Personal History (42 page)

Essentially, Phil agreed to pay the $8.5 million that McCormick wanted for the paper. In addition, however, he agreed to give termination or severance pay to
Times-Herald
employees who did not move over to the
Post
. This meant another million or so.

After transmitting the written offer to the
Tribune
people, Phil came
home with my father and put in calls to the top
Post
executives, gathered them all at our house, and outlined the deal, saying, “If it works, in three days we’ll also be publishing in the afternoon.” He asked them to think through what this would entail, but not to tell anyone for the time being, including their wives.

The contract was accepted with only minor changes. Phil, always impatient with legal procedures despite being a lawyer, said later—after the whirlwind twenty-four-hour negotiation—that he always knew it could be done. The contract was hand-carried to the
Times-Herald
building, where a meeting of
Tribune
stockholders was in progress. It was only at this point that Bazy Tankersley first heard about the pending sale. One person at the meeting described her as looking as if she had been “struck by a thunderbolt.” She asked for time to raise the money to buy the paper herself, but Colonel McCormick, who was presiding, won approval for the sale. They did give Bazy about forty-eight hours—until the meeting of the
Tribune
’s board in Chicago on the Wednesday of that week—to raise the money, but did so with the completely inhibiting caveat that she could not disclose why she was trying to raise it.

On Tuesday morning, the colonel left for Chicago—with more suspense left for us to stew in, lest Bazy succeed in raising the money. Phil and Chess Campbell met again on Tuesday at his suite in the Ritz Carlton. In a suite down the hall, other
Tribune
executives were breaking the news to
Times-Herald
executives, whom Phil then talked to. While Phil was doing this, Campbell entered the room and began to prowl around with a concerned expression, looking under chairs and tables. When Phil asked what he was looking for, Campbell replied, “To tell you the truth, it’s the letter of transmittal from you and Mr. Meyer.” Phil immediately joined Campbell, both on their hands and knees, ransacking the room. Finally, Campbell called his law firm. “Oh,” said one of the lawyers, “we have that. We’d never let go of that.” This was just one indication of the confusion and rush surrounding the deal. Phil had completed one of the most important newspaper purchases in history in twenty-four hours—backed by my father all the way, including financially.

Also on Tuesday, Phil called
Post
company executive John Hayes to his office and handed him an American Security and Trust Company check for $1.5 million as the down payment for the paper. In an effort to preserve security, the check, John was stunned to observe, was made out to him personally, and he was dispatched to Chicago to deliver it in person. So anxious was Phil that John get there that he insisted he take an overnight train rather than risk losing the check (and John) in a plane crash.

Meanwhile,
Post
executives set in motion the necessary behind-the-scenes activity that would allow for publication of a joint paper if the sale
were to go through. Russ Wiggins let some of his executives in on the secret. A list was drawn up of people on the
Times-Herald
whom they wanted to interview. Don Bernard, our advertising director, took a suite at the Mayflower to talk to his managers. Their first job would be to call merchants and others to inquire whether advertising placed in the
Times-Herald
should be inserted in the consolidated paper.

Probably the most complicated job was discussed by the circulation directors, who would have to deliver the enlarged paper to the homes of both
Post
and
Times-Herald
subscribers. They made plans to use
Times-Herald
men and trucks.

On Wednesday morning, Hayes arrived at the Tribune Tower in Chicago, where a much-agitated right-winger was dashing in and out of Colonel McCormick’s office trying to dissuade the colonel from selling to us rather than Bazy. As reported by
Time
, Bazy had called a long list of wealthy, conservative potential backers, such as Sears, Roebuck’s chairman, General Robert Wood, ex-Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and Texas oil man H. L. Hunt. She had raised $4 million and asked for time to raise more. The colonel said no—he didn’t want to sell to amateurs. He respected my father as a professional newspaperman.

We—Phil, my parents, John Sweeterman, Floyd Harrison—were in Phil’s office, from which we put in a call to John Hayes at the
Tribune
and kept the line open so as to maintain the connection while waiting for news of the board’s approval. We all took turns talking to John, to keep the line occupied lest we be cut off. At last the board approved the deal, the check was delivered, and Colonel McCormick signed the agreement of sale. Hayes hurried to our open phone and said to Phil, “I’ve got it. We’re all set. Let me tell you about …”

“Goodbye, we’re on our way,” said Phil, banging down the phone, cutting John off. We were terribly moved, and excited beyond all imagining. After great gleeful shouts, I remember telling DeVee Fisher, Phil’s loyal, longtime secretary, that we mustn’t appear to gloat, but I must have said this through the smile that I couldn’t have gotten off my face if I’d tried. The time was 12:44 p.m., St. Patrick’s Day, 1954—a supreme moment in the history of The Washington Post Company. We now had the morning field in Washington to ourselves, daily circulation jumped immediately from 204,000 to 395,000, and Sunday circulation rose from 200,000 to 395,000.

That afternoon and evening, however, before we hit the streets with our combined papers, were a real challenge. With so little advance planning, things were chaotic. John Sweeterman’s job had been to stay at the
Post
and plan as best he could, assuming the deal would go through. It was his basic plan that was put into operation and made the whole thing work.

