Personal History (97 page)

During these negotiations, we were having trouble responding to various demands for paid leaves, four-day weeks, vacations, and so on which were on the table. What followed was complex and interesting and by no means easy, despite the lighter moments. We sat for long hours in a smoke-filled room—both Fritz and Paul smoked cigars continually. Finally, because we felt that the city room was not hearing the management side of the story, we decided to enlist the help of the top editors to write a statement that could be presented to the guild stating our position. We tapped Ben and Howard, Phil Geyelin and Meg, all of whom were known
to possess great authority on the news and editorial floor, as well as some knowledge of what might be the management side. We also asked them because they were our friends.

The four of them agreed, and retreated to a bar in the nearby PickLee Hotel, an old-fashioned and favorite watering hole called the Old Corral. There they wrote a statement on long yellow paper, literally saturated with martinis as they labored over it, plus what Meg described as some “boilerplate stuff.” The three men then asked her to type it all up, which—this being pre-liberation—she did. Single-file, they then came into the board room, where several of us were gathered, trying to work on our problems. I looked up as they filed in and could see instantly that they were all four totally plastered. As Meg remembers, I got a huge grin on my face and said, “Meg’s drunk.” She said the others were coming in behind her and burst out laughing, at which I said, “Jesus, they’re
all
drunk.” Phil Geyelin got terribly indignant and tried to sober up quickly. He handed the statement to me. I began reading it, stopped right away, thanked them for their effort, and sent them on their way.

Ben always hated contract time. The inevitable tensions and altercations often tore the city room apart and interfered with his plans for progress. Since he was focused on pushing the paper forward, he tended to get impatient with the business side, seeing these periods of tension as roadblocks to progress and the source of ill-will in the city room. When management became determined to turn things around, the leaders of the guild tried to drive a wedge between Ben and the business side of the paper. For too long my sympathies were with the editors, with whom I had always related more easily than with the business executives. As time went on and I understood the problems better, I saw that the editors had to learn to become managers, which in our earlier burst of growth they had not been asked to be and, indeed, weren’t.

The only nonunion area of the
Post
was the circulation-delivery organization. There, Phil, Harry Gladstein, and Jack Patterson under him had installed distributors who handled different areas of the town and suburbs and who made more money by selling more papers. There had been repeated efforts to organize the dealers, but these had so far been successfully warded off, though there was constant background noise from a nucleus of dissident dealers trying to organize the others.

One thing I knew was that the life and future of the
Post
depended on fending off a circulation union. I knew that, in case of a strike, if we were ever able to get to the point of printing without the craft unions, we could not succeed if we had no way to distribute the paper. We knew that at the
Star
, where the Teamsters had organized the delivery trucks, incentives for carrying and distributing additional papers had been eliminated, which, of course, frustrated attempts to grow the
Star
’s circulation.

We fought hard against unionization of the dealers, but it was difficult in the face of increasing slowdowns from the printers. The dealers suffered greatly because of the lateness of papers. I frequently went out to the alley late at night and stood there talking with and listening to them while they waited for the papers. Mostly, I let them dump on me as a way of letting them know that I cared. I remember one middle-of-the-night vigil when one of the men I knew and liked, who was driving furiously out of the alley, stuck his head out of the window of his truck and said, “Well, if it isn’t the Mother Superior. Come here, dear.” He let me have a good piece of his mind.

F
ROM THE COMPOSING
room to the pressroom, the
Post
was entirely out of control. After John Sweeterman left, we didn’t have the strength and know-how to address labor problems at the top. Complicating things was the fact that all the Washington newspapers used to negotiate together. In dealing with the unions, John Prescott and his
Star
counterpart, Bin Lewis, had met with the union leaders and laid out the situation frankly—our costs were too high and we were headed for trouble. Bin was a decent and able man, a member of the
Star’s
enormous family, and he shrewdly let John do all the talking, so the
Post
became the focus of union hatred and attacks, leaving the
Star
less vulnerable. Prescott, Larry Wallace, and Jim Cooper were constantly harassed, or, in Jim’s case, tormented by silence, since the union labeled him a “notorious strikebreaker” and fined people who spoke to him, although this silent treatment was lifted some months later, after Cooper had improved conditions in the stereotype department.

