Personal History (107 page)

In July, seven former
Post
pressmen were indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with the opening riot. Four were also charged with assaulting Jim Hover, the foreman. One was alleged to be a minor hit-man for the Mafia. A week later, eight more were indicted on charges of destroying
property. In April 1977, a year and a half after the opening salvo, these fifteen former pressmen pleaded guilty to misdemeanors ranging from simple assault to disorderly conduct, and were sentenced in May by Judge Sylvia Bacon, who said that their actions during the strike were “planned, purposeful and unjustified. These events did not erupt spontaneously.” Six were jailed and the rest given suspended sentences and fines. Plea-bargaining helped make the sentences fairly mild, but I was happy not to have to go through re-arousing all the old passions in a trial. Dugan had been handed a real defeat, but he, too, was a victim in some ways—of his past successes and his own intransigence. In June 1976, he had been defeated in a re-election bid for the presidency of Local 6.

Brian Flores, who had masterminded most of the guild strategy and run its meetings, had also met his Waterloo. The local guild leaders tried to bring disciplinary action against members who had crossed the picket lines, not even allowing these people to have their own lawyers; they were to be union trials. In protest, there was a movement to get rid of the guild, and about a third of the eight hundred members resigned and formed the Washington Newspaper Union, mounting a challenge to the guild as the bargaining representative. The independent union only narrowly lost, but it did succeed in getting the international union to realize it would lose the
Post
unless something was done. Leaders of the international persuaded Flores to resign as administrative officer and replaced him.

W
E HAD WEATHERED
a strike we hadn’t asked for and didn’t control. The
Post
had survived this crucial test, but there was no “clean victory”— it was a painful one for the
Post
, for its guild and craft-union members, and for the Washington community. It divided the paper, creating a false atmosphere of “us” versus “them.” Nearly two hundred people lost their jobs; one committed suicide. There were many sad consequences for far too many people and their families.

I never wanted the strike. I know that many people believe I deliberately set out to destroy a union, but that was certainly
not
the case. And if it had been the case, it would not have worked. Certainly I and everyone in the building who was interested in putting out an on-time, quality paper were fed up with the tyranny which the pressmen’s union had imposed on us over the years, but I never dreamed it was possible to replace the pressmen, nor did I feel it was desirable.

Most people at the
Post
are still represented by unions. As I said early on,
“The Washington Post
has lived long and honorably with its unions.” Mark and I both said repeatedly throughout the strike that we believed the
Post
benefited from “strong, healthy trade unionism.” I believed that then, and I believe it now. I felt this as the publisher as well as personally. My father
was the only publisher ever made an honorary member of the pressmen’s Local 6. I myself had come to maturity in an age of strong labor. I was a believer in the labor movement. One of my earliest aspirations had been to be a labor reporter. Yet I also feel that the unions have to stay productive, and that there are areas that need not be unionized.

What I stand by unequivocally is that we had no other choice but to do what we did, to take the actions we took: the future of the
Post
, as well as of the Post Company, hung in the balance. I knew that we had to have a well-run production department—all of our jobs depended on it. I knew that we had to retrieve management rights that had eroded over the years. I have always thought that blame is divisible, and I take responsibility for some of the management problems that led to the eroding of our rights to run the pressroom; others I inherited. But wherever the source of the problems lay, I knew they had to be corrected.

I was also convinced that we set about doing this in an enlightened and decent way. I believe that we offered a generous resolution from the beginning and throughout. We wanted to settle with the union, but we wanted to settle responsibly. Our aim was always the same: we were asking for the reasonable right to retrieve some of the bad practices that had built up over the years. We tried to be fair—which I know is something many of the pressmen and their families will never believe. We weren’t asking the pressmen merely to surrender the outmoded practices to which we objected; we were prepared to give for what we got. We would have willingly bought back what we had earlier given away. The pressmen’s union was not prepared to give up anything. The union—or at least its leaders, Dugan and Davis—seemed to be saying, “What’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is negotiable.”

Ironically, it was the pressmen themselves who made it possible for us to achieve what we had longed for. I view the strike as a great tragedy that could have been avoided with wiser union leadership. I believe, as I wrote someone at the time, that “Local 6 killed the goose and its golden eggs with their unbending determination to keep it all.”

Dugan could see that unions and management at other papers were arriving at contracts that met the needs of both sides at the table. He could also see that some of the best papers in the country at the time—the
Los Angeles Times, Newsday
, and the
Miami Herald
, for example—were almost completely nonunion. But he remained adamant, refusing to bargain reasonably and act responsibly. Many fine and able pressmen were caught in a bind of having to resign from the union or remain with the leaders who had led them so poorly and had done such harm.

There is undoubtedly a tendency to think that unions must be victims and therefore right, and that employers are probably brutal, powerful, and therefore wrong. I felt this was a particularly serious misperception in our
case. I understood people who felt loyal to the union and not to the company when forced to make what I knew was a very hard choice—and said as much in letters to the wives of a few of the pressmen—but I also understood that it was a choice these men had made. I felt that the philosophy that any union is right no matter what it does was an odd cause for which to sacrifice one’s career. I wish the pressmen had influenced their union leadership to be responsible in the first place. Failing that, I wish they had returned as individuals. Unfortunately, many followed Dugan over the cliff.

