Personal History (35 page)

Two days after the sale of the
Post
to us was announced, when much of the family, including Phil and me, was at Mount Kisco, we received word that Cissy Patterson had died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-three. It seemed impossible that this colorful, dynamic, strong, but sad and lonely person was gone. She had been in increasingly poor health, and there were plenty of tales around town of drugs and other habits that increased the danger to her life, but still she was a Washington institution and seemed destined to be here always.

Most important for Phil and me as the new owners of the
Post
was what would happen to our competition, the ever-present, widely read
Washington Times-Herald
, which Cissy had owned, edited, and published. Speculation began right away. Rumors were rampant—Cissy’s more liberal and estranged daughter, Felicia, would inherit and revamp the paper, for example. But Cissy left the paper to seven of the
Times-Herald’s
executives, the principal ones of whom were the general manager, William Shelton, and editorial-page editor, Frank Waldrop, the operative figure, the closest to Cissy.

When Phil heard of Cissy’s death, he left Mount Kisco almost immediately to start talks with the seven heirs about their intentions. Because of estate-tax considerations, the inheritors felt they had only a year in which to decide whether to keep the paper and continue to operate it or to sell it. We all knew there were too many papers in Washington, and we also knew that only one of the morning papers was likely to survive. It was with this knowledge that Phil began to cultivate his relationships with Shelton and Waldrop. Their conversations continued throughout the year.

In any case, we—at thirty-three and thirty-one—were now the owners of the
Post
. The paper was then incorporated—my father would no longer pay its losses, which increased Phil’s already heavy obligation to make the paper viable. It was another of those crucial moments, another big step in the evolution of our lives. Overnight we became adults with a huge but exciting responsibility.

E
VEN RECOGNIZING
how far the paper had come from the wreck my father bought in 1933, what we owned in 1948 still looked pretty fragile. As Phil said, “We were sitting in a leaky boat. The paper … had practically no assets and had begun to repeat a familiar pre-war habit of losing money.” Our hold on the
Post
and its future was precarious.

The
Post’s
dilapidated, roach-ridden building was a fixture on E Street in downtown Washington. One
Post
reporter described the building as “faithful as Man O’ War but ancient feeling as Caesar’s bones.” The front steps opened into a dark, shabby, small vestibule, large enough for the bottom of a long flight of wooden stairs and the creaky, rickety elevator that people wisely avoided. The city room, located on the second floor, was a small town of constant activity. Clouds of smoke hung low over men, still in their hats, hunched over typewriters at their desks. Russ Wiggins, who had been in full charge of the news department since he had come in 1947, had done, as Phil said, “a most amazing job of developing our news coverage and news writing,” taking the paper to a much higher level—astounding, really, since he was on a rigidly tight budget.

Together, Phil and Russ created a national staff that was still thin but beginning to be professional—in great part because Russ’s standards of professionalism were high. Russ was once described by Phil as someone who “does not lose his Pollyannaish enthusiasm easily.” Early on, he was involved in a flap with Molly Thayer, a reporter who often used Washington social gatherings to pick up important news bits. Russ’s memo to Phil about her reaction to his changing her copy is typical of his attention to detail and concern for the facts:

It was in 1948 that Ben Bradlee came to the
Post
for the first time, and largely by chance. He had returned from the war and started a newspaper in New Hampshire, which did pretty well, but in the end, as with many such ventures, it folded, leaving Ben without a job. He had two reference letters introducing him to editors at major papers—one to the
Baltimore Sun
and one to the
Post
. When his train arrived at the Baltimore station, the weather was gray and depressing and so was the station. Ben took one look through the train’s window, said, “The hell with this,” and didn’t get out. The train rolled on to Washington, where he arrived at the
Post
and was eventually sent to Russ Wiggins. Before Ben was hired, Phil had to approve, since he oversaw every empty job slot in order to assess whether we should fill it at all and, if so, ensure that it was filled with the best. Ben was hired, and came on board at $80 a week.

Only three years later Ben went to Phil and said he’d like to be a Nieman Fellow, which meant going to Harvard for a year under a special program for journalists. To which Phil retorted, “Why? You’ve already been to Harvard.” Ben quit and took a job as information officer in the United States Embassy in Paris, but it was too stultifying for him, and soon he went to
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau.

In many ways, Phil was at his very best as a publisher in these years. He sparked ideas, praised and persuaded, criticized and cajoled. As he went about his more than full-time chores of administration and policy-making, he worried constantly about the difficulties that confronted him as owner and publisher. He was acutely aware of the dilemma that arose from the fact that “a newspaper must be a successful commercial enterprise in order to survive. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.” He believed that, “despite the difficulties involved, it is best for the publisher to have an ownership part in a paper, and not merely represent absentee ownership as a hired man”—now almost completely a thing of the past.

Phil was always trying to stimulate the press in general and the
Post
in particular to better performance. He insisted that newspapers should not “brush off our defects by blithely saying that people can cancel their subscriptions if they disagree, since in many cities there is no choice.…” He worried continually about basic news reporting and how to do a better job of bringing news to readers. In a speech he gave at the University of Michigan in December of 1948 he said:

On the advertising front, he was constantly writing advertisers like General Motors and Procter & Gamble about campaigns that broke in the
Star
or
Times-Herald
, explaining why they should have been in the
Post:
“We are especially equipped to sell Ivory for you—witness our first place in local grocery linage in the U.S. (only morning paper in a metropolitan city to have leadership).…”

Recognizing the difficulties in trying to change old habits but knowing the inherent cost-effectiveness of automation, Phil began the conversion of the
Post
’s accounting department to machine operation, installing IBM machines as early as 1946. And in an important move on the personnel front, the
Post
became a pioneer in the city on initiating a policy of hiring reporters on the basis of merit alone.

