Personal History (106 page)

At the same time, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board refused to issue a complaint filed by the union accusing us of delaying or stalling tactics and refusing to bargain in good faith.

Still, the tension was high. The pressmen’s wives started to write me. Christmas Eve—a day I never dreamed would find us still in this strike situation—was hard for all of us. Ben’s annual letter to me was especially
poignant and understanding. He acknowledged that he felt I would “never do anything more difficult.” He was so right. He also said that his own New Year’s wish was to have the “turmoil ended, so that we can return to our task of putting out the best paper in the world without compromise and without menace.” I think the strike was especially difficult on Ben. He himself admitted later, “I have never been comfortable in or with the labor movement.” Whereas I had been living through these months with people who were of one mind, he had had to live each day with people who were tormented by what they were doing in not supporting the union, reporters who had to be calmed and reassured constantly. I also recognized that what I was doing in trying to change the labor situation was something I had been working on for years, whereas for Ben the strike was nothing but a mammoth interruption of what he had been trying to do for the past decade.

In responding to Ben, I shared with him my view about how it would turn out: “I know it’s going to be good—better than you think from every point of view. I pray it’s over before too long but it would be fatal to try to push it faster than it can go.”

On New Year’s Eve, to my great distress and anger, the
Star
ran an open letter from a group called the “executive committee of the Committee for a Fair Settlement.” The letter urged round-the-clock bargaining to be mediated by the Federal Mediation Service, and if that failed, binding arbitration. It was endorsed by George Meany and signed by a hundred people, including many civic leaders and liberals, among them Reverend Walter Fauntroy; Monsignor George Higgins of the Catholic Conference; Leon Keyserling, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Reverend John Walker, bishop of the Washington National Cathedral; Senator Hubert Humphrey; and Representative John Brade-mas, who later wrote me that his name had been used without permission.

I believe that
all
the signers were being used, although many of them didn’t realize it. They thought the position was a neutral one: that we had won the strike but should now submit to an arbitrator what we had already won. They had little idea what the real issues were but had simply let themselves be duped by the union. In fact, the ad was paid for by the Newspaper Guild, which was made clear at a press conference the same day the ad appeared, called by the members of the committee that had placed the ad.

I sent letters to several of the signers whom I knew, including Hubert Humphrey, saying I was disappointed that they had let their names be used without at least asking to hear our side. Hubert wrote back immediately saying he had thought the open letter was nothing but an appeal to both the
Post
and the unions to try to settle the dispute and he still didn’t think it took sides. He added, however, “On second thought, it would
have been better if I had kept my nose out of the dispute.… It was one of those hasty decisions and, I suppose, one that I would have been much better off never to have made,” apologizing if it had caused me distress, which, indeed, it had.

I wrote John Walker, too, sending him a package that was being mailed throughout the Washington metropolitan area by a group called Post Unions United, containing a reprint of the ad along with a postcard addressed to the
Post
canceling a subscription and a prepaid subscription card addressed to the
Star
. There was hardly a need for fact-finding, I wrote, “nor is there any justification for arbitration of an issue that rightly belongs to the collective bargaining process.” Bishop Walker replied that he was profoundly disturbed by the subversion of the purposes of the open letter and that he was withdrawing his name from the committee.

My great friend Joe Rauh, who had also been a signer of the ad in the
Star
, contributed to my worries by coming to me to say that he feared my obstinacy vis-à-vis the union was effectively acting as “a wedge being driven between essential allies”—the liberal/labor coalition. We spent three hours one afternoon at my house while he argued the necessity of taking the pressmen’s union back and I tried to explain why that couldn’t happen.

My differences with Joe reflected one of the ironies of the pressmen’s strike. It was difficult to find myself being viewed as antilabor, and it was strange for me to find in my camp many people who normally would have been on the directly opposite side of the mat—and the reverse as well, with many of my friends taking a position contrary to mine. This strange switch was reflected in various situations throughout those long months of the strike. For example, Pat Buchanan—never one to support
The Washington Post
—wrote at the time that, although the company was a media cartel which ought to be broken up, and although the paper’s “editorial policies have encouraged the shift of economic power toward Big Labor,” “its fight with Local 6 is a fight it has to win.” He managed to add about the company: “It probably deserves what it gets.”

B
Y
J
ANUARY
6, 1976, we had hired 107 people as permanent replacements for the pressroom, with a white-nonwhite mix of about 50-50 and with almost 10 percent women. Beyond starting to train these new hires, the issue now was to get the other craft unions back. Not much progress was being made. The paper-handlers, though they had voted to return, were not yet back at work, because of a glitch with their international. A few individual craft-workers had returned on their own initiative, but the overwhelming majority of them were still on strike or were respecting the picket lines of the striking unions. And in mid-January, the local pressmen’s union filed a $20-million countersuit against
the
Post
, claiming the newspaper had conspired to “ultimately destroy the union entirely.”

Just a few days into the new year, the
Star
ran four articles on the strike, purporting to tell the full story—the story from management’s side, from the union’s side, and from the guild’s. In reply to a reader who had canceled the
Post
after reading the
Star
’s articles, I said, “I will ask the Circulation Department to stop your paper if you request, but if you are doing it as a result of reading the
Star
, this was the most outrageous, deliberate knife job any paper has done to another. I would cancel
The Post
myself if I depended on the
Star
article. I enclose my own view of the issues. If you still want your paper canceled, I will do so.”

