Personal History (65 page)

Yet, despite all my problems about the magazine, Miss Dutiful that I was, I went to New York early every Tuesday morning, stayed over Tuesday night, spent Wednesday at the
Newsweek
offices, and returned late that afternoon. This allowed me to attend the editorial meeting and conferences on the cover story for the week. I tried my best to learn what made the magazine work, but I often got quite depressed up there. I was constantly worried about perceived minor slights, or awkward encounters with people. I couldn’t tell which were valid worries and which were not.

It’s understandable that I was much more comfortable at the
Post
. Not only was it in my hometown, on my own turf, but at the
Post
were people who knew me and whom I knew, especially my dear friends Russ Wiggins and Al Friendly. I was no doubt more relaxed with the newspaper because what little work I had done had been on newspapers, and I had lived through a thirty-year history of having the paper in the family. But even at the
Post
my road was a bumpy one. The whole start of my working life was a process of nibbling around the edges, of trying to learn what made editorial and business function and how they fit together. It was a difficult and lonely process. I made endless unnecessary mistakes and died over them. There was nothing to do but feel my way. Gradually I put things into place and began to get used to an office routine, becoming adjusted to the presence of secretaries, to answering mail, to trying constantly to relate to people and learn from them or at least to accommodate myself to them, as they began to accommodate themselves to me. Some people at work were shy around me, wanting to keep me at a distance, while others wanted to guard their turf. Some welcomed my presence, but others viewed me as an ignorant intruder to whom they had to be patient and polite. Most company employees probably went quietly about their business, not bothering about me at all.

When people were hostile to my arrival on the scene, I took it personally. Some of the executives didn’t know how to deal with a woman in their midst—particularly a woman who controlled the company. I didn’t understand sexism or anything to do with it—nor, in fact, did many of the men with whom I worked. And I was encumbered by a deep feeling of uncertainty and inferiority and a need to please, to be liked. What people really want and need is rational, logical leadership, but when I had to decide
something, I asked the advice of everyone I could, often irritating those closest to me, who felt, understandably, that I should trust their judgment.

This seems to be what happened between me and John Sweeterman. Tension between us increased from the start, and I wasn’t brilliant at handling the situation, to say the least. I seemed to irritate John with all my questions. I may have been welcomed by the news-and-editorial side of the paper, but John and the business side didn’t know what to do with me. The feeling was mutual.

I knew it was John who was largely responsible for the paper’s success, through his strategies, business plans, and tight-fisted control of the company, which was necessary in those days. John held the purse strings and controlled the budget, so in effect he had his hand in almost everything. Bill Rogers, the company lawyer, always took John’s side when I was critical of him. Bill kept telling me that John was doing a fine job and that I should appreciate him. It was a message I failed to get at the time, but Bill was right.

What I see now is that John had been given complete authority by Phil, almost from the time of his arrival in 1950, and that Phil had backed him firmly and completely. His authority had expanded over the years, as Phil grew less involved in the day-to-day operation of the paper, and particularly as he grew ill. From 1961, when he had been made publisher, but especially since the onset of Phil’s more pronounced ups and downs, John had been the final decision-maker, consulting no one, conferring with few about his decisions. And here I came along, asking hundreds of questions—Why did he do this? Who was in charge of that? How was this being done? If John had accepted my questioning in the spirit in which it was intended—that I was trying to learn—he might have been able to take me in hand and teach me, and our relationship might have gone better. But he wasn’t used to women in business, and particularly one as ignorant as I was. He had a temper when crossed, and we had a few encounters that reduced me to tears and therefore made everything harder.