Phil often involved the
Post
in righting wrongs, as he saw them. Apparently, he had always had in mind the idea of a congressional investigation into organized crime. In May of 1949, he met with Senator Estes Kefauver, whom he thought of as “a decent man with a lot of guts,” to broach the idea of Kefauver’s taking on the chairmanship of a special crime committee to investigate the connection between organized crime and politicians around the country. After a second meeting, Kefauver declined the idea as lacking public interest—to which Phil exclaimed, “Jesus, Estes, don’t you want to be vice-president?” But after Phil ran a few front-page stories about crime, the senator expressed a fervent interest in getting started on the hearings that were to rocket him to fame and national recognition. When Kefauver eventually closed down the hearings, Phil said to him that he understood he was going to write an article for
Look
or
Life
, and he would appreciate it if Kefauver gave the
Post
credit for helping get the investigation started. To which Kefauver replied, “Well, Phil, old man, I’d be glad to do that, but tell me, just what did
The Washington Post
have to do with starting the investigation?”

Another wrong that Phil was willing to use the
Post
to right was segregation in Washington. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in the
Brown
v.
Board of Education
case, Washington was a highly segregated city. Phil’s entire childhood and adolescence had been spent, as he conceded, in the Southern tradition of white supremacy, and he was fully aware of the difficulties in bringing about the necessary change.

In his first, brief tenure at the
Post
, Ben Bradlee was deeply distressed by the side of Phil that used the paper to achieve his political purposes,
however worthy. In 1949, riots were taking place, as members of the leftist Progressive Party, which had fielded Henry Wallace as a candidate the year before, led black children to swim in Washington’s previously all-white public swimming pools. The violence grew steadily into pitched battles. In one case, there were two hundred whites arrayed against an equal number of blacks—with park police on horses in the middle. Ben, with another reporter, was on the site for thirty-six straight hours. Emotions ran high, including those of the reporters, who had witnessed the use of clubs with nails embedded in them and had seen several people sent off to hospitals as well as one woman trampled by a horse. The reporters returned to the
Post
to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. It didn’t even make the front page of the local news section; instead, it appeared buried in the paper, on page B-7. As Ben later remembered, “The whole thirty-six-hour adventure was called an ‘incident,’ and the word ‘race’ was never mentioned.”

In the process of blowing his stack, as only he could do, Ben felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around to find Phil, tuxedo-bedecked, who said, “Okay, buster, come with me,” and led the way to his office. Around the table in Phil’s office sat Secretary of the Interior Julius (Cap) Krug, Undersecretary Oscar Chapman, President Truman’s special adviser Clark Clifford, and two or three others. “Tell them what you just told me,” Phil ordered Ben, after which he asked Ben to leave. Phil then cut a deal. The story would run on the front page of the
Post
unless the people with the power to do something about it integrated the pools. They agreed, shutting down the pools in the middle of that hot summer but promising to reopen the following summer on an integrated basis, which they did.

This was a typical example of the way Phil used power, in this case the paper’s, to accomplish something good. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. It isn’t—and probably wasn’t even then—the way to run a newspaper. To keep a story out of the paper to achieve a purpose, even a fine one, is neither appropriate nor in the spirit of my father’s definition of the duty of a newspaper: “To try to tell the truth. To find it out and tell it. To have a competent editorial department to interpret that truth.”

F
ROM THE TIME
of Cissy Patterson’s sudden death in 1948 until the following summer, the most important activity in which Phil was involved was his unrelenting attempt to buy the
Times-Herald
. We believed that our lives—or, rather, the company’s life and the life of the
Post
—depended on our acquiring it. Others we knew who were interested included William Randolph Hearst, Jr., the ever-eager Samuel Newhouse, and the Scripps-Howard organization, which owned another one of our competitors, the
Washington Daily News
. Phil felt he had a real chance, because Cissy Patterson’s cousin, Colonel Robert McCormick, the editor and publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, showed no interest in the
Times-Herald
at the time, and it was worth more to us than to any of the others.

From the beginning, Bill Shelton, the
Times-Herald
’s general manager, agreed that we were the ones who ought to get it. But he also felt that Frank Waldrop, who had been closest to Cissy and was most loyal to her memory, was likely to be a “fly in the ointment”—how big a fly I never knew until recently. Waldrop had not only worked for Cissy Patterson but respected her—indeed, loved her. He felt he owed her everything, and he admired her “guts, the fact that she was really trying all the time, trying right up to the day she died.” Shelton and Phil, sometimes with Waldrop, held regular negotiations until summer, when the year of decision would be up. When the heirs decided to sell, Phil and my father made a secret written proposal to the seven executives, offering $4.5 million. In addition, my father put up another $1.05 million for the
Chicago Tribune
stock that was in Cissy’s estate, with the understanding that he would help the executors liquidate it—something Shelton and Waldrop had asked for—taking whatever Colonel McCormick didn’t want.

That summer we rented a house in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Phil commuted on the weekends, always tired and nervous over the negotiations on top of all his other work. I often would remove the children from the small house so he could sleep. I remember taking them outside on one cold, rainy Saturday for what I described to them hopefully as “a picnic breakfast”—just to make sure we wouldn’t wake him.