Personal History (13 page)

The search was on for staff people for the editorial-and-news side of
the paper as well as for the business side. People of uneven quality were hired; others were brought in for advice or appraisal. Management problems at the
Post
vexed him from the beginning. As general manager to oversee everything except the editorial page, he hired Eugene MacLean, from the
San Francisco News
, who lasted about two years. He recognized that although MacLean was a superior reporter, he did nothing to build up good people in the organization. He saw him as lazy, a drunkard, and a womanizer. I myself was quite surprised during one of MacLean’s visits to Mount Kisco when, during the course of an earnest conversation about newspapers, he suddenly grabbed me—a seventeen-year-old—and kissed me. I told nobody about this.

My father knew nothing about advertising, but after one false start he hired a first-class business executive, Don Bernard, whom he had found at the
Knoxville Banner
and who eventually helped him bring order to the chaotic business side. Editorially, too, the dark preceded the dawn, for my father soon found Alexander F. Jones—Casey, as he was known—who appeared on the scene in November 1935 as the
Post’s
new managing editor. Casey was just what the
Post
needed. He came from the blood-and-guts school of journalism, and was a fine, solid, slam-bang, hard-news, straight-ahead editor, perfect for a transition period. He brought substantial professionalism and journalistic standards to the job, as well as technical knowledge and expertise in newspaper management and production. Together, Casey Jones and my father went on a hiring spree, in some cases paying high salaries out of line with the times, and brought on many people who became important to the future of the paper. Recognizing the significance of a paper in the nation’s capital, they began to assemble a separate staff of national-news writers to give full coverage to government news, particularly the affairs of the federal government. From the beginning, my father also had seen the importance of the local aspect of the paper, particularly in light of the strange way in which the city was governed.

In sports, my father had the benefit of a holdover from the old McLean regime, Shirley Povich, a brilliant sportswriter and editor hired in 1921 by Ned McLean, for whom he had once caddied in Maine. After a sensational career of more than seventy years, Povich still goes into the office frequently, and occasionally writes for the paper. Povich later told the story of another area—like the comics—about which my father was an innocent. In 1934, when the Senators, the local baseball team, were finishing a disastrous seventh in the American League, my father, thinking the team was supposed to win the pennant every year, as they had in 1933, asked him what was wrong with the ball club. “Pitching, no pitching, Mr. Meyer,” Povich told him. “Tell me, maybe it would be good for
The Washington Post
, how much does it cost to buy a pitcher?” my father innocently
inquired. He had already grown to realize the importance of sports to newspaper readership.

In those days, the people in Washington often found out what was happening at the ballpark by watching the big scoreboard in front of the
Post
’s E Street building, where the scores were posted in chalk. Occasionally my father himself carried the scores from the telegraph man to the man at the scoreboard. Once, when Goose Goslin hit a home run to win a big game, he asked that the scores not be posted until he could get there and see the pleasure of the large crowds that always gathered to watch.

Understanding the limits of syndicated material and the extent to which it caused newspapers to lose their individual character, my father was determined that the
Post
attempt to be as original as it could. One area he focused on was the women’s pages, building them up under a highly intelligent editor, Malvina Lindsay, who also wrote a column, “The Gentler Sex.” He thought the
Post’s
material for women was dreary, and began to create a staff of writers, as he said, “who would write for Washington women, among Washington women, and about the interests of Washington women.” Even within a year of his purchase of the paper, he considered this revitalization of the women’s pages to be one of the
Post
’s most successful accomplishments.

Unusually for the times, he hired women for those pages and gave them prominent roles on the paper. His interest in psychiatry and mental health led him to look for a psychiatrist to write an advice column for people with problems. When he couldn’t lure a psychiatrist to the task, he selected Elizabeth Young, a staff reporter on the women’s pages, to write it, and had her work overseen by a psychiatrist for the first few months. Young, who wrote under the name Mary Haworth, was so capable that her column became one of the most popular features on the paper, receiving more than twenty thousand letters a year seeking advice. It’s hard to convey how groundbreaking and successful this column was, but it was eventually syndicated and read by twenty million people.

Another successful initiative of his was introducing the publication of reader opinion polls. Dr. George Gallup was just starting his American Institute of Public Opinion, and his polls weren’t taken very seriously. Ever the logical thinker, and having always put a premium on the importance of research, my father signed the first contract with Gallup and ran his polls on the front page.

Most important, what he worked on from the very start of his ownership was developing the editorial page. He believed that the editorial page as a force in American life had dwindled in power and prestige and felt that a rejuvenated page on the
Post
would make the paper—that a good editorial page was more important in the nation’s capital than anywhere else in the country. He tried always to instill in the editors the importance
of avoiding emotional, vindictive, or partisan voices. And he vowed never to subscribe blindly to a government policy simply because it was a government policy, not to submit to domination by officialdom, and to avoid the “subtle influence of mob psychology.” He had his own philosophy in place, but the challenge was to find a really distinguished editorial-page editor, one who shared his ideals and his aspirations.

After making several efforts to hire high-profile writers from other papers, he began to look for a “vigorous, unlabeled young man” and settled on Felix Morley, who arrived at the
Post
in December 1933. Morley had been a Rhodes Scholar and a research fellow at the London School of Economics. He had also been an editorial writer and a foreign correspondent for the
Baltimore Sun
and was the author of a book on the League of Nations. The brother of novelist Christopher Morley, Felix was very bright, literate, and a Quaker. Again, my father started a tradition—carried on to this day by the publisher of the
Post
—by making an arrangement with Morley that he would never be asked to write something with which he disagreed. The two men agreed that in case of a showdown the publisher reserved the right to have his view prevail, and their relationship evolved into a collegial one and remained so until their strong disagreements prior to America’s entry into World War II, when Morley’s pacifist views made him more of an isolationist.