Yet, despite the strains with John, the
Post
and the company continued to grow. In the years since the purchase of the
Times-Herald
, the paper had in fact flourished, increasing the quantity and quality of news. By the time I went to work, its circulation had reached more than four hundred thousand daily and more than half a million on Sunday, well ahead of the
Star;
in advertising, we were now first in Washington. Our two television stations were starting to grow, too. John Hayes had run the stations in much the same way John Sweeterman ran the paper, having been given the same kind of authority by Phil, but Hayes was more open to me. Perhaps, too, because television was completely strange to me, I stayed out of that business more in the beginning, and therefore didn’t get into his hair as I did
with John Sweeterman. Also, the stations were doing better than the paper was and didn’t face the competitive or labor problems and crises that the
Post
did.

One persistent worry that began as soon as I went to work had to do with rumors that I wanted to sell. Naturally, right after Phil’s death there had been numerous offers to buy the whole company. Many people thought I would decide to sell it rather than go to work. Little did they realize that, having lived through the rebirth of the paper from its bankrupt McLean days, having stood by my father and my husband as they built it up with such zeal and devotion, I would never sell; it was unthinkable for me. But I was descended on by people trying to buy. Fritz had received some offers even while I was in Europe, one from CBS through Frank Stanton, which I rejected firmly. Perhaps I overreacted to these overtures. Instead of understanding that we had a desirable and vulnerable-looking property, I regarded the would-be buyers with outrage—more or less as vultures circling around my head, waiting for me, the helpless-seeming widow, to keel over. Because of my insecurity, I was unable to discuss anything to do with purchase offers coolly, and all these feelers had the unhappy effect of adding to my unease. I remember meeting Roy Thomson, the head of a huge Canadian newspaper conglomerate, sometime within the first six months of my being at the company. He took me by surprise by telling me of sending men to scour America to smell out media properties to buy. I actually recall quaking when he said, “There are lots of reasons why people will sell—a paper not doing well, an elderly owner without an heir, a widow.…”

The first real offer to buy the company was never formally delivered. It came from Times Mirror through John McCone, then head of the CIA and a friend of the Chandler family. McCone was with Scotty Reston in the back seat of a government limousine, and, knowing that Scotty was my friend and would carry the message to me, he told Scotty of Times Mirror’s interest in acquiring the
Post
. Scotty actually answered for me, saying that he knew I wasn’t interested in selling but would let me know of the inquiry. The next bidder—and the most persistent—was Sam Newhouse, who offered $100 million for the company. We turned this down emphatically, but Newhouse never took no for an answer and kept reappearing with better offers. Every time I shut one door, he would enter through another. He began to try to approach us through intermediaries, one of whom was Clark Clifford.

The last try during that early period was the most amazing. Four months after I went to work, Ted Sorensen came to lunch with me to explore the possibility of his working at the
Post
, the idea of which appealed to me: he had been a large power in the Kennedy White House and was obviously able. I very much wanted to think creatively on how to attract
Ted. We discussed jobs for him in administration, in editorial, and as a columnist. He was negative about everything until finally he came forward with what was actually on his mind: “The only job I really want is yours,” he said. “Why don’t you move over and let me run the company for you?” I was startled but managed to say that, if mine was the only job he wanted, there was nothing more to talk about.

A few months later, Ted called and asked if I was going to a particular party. When I said I was, he suggested picking me up before the party, because he had something to discuss. He arrived a little early, and we sat down in my library. Without much hesitation, Ted said, “I am empowered to offer you a hundred million for the
Post
alone. I would run it, and you can keep the rest.” I was truly nonplussed. I said, “Ted, is this from Newhouse?” After a brief moment of playing games, Ted said that it was, but the difference was that he would be running the
Post
. Newhouse then operated his papers extremely tightly, with small newsholes and large profit margins. I said, “You don’t really think Newhouse would let you run it, do you?” Ted insisted that he would, which was supposed to appeal to me. When I said I was surprised he would participate in such an offer, his response was, “I told you I wanted your job.” And in that jolly spirit, we left for the party.

