Personal History (98 page)

I think this was the real beginning of my knowing how much Warren
would mean to me. After lunch he and I spent an hour together, during which he offered to stop buying our stock because he perceived it was worrying me. He described his “bite” of the company as “baby teeth,” but added, “If they look like wolf’s fangs, I’ll take them out.” I didn’t even know how to respond—and after some little time, I agreed I would like that. Charlie Munger, Warren’s partner, had suggested he wait one more visit, but Warren was anxious not to appear as a threat, particularly since he was hoping for an invitation to join our board.

Warren wrote me a few days after the lunch, saying, “When you can obtain total participation by talented and intellectually diverse people without diluting authority—and at the same time enjoy yourself immensely—you are achieving something.” With the note he sent me a box of candy from See’s, another company he owned, and a memo on amortization of goodwill.

D
ESPITE OUR DEFEAT
in the wildcat strike, which disturbed me considerably, the results were not all negative. We had finally started to address the nagging problem of the slowdowns, and we had built up our confidence about our ability to print without the unions. We knew—and they knew—that we could print. We also ran stories saying exactly what had happened, showing a new candor with our readers and the unions. Still, it remained a defeat. The unions had won a considerable victory in getting Padilla reinstated and in preventing our running the presses. Very significantly for the future, Dugan, with some reason, saw himself as the hero of the occasion and got the idea that his power was very great—that he could call the shots—because he was responsible for defeating our effort to publish. The lesson seemed to be that, if kicked hard enough, we would give in—a dangerous lesson. Dugan never stopped testing us, testing me. Later, we ran a story on unions that he considered unacceptable and he called me to say that his men wouldn’t run the presses. I told Jim there was only one editor of the paper, and it was Ben Bradlee, and he’d better print what Ben edited. I must say it ended there.

The aftereffects of the twelve printers being arrested and charged for staying in the building also caused a lot of grief. There were bumper stickers all over town: “Save the Washington Post 12.” I responded at great length to all of the letters I received, many of which implied that we were embarked on some sort of irrational war and that we were “uncaring.” One of the printers piously suggested that we were equating money with success. I wrote him an indignant reply:

As the months wore on into 1974, I was besieged by angry advertisers on the one hand and unhappy, petulant union members on the other. When we put out the company’s 1973 annual report, I sent a letter to all
Post
employees saying 1974 was a pivotal year for the company and that we had “to turn the tide and begin to increase our profit margins.” Some of the employees wrote me that they found my letter offensive. In a speech to security analysts, I mentioned a goal of around 15-percent profitability as the norm for the paper to get back to—not a particularly lofty goal, especially since other companies routinely had profit margins of 20 percent or more. The unions called this greedy, and people in the city room, most of whom had little idea about business or profits in those days, posted caricatures of me as Justice with scales on one side weighted down with gold. Meanwhile, the printers continued their slowdowns, and in late March they rejected, by a vote of 740 to 18, our contract offer: guaranteed lifetime jobs in return for freedom to automate.

The guild, too, was beginning to boil up over its impending contract negotiations. We had had some disastrous negotiations with it, some of which had little to do with the specifics of any labor contract and more to do with grievances of minorities and women on the staff and with feelings of insecurity among young reporters as they competed for space in the paper and attention from their editors. Both sides approached the early-April contract deadline with trepidation. Brian Flores had been enraged by Larry Wallace’s firm but patient method of negotiating, something he’d never encountered before. Basically, Larry had said, “We’ll give you an economic package of $35 a week, and you decide if you want it in wages or benefits.” Flores responded, “We will not be ‘packaged.’ ” When we made our final proposal, which was both generous and fair at a time of wage and price controls and high inflation, the guild’s bargaining committee didn’t communicate our offer—including a cost-of-living increase—to its membership. Since Brian had the strike vote in hand, he simply called the strike.

I was in Detroit giving a speech when the guild struck. I got back that evening. We decided to go on publishing, again using news executives and guild-exempt people, this time doing the writing and editing. The crafts all stayed in and performed their duties—however reluctantly, and, in the case of the still-negotiating printers, with worse attitudes than ever.

Quite unorthodoxly, the guild stated that it would not put up a picket
line, which its leaders felt would protect the craft unions from our publishing the paper without them. Bob Levey, then head of the
Post
’s guild unit, said that “the ‘absence of [editorial] excellence would be so noticeable’ that it would ultimately become an economic sanction itself.” I believe that the real reason the guild omitted the picket line was the fear that they would then have to stay out until the typographers settled, and this might cause a much longer strike for them.

But the guild had pulled all its members out of the building—about nine hundred employees walked out. For the duration of the strike, we—including the editors and others who were guild-exempt by reason of their jobs—filled the paper with wire-service copy and photographs, and we all wrote whatever we could. Since “Style” was the place where wire-service copy was the least available, even I wrote two stories that went in. One was about the Iranian ambassador’s sister, Homa Homayoun, who was a member of Parliament. I interviewed her and pecked the story out on my typewriter. Then Meg and I together interviewed Nancy Kissinger, Henry’s new bride, who had just come to town. We sat talking with her on my back terrace, and afterwards, as we started to write up our piece, neither of us could remember what she had worn, in order to describe it. Ben needed our copy quickly and came up to my office and began grabbing pages from Meg’s typewriter and rushing us on. We did manage to finish it in time, and it appeared on the front page of “Style.”

