Personal History (112 page)

On August 7, 1981, the 128-year-old
Star
ceased publication. There was no gloating. As Don said, this was “a sad day for Washington and the newspaper business.” The city and the country had lost a great American newspaper. A
Post
editorial a few days later stated, “Nobody wanted the
Star
to go out, but it is gone. Sadness, nostalgia, anger, sentimentality and apprehension have all been stirred by its loss, and these feelings have been shared by the people at the
Post.”

I knew the
Star’s
folding would present problems as well as opportunities for us, including resentment of our dominance and of the loss of the other much-beloved voice. There was predictable bitterness. Unless one understands newspaper economics and the inevitability of what happens when some degree of dominance is achieved, the tendency is to blame the remaining paper for being ruthless.

Almost a month later, when it was clear that no one would come forward to revive the fallen
Star
, we bought its land, building, and presses. We hired a number of its writers, most notably Mary McGrory. We picked up enough of its circulation so that, even with our new Springfield plant, we desperately needed the building and presses—and we’re still printing there. Not a year passed before the opening of the
Washington Times
newspaper, founded and funded by the Unification Church. Its circulation and advertising are weak, but the paper does provide a lively, conservative editorial voice—at vast expense to the church. Presumably its backers feel that their presence in the nation’s capital and access to the government are worth the price.

——

T
HE BEGINNING OF
the end of the
Star
was not the only dramatic occurrence that spring of 1981. The previous fall, an article by one of our new, young (twenty-six), bright reporters, Janet Cooke, had appeared on the front page of the
Post
. “Jimmy’s World,” a piece about an eight-year-old heroin addict, created a major impact on the community. The story was sent out on the news-service wire and became a national and even an international
cause célèbre
.

We felt the story was so good and so well written that we submitted it for a Pulitzer Prize, which it won. The day after the prize was announced, though, the whole story began to unravel, as it was revealed that there were inconsistencies and exaggerations—if not untruths—in the way Cooke had portrayed her own life. When the biographies of the Pulitzer winners appeared in various newspapers, Vassar College called us to say that Cooke had not only not graduated from there with honors, but had not graduated at all; she had attended but left after a year for the University of Toledo, where she had received a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s, as she’d claimed. People on the
Toledo Blade
called the Associated Press to say that their records of Cooke’s credentials didn’t jibe with those that were appearing in wire stories. When we checked what Cooke had listed as her own credentials, we found that they didn’t correspond to what she’d written elsewhere—for instance, it turned out that she didn’t speak several languages.

On April 15, 1981, Janet Cooke finally confessed to
Post
editors that she had fabricated the story. “Jimmy” turned out to be a composite, and the quotes attributed to the child were, in fact, invented. Certain events Cooke had described as having eyewitnessed never happened. Ben sent a telegram to a long list of news organizations saying: “It is with great sadness and regret that I inform you that Janet Cooke,
The Washington Post
reporter awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing Monday, has determined that she cannot accept the award.… She regrets these events as much as
The Washington Post
regrets them. She has offered her resignation, and it has been accepted.”

We immediately assigned our ombudsman, Bill Green, to write about what happened and why, believing that this was the most objective way to hang out every detail of our embarrassment and to help us all understand where we’d gone wrong. Many things had indeed gone wrong. At almost no point was Cooke asked hard questions about what she was reporting. She was trusted, and she wrote so well that no one thought to check the facts of the story. The editors all relied on each other, so that the story had gone from desk to desk until it eventually ended up on the front page. Even her bio had not been sufficiently checked when she was hired.

I believe that we did all the right things after the fact. We revealed the truth in excruciating and embarrassing detail. We apologized editorially.
We examined the system that had let it happen. Bill Green asked some tough questions—including whether race (she was black) helped Cooke advance faster than she should have—and drew a number of conclusions: the business of trusting reporters had gone too far; young reporters were looking for a Watergate under every rock; the scramble for journalistic prizes was poisonous; new reporters shouldn’t be pushed so fast; the editors didn’t listen enough to lurking doubts below them.

Janet Cooke blamed the paper for putting too much pressure on reporters to get what Woodward called the “Holy Shit” story instead of solid reporting. She accused us of creating competition among reporters to get on the front page. The journalism faculty at Howard University filed a complaint against the
Post
relating to the Cooke affair.
The New Republic
titled one of its articles on the matter “Deep Throat’s Children.”

I felt for Don Graham, who was then the publisher and who took on a very tough news conference and handled it well. I stuck out our collective neck even farther by calling Tom Winship, then chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, a group that was meeting in Washington shortly after the prize was returned, to ask him if he was planning a session on the affair. He said he wasn’t, and that at this late date there was no place for it. My response was: “You’ll be the laughingstock of the industry if you don’t do the program. I personally dread it, but it’s the big ethical issue of the moment. You’d better find the time.” Tom agreed and scheduled an early-bird meeting, heavily attended, in which our editors got pummeled. I was proud that Don Graham stood there by Ben, often with his arm around Ben’s shoulder. Also right there was our incomparable former editor, Russ Wiggins, who, with his usual wry humor, said, “I feel great about the state of the American press. Every editor I saw assured me this couldn’t have happened at his paper.”

We took a terrible drubbing from all sides, and rightly so in some ways. Clearly, we had made mistakes and some of our procedures were not functioning properly. But I felt that the self-righteousness on the part of many in the industry, assuming it couldn’t have happened in other places, was not only spiteful but shortsighted. I later told an ANPA gathering that there was a real danger that, in our efforts not to have such a thing happen again, “we will become so nervous we will go to the other extreme, and not do the job that a free press is supposed to do.”

