Personal History (110 page)

Sixteen persons were appointed to the commission, four of whom were former or current heads of government: Ted Heath from Great Britain, Pierre Mendès-France from France, Olof Palme from Sweden, and Chile’s Eduardo Frei. Nine of the sixteen representatives were from the developing countries. Two of us—Peter Peterson, my old friend from the Nixon administration, and I—were from the United States. It was perfectly clear that I was a token woman from the North, counterbalanced later by the addition of a Malaysian businesswoman, Khatijah Ahmad.

The first of our meetings took place in December of 1977 at Gymnich Castle near Bonn. For me, it was like plunging into another world, one where people spoke peculiar languages, in all of which they tossed around strange acronyms while bantering about meetings and reports from the past, United Nations subdivisions, and the functions of the Bank and the IMF. Since we sat alphabetically, it was only natural that several twosomes developed. My friendship with Ted Heath—my “G” to his “H”—grew over the two years of our seat assignments.

For most of that first meeting—indeed, for most of the first year—I said little or nothing, too intimidated by the unfamiliar issues and the experts around me. Gradually, through the meals, the walks, the informal gatherings over tea or drinks, the atmosphere began to change. And in certain areas, things were warming up a little faster than I realized. One of the most radical of the Third Worlders, a famous ladies’ man, surprised me by inviting me to his room. I thanked him for the compliment but said I followed an old adage, “Never where you work.” He replied that he heeded another one, “Never say never.” The atmosphere had certainly grown more friendly.

As the time for the final meeting drew near, none of us could see how we were possibly going to produce a report; the commission seemed to consist of prima donnas who rarely agreed on anything. But our chairman was clearly determined to push through a report at the final meeting. During an exasperating afternoon session, Brandt, beet-red and breathing heavily, blew his top, made a final statement, and withdrew completely, depressed at our lack of progress. The remaining commissioners decided that Shridath (Sonny) Ramphal of Guyana from the South and Ted Heath from the North should work with Michael Hoffman, Brandt’s aide, on the final draft. We met one more time and, led by Ted, worked our way through comments on all the sections. By great good luck, Ted later recalled, Brandt was delayed in arriving in England, and Ted seized the moment to force decisions and get the report accepted.

What effect did it have? Quite a lot in certain European countries; very little, if any, in the United States. We had arrived at a negotiated consensus. There were things in the report to which all of us took exception, but you had to sign it or not, and we all did. In the end, the report turned out to be exactly what it was designed not to be, with the various commissioners basically representing their states or constituencies.

I spoke to Ben about the report before it was released, saying that, though I knew this kind of thing didn’t much interest him, I thought it mattered and hoped he would make sure it got the kind of news play it deserved. Ben’s attention span was not always perfect, but I was positively disbelieving when I located the story of the commission’s report on page 25 of the
Post
. Even
The New York Times
had put it on page 3. I was so angry I was absolutely unable to speak to Ben for twenty-four hours lest I explode. He had simply forgotten.

I suppose I did contribute something by imploring the editors of
Newsweek
to focus on the issues—in fact, urging them to do a cover story on the Third World. I knew it wouldn’t be a thriller but thought it was something we owed our readers. After considerable foot-dragging,
Newsweek
finally did a cover story, some time shortly after the Brandt Report was issued. To the not-so-secret satisfaction of the editors, it was the worst-selling issue of the year.

D
URING THIS PERIOD
, while I was still publisher of the paper, more of my energy was going to The Washington Post Company than to
The Washington Post
itself. I had been thinking for quite a while about turning the paper over to Don, but was struggling with several questions: When was the transition best for Don? When was it best for me? When was it best for the
Post?

Toward the end of 1978, when I had been publisher in title for nearly
ten years and in essence for some years before that, I decided the time was ripe. I was enough detached as a parent to know that Don was ready; he has always been more mature than his years—always hardworking, conscientious, decent, bright, and able. And I needed to concentrate on the chairman and chief-executive-officer aspects of the company, which were growing more and more demanding. At the same time, I had come to the conclusion that there had to be a change in the editorial page. I couldn’t solve Phil Geyelin’s problems for him, and the situation had grown difficult for everyone. I thought that Phil should retire and that Meg should become editor, and I knew Don agreed, but for two reasons I didn’t want to be the one to make the change. First, Meg was my friend, and I worried that such a move on my part—in essence, promoting my friend—might be perceived negatively. More important, I had learned when I began to work and made my own first major move—bringing Ben to the
Post
—that there was a completely different relationship with the people you put in place as contrasted with the people you inherited from your predecessor. I didn’t want Don to inherit my editor, even if it was someone on whom we agreed; I felt strongly that he ought to have the opportunity to name his own editor.

So I decided to act at the beginning of the following year. On January 10, 1979, at a routine expanded staff meeting, I turned over the title of publisher of the
Post
to Don. Having made my announcement, I went on to answer publicly some of the questions I had been wrestling with privately: what would it mean and why now. “To the question of why now, the answer, in fact, is easy. It is because Don is ready and I am ready. Actually, I suspect Don was ready before I was,” I told the staff. Don, with his usual grace, responded, “My mother has given me everything but an easy act to follow.”

My father, Phil, my son, and I all had in common a love of the newspaper business. But Don is also very different from the other three of us. To begin with, he was far more qualified in experience and temperament than we were at the time each of us took over. He had edited both the
St. Albans News
and the
Harvard Crimson
. Newspapering clearly was where his interests lay. When he was in Vietnam, we had written each other about his future on the
Post
. By then he had decided to put off coming to the paper in order to learn more about the world. He strongly believed that you couldn’t “be a good newspaperman if you’ve done nothing but work for newspapers all your life.”

