Personal History (12 page)

The auction was held on the steps of the
Post
’s gray gingerbread building at E Street on Pennsylvania Avenue on June 1, 1933, just a few weeks after my father had ostensibly retired. Gathered there on the steps of the building that day, among others, were Ned McLean’s estranged wife, Evalyn, dressed in black and wearing the Hope diamond; her two sons; her
friend Alice Longworth; David Bruce, then Andrew Mellon’s son-in-law; the
Washington Star’s
president, Victor Kauffmann, and its business manager, Fleming Newbold; and representatives for the McLeans, Hearst, and other bidders. All that was being sold at auction was what was left of the fifth of five newspapers in town: a circulation reduced to fifty thousand, the quaint, run-down old building, and an AP franchise—in short, a decrepit paper with debts of $600,000.

Mrs. McLean’s attorney and Hearst’s lawyers, urged on by Cissy, were the only bidders who stayed with Hamilton’s bids initially, but Mrs. McLean dropped out of the bidding at $600,000. Hearst’s people kept pace with Hamilton’s bids until the price reached $800,000. Hamilton, as instructed, went to $825,000. Hearst must have instructed his bidders to stop at $800,000, because they then dropped out. Cissy Patterson begged the auctioneer to delay the award so that she could telephone Hearst for his authority to go higher. She received three delays, but then Hamilton threatened to withdraw his bid. Hearst, who was no doubt cash-poor in 1933, finally refused to go on. The gavel came down to Hamilton, acting on behalf of an anonymous bidder. My father had bought
The Washington Post
—for which he had five years earlier offered $5 million—for $825,000.

W
HAT IS MOST
amazing to me about the purchase of the
Post
—especially given its importance to my future life and that of my family—is that I knew nothing about it. No one in my family had mentioned it to me either before or even immediately after, nor were they aware they hadn’t told me about it.

At the time of the auction, I had just finished my junior year at Madeira and was still there, preparing to take college boards. Nancy White roomed next door to me. She was the daughter of Tom White, the general manager of all of Hearst’s enterprises—his right-hand man, in effect—and also a close friend (some said lover) of Cissy Patterson. Nancy and I, naturally curious because of her father’s interests in journalism and my father’s years of public service, discussed the auction and speculated on the anonymous purchaser of the paper. When I finished my college boards, I went home to Mount Kisco, where the family had already settled for the summer. As we were sitting on the porch, my mother mentioned something to my father about “when you take over the
Post,”
and so remote in my mind was the possibility that he might have been the anonymous buyer that I asked in all innocence what she was talking about. “Oh, darling,” she said, “didn’t anyone tell you? Dad has bought the Post.” “No,” I said, “as a matter of fact, no one did.”

Shortly after I discovered the secret purchase, it was announced publicly. The delay between the purchase date and the date of revelation of its
new owner was necessary so that the courts could approve the sale. My father had agreed to a ten-day delay by the court, at the end of which Charles Evans Hughes, then a lawyer for Evalyn McLean, sought to reopen the bidding. When the receiver reported that the anonymous bidder was ready to pay cash, the court finalized the sale to my father, which was announced in a box on the front page of the
Post
on June 13, 1933.

The first time I was ever in
The Washington Post’s
building was a day or two after that, when my brother Bill and I traveled from Mount Kisco to Washington with my father and were taken on a tour through the building at night by what must have been some very nervous individuals. There was a skeleton staff that had remained through the difficult last days of the McLean era—a few fine people who had kept the paper going and some others who had nowhere else to go.

Much of the reaction—at least what appeared in print—to the announcement of the new owner was favorable. Privately, however, there were doubts, which lingered on for years, both about the possibility of the
Post’s
being a nonpartisan paper and about whether the number-five paper in town, run by an inexperienced publisher, would ever make it. On the latter point, Gardner Cowles, one of the most able independent publishers in the country, warned my father that Washington was an afternoon-newspaper town, with the government workers getting to their jobs early and home by four-thirty. He said no morning paper, especially the
Post
, would ever amount to anything. The
Star
had the town by the throat. To Cowles, my father rather piously responded: “The Capital of this great nation deserves a good paper. I believe in the American people. They can be relied on to do the right thing when they know the facts. I am going to give them the unbiased truth. When an idea is right, nothing can stop it.”

As to whether the paper would or could be nonpartisan with a Republican owner like Eugene Meyer, my father emphasized from the start that the
Post
would be independent. Even in the announcement about his ownership, there were several key statements that proved to be the underpinnings of Eugene Meyer’s
Post
. It was his aim to improve the paper, and he would do so by making it an independent voice. He explained that, in purchasing the
Post
, he had acted in his own behalf and without persuasion from “any person, group or organization.” Although many people did not quite believe this at the time, it was true, and he was trying to assure the public that the
Post
would not be a toy: it would not be the voice of the Republican Party, and it would not be used to fight Franklin Roosevelt (although it later did, to some extent).

From the beginning, my father was excited. The challenge seemed to have rejuvenated him. Morale at the paper improved immediately after he reversed the 10-percent pay cut that had been imposed by the receivers
and told the employees they could all keep their jobs if they just “made good.” Then he looked around and very quickly began to face the stark reality of the wreck he had acquired—a paper with a reduced number of pages that had lost most of its good people, a paper with drastically diminished circulation and advertising, and one that had been operating without knowing whether the presses would run the next day. On the very day he was announced as the owner, the paper was only eighteen pages, with a total of nineteen columns of display ads and less than two pages of classified ads. As my father said, it was a paper that was “mentally, morally, physically and in every other way bankrupt.”