I was beside myself with worry. Night after night, the questions were: how could we get tomorrow’s paper out, and how late would it be? Costs were escalating, profits diminishing, and at the same time a large part of the work force was deeply dissatisfied and hostile. Knowing we had to begin to manage, to regain control of our own production departments, I tried to consult various people about what to do. I met with Sam Kagel, my old friend from my San Francisco days, whose business it was to negotiate for unions. I also invited a labor economist from Harvard, Professor John Dunlop, to come down and meet with us to assess our situation and help develop some long-run strategy. Dunlop suggested setting up ongoing discussion groups to talk about issues of concern and interest to both sides on a continuing basis, so that when contract negotiations began, anger over secondary issues would not impinge on the bargaining of the moment. He also suggested the need for better communication generally, so I invited all the union heads to lunch with us to discuss peripheral issues—the new building, for instance.

Many theories were propounded by the so-called experts I consulted, but the basic truth was that we didn’t have the thing that matters most: competent, alert managers who know what they are doing. Without that necessary ingredient, we weren’t going to make much progress. While working toward improved management, I decided—with John Prescott—that we had to begin to prepare to publish in case of a strike by the production departments of the paper. Accordingly, as early as 1972 we set in motion a plan to train nonunion
Post
personnel to run certain equipment necessary to print the paper. This was not unprecedented, having been done by several other newspapers. What we were trying to do was gain some sort of parity at the bargaining table by being able to print the paper without union labor—in effect, to take a strike if we had to.

John Prescott, Ken Johnson—a young night editor who had crossed over into production—and I from the
Post
, and Jack Kauffmann and Bin Lewis of the
Star
, agreed: each paper should be prepared to publish in the fall of 1973 if a strike proved unavoidable. John then planned and implemented a training program, with Ken Johnson’s help. He set up an “emergency-procedure committee” that met weekly in 1973, and sometimes twice a week. We sent several people to the training center in Oklahoma City, SPPI, where Jim Cooper had once worked. We rented a large space in suburban Washington, where we set up a course in production training.

All of this was by way of learning to walk before we could run, and it was all background to what was to happen that fall. As we entered the time of year when advertising traditionally grew to its heaviest, meaning larger papers, we also headed into the time for the usual disasters, when there were more opportunities for the composing room or the pressroom or the mailroom to hold up the papers to harass management. Slowdowns grew even more common, which meant that our distributors were waiting three and four unpaid hours, our carriers were quitting, complaints were pouring in from subscribers—and the printers and pressmen were seen flaunting their overtime paychecks in the faces of the dealers.

We had been trying to negotiate a contract with the printers, who had been slowing down more than ever. After Larry Wallace arrived, our negotiations with the ITU took on a new and firmer tone. John Prescott had recently issued a letter threatening disciplinary action, including discharges and firings, for anyone caught in a work slowdown or obstructing the printing of the paper. Things got increasingly tense and confrontational after that letter. It wasn’t easy to prove a slowdown, but one of the supervisors finally did. A printer named Michael Padilla was “marking up” an ad. When, after eight hours of work, there were only two marks on his copy, he was fired. Padilla was not one of the usual troublemakers but an experienced printer who was normally okay.

This action on our part triggered a major confrontation with the
union. The other printers refused to work but stayed in the composing room until the next two shifts arrived. We were then faced with a milling mass of printers, hundreds strong, none working—in fact, refusing to work until Padilla was rehired. Federal marshals were called in to evict them. Everyone left at that point in a wildcat strike, except twelve printers who were promptly arrested and held in contempt.

I was in San Francisco at a meeting when all this started but flew right home. Faced with what we considered an illegal work stoppage, we felt we had no choice but to try to produce a paper. We decided to put our “emergency procedures” to the test and to attempt to print without the unions, using our newly trained executives and exempt people.

