Personal History (102 page)

We hired guards to establish better security around the plant, which had the desired effect of encouraging more people to come in to work. Though more guild members came in, the guild issued a bulletin calling on both sides to resume negotiations, criticizing Larry Wallace’s tactics, and appointing a three-member committee to monitor negotiations and report back to the membership in one week. The guild forbade its members to perform any work other than their own, essentially preventing members from helping us in any way; a few brave people did so anyway.

Throughout the long months of the strike, but especially in those first few wild days, there were fervent discussions, heated arguments, vituperative bulletins, and repeated meetings among guild members, with the guild officers threatening and cajoling while the members continued to vote to stay in, although the margin of votes grew increasingly narrow. Two days after that overwhelming voice vote on the first day of the strike, when the guild voted again to stay in, the vote was 244 to 186.

On October 3, I went to a meeting of publishers at the headquarters of the American Newspaper Publishers Association in Reston, Virginia. I knew they had invited Joe Allbritton and me separately to talk to the members. I gave the publishers a full account of what had happened to date and where we stood in negotiations and in continuing to publish. I took with me photographs of the pressroom, evidence of what had taken place. Basically, my fellow publishers asked me if this was the time to get together in a joint operating agreement with the
Star
. Answer: no. They also asked if I intended to go all the way, by which they meant, did I intend to “bust” the union and never let its members back? My response to this was that I didn’t know how things would develop, but that we expected to publish while trying to negotiate with the union; we would do the best we could under the circumstances. I consistently refused to promise to get rid of the union, because I wasn’t going to risk the paper over something we might not be able to achieve. Some of the publishers said that, if I didn’t promise to go that far, they wouldn’t help. I said I was sorry if that was the
case, because we obviously badly needed all kinds of help, but I couldn’t promise to do something that might not be possible to do. At that point, I was less focused on ultimate goals—not even being sure what our goal should be—and more resolved on getting the presses fixed and publishing the
Post
temporarily without the craft unions but from our own plant.

After I had finished my presentation and was on my way out, a good friend of mine, Frank Daniels, publisher of the
Raleigh News and Observer
, jumped in the car to keep me company on the ride back to Washington. Frank spoke with a strong Southern accent, and I’ll never forget his words—or his inflection and meaning: “Watch out, sugah, they want you to bust the union.” Despite the warning from Frank and the one issued at the meeting, much of the industry was extremely helpful, and several papers supported us valiantly throughout.

By Sunday, October 5, we were still publishing a clearly curtailed—and money-losing—newspaper, printed by the remote plants, which of course we were paying. On October 6, I met with those people who were still working so that I could tell them what we intended to do. The first thing I did was to address the union charges of bad-faith negotiating and “union-busting” by stating firmly my own belief in the value of unions:

I especially addressed guild members, saying how much I appreciated and didn’t take for granted their presence in the building. I honestly felt that those who were there had made a hard choice and a brave decision. I also told them that I knew they, too, would strike if they felt the management was being unfair vis-à-vis the pressmen. I assured them that the channels of communication in our building, though imperfect, were nevertheless open, adding, “When you think we are doing something wrong, we will listen. Within our walls, as at the negotiating table, we are trying to do what is morally right and what is humanly right before we are trying to do anything else.”

Mark then spoke, and he also said that we were willing to resume negotiations with the pressmen. The violence, of course, complicated the negotiations immeasurably. We sued the union for damages, and a grand jury began investigating the violence.

By that evening, one press was fixed. We had a crew ready to run it—a group of advertising executives and others, including a woman, which was quite a historic breakthrough in itself. This special press crew was led by Joe Arcaro, a much-beloved figure, who was head of retail sales. The crucial moment had arrived, but could our amateur and barely trained executives really run a press? The press looked so huge and complex and forbidding that it was almost impossible to believe it could work.

Many of us—Ben and I included—were in the pressroom that night watching to see what would happen. “Go, Joe, baby,” Ben yelled out, and, incredibly but surely, the press roared into action. We printed a hundred thousand papers that very night.

The next and even greater drama took place on the platform, after the papers had made their way through the mailroom, where they’d been bundled by another crew of executives and sent down the chutes to the waiting trucks. The back platform was all lit up, and the whole alley was electric with tension and excitement. Don Graham was there to help load the first truck, which was to be driven by an extremely brave distributor, with another one riding “shotgun,” in a nearly literal sense. Meg and I
were both on hand, waiting and watching. There was a police car ahead of the truck, and one behind. To loud jeering from the picketers, the trucks left the alley and were escorted safely to the District line. It was an electric moment, filled with symbolism for those of us watching.