I
N SOME WAYS
, we obtained by accident what is given to few in their lives—a new chance. Though this was a strike that was not looked for, it was one that was desperately needed. As I told Ben at the time, in an odd sense the strike was “a business-side Watergate that fell on our heads but then had to be pursued.” We had wanted to accomplish gradually over many contracts what we were not only enabled but forced to do in one blow as a result of the strike. After years of defeated hopes at contract times, after the agony of concern about how to turn around a seemingly impossibly difficult mess in production, we were given that rare and unexpected gift we all dream about—a clean slate on which we could begin to rebuild. We now had settled our two worst labor problems—the ITU and the pressmen—in different ways. We could begin to address, in a more orderly way, the rest of them, including the mailroom, where there was still featherbedding and inefficiency.

Most important, we had gained the opportunity to deal more professionally with our unions—and the right to upgrade the quality of our production management as well as the ability to manage. We were able to bring in enlightened modern managers—particularly Don Rice and, later, Tom Might, who together brought production from the worst-managed department in the building to the best. The fine current production vice-president, Mike Clurman, was the last apprentice printer we hired.

It’s sobering to look back at the strike and realize that, as with Watergate, one reason we survived is that we were lucky. Granted, we had the strong will of the people inside and outside the building who helped us, the leadership of Mark Meagher and Don Graham, as well as the dedication and ability of the nonunion circulation department that distributed and delivered the paper. But we also needed some extraordinarily lucky breaks—and we got them.

The initial deliberate destruction of the presses, which seemed at first sight like such an overwhelming catastrophe, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The damage—and the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike—helped greatly with public opinion, with other newspapers
that came to our aid, and, above all, with keeping the guild working. The rampage that some of the pressmen went on straightened our spines on the management side. It made us very determined to come to terms with the arrogance that it reflected.

At the time, I was both angry and baffled about the violence. Why did they do it? Only in hindsight did I come to understand it to a certain extent—although never to accept it. Dugan and Davis knew that in order to prevail they had to shut off either our means of distributing the paper or our means of producing it. Because our distributors were independent operators, the union had no other option than to focus on our means of production—the presses. Also, there had been a strike at a newspaper in Kansas City, and that paper had replaced its striking pressmen the day after they struck, and the union had never gone back. In August 1975, just over a month before our own strike began, the head of the Kansas City pressmen’s union made a speech to our Local 6 at the
Post
saying that their error had been leaving the presses intact and ready to run. I suppose Dugan and Davis decided not to make that same mistake. Larry Wallace suggested that Dugan possibly “thought he had figured out a way to succeed where [other] pressmen had failed.” I believe that it was the roughneck out-of-town element of the union who mapped out the damage and sabotage rather than longtime
Post
pressmen, the majority of whom I don’t think even knew that the damage was planned. In fact, Everett Ray Forsman, a union official who played no role in the violence, left the room in tears after seeing the extent of the damage.

Even the weather was on our side. Whereas Washington had experienced some torrential rains in the late summer and early fall, the days remained fairly clear throughout the strike, which allowed the helicopters to fly in and out regularly without being grounded.

Though the strike at
The Washington Post
ended for the most part in February 1976, its reverberations are felt to this day. We learned a lot of necessary, albeit painful, lessons about the need for strong and compassionate managers who are knowledgeable about the tasks at hand, about labor relations, and about communications. And we put what we learned to good use. There were extraordinarily positive outcomes for the company in greater efficiency and flexibility and in the ability to manage. Our increased productivity was evident in the pressroom, where we went from seventeen pressmen on each press before the strike to eight-to-ten-person crews afterwards. Press speeds increased; for us, it was the equivalent of buying another press. Our pressroom began functioning again the way a pressroom should, and the atmosphere improved throughout the building.

As a manager, I had learned the hard way that, when management, for whatever reason, forfeits its basic right to manage, only trouble can result. The strike made me more determined to establish better communications
within the company. And the result was a better, stronger newspaper. Without the groundwork laid by the strike, we would not have been able to build and to grow. We bounded back from the trauma of the strike because the
Post
was a good newspaper to begin with, one that people liked, and because our regained control over the pressroom meant that we could print and deliver the paper on time, something we hadn’t been doing for years.

It is ironic that I, who have never liked confrontations, should have been faced with this major one. My mother rarely did things tactfully or in a low-key way; she loved and thrived on strident confrontations. Perhaps for that reason, I always ran the other way when it came to a showdown. I hated fights, which I always found unpleasant and invariably feared losing. On the other hand, in this big one, when I was cornered, I had no choice but to become embattled. I know that I risk sounding pretentious or sanctimonious when I say that, at bottom, I regarded the actions we took as fulfilling our obligation to our readers. But I’ll take the risk and say that, for me, it was true.

Yet even when it was over, I had mixed feelings. “It’s an awful thing,” I wrote a friend in February 1976, “to find yourself engaged in and curiously emotionally worse in victory than in battle.” It was, as I also said, “equally awful to meet people who believe the propaganda emanating from a coalition of enemies, that I have suddenly gotten money-grubbing and heartless.”

I emerged from the strike with a higher profile than ever before. Though at the
Post
and in the community some people may have had mixed feelings about me, within the industry my star had risen. Even those publishers who denounced the so-called liberalism of the
Post
’s news and editorial pages applauded our actions on the management side.

To say that I was grateful to many people is a supreme understatement. I was indebted to Mark Meagher for his strength and his many abilities throughout those long months. Don made me proud—as a publisher and as a mother. Larry Wallace proved himself to be a man of great competence and common sense; he had my confidence throughout the negotiations. People in the industry—although they may have helped for the common good—were still extraordinarily generous to take on our problems. Those 125
Post
people who worked so hard at their own jobs by day and other jobs by night, doing work normally done by nearly fifteen hundred full- and part-time production people, earned my undying respect and affection. I have always considered the daily paper a miracle of sorts, but never more so than during the strike.