Personal History (113 page)

My major frustration in the first few years after Dick’s arrival was that we were still not regarded by the financial world as a hot property, which kept our stock undervalued. This, however, worked to our advantage, since we continued our consistent pattern of buying in the stock, which helped us later.

Of all our attempts to grow, our most spectacular success and the best acquisition that Dick and I made together was cable, which began with our purchase of fifty-three cable systems from Capital Cities Communications Company, a purchase finalized in January 1986. Throughout 1985, Warren had helped his friend Tom Murphy, CEO of Cap Cities, acquire the ABC network. I was happy for both of them when the deal went through, at least until I realized the implications for me vis-à-vis Warren, who pointed out the obvious—that he would be going on the board of Cap Cities/ABC and would therefore have to get off ours. By then, Warren had been a board member for eleven years and never missed a meeting. Telling me this was hard for him; he knew I would feel bereft, to say the least, but he assured me he would still be at the other end of the telephone, that we would see each other as much as usual, that he would not vanish from my life. Even so, I was disturbed and saddened by the news.

In fact, it worked out well. Warren kept his shares in our company and remained involved with us. More important, as a sort of consolation prize, Murphy allowed us to bid on Cap Cities’ cable systems, whereas that company divested everything else through investment bankers. Warren kept a correct distance from the negotiations, which were carried on between the Post Company and Cap Cities exclusively. We ran numbers, deliberated, discussed at length, argued among ourselves, and finally completed the acquisition for $350 million, much the biggest acquisition in the company’s history—and the one that propelled us forward to our highest rank in the Fortune 500, that of 263 in both 1986 and 1987. By adding new customers and purchasing other small systems, Post-Newsweek Cable has now
grown from 350,000 to 580,000 subscribers. And, happily, Warren is now back on our board, after serving Cap Cities/ABC for ten years, when it was sold to Disney.

At
Newsweek
, after years of tough going, we had begun to turn things around. One of the most painful failures on my part was that both the business and the editorial sides of the magazine kept undergoing managerial turmoil, each for different reasons. With editorial, I was directly responsible for the problem, and it took a long time to get it right. I still sensed great pools of ill-will and even disloyalty at
Newsweek
. Part of this may have been due to the excessive management turnover, but some of it certainly was the result of the natural competition between those working for the company in Washington and those working in New York. I finally offered Rick Smith the editorship, and knew he’d be just right for the job when he responded with, “Don’t worry, I won’t fuck it up.”

Indeed he didn’t. Under his strong leadership, first as editor and later as president, the whole mood improved—yet another example for me of how things get better when management acts together. Even with the problems newsmagazines have experienced in the new environment,
Newsweek
has had many fine successes and a great deal of solid growth. In the mid-1990s,
Newsweek
came to be considered the best of the newsmagazines, with its stellar writers like Jon Alter, Bob Samuelson, Jane Bryant Quinn, Allan Sloan, George Will, Meg, and many more. I felt a great deal of satisfaction.

Post-Newsweek Stations began to do better and better as well. Our stations cover all three major networks, so that, as Warren once pointed out, “anything achieved is independent of whether any one network happens to be hot at the moment.” Joel Chaseman proved that he could operate the television stations so well under Dick’s direction that their margins grew competitive with the best in the business. Our television news was as distinguished as that of the
Post
and
Newsweek
. All of the stations (including the two we have since acquired in Texas: KPRC in Houston and KSAT in San Antonio), now ably led by Bill Ryan, were and continue to be leaders in news. Following the demise of the
Star
, the
Post’s
penetration of its market was around 50 percent daily and 70 percent Sunday through most of the 1980s—by far the highest of any major U.S. metropolitan daily.

