Personal History (111 page)

Once, much later, Warren and I discussed women bursting into tears in business situations and I reminded him of our ride to Glen Welby. “Well,” he said, smiling, “we made several hundred million dollars then. The next time you burst into tears, call me first.” He added, “Look at it this way, Kay. If you hadn’t bought it in,
I
would have burst into tears, so one of us had to cry.”

From this point on, I really concentrated on trying to get the company straightened out. I resigned from most of the outside boards on which I had been serving—the University of Chicago and George Washington University among them, as well as Allied Chemical—and became much more actively involved with groups associated with the media and with newspapers: the Bureau of Advertising, the board of the Associated Press, and, most important, the board of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.

Given all the company’s problems with which I was dealing at the time, it may have been crazy to have been involved so actively with all three of these industry organizations, but since none of them had any other women, it served a purpose for them and was helpful with the industry, as well as helping me become more familiar with some of the larger problems that media companies face.

The Bureau of Advertising, on which I served from 1971 through 1979, bumping up to its executive board from 1980 to 1982, had not been a favorite of Phil’s, but I found it a congenial place. Its board had a decidedly lopsided composition at the time: not only was it all-male and all-white, but it was business-not editorial-oriented.

The eighteen directors on the AP board are elected by the membership, and anyone wishing to serve has to campaign for election, which I
found difficult. Although I’d been warned that most people didn’t get elected on their first try, I was still disappointed when I was defeated on mine. The following year, in April 1974, I was better organized and won, becoming the first woman member of the board, on which I served the allotted three terms until 1983.

I had been elected to ANPA’s board in 1973, again the first woman, but this time not until a man who actively opposed women members had himself left the board. I wrote Lori Wilson, Al Neuharth’s wife: “The view of ‘The Good Ole Boys’ will not die except generationally. Their view of the ‘lovely ladies’ and toasts to the wives will be with us for the rest of our ANPA lives!”

In those years, the chairmanship of the board alternated each two-year term between men associated with big and small papers, and under a very undemocratic procedure the incumbent chairman essentially chose or designated his successor. In 1979, Al Neuharth, who was the group’s chairman at the time, approached me with the idea that I become chairman after the tenure of a nice, able man, Len Small, who ran a group of Illinois papers and was slated to succeed Al. The idea had never entered my head, but Al was firm in his conviction that I should be willing to take on the job, pointing out that if I didn’t there was no other woman in the foreseeable future who would be there to do it. Little by little, I came to agree that I should be available—another barrier to crack—and that it might be interesting as well. I said if he could pull it off I’d like it, so Len invited me to succeed him when his term was up in 1981 and made it known that this was to happen.

But another tragedy hurled me into yet another job with little or no preparation. Len was killed in an automobile accident and, with almost no warm-up, I was handed a new time-consuming responsibility nearly two years before I expected it, becoming chairman of ANPA in April of 1980. Managing a big, all-male (except for me), diverse organization—small and big papers have very different points of view and interests—was one more stressful obligation. It was inconceivably intimidating for me, at first, to preside over the two-day committee meetings and the conventions, and in between to deal with the staff at the headquarters in Reston, Virginia. In addition, I had to wrestle with the dawning problems of electronic news and the challenge of the phone companies.

A
ROUND THE COMPANY
, I was dealing with matters ranging from the circulation outlook at the
Post
and
Newsweek
, to newsprint costs, to continuing profit problems at PNS. I tried to concentrate on strategic planning for the company and hoped to make progress in the divisions and to improve the way in which each related to the others. We still needed a
sounder growth policy in corporate. I had been thinking and working and picking the brains of various people for years about growth issues but had seen little or no progress. I was also thinking about the importance of performance appraisals and rewards, financial and otherwise. As always, there were people problems.

In the early summer of 1979, I went through another painful turnover at
Newsweek
. Ed Kosner had been a very successful number two under Oz Elliott, but without Oz he was having difficulty managing the large staff. Ed was a journalist of rare gifts but not yet a manager. Morale was at a low point. One person described to me what was happening as being “like the magazine having a nervous breakdown.”

Peter Derow and I spent a lot of time discussing what to do, and again I’m afraid I listened to him and took his advice against my instincts. For one thing, I told Peter that, if Ed was in so much trouble, we had to warn him. Peter’s answer was, “Absolutely not; if you do that, he’s so unpredictable he might walk right out the door.” Stupidly, I gave in to Peter’s fears and didn’t have the blunt talk with Ed that anyone under danger of dismissal has every right to expect and that can often be effective.

In the meantime, I’d been approached by an editor whom I knew at firsthand to be highly skilled in newspapers and whose skills I thought would be transferrable to a newsweekly. This was someone I had worked with and trusted, who wanted the job and who I thought would be perfect. But when I discussed it with Peter, he discouraged me from taking a risk by bringing in a non-news weekly editor. Again I acceded to what I believed was his better judgment. So we went back to Lester Bernstein, once
Newsweek
’s national and managing editor, who we thought would make a safe transition for a few years until we found another editor. I knew instantly that this was a wrong move when the first thing Lester did was take a month’s vacation.

When Peter and I broke the news to Ed, he was naturally upset and bitter, and he had a valid cause for complaint, since neither of us had ever fully aired our differences with him. There was a meeting to let the editorial staff know about the changes. Ed walked in, said, “I am leaving the magazine,” and then walked out of the room and out of the building. I stood up directly afterwards, said I was sorry for the abruptness of it, and praised Ed and Lester; then I, too, left. I wanted nothing more than to escape, and there was such a large crowd waiting for an elevator that I walked down the stairs from the fortieth floor to the twelfth, where the corporate offices were.