The emotional stress of the entire strike and the losses on both sides were epitomized on February 10 when one of the pressmen, John Clauss, committed suicide. The Coordinating Committee of the Alliance for Labor and Community Action wired me immediately, saying, “You are responsible for the death of
Post
pressman John Clauss.”

I drafted a response that I never sent, perhaps because I was trying to be rational in what was an emotionally charged environment. I wanted to point out that the reason the news story that had appeared in the
Post
said John Clauss was afraid to cross the picket line was that that is what his suicide note had said. In the end I saw no point in responding to what I viewed as intemperate and unfounded accusations.

F
EBRUARY
15 was possibly the key moment in the denouement of the strike. The mailers finally voted—129 to 58—to accept a new contract, and reported for work the next night. On February 17, the
Post’s
chapel of the photoengravers’ union voted to accept our contract offer, and returned to work a few days later. The typographers, who were observing the picket line but were not on strike since they had a contract, came back
in with them. We were still negotiating with three groups: the engineers, who held out until March 1; the machinists, a majority of whom were back at work; and the building-services union.

At the end of February, Bob Kaiser, who had been covering the strike, wrote a long piece about everything that had taken place, which took over much of the “Outlook” section of the paper. Because it was a remarkably detached piece of reporting, it was widely applauded. I didn’t agree with all that Bob wrote, but I believe newspapers have to let themselves be written about and have to live with it.

Naturally, there had been a lot of press reaction to the strike during those long months. It ranged from very positive to the other extreme. One of the worst stories ran in the beginning, by Eliot Marshall in
The New Republic
. Marshall had been a classmate of my youngest son, Steve, at Harvard, and was about twenty-six at the time. I called him and said that some of what he’d said was demonstrably wrong and I could prove it. He said he was so sorry but he had it from an impeccable source—the
Star
—and every good wish. I did not call his publisher.

In January there had appeared in
Washington Monthly
one of the last in a series of outrageous press pieces about the strike, this one by an exnational editor of the
Post
, Ben Bagdikian, who since leaving the paper had made a cottage industry of criticizing us. His article was entitled “Maximizing Profits at the Washington Post.” I sent a copy to Don, with a note: “This literally takes my breath away it’s so insane—the conclusion being that newspapers need more Davises and Dugans.” I memoed Ben Bradlee separately, and intemperately, “I am really embarrassed to think this ignorant biased fool was ever national editor. Surely the worst asps in this world are the ones one has clasped to the bosom.”

The public got in on the act also, writing me and others at the
Post
with a range of opinion on the strike. Someone even wrote to ask: “Haven’t all you magnificent geniuses over there figgered out yet how to blame your press room sabotage on NIXON?”

By March 1, the strike was essentially over. We had had a difficult balancing act to manage, and in the end we had stayed on the tightrope and reached the other side. All the unions, with the exception of the pressmen, were back at work. When it was over, twenty-two pressmen (including supervisors) came back—as individuals—out of more than two hundred members of the union, and twenty-eight out of forty-three stereotypers returned. Some pressmen didn’t come back for philosophical reasons and loyalty to the union; some were no doubt afraid to. I know that one of the supervisors who did come back, Hoot Gibson, was frightened at first. When I asked him what he thought might happen, or what the union could do to him, he responded, in his slow, West Virginia drawl, “Anything, anything at all. Why, they could kill your dog or your horse.” Hoot
and I had a long talk the morning he returned—a talk on which I’ve never ceased to reflect—about what had brought us to this dreadful mess. Hoot recalled the early days of the
Post
, in the old E Street building, when “We all enjoyed our work and each other.” “We used to come in fifteen minutes early just to visit before we went to work,” he remembered. And he emphasized how much easier it was to relate to each other when the paper was smaller. It’s interesting that on one night we had twenty-three amateurs running the mailroom, and the very next night there were sixty-nine people manning the same equipment.

We handled the return to work very carefully, not pressing people who were slow to come back. We wanted to bind up wounds, not create more. We tried to welcome everyone back into the building. We tried not to gloat. Although there were many uncertainties at the
Post
, including the cost of buying out some of the printers and getting back some of the linage lost during the strike, we had begun to resume normal operations. Despite the three months of the strike at the end of the year, we had actually finished 1975 with an increased share of the Sunday field in Washington and with total
Post
linage down less than 2 percent.

We still had to come to work through what was an increasingly forlorn picket line, which was awful, and pressmen’s wives and children picketed my house in Georgetown every Sunday for months, so I had to drive in and out past their sad line, which bothered me more than anyone will ever know. The picket line at the
Post
wasn’t called off until May of 1977.

The pressmen kept resolutely harassing us. They had picketed the opening of the movie
All the President’s Men
. And in July 1976, when I spoke at a bicentennial program at the Washington Monument, pressmen hidden in the audience emerged hooting and yelling and drowned me out. I made a few attempts to keep going, realized they were futile, and suggested we all join hands and sing “God Bless America,” which had been scheduled for the conclusion; this we did. It was, of course, somewhat nerve-racking to have them suddenly appear from the dark night, and I left as soon as I could.

In June, there was one sign of vindication for the actions we had taken. Superior Court Judge Leonard Braman issued a “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” in response to a five-day hearing on our request for a permanent injunction against Local 6. The judge came down hard on the union, saying essentially that in the case of Local 6 the First Amendment’s freedom of speech by picketing had gone “beyond the pale of protected communication, and coercion has been mingled with speech.”