Personal History (101 page)

Contracts with nine of the craft unions—including the pressmen, who by now had combined with the stereotypers—were all scheduled to run out on October 1, 1975. We approached that date fully expecting a tough time and long negotiations. What we got was the unexpected.

V
ERY EARLY IN
the morning of October 1, 1975, I was awakened out of a sound sleep by the loud ringing of the phone next to my bed. Groggily I looked at the clock as I reached for the phone, and was mystified. It was about 4:45 a.m. What could it mean? We had feared the midnight deadline when the contracts between
The Washington Post
and its unions were set to expire; in fact, I’d been so worried that I had returned early to Washington from meetings in Florida. I phoned Mark Meagher when I got back: Should I come to the paper? No, he replied, everything was quiet; all the executives would be there in case anything happened; there was every indication that the negotiations would continue beyond the deadline. So I went to bed thinking that, if midnight came and went with no problem, both sides would carry on with the back-and-forth bargaining.

My phone call was from Mark. The pressmen had “Pearl Harbored” us, running the presses past midnight to throw us off about their intentions, and then, at about 4:00 a.m., just before the end of the pressrun, disabling all seventy-two printing units of the nine presses. Having done severe damage in a variety of ways—including setting fire to one press and brutally beating the pressroom foreman, Jim Hover, who had come out of his office to see what was slowing the presses—the pressmen, Local 6 of the Newspaper and Graphic Communications Union, walked out, taking with them the other craft unions, and started picketing.

There was no time to think. I dressed hastily, jumped in the car without waking my driver, who lived nearby, and drove myself down quiet, dark Massachusetts Avenue to 15th Street. When I rounded the corner to the
Post’s
building, I witnessed a frightening sight: the street was ablaze with lights and action, with fire engines, police, television cameras, and hundreds of pickets massed around the building.

A policeman stood in the middle of the street blocking traffic from entering. I pulled up, explained who I was, and said that I needed to go in but
hesitated to drive alone into the parking lot next door to the building. “Leave the car right there,” he told me. “I’ll watch it.” I pulled over, got out, and began walking down the middle of the street, where the picketers saw me coming. For a moment I was worried that they would try to prevent me from entering or, worse, hurt me, but I suppose I assumed they would not hurt a woman—which later turned out not to be the case. As it was, I put my head down and plowed through the picket line into the side entrance.

Once inside, I experienced a sort of reverse drama—a quiet, empty, dark building with no one in sight. Almost all of the executives and managers had gone home at about 2:00 a.m., when everything seemed quiet, and when Larry Wallace had reported that negotiations would continue. Mark had called them to come back in, but they were upstairs conferring.

I went downstairs to look at the deserted pressroom; what I saw shocked and saddened me. Clearly there had been a riot of sorts. A foot of water covered the floor. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Ben later described the place as looking like “the engine room in a burned-out ship’s hulk.” I don’t remember seeing a soul in the entire area, maybe a remaining fireman or two. It was eerie, standing there looking at the damage.

I went up to the seventh floor, where I found Mark and the assembling executives. Mark explained to us what had happened. When the previous night’s negotiating session had ended at about 9:30, Dugan had handed Wallace a letter saying that his men were terminating the contract but were willing to continue to work under its terms “only as long as meaningful negotiations continue.” Because a federal mediator had scheduled more negotiations, and because Larry had had conversations with several union representatives to the effect that the other unions were willing to forgo scheduled negotiating sessions with the company for a few days while the negotiations with the pressmen continued, both he and Mark had assumed that those negotiations would carry on. The first Mark knew that this was not to be was when Jim Hover, bleeding profusely from a head wound, walked into his office.