Besides Phil, others whom he respected had suggested to him that doing many different things and having many different experiences was the best possible preparation for any job. Don had particularly learned from John Gardner, and from Scotty Reston, who told him that he thought “the important thing was that no one should be able to say to someone ‘You just
don’t understand my situation.’ ” He wrote me in December 1967, “Instinctively, I see that once I start working for
The Post
, I won’t ever work for anyone else again. And there is a hell of a lot I want to do before then.”

Don began, after Vietnam, by becoming a policeman in the District of Columbia. The
Post
’s much-loved, longtime reporter on the police beat, Al Lewis, came to see me when he heard the news, saying, “I can stop this. It’s way too dangerous. We don’t want him running around doing that.” In some ways, I didn’t want it either—it
was
dangerous and it worried me—but I also knew that it was what Don wanted and that he had good reasons for choosing to do it. Oddly, he seemed to grow up noticeably more in the time he spent in the police department than in the previous two years in the army. I asked him why that was so and he responded, “Oh, that’s easy. In the army you just do as you’re told all day long, while on the police force you’re constantly having to make your own decisions in difficult circumstances on the spot.”

Don started at the
Post
as a metro reporter beginning in January 1971. He then moved through various jobs in a number of departments, from being a general clerk in accounting to assistant home-delivery manager in circulation, from promotion clerk to outside sales representative in classified and retail advertising, from assistant production manager to
Newsweek
’s Los Angeles bureau.

In the fall of 1974, Ben Bradlee had a problem with the sports department: two managers were battling with each other and the section clearly was feeling the effects. Without telling me, Ben resolved the problem by offering the job of sports editor to Don. I had counted on furthering Don’s training program by getting him more involved on the business side of the company and was somewhat irritated with Ben for resolving his problem at my expense, but I also saw it as a great mid-career management job for Don. Because it combined his passion for the editorial side of the business with his love of sports, I could hardly frustrate him by not agreeing. So I acceded to the move on condition that Don go in and out in a year and that he replace himself, which he did brilliantly with George Solomon.

In his year at the helm of sports, Don worked harder than anyone I’d ever seen. I once found him at his desk at three in the morning and asked him why he was there. His response was that, since he’d done a stint in production, he knew exactly how many late scores it was possible to send down to the composing room between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., and still get the paper out on time.

When his year in Sports was up, Don became assistant general manager, and it was from that vantage point that he was so helpful to me and so instrumental to the paper during the pressmen’s strike. I knew then that he was more than ready to take over as publisher. The relationship between
him and me might have been immensely difficult, but we have both worked to make it smooth. It’s difficult to have a parent for your boss; to have that parent be your mother is even harder. Don deserves the major share of the credit for making our professional relationship a happy one.

Once he was publisher, Don named Meg to succeed Phil Geyelin as the editorial-page editor, with all the expectable stresses and strains. She reinvigorated the page and ever since has edited it and the op-ed page, and written her column for the
Post
and
Newsweek
, with great distinction.

Though I had always known Don would one day become publisher, what I hadn’t foreseen is that it would be so hard for me to give it up. But the move was an enormous emotional wrench, which I had to steel myself to endure because I knew it was right. “Publisher of the
Post”
is a title I would miss. I loved being directly involved with the paper and was intensely emotionally attached to it. The early years of participation with my father and Phil in the struggle to survive and my own dramatic years as publisher had left me with an immeasurable and immutable love for the
Post
, but I wasn’t going to hang on too long just because I enjoyed it all so much.

So I had withdrawal pangs, but I left with a more-than-full-time and challenging job as head of the company—chairman and chief executive officer, responsible for the growth, soundness, and economic health of a half-billion-dollar company with five thousand employees and about two thousand shareholders.

B
Y THE FALL
of 1979, the company was doing pretty well from a financial point of view—there had been a slight run-up in the stock—but as always there were problems, including the ongoing difficulties at the
Trenton Times
and
Inside Sports
and an earnings decline. I was feeling less than confident about my ability to turn any of this around. Warren and I were driving down to Glen Welby for the weekend when, as tactfully and gently as he could, he broke the news to me that Bill Ruane and Sandy Gottesman, close friends of his and investors who had bought a lot of
Post
stock for themselves and for their clients, were going to sell tens of millions of dollars’ worth of it. Ruane managed the Sequoia Fund, and Gottesman was a managing partner at the First Manhattan Company, and these groups were about to sell all or half of their Post stock.

Warren had pondered how best to deliver this news, and he tried sugar-coating it in every way he could. I have to admit that my immediate response was to burst into tears. Here were these terribly clever investors, reputed to have such great judgment, who no longer believed in us; others surely would be leaving in droves. I considered their move a referendum on my management of the company, and it was clear I was found wanting.

Warren did his desperate best to console me, explaining that Bill considered
he had done so well on Post stock that it added up to too much of some of his portfolios. He was keeping his own stock. “You don’t know Wall Street,” Warren tried to reassure me. “People don’t think in a long-term way there. When your stock reaches $100, Wall Street will buy it.” Naturally, I thought he was just trying to make me feel better; it was absurd to think that the stock would ever reach $100. I was not consoled.

Warren, of course, had a totally different perspective from mine on what Bill and Sandy were doing. He viewed it as an enormous plus in the lifetime of the company, almost like the
Times-Herald
merger. Though he knew I’d be profoundly distressed by the idea, he realized right away how much the company would benefit in future profits by their selling their stock. He tried to convince me that we should be holding a party, adding, “Don’t worry. We’ll just buy what they sell. It will be good for us and they’ll regret it.” Although I didn’t stop worrying, we did buy in the stock at an average price of $21.91, which Sandy and Bill had bought before two splits at an equivalent price of $6.50.