Out of everything we accomplished during the eighties, I was proudest of our improved management of the company, an area in which Dick was particularly strong. I once said I would like to win a Pulitzer Prize for management, and finally I was able to believe that we were becoming a truly well-run company. What’s more, the effects of better management began to show. Our core businesses improved immeasurably in profitability, so that after a few years the company really took off: for several years,
The Washington Post Company led all companies in our field in a number of ways. Probably more important to me than any public acknowledgment of our gains, however, was what Warren thought about how we were doing. In mid-1984, he sent Don, Dick, and me a memo saying that he had just gone through a recent survey of publishing companies that charted their performance in various areas. He pointed out that, when Berkshire Hathaway bought its first shares in The Washington Post Company in the spring of 1973, the cost was $10.6 million, and the market value in 1984 for those shares was $140 million. He had gone down the list of publishing companies in the survey and run the numbers to calculate what would have happened if he had spent this same $10.6 million at the same moment in the shares of the other companies listed. In any other company, he would have fallen far short of what he had earned with Post Company stock, so he concluded: “Instead of thanks a million—make it thanks anywhere from $65 to $110 million.” It got even better later.

A
FTER ALL THE
years of struggle, things had finally started to go smoothly for the company and for me. Though I never stopped worrying altogether—it’s not in my nature—the business of the company was going well enough, and I had enough confidence in Dick, that I began to relax a little and to enjoy a larger life again.

As the editorial corporate head of the company, I had always felt strongly that part of my job was to follow important world issues that could affect the company and its holdings, but I hadn’t always been in a position to give this responsibility the time and attention I felt it deserved. Starting in the late 1970s, I had taken some trips with a few editors and reporters—Meg and Jim Hoagland almost always going along—to one or several countries, to observe for ourselves what we had been reading about in the pages of our own publications. The number of these trips picked up in the early 1980s, largely because Dick’s steady hand would be at the helm while I was gone.

On one of the first of these trips, at the request of the Romanians, we interviewed their communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, in the very palace where he and his wife were later killed. He spent the entire interview complaining of his treatment by the West, while we tried to ask questions about his persecution of different religious and ethnic groups and his repression of dissent. The interview was stilted, to say the least: we took turns asking predetermined questions which he answered at length and mechanically. His long answers were shortened by our interpreter to, “He says, ‘Welcome.’ ”

In 1978, the high point of a trip to West Africa was a visit to open a school in a small village a few hours outside of Abidjan, the relatively
affluent capital of the Ivory Coast. Accompanied by a young couple from the U.S. Embassy, we were welcomed by most of the village, led by a chief in robes and derby hat, despite the 105-degree heat and oppressive humidity. At an outdoor banquet, he made a speech in French declaring what an honor it was to have me there as the seventeenth-most-important person in the world, a description he had obviously picked up from a poll that had appeared in
U.S. News & World Report
. From then on, Jim Hoagland enjoyed referring to me as
“numéro dix-sept.”

In 1980, I scheduled a trip to the Middle East with Meg and Jim, to include, at Henry Kissinger’s suggestion, Saudi Arabia as well as Egypt and Israel. We were not sure the Saudis would receive two women, but embassy officials—and, more important, Prince Bandar, an influential member of the royal family then in this country training with the Army Air Force—told us we would be welcome. Meg and I had been so thoroughly briefed about how to dress and how generally to comport ourselves while in Saudi Arabia that we were in a state of mild terror as we landed, but we were told that our even being allowed to disembark from the front of the plane represented real progress: only a few years previously, Pat Nixon and Nancy Kissinger had had to exit through a door at the back of the plane.

Women were simply invisible in Saudi Arabia. We saw them only once during our visit—at the house of Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, then minister of petroleum and mineral resources, where he had assembled a small group of very Westernized technicians, middle managers in government, and their wives. By contrast, a dinner at the home of Prince Abdullah, then the third-most-powerful man in the country and the head of its National Guard, turned out to be something out of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. We drove up to his palace, Meg and I dressed demurely in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, covering everything we possibly could, and stepped into a large oval room around the walls of which members of the Guard sat cross-legged, with full military regalia over their Arab robes, leather straps lined with bullets crossed over their chests. They stared at us as we were led to seats elevated above theirs but surrounding a kind of throne that was positioned even higher than ours, in which sat Prince Abdullah. We learned later that Abdullah had had to explain to his men for an hour beforehand why he had to have these two American women to dinner.