Our gathering in Mark’s office soon after 5:00 a.m. that first day was the beginning of what turned into several months of high drama and intense challenge. I never wanted a strike and had definitively told Mark and our managers to avoid one if possible. And once it began, I agreed with Mark, who said at the very beginning, “We don’t want this strike to last one second longer than is necessary.” However, none of the preparations we had made for publishing in case of a brief strike (which was the most we feared) had included the possibility of trouble such as had occurred. We were stunned by having the presses so badly damaged—electrical wiring had been ripped out, essential operating parts removed, oil drained out to strip the gears, and newsprint rolls slashed—and by having almost all the craft unions in the building out on strike together.

The first thing we had to deal with was the reporters who started to come in to work, unaware of what had taken place. We set up tours of the pressroom for anyone who had come into the building through the picket lines. These tours were Ben’s idea. Once he saw how extensive the destruction was and how premeditated it had been—for example, fire extinguishers tampered with, and fires then set—he was convinced that the reporters needed to see for themselves what had happened, to get the facts, so that they could make an informed choice. Most of these Newspaper Guild members were as shocked as the rest of us. That afternoon they held a boisterous meeting at which many of them criticized the damage and violence. Brian Flores and the rest of the paid hierarchy of the guild strongly urged them to support the pressmen and denied that much damage had occurred. The guild, however, in a voice vote, voted overwhelmingly against a motion to honor the picket line—except for the very small union representing those who worked in building services, the guild was the only one of the
Post’s
unions to cross the picket line. Some guild members decided to honor it, but most stayed in. The great majority of them were troubled and torn, but they were at work, for which we were grateful—although we knew that their presence was tenuous and might grow more so as time passed.

The battle of public relations started immediately. Luckily, we had hired Ted Van Dyk to take care of our PR in case of trouble, so we were able quickly to release a statement explaining what had happened and then to keep up a steady beat of bulletins throughout the strike, explaining the position of the
Post
’s management and the rationale for our actions. The pressmen’s union put forth its own public-relations effort, accusing the
Post
of being responsible for the frustration of its members. Their party line was that the
Post
was outrageously trying to eliminate important clauses negotiated in previous contracts.

T
HE FIRST FEW
days of the strike were particularly wild, punctuated by court procedures and attempts on our part to get organized. October 1 was taken up with
ad hoc
planning. All but about fifty thousand copies of Wednesday’s issue of the
Post
had been printed, and those were distributed. While we were assessing the extent of the damage and whether the worst-hit presses were permanently ruined, we announced that there would be no paper the next day and had no guess as to when we would be able to resume publication, but Mark added that the editorial staff was going about its normal work and that we intended to publish soon, “somehow, somewhere.”

One of our first concerns was the personal safety of those who were working and would be daily crossing the picket line. This worry led us to
seek a temporary restraining order that would restrict the pickets from violent acts, in part by limiting the number of pickets who could be outside the building in any given period. We managed to get a court order about twenty-four hours after the initial violence, but despite this a smoke bomb was thrown through a window in our photo studio, and there was indiscriminate swinging at people going in and out of the building. Kathy Sawyer, a reporter, was struck on the head with a chunk of wood, and Vee Curtis, a circulation manager, got punched. Unfortunately for the union, so did Maurice Cullinane, D.C.’s chief of police, who was coming into the building in civilian dress. The police made more than twenty arrests, most of them for disorderly conduct, but one of someone carrying a gun.

At the same time that we were addressing safety concerns, we moved quickly to make sure we could publish as soon as possible. Someone had previously been in touch with several small nonunion suburban papers about printing parts of the paper in the event of a strike. By 7 a.m., we were already on the phone to these papers to see what could be done.

On the morning of October 2, Mark and I went to see Joe Allbritton to propose the idea that the
Star
print the
Post
on its presses, which would, of course, have resulted in that paper’s being shut down, too, in solidarity with us. Knowing that Joe had refused to negotiate with us in the first place, I realized that he probably wouldn’t agree, but I felt I had to try. As I assumed would happen, he refused to help us.