We all filled in in other capacities, too. The work for the exempt executives and their staffs was hard and intense and long. I spent some days taking complaints in the circulation phone room. Together with Ben, Howard, Meg, Liz Hylton, my longtime assistant, and some others, I learned to take classified ads and spent hours at it—a skill that became even more useful the following year. We were stunned at what hard work it was, with no letup. You took an ad and hung up, and the light was already on with a new caller. Electric typewriters were then used to fill in the complicated classified forms, but since my typing wasn’t up to speed, I took the ads by hand and gave them to someone else to type. I tried to avoid the callers who had long, complicated ads—used-car dealers calling in to advertise several cars, for example. But one day toward the end of the strike, I got a Mercedes dealer on the phone, and everyone else was busy, so I had no choice. I told him, “Look, I’m new around here, so please go slow.” We struggled through his list of six cars for sale and then he said doubtfully, “I think you’d better read it back.” “All right,” I said, and reread the ad swiftly and accurately. “Well,” he said, “you sound overqualified. You could be anyone. You could be Katharine Graham.” I was startled for a second before I replied, “As a matter of fact, I am.” I later met the dealer in person, and we laughingly recalled that odd moment.

During one of our long mornings in Classified, I heard Ben ask Meg,
“When is it piss time around here?” After a pause, she replied, “I don’t know. I think Wednesday.”

I remember taking an ad at 9 a.m. one day from someone calling in with a pony for sale for $100. Lally’s girls loved riding and occasionally came to the farm, so I called Lally and said, “I’ve just taken an ad for a pony for sale. Should I buy it?” “Mummy,” Lally exclaimed, “have you gone mad? Where are you? What are you
doing?”

Despite our amateur standing, we weren’t all that bad at ad-taking. Phil Foisie, the foreign editor, was overheard taking one in Japanese. One of Warren Buffett’s associates and friends, Bill Ruane, came down during the strike to look over the company to determine whether he, too, would invest in the
Post
. He wrote me after his visit:

For every lighter moment in the strike, however, there was an equally dark one. In the composing room, the hostility to editors turned physical. Men there dropped large pans of metal behind the editors to make them jump and flipped the lead so it hit them on the head, all the while inserting type excruciatingly slowly while constantly looking up to ask, “What next?,” using crude language in the hopes of shocking women editors. They would also replace type, so instead of “Staff Writer” a byline might read “Washington Post Staff Rat.”

After two weeks of grinding work, we were all really tired. I believe there were only seventeen guild-exempt editors at the time. The paper was being put together by them and a few other exempt but not regular writers or editors, replacing the eight hundred guild members who were out and who luckily were getting tired of sitting at home unpaid. There had been a lot of talk by the guild reporters about “removing their excellence.” Unfortunately for them—and for me, who cared so deeply about editorial importance and quality—their excellence was remarkably unmissed. During the guild strike, a majority of
Post
readers, according to a
Star
survey, said there was no change in the paper. Of those who noticed a change, a majority thought the
Post
was better! Despite some of the inferior material and wire-service copy with which we necessarily filled the paper, many people didn’t realize the paper was on strike at all, a rude awakening for both the guild and us. The guild had genuinely thought we couldn’t get the paper out without them, but we proved that we could, and
we did. Editorially we had produced a paper each day—without the guild’s “excellence,” but a perfectly acceptable paper nevertheless. The Sunday paper on the day the strikers came back to work turned out to have the
Post’s
largest classified section ever.

The guild had sent out a letter from its chairman saying to hang tough: “Many members are saying they don’t understand why the ‘good old Washington Post …—and particularly Mrs. Graham—doesn’t move to make us a fair offer. The answer is that the GOWP doesn’t exist any more.” He went on to urge them to ask their friends and neighbors to cancel their subscriptions to the
Post
. The guild leaders also sent letters to advertisers accusing us of being politically liberal while not providing “decent wages, hours and working conditions.”

To counter this kind of propaganda, we sent our offer directly to the guild members’ homes so that we could be assured that they and their spouses would know what it was we were offering. When people read it, they were furious with Flores for saying that there was no cost-of-living increase. Negotiations were resumed after the offer was sent out. Finally, on April 24, after an intense all-night bargaining session, the guild accepted—by a vote of 347 to 229—a contract not substantially different from our original offer, and agreed to return to work the next day.

We were all exhausted but happy to have the strike over and the guild returning. Every afternoon around six throughout the strike, there had been a gathering in my office for a drink before dinner, which we were serving on the ninth floor of the
Post
. As the news of this opportunity had spread, the numbers of drinkers had grown, so there was a huge gathering of relieved people on the night of the guild vote to return. Before I knew it, we had all formed a big circle in the outer office. Lou Limber, one of the great advertising executives, was Greek, and he led us in a pathetic version of the dance from the movie
Never on Sunday
, with Lou and me in the center of the circle—I with a handkerchief grasped tightly between my teeth. Knowing we had to put out one more paper, most of us finally repaired to the dining room, though a few stayed behind and carried on drinking. In the middle of dinner, Mary Lou Beatty, national editor, approached me hesitantly and said, “Mrs. Graham, I’m sorry to tell you that Buddy Humphries fell straight over into your ficus tree, which exists no more.” The evening was well worth the sacrifice of the ficus tree, and Bud is still an excellent ad salesman.

Certainly there were those who resented Prescott and Wallace—and me—and the drive to make the paper profitable. Many of the young guild members were just beginning to mature at that time and had little comprehension of either management or business. To a lot of them there was something dirty about profits and something greedy about those seeking
profits. They had no idea of what was needed to maintain and grow a business healthy enough to pay their substantial salaries and benefits. This attitude, encouraged by the union leaders, distressed me profoundly. What I myself saw as the underpinnings of the strike was that people were being well paid but poorly managed and poorly communicated with.