed
in the mid-1980s by an ad man (to the New York Times) thus: "Long
ago Warren identified communications companies as the bridge
between the manufacturer and the consumer." Graham became
a big-picture mogul, pickling herself in the sonorous platitudes
of the Brandt Commission, on which she served. Probably the most
tedious (and useless) interview ever published by the Post, or
any newspaper for that matter, was Mrs Graham's interview in
Moscow about the minutiae of arm-control with General Secretary
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Another press mogul, Lord Northcliffe,
founder of Britain's popular press, once famously advised his
reporters, "Never lose your sense of the superficial",
by which he meant, "Be sprightly, make our readers sit up."
What would Northcliffe have said about the Post's nadir, symbolic
of what Mrs Graham had allowed, maybe even had urged to happen:
the 7-part, multi-thousand word series published in January,
1992. The series launching this election year was by two of the
Post's most prominent reporters, David Broder and Bob Woodward,
who "for six months followed the Vice President everywhere"and
"spent an unprecedented amount of time interviewing Mr Quayle",
discovering after these labors that the derided veeplet was a
much undertestimated statesman of wise and discriminating stature.
In the early 1990s we used
to get copies of letters sent to the Post's editors and ombudsman
by Julian Holmes, a Maryland resident with a career in the Navy
Weapons Lab, who read the Post diligently every day, firing off
often acute and pithy criticisms. In all, Holmes told us the
other day from his Maine home, he sent some 130 such letters
to the Post and achieved a perfect record of zero published.
Deploring the Quayle series
in a letter sent ombudsman Richard Harwood on January 22, 1992,
Holmes pointed out that nowhere in the "in-depth" exam
of Quayle could be found the words crime, public land, population,
health care, oil, capital punishment, United Nations, Nicaragua,
unemployment, homeless or AIDS. "Perhaps," Holmes wrote,
"the explanation for these obviously shallow interviews
lies in the institutional philosophy of the Washington Post Company
and in the kinds of writers the Post hires." (You can see
why Holmes didn't get published in the Post.)
No need to labor the point.
The basic mistake is to call the Washington Post a liberal paper,
or its late proprietor a liberal in any active sense, unless
you want to disfigure the word by applying it to such of her
friends as Robert McNamara. When it came to war criminals she
was an equal opportunity hostess. In her salons you could meet
Kissinger, an old criminal on the way down, or Richard Holbrooke,
a young 'un on the way up. The Post's basic instincts have almost
always been bad.
Former mayor Marion Barry had
some pro-forma kindly words for Katharine Graham after her death
but we've always thought that one decisive verdict on the Post's
performance in a city with a major black population came with
that jury verdict acquitting Berry on the cocaine bust. Those
jurors knew that the Post, along with the other Powers That Be,
was on the other side from Barry, and we've no doubt that firmed
up their assessment of the evidence. In that quarter, for sure,
neither the Post nor Mrs Graham had an excessive amount of friends.
CP
|