In Egypt, we interviewed President Sadat at his country home. We had several small tape recorders going as he talked, the Egyptians a single large one; we were impressed to see a man emerge as if by magic from behind the bushes in the garden to change the tape. Sadat kept addressing me personally with brutally offensive remarks about some of his neighbors. He would say, “Jimmy”—referring to Carter—“told me I can’t say
this, Katharine, of King Hussein,” and then he would go on to make some derisive and cutting remark. He also had some biting things to say about Henry Kissinger. But it was an interesting interview, and everyone went straight to work writing it up for the
Post
and
Newsweek
. We were amused when an Egyptian government man appeared, somewhat embarrassed, to ask us for a copy of our tapes from the interview, since their recorder hadn’t worked. Later, we were dumbstruck to discover that, whereas we had observed their ground rules and had omitted all the startling remarks Sadat had made, the transcript of the interview ran in its entirety in an Egyptian paper, complete with the acerbic asides addressed to me. I hate to think of the repercussions these may have caused.

While we were in Egypt, I asked to see the shah of Iran, to whom the Egyptians had given refuge, and at the last minute they agreed to allow Jim and me in. The shah was perfectly willing, even eager, to talk at length and on the record, and indeed he spoke for two hours, flaying the British and the Americans for turning their backs on him. He regretted, as Jim noted in the lead to his story, “having followed ‘a policy of surrender’ to his opponents during his final days in power and said he wished he had used military force to put down the demonstrations that broke his rule.” He told us that it was his own miscalculations, coupled with conflicting signals from the American and British governments, that had caused him to fail. Our interview with the shah turned out to be his final one, since he died shortly thereafter.

In Israel, nothing equaled our last dinner there, which was hosted by the director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—a dinner that degenerated into a savage attack on the
Post
in general and its editorial policy in particular. At one point, Meg spoke up to rebut these attacks, saying that the Israelis needed to understand that one couldn’t help being humbled by all that the Jews had experienced in Europe and by the danger they were in now—and that nobody she knew thought otherwise—but “what we were writing was our idea of what had to be done to avoid a terrible fate.” With that, the questions began and grew increasingly hostile. The Israelis were especially vicious to Meg, who, being Jewish, was someone they thought ought to espouse their views uncritically.

One of the most bizarre of the interviews we held during these trips was with Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Jim Hoagland, Chris Dickey of
Newsweek
, and I had gone to North Africa in 1988 to take a closer look at the growth of fundamentalism there. We succeeded in a last-minute request to interview Qaddafi, who was in Algeria at the time with the leaders of that country and Tunisia, and we were flown to where the leaders were meeting and where we were to see Qaddafi. We were all startled to be told that he wanted to see me alone first, but I walked into our agreed-upon meeting place and Qaddafi received me in a small room, rising from
a leather chair to greet me politely. We exchanged small talk, and then he quickly led the discussion to Bob Woodward’s book on the CIA,
Veil
, which had just come out, and in which Bob had reported on the CIA’s having collected information about certain of Qaddafi’s proclivities, alleging that he had been known to wear makeup and high-heeled shoes and that his aides had bought a toy teddy bear for him. Qaddafi, like everyone else, was concerned about what had been written about him. What I particularly noticed was his eyes; they never stopped rolling around, looking everywhere but straight at you. He used an interpreter, but seemed to know a lot of English, and occasionally even corrected the interpreter’s attempt to soften his language.

My meeting with Qaddafi went on long enough so that Jim got edgy, and finally he and Chris decided to interrupt. When the interview was over, I asked if I could take Qaddafi’s picture. When he agreed, my camera inconveniently jammed. I was so frustrated that I gave it a powerful hit, and it somehow worked. I got a sufficiently good photo so that
Newsweek
used it in a story and gave me a credit as a free-lancer, as well as a check for $87.50, which I framed.