The Newspaper Guild was steadily putting out bulletins to the
Post
unit. One that first week said that many of its members were not going to work because they couldn’t cross the pressmen’s picket line and “because they bitterly resent management’s efforts to intimidate Guild members who are still working inside the building and those who have chosen to stay out.” The guild reminded its members that the situation was fluid and could change at any time. On October 7, the guild voted a third time to stay in, but this time by an even smaller margin, 270 to 251. Oddly, the pressmen actually managed to help us in our efforts to keep the guild working. Whenever we were extremely nervous, they would pull some stunt that outraged guild members and helped keep them in. One such occurred when Jules Witcover, a popular and star reporter, was beaten up as he walked to the garage to get his car, chipping his teeth and requiring several stitches close to his eye.

Also on October 7, we held our first bargaining session with the pressmen, under the auspices of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. It was an all-day session that Mark characterized as “helpful and constructive.” A second negotiating team, also under the supervision of Larry Wallace, was to begin meeting the next day with the machinists’ and electricians’ unions. In the meantime, Joe Arcaro’s crew had more than doubled their output, printing over two hundred thousand papers that night. And with sixteen nonunion engineers from newspapers around the country working to repair our damaged presses, we hoped to have a second press running soon. We did so by October 9, when we ran 280,000 copies of the paper in our own plant and anticipated phasing out the use of the satellite plants as more of our presses were repaired.

Still, we estimated a daily loss of $300,000 in advertising revenues compared with our normal linage—linage that was going into the
Star
. Once the presses were fixed, we principally needed able electricians and machinists, workers with skills that were difficult to acquire by amateurs, and which our executives lacked but without which we couldn’t publish.

The
Post
’s three hundred circulation dealers were absolutely instrumental in all of this, since it would have done us no good to be able to print but then not distribute. The dealers were spirited and courageous, not to mention patient and resolute—despite all kinds of violence against them personally. Within a week, we were delivering to homes and newsstands at a near-normal level. The only papers not going out in the first few weeks were the ten thousand mailed copies and those leaving town by bus, train, and airplane. For these, Jack Patterson, vice-president of circulation,
decided he needed help and proposed to hire outsiders. Don’s naturally cautious nature made him resist this request; he felt that the pressmen might use the opportunity to smuggle someone into the building to hurt us. After listening to Don for a while, Jack, with all his independence and drive, ignored him and hired the outsiders.

Preparing the mailing for the large Sunday papers was time-consuming and dirty. For that, Jack recruited volunteers. Meg, Howard, Phil Geyelin, Liz Hylton, and I responded to his call, as did many others, and we worked in the mailroom on Saturday nights throughout the strike, as well as on several other nights during the week. We went on duty when the presses started to run at about 9:30 p.m. and at first didn’t finish until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. It was a tough job that left us filthy, sweaty, and covered with paste. We had to roll up each individual paper in a brown wrapper, paste on an address label, seal the whole thing shut, and throw the finished, wrapped package into the big, smelly, heavy, and unwieldy canvas bags at the side of the work-table, which we then dragged over to another station from which they were finally hauled off to the post office. This was the only time in my life that I regretted the substantial circulation the
Post
had outside of Washington. The whole job was so tedious and interminable that we came to look on it as our supreme service for the cause, the ultimate sacrifice. Warren Buffett, who spent several Saturday nights in the mailroom with us, said it made him rethink the price of the Sunday paper—no price was sufficient.

F
OR THE FIRST
ten days of the strike, we operated at an extraordinarily high level of activity and in a state of particularly high pressure. There were constant meetings of top management. The tensions for all of us were indescribable, and the strain on me was the worst I have ever experienced. The uncertainties, the difficulties, the violence against the people who were working, the fear that the
Star
would use the opportunity to turn the tables, were all overwhelming. I felt desperate and secretly wondered if I might have blown the whole thing and lost the paper. I didn’t really see how we were going to manage. The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock. Yet, despite my inner turmoil, I had to appear calm and determined and to come across as optimistic in order to convey that attitude to others.

One of the toughest pressures that was brought to bear on me came in a meeting with Ed Williams and Ben, together with Mark and Don. I know that Ed and Ben thought they had the best interests of the paper at heart, but Ed, at least, clearly thought we were committing suicide by not giving in to the pressmen’s demands. Ed was a lawyer with superb judgment about almost everything, but I felt he didn’t understand the issues in this case, or all that lay behind the strike and how important it was that we
not give in. On top of everything else, he told us in no uncertain terms that we seemed to be operating under some delusion that we were actually putting out a paper. He said, “I read it in the car coming to work. It takes me five minutes and then I throw it on the floor. Joe Allbritton is eating your lunch. You have to give in and take the unions back.”

I’m not sure what Ben’s view was at that moment, except that I know he always cared above all for editorial quality, so it must have pained him to hear Ed say this about the paper he had worked so hard to build. I also know that he was worried about the people who worked for him—the reporters and editors—who remained deeply distressed. And perhaps he had been persuaded by Ed that we were wrong. But Mark, Don, and I had no doubts; we just shook our heads and said we had no choice but to go forward and carry on as best we could. The meeting with Ed and Ben bothered me because I loved and valued them, and continued to do so, but it didn’t shake my conviction—or Don’s or Mark’s—for a minute.