Meanwhile, at the
Post
, Roger Parkinson, one of Mark’s young assistants, a Harvard M.B.A. newly arrived from
Newsweek
, got to work trying to find a way to move the pages—
if we
could set them—from our building to the outside small plants for printing. Having been in a Green Beret unit in Vietnam, Roger thought of helicopters and had the wit to look under “H” in the Yellow Pages, where he found a company willing to contract for the flights. Then he turned his attention to where the helicopters might land. The parking lot was dismissed as being too close to the picketers; the roof was chosen as being safer. Immediately, John Tancill, one of the
Post’s
old guard, who was in charge of the building, said it was impossible—the roof wouldn’t hold the weight.

When it was decided that Tancill could be proved wrong only by a test landing on the roof, Roger swung into action, checking first with the District police, who gave us permission, and then with the White House, because of regulations forbidding flights near it. Permission was granted, though with the stipulation that since Emperor Hirohito was in town we couldn’t fly south of K Street, just one block away from our building, which would take us too close to the White House. Then the State Department had to be called, because the Embassy of the Soviet Union was right behind the
Post’s
building. State said that we couldn’t do it, to which we responded that we had to. At one point, the pressmen went to the Federal Aviation Administration
to try to stop the helicopters. I argued our case to Bill Coleman, then secretary of transportation, and the FAA stuck with us.

Once all the pieces were in place, we flew in a test helicopter. John Waits of Production ran up the stairs to the roof with the film that first night and handed it to Roger, who in turn handed it over to the pilot. We all cheered as the helicopter took off. I was on the roof, watching in amazement, and in my great excitement, realizing this would work, I hugged everyone in sight. From then on, I held my breath each time a helicopter came in or took off. I wasn’t the only one frightened by the risks involved. In the early days, when we needed electricians and engineers to help us repair the presses, at least one man said that crossing the picket line was less frightening for him than being helicoptered into the building via the roof.

W
E HAD MISSED
one day of publishing the
Post
and didn’t intend to miss any more. We had identified six plants that agreed to print the
Post
. Don, pale with fury, appeared in my office later on that second day, the very day that I had gone to see Allbritton, to say that not only was the
Star
not going to help us, but it was going to publish the name of one of the plants that would be printing our paper—almost an invitation to the picketers to start beating up people there as well. I called Joe immediately and suggested that if this was so it might get someone killed. Joe replied that he was unaware this was happening and asked who could possibly be doing it. I exploded, “I don’t know, Joe, but if you can’t find out who in your goddamn paper is doing it, I can’t help you.” This was an unneeded outburst of temper, but we were all very tense. The
Star
didn’t print the name of the paper at that time; some of the plants that helped us actually revealed the fact themselves.

Working out helicopter landing sites at each of the small plants was highly complicated. Sometimes there was only a football field lit with the headlights of cars. At the other end of the process, the circulation department had to work out inconceivably complicated routes to pick up the papers at each of the plants for delivery back to Washington and its surrounding suburbs. Because different papers’ production centers would get tired—they were printing their own paper as well as parts of ours—some would give up or take a break, which meant that each day our planners had to start virtually from scratch, replanning landing sites and delivery schedules.

Despite all the logistic difficulties, on October 3, with only one day of not publishing, the
Post
printed and distributed to our readers—late but nevertheless there—a limited, twenty-four-page edition of five hundred thousand that had been printed in the six small plants ringing the Washington area. It was a halting beginning, but a real and significant triumph.

Knowing that we couldn’t ask these plants to print their own paper
and
ours indefinitely, we set to work to try to get our presses up and running again. To complicate matters further, the Goss Company, which made the presses we owned, was on strike, so parts were hard to obtain. I personally called the international president of the machinists’ union, who was in San Francisco, where the AFL-CIO was having a national meeting, and asked him to let union machinists fix our presses. I pleaded with him that we had to fix the presses and told him that we hoped to stay with union labor but that, if the union machinists couldn’t come into the building, we would have to bring in others. He remained adamant, so other newspapers—mostly nonunion, but a few union—lent us machinists, particularly electricians and engineers, to begin to repair the damage.