We were all there at the
Post
on the night of November 4. It was a dramatic moment, with rumors of printers and pressmen carrying guns. Coincidentally, Warren Buffett and his wife, Susie, were right across the street from the paper, staying in the Madison Hotel, having come to town for their close-up look at The Washington Post Company and for a dinner in their honor at my house the next night. They were looking out their window all night at the commotion, the lights, and the television cameras. It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning for this new stockholder to observe what was happening at
The Washington Post
.

Inside the building, we set to work, Jim Cooper and Ken Johnson in the lead, and, to all of our relief, we got through the complicated process of creating a newspaper, ending up with a forty-page photocomposed paper. As we were getting ready to print, Dugan and the other union heads were meeting. Dugan kept calling John Prescott, asking when he was going to run the presses and asking for more time, saying, “Maybe I can work on these guys.” At a certain point, Prescott and Wallace were invited to meet with the unions in the Statler Hotel. This could have been when John first started waffling, because when those two returned Jim and Ken came to me and said, “John is thinking of pulling back. If he does he’ll break our hearts.”

The trucks were waiting patiently in the alley, so I went to John and said as firmly as I could that he was on the end of a diving board and had to go ahead and dive. Finally, John gave Dugan the hour when we would start the presses, and we carried on successfully until a self-imposed disaster ensued. In the course of walking around the building, John met Dugan and his pressmen at the back door of the
Post
. Dugan had kept careful track of our progress inside and knew we had prepared the presses and were ready to run them.

“What are you doing here?” John asked.

“Well, these are our presses,” said Dugan. “If anybody’s going to run the presses, we’re going to run them. We want to come in.”

Dugan persuaded John that the union couldn’t stand the idea of
strangers running “their” presses and that the men wanted to come back in to run them. John believed him and let the pressmen in. They invaded the pressroom, screaming and yelling about scabs. The terrified people—executives and advertising salesmen who had been working the presses—naturally fled at the sight of the tough pressmen, who immediately sat down and refused to let anyone run the presses. They slashed a lot of the blankets that surround the rollers on the presses and tore out all the webs, stopping the whole night’s work.

John sadly said to Dugan, “You told me you were in here to operate these presses.”

“Well, I lied,” was Dugan’s simple response.

They had us. Our whole evening’s efforts were lost. In effect, we had to surrender, with only a slight face-saver. We agreed to reinstate Padilla with just a letter of reprimand in his file. Earnie Smith, our tough, devoted composing-room foreman, burst into tears when told he had to take Padilla back. In return, the pressmen eventually ran off a hundred thousand or so of the nonunion-printed paper, after the stereotypers had scratched out the first paragraph in the story describing our achievement and what we had accomplished.

We had made a serious mistake in letting the pressmen back into the pressroom, but, amazingly, they had printed a paper totally prepared by nonunion labor and cold type. The wildcat strike had taught both the unions and management quite a bit. Nevertheless, when the printers came back to work, they resumed slowdowns and production disruptions.

I went home that morning at about six, tired and depressed, and only then did I remember that I had forty people coming to a black-tie dinner that night at my house for the Buffetts. Since I had been up all night I thought of canceling, but it seemed easier to go ahead with it. Warren still recalls his introduction to Washington life, sitting between Barbara Bush and Jane Muskie.

We had scheduled a lunch at the
Post
the next day so that Warren could meet with various people on both the business and editorial sides of the paper. There was some talk of acquisitions, and someone mentioned the problem of amortization of goodwill being a disadvantage in a company like ours, because of its accounting impact. Howard Simons, always a delightful but mischievous goad, looked at me and said, “Now, Katharine, how does that amortization of goodwill work?” The conversation stopped for a second, Warren recalled, and “I could see this look on your face like he’d asked you to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity with several corollaries. Here was my chance to be a hero. So I jumped in and explained in a fairly succinct way how it worked.” When Warren finished his explanation, I looked at Howard and said, “Exactly.”