Personal History (36 page)

On the weekend before the negotiations were to become final, just before Phil was to leave for Washington, he and I sat on the beach alone, talking and dreaming. I vividly recall his saying, “I know getting the
Times-Herald
would be too good to be true. It’s too much to hope for, but just let’s shut our eyes for a moment and pretend we have it. The first thing I’d like to see is Sam Kauffmann’s face when he hears the news.” After we’d indulged ourselves this way for a while, he realistically and soberly said: “If we don’t get it, I’ll die for a week. Then I’ll try to think of doing it another way.” We were cautious, but we couldn’t help hoping that this would be the end of the long, hard struggle.

Phil called me early the next morning with the news that Colonel McCormick had stepped in and bought the paper. He asked me to break up the house there, take the children to Mount Kisco, and come down to be with him. Weeping, I sat at breakfast with the children before I began the move to join him in Washington.

What we didn’t understand at the time was that we might have got the paper at that point if not for Frank Waldrop’s loyalty to Cissy’s aims and aspirations. Yes, we were willing to pay the most for the paper, which
pleased the other six heirs, but Waldrop believed it would frustrate Cissy’s intent. He felt it would have been a “betrayal and surrender”—a sentence of death for the
Times-Herald
—so he told the other heirs, “Do as you wish, but I’m not going to sign it.”

Waldrop made sure the colonel heard about my father’s willingness to take care of the
Tribune
stock. Unfortunately, McCormick interpreted this not as something helpful but as a threat to his total control of the great enterprise, and he stepped in and bought the
Times-Herald
for just what we had offered. Phil and my father tried to raise their offer. Mother, always magnificent in a crisis and wanting to ensure the future of the
Post
, called from Mount Kisco to say that, if the sale hinged on the amount we were offering, then she didn’t need to live so elaborately. “Eugene, throw in the house. Nothing else matters.” She really meant it. We all had our hearts and souls in this deal. However, the
Tribune
and
Times-Herald
people actually hid from our lawyers to prevent being presented with our higher bid, and we never really got the chance to up the ante.

When I arrived in Washington, I found Phil in a great despond. We both thought the future much dimmer, if not hopeless. Now we were faced with the great, rich, highly professional, and profitable Chicago Tribune Company as our competitor, with the colonel, whose business acumen was widely known and respected, having seemingly unlimited assets to pour into opposing us. More than ever, we thought in terms of a battle for survival—now against Goliath.

One night, a week or so after the takeover, I woke up at two in the morning to find Phil smoking and finishing a book he had obtained from the library on the lives and careers of newspaper magnates Colonel McCormick and Captain Joe Patterson. Phil said, “You know, they put the company together when they were in their thirties. Now they’re in their sixties and I’m in my thirties. I think we can make it another way.” With that simple conclusion, Phil got over the terrible blow of being defeated in a deal on which we thought our life depended.

And so the struggle for survival continued, absorbing all Phil’s energy and attention. The
Post
continued to grow in quality and influence and even in some important business measures, like circulation, but lost ground on others, like advertising. These were lean years, yet we moved steadily forward.

Our competition was formidable and fierce. Various members of the families that owned the
Star
served on the boards of the most important banks and businesses throughout Washington. The paper also appeared to have a heavy hand in running the government of Washington, D.C.: John Russell Young, who was chief of the city’s three commissioners, was the former White House correspondent for the
Star
. The offices of the city’s
Board of Trade were actually located in the
Star
’s building. Judges were appointed only with the approval of the
Star
. At least on the surface, the
Star
was all-powerful and omnipresent.

Almost everyone in the top management of the
Star
was a member of one of the three families that owned the paper. With the exception of a few fine professionals, most drew a paycheck and did little real newspaper work. (The editor, Ben McKelway, was an outside professional, a nice man with fine credentials.) Members of the family tended to live not in the city but in Chevy Chase or the Maryland suburbs, where they rode to the hounds. Many were snobbish and WASPish. My father actually included as one of his assets the twenty-seven members of the owning families on the
Star
.