The purchase brought problems for us, of course. As a result of
adding all the features of the
Times-Herald
, we were running a more-than-double press run of a larger paper, which created problems in itself. Another problem was the
Times-Herald
employees not absorbed by the
Post
, which created a union/employee situation. Also, any time a community loses a paper, there are tensions, unhappiness, displaced people, and the feeling that a voice has been stilled. There remained three papers in Washington, though, so people didn’t feel that they were at the mercy of one voice, as happened later in most cities.

Combining news and editorial on these papers was difficult, since we had two very opposite cultures to meld. The
Times-Herald
had more of a mass audience; ours was more of a class audience. The
Times-Herald
had been loaded with features. It was full of comics, columnists—especially conservative columnists—sports, gossip, sex, and crime. The
Post
was more serious-minded and didn’t carry all the fun stuff. What we did to mute the criticism we knew would come was to pick up from the
Times-Herald
every columnist, critic, comic, and feature of any kind—with one or two minor exceptions that Phil and Russ felt unable to swallow—so that
Times-Herald
subscribers would find everything they cared about still there in the paper. We started that night by running two equal-sized names on the masthead—
The Washington Post and Times-Herald
. Gradually, over a period of years, we shrank the size of print for the name
Times-Herald
until finally it disappeared altogether.

When we put the two papers together, we covered the market. In fact, something sparked in the combination. We kept the circulation of both papers minus the overlap, and then started to grow. Much of this was due to Sweeterman’s policies. What he had done was continue to deliver the paper to all the
Times-Herald
readers—even if they had tried to cancel their subscriptions. This way, they had time to look through the paper and see that their favorite features were still there. As John said, “They just rode along with us and they started paying their carrier bills after a while.” With the
Times-Herald
circulation that we held, we had 70-percent penetration of the morning market in the Washington area.

That kind of coverage and the particular mix of the combined circulation helped to produce volume business for the stores, and the results in advertising started to show immediately. The
Star
, which had relied on advertiser loyalty, was so self-satisfied and complacent that it simply went on doing what it had been doing. Its idea was that the
Times-Herald
circulation didn’t draw advertising by itself, so why would it do any better because it was running off
Post
presses?

One of the most important issues—one that actually came up in the few days while we were in the process of buying the paper—was antitrust. Gerry Gesell handled this most sensitive issue with consummate skill. We wanted to buy the assets of the
Times-Herald
, not the stock, since the Clayton
Antitrust Act prohibited acquisition of stock but not of assets. McCormick, on the other hand, wanted to sell his stock, so as not to have to deal with the people problems and others he’d be left with if he still held stock. He just wanted to sell the whole company.

We obviously were not in a position to argue, so Beebe and Bradley had worked out an immediate purchase and then the immediate dissolution of the Times-Herald Company and the transfer of its assets. That was all done, and the bank accounts were transferred. Gesell called Graham Claytor, later secretary of the navy and head of Southern Railroad, and had him come up from Roanoke just to handle the principal bank account, so there was no money left, no anything left, nothing on the books that could be construed as suggesting there was any kind of company left.

Almost immediately after that, Phil got a telephone call from the head of the antitrust division at the Justice Department, who said that they had heard rumors that the
Post
was acquiring the
Times-Herald
and he wanted to see the
Post
’s lawyer right away. Phil called Gesell, who went alone to the Justice Department. Gesell recalled later that the division head was in his private office with nine of his top staff:

It turns out that there is a clause in the antitrust laws called the “failing company doctrine,” which makes an exception for companies that merge if both of them are failing. Although the doctrine had never really applied to newspapers, because newspapers always had somebody who would buy them, Gesell had decided to rely on this.

Many conservatives, some in Congress—horrified to think that a conservative voice was going to be taken away by what was, in their view, the lunatic, liberal wing of American journalism—leaned on the Justice Department to bring an antitrust suit on monopoly grounds. Even Clare Booth Luce, of all people, told Phil and me one evening that it was too much power for one family to have. But there was never any prosecution.

One sad outcome of the
Times-Herald
acquisition was a letter from my sister Florence to my father. Deeply unhappy much of her life and constantly
at odds with the family, Flo chose this moment to complain that her absence had caused her and her boys somehow to lose out either financially or in ownership of something valuable. My father wrote back that this was not the case and explained that no one in the family would be any poorer. He later reported to us that Flo had cabled back in an “entirely satisfactory” way and “fulfills our hopes for her better understanding and changing attitude.”

One of the more interesting sidelights of this whole thing was that, in the middle of the purchase and merger, the
Post
had published what we regarded as a moderate editorial responding to a televised speech by Vice-President Nixon, in the middle of which he remarked in an aside, “Incidentally, in mentioning Secretary Dulles, isn’t it wonderful, finally, to have a Secretary of State who isn’t taken in by the Communists, who stands up to them? We can be sure now that the victories our men win on the battlefields will not be lost in the future by our diplomats at the Council table.”

The editorial had been moderate at Phil’s order, just before he disappeared into negotiations. However, it wasn’t moderate enough to suit Nixon. He called up Harry Gladstein, the circulation manager, and canceled his subscription to the
Post
—both at home and at the office. Harry asked Phil, “What do you think he’ll do in the morning, when he discovers there’s no alternative?”

W
HEREAS MY WHOLE
memory was that our life depended on our getting the
Times-Herald
, John Sweeterman remembers the time differently and perhaps more accurately. He has said that, if it hadn’t happened as it did, we