Personal History (80 page)

“Forgive the melodrama,” Meg concluded, “but I should like to think that
The Washington Post
will be known as one of those rare institutions that perceived the enormous cost of putting sex and race back into law, that resisted the temptation of fashion and convenience—that had the foresight to say no.”

B
EYOND THE WORKPLACE
, in the early 1970s there were also many unenlightened, regressive sanctuaries of male supremacy, among them, in Washington, the National Press Club, the Gridiron Club, and the Federal City Council. The Gridiron held an annual dinner at which the members, who were journalists and editors, performed political skits and songs of a slightly Princeton Triangle quality for an audience of government leaders, business heads, and other well-known people, as well as newspaper people from all over the country. Naturally, it was an all-male affair. Here, actually, as in some other arenas, it was easier for a black to be accepted than for a woman: the columnist Carl Rowan was already a Gridiron member.

By this time, women reporters had begun picketing the annual dinner and giving counter-Gridiron parties and urging government officials not to attend. The club was feeling the pressure and knew it had to change,
and in 1972 the leaders decided to invite a few women as guests. Nineteen were asked, of whom I was one. Others included Mrs. Nixon and Mrs. Agnew, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Representatives Shirley Chisholm, Martha Griffiths, and Edith Green, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Margaret Mead, Barbara Tuchman, and Coretta Scott King.

Controversy over the invitations immediately arose. Mrs. Chisholm responded in a press release headlined “Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner!” Several men had also pointedly declined the invitation that year, including Senators (and then presidential candidates) George McGovern and Edmund Muskie. Alice Longworth, on the other hand, had said she wouldn’t miss it for anything, adding, “Only real illness could make me miss the dinner. I’ll have to be too ill to stand if I don’t go.”

My first reaction was that after all these years of being on the outside I was excited to be invited, and I was all set to accept when I received a letter signed by many of the women on the editorial side of the paper and from other papers, asking me not to go until the club accepted a woman as a member. But there was no opening at the club at this time, and the gesture of an invitation seemed to me a beginning. Besides which, I really wanted to go. However, I asked several of these women to dinner at my house to discuss the issue. Among those who came were Meg, Marilyn Berger, Liz Peer, Sarah Booth Conroy, and Elsie Carper. They made many valid arguments, but the clincher belonged to Sally Quinn, who said, “If a country club excluded you for being a Jew but said they’d like to have you for dinner, would you go?” That cemented my decision to regret the invitation, which I did.

Meg and I were planning to have dinner together on the night of the big event. She had worked late, and as she left the
Post
’s building, a picket line was already forming across the street at the Statler Hotel. Placards read: “Write On, Sisters,” “I’m a Member of the No-Iron Club—Support a Permanent Free Press,” and “This Is the Last Supper.” Meg saw that Judith Martin—now “Miss Manners”—was already walking the picket line, pushing a baby buggy. She called to describe the scene to me, and we—both too self-conscious to picket—decided that we had to take a look at the white-tie-attired men and the few invited ladies who had accepted make their way through the gauntlet.

Thinking we’d be less conspicuous, we hopped into Meg’s beat-up Mustang rather than my more identifiable car and began our cruise, trying to be as casual as possible, circling the block, driving past the hotel to see what we were missing. With all of the media coverage, we were worried about the cameras’ catching us in what we knew would be a dreadful photo and could already imagine the caption—but we couldn’t resist. So Meg drove and I hunched down as best I could, trying to avoid being seen, while Meg tried to shield the whole car by keeping us partially hidden behind
a bus. We had a hilarious perspective on this scene of limousines, white tie and tails, the baby buggy, and the picketers. After many circlings and several sightings, we went back to my house and had dinner and a great laugh, satisfied to have had it both ways. It was not until 1975 that the Gridiron changed its policy and admitted women; that was the first year I attended.

The Federal City Council was another case in point. Ironically, it had been created in large part by Phil, and many
Post
executives had been or were members. I was only vaguely aware of my not being included until one day when I was invited to go along with council members on a tour of the District’s subway system, then being constructed. As I looked around our group, it dawned on me that not only were there no other women present, but there were none on the council. I was absolutely sure that there had been women on it when Phil founded it, because I remembered at least one. I asked what had happened and only then realized that no one had ever asked
me
to join. I remember being more indignant than embarrassed—a more helpful reaction for furthering the goals of the women’s movement—and insisting that someone make sure the head of the council knew that either they must get some women in the organization or the
Post
was going to write about it. Very soon after our tour I was invited to join, together with a few other women.