The
Times-Herald
also continued to be a force in Washington. Bill Shelton and Frank Waldrop remained on the paper, but shortly after he bought it, Colonel McCormick appointed his niece Ruth Elizabeth (Bazy) McCormick Miller as publisher. The colonel had remarked that he intended the paper to be “an outpost of American principles” and called Bazy and her husband, Maxwell (Peter) Miller, Jr., “missionaries to print these principles.” He said that, after trying for so many years to bring Washington to the United States, he was now “sending the United States to Washington.”

The fourth paper in Washington, the
Daily News
, was still perking along in its own niche, which was largely lunch-counter and street sales.

What we tried to do at the
Post
was to reach the average reader, in contrast to the
Star
, which was geared to the city’s power structure and a middle- and upper-income readership, and to the
Times-Herald
, which appealed to blue-collar, downscale, and upper-crust lovers of scandal and gossip. Phil obviously kept an eye out for the competition, but he felt, as did my father, that improving our own paper was the surest way to improve our chances of survival. As Russ Wiggins remembered, “We didn’t really get into slugging matches in the old partisan newspaper tradition. We covered the news in competition with them, but we didn’t get into vituperative disputes,” and this attitude of honest competition played an important role then and later.

On the business side, Phil succeeded in hiring a first-class circulation manager, Harry Gladstein, from Hearst’s
Los Angeles Examiner
. This position had been a revolving door of incompetence and amateurism, so Gladstein’s arrival late in 1949 helped solved a problem that had been a sore spot from the beginning. But Phil’s most important business recruit was John Sweeterman, who came as business manager and eventually became publisher, the only non-Meyer-Graham-family publisher of the
Post
to date. He had been general manager of the
Dayton Journal-Herald
, and
when that paper was sold to Cox Newspapers, he temporarily published a group of “shopping” newspapers, and was president of a publishing company that printed circulars.

Phil courted John assiduously for a few months, but, looking at a paper that was losing money and was still third out of four papers in Washington, John declined the offer, holding out for a higher salary and some stock participation. Phil asked me to listen in on one of the crucial phone conversations in which John spelled out his terms. Phil was so anxious to get him that he offered John the same salary that he himself was making at that time, $30,000. When John said he simply couldn’t come for $30,000, Phil raised his own salary to $35,000 and offered John the same.

One of John’s first visits to us was at home, where I was in our yard with the children, all of us barefoot in the summer heat. My being barefoot made a deep impression on John, which he often recalled as culture shock. He finally accepted Phil’s offer, arriving at the
Post
in mid-1950, and almost immediately Phil and others felt they were in good, sure hands. And so the case proved. There was a great deal of mutual respect between Phil and my father on the one hand and John on the other. John later said, “I was so impressed with your father, with his wisdom, his manner, his strong personality … and the same with Phil. I put my future in their hands, really.” For his part, Phil was certain we had “found ourselves a prize package,” and felt, as he once said, “Aren’t I a lucky son of a bitch? This guy could run General Motors.”

After a short while, Phil gave John great autonomy—in effect saying, “You run the business side of the paper and I’ll back you up.” John immediately set to work redesigning parts of the paper and cleaning up the organization. He brought in a great production manager, Harry Eybers, and a fine classified-advertising manager, Jim Daly. This was the nucleus of the team—together with Don Bernard and Harry Gladstein—that brought us such success later.

John was very strong and dominating. At times he was at loggerheads with various editors or executives on the news side, particularly Russ Wiggins, who wanted to do some things that required money—which John basically didn’t like to spend. He was famous for focusing on cost-cutting measures, which many others looked on as mere penny-pinching. But in the end, it was John’s single-minded pursuit of cost-cutting and revenue-generating moves that helped turn the situation around. Indeed, under John’s direction and because of his introduction of more professional business management, we started to make very real gains in circulation and in advertising. He also focused on building the Sunday paper.