T
O ADD TO MY ANXIETIES
during this difficult period, Peter Derow told me he’d found another job—ironically, back at CBS. He was quite willing to start in again on what was wrong with me and the company, but by this time I’d grown tougher and told him that once was enough. It seemed to irritate him not to be able to do a repeat monologue on my failings.

Only as the search for a new company president grew a little more organized did I become more optimistic about the future. I held interview after interview with various candidates, at first not quite knowing what it was I was looking for, but somehow feeling I’d know it when I saw it. The search went on for so long that I began referring to it as “the search for Mr. Wonderful.” But over the course of the process, I came to realize that I did have an idea of the goals of the company, and the search process helped me crystallize that idea while at the same time helping me define the qualities I was looking for in a president.

At last, in early July 1981, when I interviewed Dick Simmons—who had been president of Dun & Bradstreet—I instantly saw in him a number of the qualities I knew I needed and wanted, including a proven track record as a manager. A few days later, Warren, Don and Mary Graham, and I had dinner with Dick at my house. He and I then met together for several hours on a Saturday, talking comfortably. Two weeks later, I extended an offer to Dick to become president and chief operating officer of The Washington Post Company. The search for “Mr. Wonderful,” which had taken more than a year, had ended.

D
ICK
S
IMMONS’S
arrival helped make the decade of the 1980s the best years from a business point of view both for the company and for me. The Washington Post Company began achieving its goals of sustaining earnings growth, developing new businesses, and building for the future. And a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. I no longer dreaded the meetings to discuss plans, options, acquisitions. Without the tension that had existed for so long between me and whoever occupied that office across the conference room from mine, the future seemed more certain—and more positive. I realized only in retrospect how tough the previous years had been. Working became a pleasure again. Without recognizing it, I had gotten to the point where, the better things were going under my management, the more unhappy I became that the results weren’t even better. Many of Dick’s first moves helped make those results better yet, and, equally important, he helped me gain some perspective on how the company was doing, what we should be doing, and what we could expect to do.

In some ways, Dick and I were an unusual duo. We are very different from each other in style and temperament, yet were remarkably compatible. In time, we almost shared the company’s top two jobs. He was much more than a chief operating officer; he was my partner and friend. His true and sure sense of himself helped keep him untroubled by my peculiar managerial background and my tendency to call Warren about any problem or opportunity. I tried always to give Dick the credit he deserved, as well as to give him a free rein in all operating aspects of the company. He in turn seemed very unbothered by my higher profile.

Dick moved fast and with assurance. In late October 1981, just a few weeks into his tenure, we announced that we were selling the
Trenton Times
to Allbritton Communications. And a few days later, we announced that we were engaged in discussions relating to the sale of
Inside Sports
, which had lost a lot of money and showed few signs of turnaround or possible
improvement. I knew it had to be sold and was relieved when Dick moved quickly to do it. The sales of these two properties significantly reduced the company’s earnings for that year but allowed us to focus our efforts on the development of our core businesses, which were all setting new records for revenue.

Dick also took the lead in looking for growth opportunities in line with the main mission of our company, related to the way people communicate. In 1982, we took our first step into the electronic age by getting into the cellular-telephone business. A few years later, after building some of the first cellular systems in the United States, we divested ourselves of what we had acquired in this area. It was a strategic exit based on our own recognition that those companies with market dominance had a significant advantage over the smaller players, of whom we were certainly one. Nevertheless, we did very well financially. (Alan Spoon, who later became president of the company, deserves much of the credit here.)

In 1983, we acquired a small electronic-information company called Legi-Slate, a database publisher that is now the nation’s leading provider of online information on federal legislative and regulatory activity. We also got into cable programming, specifically related to sports, by acquiring about 50 percent of SportsChannel Associates, a network that telecast leading professional sports events to New York–area cable subscribers. These businesses, too, were later sold.

In November 1983, we successfully launched a national weekly edition of
The Washington Post
, an idea I had heard discussed since almost the first years of my father’s ownership of the paper. This edition now has a circulation of well over 100,000. Because the
Post
is a local paper, geared to the Washington metropolitan-area market, it was never feasible for us to undertake a truly national daily edition, but this weekly tabloid of selected
Post
articles on politics and government satisfies many people’s desire to follow the
Post
’s political reporting.

Late in 1984, we acquired a tutoring-and-test-preparation company, the Stanley H. Kaplan Company (now called the Kaplan Educational Centers), which interested Dick more than it did me. I confess that my lack of interest was reflected in my saying to Dick, “I don’t give a shit about it, but if you think it will be profitable, let’s do it.” Not only has it worked out well for us, despite some ups and downs, but it has considerably more purpose and potential than I realized.

In 1985, we purchased 20 percent of the common stock of Cowles Media Company, owners of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
and some other, smaller properties. That interest has grown over the years, and we now hold 28 percent.

We were less successful in several other areas. Early in 1982, we tried to buy the
Des Moines Register
, a paper and a company I respected greatly
and would have loved to acquire, but we weren’t the highest bidder. Just after we launched the weekly, we bought a 20-percent interest in the
National Journal
, a magazine about the federal government, but after being involved for three years we let Times Mirror acquire it. We looked hard at the number-two paper both in Chicago, the
Sun-Times
, and in Houston, the
Post
, but didn’t go any further.

As a company, we have been conservative in our growth—perhaps too conservative—but as the eighties ended we were not left with a load of debt and the resulting need to sell the good properties, as were many other companies, who let their desire for growth overwhelm their judgment. We turned down the
Denver Post
, which was bought by the Times Mirror Company with disastrous results. Sometimes the things you don’t do are as important as the things you do.