At the outset, in attempting to reorganize the paper, he had rather naïvely felt that since he had been a success at business and government he could apply what he had learned to the realm of journalism. Though he didn’t understand newspapers, he thought he could turn this one around simply by investing heavily and running it better. Instead, there followed years of struggle and discouragement and investment with only minimal success. He learned some expensive lessons. The going-in price was just the beginning of the financial drain and mental strain that went on for most of the next twenty years, and there were many moments during these years of uphill battle when he had his doubts about whether he could ever succeed. He would moan to us and even talk about selling it, although never, I think, seriously.

One of those moments and one of his roughest experiences came almost at once. His erstwhile friend Cissy Patterson, having been disappointed at losing her golden opportunity, now taught him a lesson in cutthroat competition which led to a spectacular brawl between the two of them. Cissy swiped the
Post
’s comics by getting her cousin Bertie McCormick to switch them to her. McCormick not only ran the
Chicago Tribune
but owned one of the most powerful syndicates that sold features to newspapers nationwide, and Cissy herself was a shareholder in his
Tribune
. She had the syndicate inform my father that the sale of the
Post
voided the contract for four of the most popular comics—“Andy Gump,” “Dick Tracy,” “Gasoline Alley,” and “Winnie Winkle.” The comics would go to the
Herald
, and Cissy proudly advertised the shift.

My father had never read comics and asked the
Post
’s business manager, A. D. Marks, whether they were important. Marks was deeply shocked at this amateur’s lack of understanding about what attracted circulation. Comics were all-important to circulation—then even more than now—and indeed were the best and most important asset the paper had, he assured the new owner, who promptly sued Cissy.

Cissy then phoned him, saying that her brother, Joe Patterson, had created these comics, and that her relationship to McCormick and Patterson
somehow gave her the right to them. When my father pointed out that he now owned the rights in Washington, she responded, “This means a fight.”

And it did. For two years the legal battle of the funny pages was waged, ending the long, close friendship between Cissy and my parents. My father first won a temporary restraining order in New York that prohibited the
Herald
from publishing the comics, but this order was later dissolved, and for a while both papers were printing them. Then she won and the
Post
filed against the syndicate that distributed the comics, winning the case against the
Chicago Tribune
in New York in July of 1934, when a judge ruled that the
Post
was the legal owner of the rights. The case against the
Herald
was heard in Washington, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia came to the same conclusion in March 1935. Cissy took the case to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. On April 10, 1935, victory was his.

When the final decree came down forbidding Cissy to print the comics in the
Herald
, she asked my father’s permission to print the ones scheduled for the following Sunday, since the color comics were printed in advance and she already had them. So intense had the bitterness grown that my father gave his approval on the condition that she give the
Post
credit and note that henceforth the comics would appear only in the
Post
. Not only did Cissy refuse, naturally, but not long after, in retaliation, she sent my father an ornately wrapped florist’s box inside which orchids surrounded a smaller package that contained a piece of raw meat; Cissy had written a card to drive home the point about the pound of flesh—“So as not to disappoint you.” This unpleasantly loaded reference to Shylock shows how brutal the fight had become. From then on, she kept goading him and the
Post
in every possible way. If the
Post
made a mistake, she exploited it. Finally, my father called her and said, “Cissy, if you don’t stop lying about me, I’m going to start telling the truth about you.”

Twenty-two months after the end of the lawsuit, she got the comics anyway, when the contract for the
Post
finally expired. She and my father didn’t speak again for years, except once when they were both asked to dinner by Mrs. Sumner Welles, the wife of the undersecretary of state, a lady unconscious of strains in relationships. My friend Luvie Pearson, who was there, later told me that they sat down together and talked most of the night.

All the while the intense fight over the comics was going on, my father was hard at work trying to improve the paper and to make it financially solvent. He soon realized that the newspaper business was like no other business he knew—you couldn’t use ordinary techniques for improving a business and then look for results. He had very little idea of
what could be done to make the paper a financial success, particularly since there were so many papers in Washington.

What he did have was a well-developed philosophy, which he spelled out in an early editorial, in 1934, and in several speeches over the next few years. He felt a newspaper was a public trust, meant to serve the public in a democracy. My father wanted a paper that would advance beyond what it had achieved even in its heyday and “take a leadership which could be achieved only by exceptional quality.” In one address, on March 5, 1935, he spoke about the principles that he insisted on from the beginning, outlining them as follows:

1. That the first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained;
   
2. That the newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world;
   
3. That as a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman;
   
4. That what it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old;
   
5. That the newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owner;
   
6. That in the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifice of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good;
   
7. That the newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
   

These principles were the heart and soul of his convictions, but how to translate them into action was the challenge. The first thing he worked on was the people needed to undertake the daunting task of turning the paper around. To begin with, he didn’t know who the good people were, or how to find them. When he did find good people—some newsmen he’d heard about or others he had scouted out—it was almost impossible to persuade them to come to work for what looked like a failing newspaper. In addition, the professionals continued to be unsure about my father’s motives. His statements to the contrary, many went on believing that he was there to run a Republican paper, or at least use the
Post
to set right the Roosevelt administration. My father always claimed that the competing papers in Washington kept circulating rumors that added to the uncertainty and difficulty of acquiring a first-class staff.