One of the results of losing the
Times-Herald
in 1949 was the immediate plunge my father and Phil took with the decision to build a new plant. When Dad bought the
Post
, someone asked him if he was going to build a
new building, a natural question given the look of the
Post
’s home. His response, however, was: “No, I’m going to try to build a newspaper first.” Having done that, he was ready to move on to provide a better operating environment for the growing paper. At the time, the
Post
’s eight hundred employees had spilled out of the fifty-six-year-old E Street home into three other buildings. The paper was handicapped by the inadequacies of both its building and its equipment, and there was no room to expand production capacity. Land had been acquired in another section of the city—on L Street, between 15th and 16th, with additional space behind. The new building, which Phil considered the most important step affecting the paper since 1933, as well as a testimonial to our faith in its future, was made possible financially by loans from my parents for the $6-million cost of the project. We are still there—with expansions—more than forty-five years later.

When the new building was halfway up, Phil called in my mother and me to more or less sign off on the interior design. Consulting us on decor was not a great idea, since neither of us had a very good eye or track record in this area. Even so, I had definite opinions about what I saw and said I thought it was hideous. Phil, expecting quick approval, was understandably irritated. He said, “All right, if you don’t like it, then do something about it; find someone to do the interiors.” I got the name of an interior designer, Mary Barnes, who made a great impact, rectifying some of the worst mistakes and putting a presentable look on the building. Because many of the colors she chose were muted, people on the
Post
referred to her as “the gray lady.”

Groundbreaking took place late in 1949, and the first full paper was printed at the new L Street site in November 1950. There was a very alcoholic, emotional party as everyone finally left the old E Street building behind. The party—more of a wake, actually—was, as someone put it, to “mourn the death of a building” which, with all its inconvenient horrors, was still much loved. In fact, many longtime employees were less than enthusiastic about moving from the dingy but bustling E Street plant into the spic-and-span newness of the quiet L Street building. The new building doubled our press capacity, while providing modern conveniences like air-conditioning, soundproofing, and a clean environment, but it looked cold and impersonal in contrast to the old. One
Post
old-timer was quoted saying, “It’ll be all right once we get to spitting on the floor again.”

At the same time that Phil was working on plans for the new building and expanding the
Post
editorially, he was working hard to build the business. For years my father had simply subsidized the paper’s losses out of his pocket, but after the A shares were passed to us, we couldn’t do that any longer. Luckily for us, the losses had greatly declined, and the radio station we owned with CBS was profitable. Phil always thought of radio
and television not as rivals of newspapers but, rather, as another form of journalism. And very early he recognized their potential for bringing profits to offset any losses the paper might incur.

In 1950, again with CBS as a partner, Phil took the company into the television field by buying a station in Washington, WOIC, whose call letters were later changed to WTOP. Since there was $800,000 cash in WTOP, we had to come up with only $330,000, or 55 percent of the remaining amount of the $1.4-million purchase price, of which CBS paid the other 45 percent. My parents loaned us the money for our share of this purchase. Phil wrote to his father at the time: “I think our timing was just about perfect, for it looks as though television here will move out of the red ink this fall. We were anxious to get in because it is going to have great effect on all other media, and especially on radio.”

Since 1948, when he had drawn us into radio, Frank Stanton had become a close personal friend as well as a business associate. Late in 1952, Frank told Phil that the three owners who had started the only television station in Jacksonville, Florida, WMBR, wanted to sell. About a month before the election in 1952, Phil set the wheels in motion that led to his purchase of the station. Ten days after the election, we left on vacation, stopping first in Jacksonville, where he completed the deal and met Glenn Marshall, one of the original owners, who was staying on to manage the station. Glenn remembered that when WMBR went on the air originally, in 1950, there wasn’t a television set in the whole of Jacksonville, and the station owners would call dealers daily to see if any sets had been sold that day.