The important thing was the establishment of an independent voice on the paper, which was its first distinguishing characteristic. Morley quickly began to make his mark on the page and on the paper. A
Fortune
article from 1944 that took a retrospective look at the
Post
said that “with his arrival the
Post
’s editorial page at once began to acquire insight, vigor, and prestige.” Morley himself started another tradition that has prevailed—that of editorialists doing some of their own reporting, as well as talking to the reporters who were working on stories and to outside sources, carefully researching both sides of an issue before forming an opinion.

As he and Casey had done for news, my father and Morley began to build an outstanding editorial staff. They hired a brilliant economic and financial writer, Anna Youngman, who had been a professor at Wellesley and was on the research staff at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. She wore her gray hair clipped short like a man’s and was a bundle of hard-headed, honest rectitude. Morley held on to an invaluable asset from the McLean regime in Merlo J. Pusey, who had arrived in 1928 and remained for thirty-eight years. Until he retired, he was a sage, somewhat conservative, and steadying influence on the paper, in the process winning the 1936 Pulitzer Prize—the
Post’s
first—for editorial writing. (Eventually he was to write my father’s biography.)

Even my mother tried her hand at editorials. She sent one to Morley in October 1935, saying, “If my first efforts are too inexperienced, pray
put them aside until I can write things in such shape that you can use them without too many changes. The medium is new to me and makes me rather self-conscious”—not self-conscious enough not to attempt them, however. She also wrote provocative letters to the editor, one of which concluded, “Yours for more and better rows in the letter column,” and was signed “Jonathan Swift.”

Post
editorials began having an effect on Congress and the government, and although the paper often quarreled with the administration, it backed the government, my father claimed, on as many measures as it opposed it. The
Post
engaged in campaigns on various fronts, fighting against what my father saw as the inflationary policies of FDR, the NRA, Rexford Tugwell, and Henry Wallace, and fighting for SEC rules that would protect investors against fraud, cleaning up Washington’s hidden slums, and coming out strongly for Roosevelt’s “quarantine” speech in 1937.

Despite my father’s desire that the
Post
be independent and objective, someone remarked that the front page at first read like a Federal Reserve Board Bulletin. It seems that many of the editors and reporters were aiming to please by giving him what they thought he wanted. Indeed, in the very earliest period of my father’s publishership, the staff persisted in focusing on stories about finance, banking, and taxation. They soon discovered he was quite serious about the independence of the paper and the autonomy of its reporters and editors within the limits of his principles. He worked out a system that endured, one of delegating autonomy to his managers on both sides—editorial and business—provided they performed according to his standards and ambitions. Since three of the last five
Post
publishers—my father, Phil Graham, and myself—came to work inexperienced in different ways, this was the only practical way to run things anyway. But I still believe it’s the best way for newspapers to be run editorially.

In 1935 alone, my father lost more than $1.3 million. From that year on, he made the
Post
a partnership with my mother, with any profits and losses to be divided between the two partners, my father bearing 93 percent and my mother 7 percent. Despite the losses—which were now partially tax-deductible—real progress had been made, but the progress was more in news than in advertising and circulation.

His quest for integrity clearly extended to the business side. He wanted to be sure the advertising-sales people would study the needs of advertisers and honestly try to fulfill them. The story of the
Post’s
editorial transformation had to be sold to retail advertisers, and my father was deeply involved in that sales effort. But real circulation success continued to elude him until over a decade later, after the war.

By 1935, my father had begun to understand what the newspaper business was all about. Gradually an organization was put in place that
worked well for its time. He installed a better typeface and improved graphics to make a more readable paper. He enlarged the E Street building by adding a wing and renting space in the Munsey Building next door. He even reported some stories himself, or at least passed on stories to his reporters. (It was he who provided the
Post
with its scoop that King Edward VIII planned to marry the divorced American Wallis Simpson.) He took great pride in delivering any tip that turned into a big story—as did I many years later.

Little by little, despite the fact that within the walls of the
Post
’s building during the first few years there seemed to be nothing but trouble, uphill struggle, a revolving door of people coming and going—some failing and some leaving for better jobs—and money hemorrhaging, the paper was making progress, so much so that Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg credited the
Post
“with the most amazing improvement in the past 12 months of any newspaper ever to come to my attention.” Prospective buyers turned up from time to time, from Andrew Mellon to Walter Winchell, all of whom my father flatly rejected, while on the other hand his own attempt to buy the
Washington Herald
from Hearst in 1936 was foiled when Cissy Patterson heard of the negotiations and phoned Hearst, weeping until he submitted. Nothing was going to come easily.

F
ROM MY FIRST
visit to the paper in June of 1933,
The Washington Post
was constantly part of my life. My family owned it, cared deeply about it, and was immersed in the minutiae of its daily travails. My father, the paper’s owner and publisher and president of the new Washington Post Company, became its best salesman, never missing an opportunity to sell an ad, offering subscriptions to cab drivers, calling the news desk frequently to ask “What’s new?,” stopping by nightly, often in his tuxedo after a late dinner, to check on things.

My mother’s level of enthusiasm and involvement was no less than his. Her bylines appeared frequently in the paper, particularly in the early years, and the extent of her caring was evident in a memo she sent my father complaining about the lack of
Post
boxes compared with the number for all the other Washington papers she had observed on one of her forays into the countryside. She stopped to interview people along the way to find out what the problem was and reported that “The Washington Post has lost a vast amount of subscriptions because for a long time it had an unreliable carrier boy. The impression of the people living there is that this circulation could easily be regained by a little special attention and a good carrier boy.”