This was the last offer of that kind, although there were several more feelers in later years for all or part of the company, and particularly for
Newsweek
—we must have rejected half a dozen such offers. Despite these adamant rejections, the rumors that
Newsweek
was for sale kept recurring in print and were damaging to morale there. At the end of my first working year, Andrew Heiskell, then one of the three heads of Time Inc., and an old friend, took me to lunch at “21,” where he hammered home the point: “What are you doing keeping
Newsweek?
You don’t know anything about the magazine business and you shouldn’t try to be here in New York.” Surprisingly, he didn’t really rattle me. I had the same fears he was expressing, but I felt confidence in Fritz, and things seemed to be moving along, not necessarily smoothly but at least in a positive direction. I told him that though I understood his point of view, I thought I’d stay.

My basic reason for hanging on to this admittedly precarious situation was the people on the magazine. It wasn’t a business-motivated decision; rather, I thought we had recently bought an institution, involving many people, and to turn around and sell the whole thing a few years later wasn’t right. I felt a strong loyalty to those people and to the organization, although I didn’t always feel it was reciprocated.

T
HERE WERE
a lot of firsts for me in those early months of my working life. I joined the board of Bowater Mersey as its first woman director. This
was my first business board other than being on the company’s, but it was to be followed by many others over the years. I also replaced Phil on the board of George Washington University.

I began to have lunches with others throughout the industry and gave my first dinner for a business friend, Otis Chandler, as a way of publicly showing a renewed commitment to our working relationship with the news service. Otis wrote me afterwards, thanking me for the “exquisite party,” and adding: “I know it was not easy for you.… At least the ice has been broken and things like this will come easier for you from now on.”

As part of getting better acquainted with the other divisions of the company, I visited our two television stations. In Jacksonville, I spent time with Glenn Marshall, who ran WJXT there. Glenn was an early enthusiast for cable television, which didn’t interest John Hayes, and I recall that, even on this first visit I made in my new role, he spoke about its importance for the future and the possibility of cable’s being the gateway to pay-TV. I was too new at my job to be able to participate usefully in the discussion, so we didn’t make the leap into cable at this early stage.

I started regularly attending
Post
editorial meetings and lunches, which proved to be the biggest help to me in comprehending what was going on in the outside world. I began to understand journalistic and political jargon, the language in which reporters and editors and government officials spoke. I remember one very early editorial lunch—when I was still painfully unsure of myself—at which our guest was Madame Nhu, the sinister, powerful sister-in-law of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. She was justly infamous for her role in that country and widely feared and disliked. This was the first lunch at which I asked a question, and I almost collapsed from worry as I summoned up my courage to ask it. I have no memory of what I actually asked, but I have a very vivid recollection of nearly dying afterwards from embarrassment and fear that I had looked stupid or ignorant.

I also distinctly recall my first lunch at the White House in my new role, a lunch in honor of President Tito of Yugoslavia. I took with me an election-projection poll, which I gave President Kennedy on my way out. He glanced at it, stuck it in his pocket, smiled at me, and said, “Oh, so that’s the way it’s going to be.”

I got a rapid introduction to another aspect of an owner’s or publisher’s job. In October 1963, I received a call from Mac Bundy from the White House saying that he was in the office with President Kennedy. They had gotten wind that Russ Wiggins was going to be critical of a trip that Jackie was proposing to take on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht—she was going off to recuperate from the birth and subsequent death of her baby, and the president had asked Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., to accompany her. Russ viewed it as a conflict of interest for Roosevelt to be a guest of Onassis,
since Roosevelt was undersecretary of commerce at the time and Onassis was doing business with him. I did tell Mac that I’d talk to Russ, but the editorial ran.

This was the first of many, many calls I have gotten over the years, which have given me a lot of experience in being the go-between between complainers, supplicants, and others of all kinds on the one hand and editors at the
Post
or
Newsweek
on the other. The editors are more often right than wrong, and Russ was clearly right this time. He stood by his position and criticized the trip editorially. The trip took place anyway, and life carried on.