It was another change of editors at the top—and yet another chance for people to skewer me for being a difficult woman. I have noticed that, when an editor got changed, it was often the people under him who had complained the most vocally who then criticized me the loudest for the
“way” it was done—so sudden, so unexpected, so cruel. Privately, however, people told me it was a move that had to be made at the time to help
Newsweek
. We went through two more unsuccessful tries at the editorship before we finally came up with Rick Smith.

There were more changes to come. My relationship with Mark Meagher was not an easy one and was growing more and more trying as I realized that here was yet another executive who had not worked out as I had hoped. Mark was a good person with great abilities in certain areas, but he was probably too young and inexperienced to have been rushed to the top of the company as president and chief operating officer. In July 1980, we announced that Mark would resign at the end of the year. The decision had been all the more difficult because I was fond of him personally. This may have been the low point of my business life; it was certainly one of the most painful and discouraging times I’d had. Mark’s departure got writ large in my mind not just as my personal failing but, rather, as a sign that the whole company was in turmoil. Corporate was certainly not well run. We hadn’t grown in any sensible or substantive way, and
Newsweek
was in managerial confusion. This time, the press really beat up on me, even exaggerating the number of changes among the top executives, in part because of a misreading of our organization chart and a mixing up of the company with the paper.

There was no one within the company to whom I could turn as a new president; I was going to have to look outside. Unfortunately, I was so shaken and discouraged by the personnel mistakes we’d made that I feared we wouldn’t search for a replacement in the right way. My reputation as a difficult person to work with made a search hard under the best of circumstances, and stories were circulating that no one but Don could become president, because who would want to be sandwiched between a mother and a son. But Don was still very young and had just taken over the
Post
as publisher the year before.

Just as I began to look for help, Peter Derow, who by now had become a director of the company and chairman of
Newsweek
as well as president, after Bob Campbell’s retirement, suggested that we bring in a consulting firm to study the company and be an administrative help while I was trying to run it alone. I thought there was merit to the idea, so we hired McKinsey and Company, and for the next year there were repeated meetings between people from McKinsey and from our company, going endlessly over what we’d done and what we hoped to do. I was increasingly baffled about the whole consultation process, which seemed to be little more than McKinsey’s regurgitating what we had told them in a slightly different but not very helpful way.

The most imprudent suggestion made by McKinsey in its report was that we should stop buying in the stock: it had been all right to do at $20 and
$21, but now that the stock had reached $26 it was no longer a good idea. I actually took this advice for a while, although, as Warren has repeatedly said, anyone would have told me the company was probably worth more than $400 million on the market and that the stock-market value was about a quarter of that amount. Perhaps no one at McKinsey ever stopped to do that math. Afterwards, Don referred to the page in McKinsey’s report on which the suggestion had been made as the “half-billion-dollar page,” given that that’s what it probably cost us in lost value to the company.

At the same time, I worked with a headhunter in my quest for a new company president. There were numerous meetings with the headhunter and with various candidates, none of whom seemed very plausible, and many of whom seemed remote from what I had in mind. They were either condescending to me or obsequious, and neither alternative appealed to me in any way. This activity went on for nearly a year, with me essentially running the company alone, with help from Marty Cohen, our financial vice-president and treasurer, and a management group that included the division heads and the few other corporate officers. It was a rough year, and I had no reason to think it was going to get any better until I resolved the management problems.

In November 1980, an additional worry came when Mobil Oil Company President William Tavoulareas sued the
Post
for libel for a story we’d run a year earlier by reporter Patrick Tyler detailing some of his business dealings. This lawsuit dragged on in various courts; one jury awarded the plaintiffs compensatory and punitive damages of $2.05 million in 1982, a decision overturned by a judge, then reinstated. Finally, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on March 13, 1987, that the 1979 story was “substantially” true and was not libelous, and after more than seven years, the case came to a close, with a decision in our favor.

By the time of the lawsuit, the cumulative effect of the pressures and anxiety and activities on so many levels at once took its toll. On a visit to New York in March of 1981 to make a speech to an advertising group, I contracted pneumonia, spent twelve days in the hospital there, and returned home extremely weak.

Immediately on my return, I got a call from Jim Shepley, president of Time Inc. and chairman of the
Star
, asking to meet me. This signaled yet another dramatic moment in our lives—mine and Don’s, at least. Jim’s call meant that Time Inc. was ready to do something about the
Star
and wanted to talk about the possibility of a joint operating agreement.

Our family had always wanted and welcomed the competition and felt that everyone was better off with it than without it, so Don and I and Warren had many meetings with our lawyers and the
Star
’s representatives trying to arrive at an agreement. We were still negotiating when, ten days after our last meeting, officials from Time Inc. held a press conference to
announce the closing of the
Star
in two weeks. I actually heard the news on the radio while I was in my car on my way to work. The announcement left me with a range of emotions: first and foremost, I was deeply sad that it had come to this, that Washington was to lose a fine paper that had many loyal readers, not to mention employees, who would be devastated. I was also numbed by the reality of this final victory of sorts—bittersweet though it was—after all the years of struggle. This was not a competitor we hated but one we respected.

There was some talk of possible buyers for the
Star
, but that seemed unlikely. Rupert Murdoch, Walter Annenberg, Mortimer Zuckerman, and Armand Hammer were all mentioned as considering making proposals. To prevent anyone from merely buying the paper in order to profit from selling its assets, Time put some fairly rigorous requirements on any buyer. We at the
Post
continued to talk to people at the
Star
, and to others, Al Neuharth and Armand Hammer among them, about possible alternative joint operating agreements, but, in the end, there seemed no way to save the
Star
.