Further proof that much of what I was hearing from women everywhere was seeping into me and affecting my thinking was a letter I drafted to Paul Miller, then chairman of the Gannett Company and later head of the Associated Press for many years. I raised a problem I felt was serious enough to bring up at the next membership meeting of the AP—the composition of the board, which was not only all-male and all-white but also business-rather than editorial-oriented. I said I would be personally reluctant to continue to participate in meetings or social occasions that perpetuated such a state of affairs. Obviously I felt strongly, but in the end my native caution took over and the letter was never sent. I regret now that it wasn’t. Much later I myself got elected to the board—the first woman—and served three terms. Everything, including the staff that came to meetings, was still the same—male and white. Although I repeatedly brought up the subject when I was on the board, it was generally treated as a cute joke, despite the association’s having been sued by its women members—a suit which I, in vain, told them they ought to settle. It took many more years for the situation to begin to change.

I always thought things would grow better with time, that the atmosphere would become more welcoming of women, particularly when there were more women involved and less notice was given to any single one of us, but it didn’t happen that way. For one thing, there never were that many more of us—and still aren’t, at least not at the highest levels.

The issues relating to women were on my mind constantly throughout these years. Though it took me a long time to throw off some of my early and ingrained assumptions, I did come to understand the importance of the basic problems of equality in the workplace, upward mobility, salary equity, and, more recently, child care. What the women’s movement eventually did for me personally was to help me sort out my thinking. Most important to me was not the central message of the movement—that women were equal—but that women had a right to choose which life-style suited them. We all had a right to a frame of reference other than that we were put on earth to catch a man, hold him, and please him. Eventually I came to realize that, if women understood this and acted on it, things would be better for men as well as for women.

I
RONICALLY
, it was during these particular years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, while I was anguishing over so many personal and professional matters, that my own profile was beginning to rise. To my surprise, I was suddenly written about. Essentially it had started with the piece in
Vogue
by Arthur Schlesinger. Later that same year, 1967, I was on the cover of
Business Week
, and still later in the year appeared on the cover of the
Washingtonian
, profiled flatteringly by Judith Viorst. This was a completely novel and strange experience. Even my mother was impressed and asked for a dozen copies.

I was unused to being interviewed and very self-conscious about these articles. In fact, I usually refused requests for interviews, cooperating only if I thought it would help the company. I steadfastly refused to do television interviews, on the grounds of protecting my privacy. I didn’t want that kind of visibility, but I also felt awkward and nervous about doing it and wouldn’t have been good at it if I had tried.

Yet, despite my apprehensions, it was pleasant having these articles be so positive. And, indeed, I was doing some things right. For instance, I formed the habit early, and have kept it up to the present, of answering letters from readers, whether of praise or criticism. People need to feel that they can react against what is published or aired and that someone is listening to their suggestions or complaints. Because of my scrupulous impulse to respond, to explain, even to soothe, there is a paper trail of correspondence from these years which reflects the growing pressures and tensions of the times. Mostly, my top priority was to back the editors and reporters and defend them from assault, especially if the complaint came from somewhere in the government, while at the same time trying to protect the company from undue heat.

Sometimes it was as difficult to deal with a reporter or an editor as
with an outsider. Editors tend to develop what Ben calls a “defensive crouch”—a natural reaction that has its virtues, because it’s often assumed in support of reporters. They get so many unwarranted complaints that they become hardened, until they will sometimes react defensively against even the most persuasive arguments. As a result, they need to be very certain that they’re not rigid, but are listening carefully for those comments and complaints that are on target, and responding to them constructively. Not surprisingly, all of us publishers and editors react as violently as the public does when it’s our ox that’s gored. I know that reporters who have never been written about are not sensitive enough to the feelings of the people about whom they’re writing—often I wish that those writers who seem to delight in savaging their targets could experience it themselves sometime. Having endured my fair share of savagery, I try harder to monitor our fairness and to be sympathetic to rational complaints from readers.

At times I’ve had to defend things I didn’t like or think were fair or in good taste. For instance, my life would have been a lot simpler had Nicholas von Hoffman not appeared in the paper. I remember one column in which he said, in effect, that all used-car dealers were crooks. This piece resulted in a very expensive advertising boycott of the paper and lost us a large amount of money. I recall throwing up my hands at one point and writing a reader that I agreed that a particular column of Nick’s shouldn’t have gotten into the paper. Nick did have extreme views, some of which were distasteful to me as well as to some of our readers, but he also had a gifted voice and represented a certain segment of the population that needed to be heard. Almost alone among American journalists at the time, von Hoffman was telling us what was in the minds of the young who felt dispossessed and unrepresented by the so-called establishment press. I firmly believed that he belonged in the
Post
.

I also took a lot of heat over the years because of Herblock’s cartoons. They inspired a great deal of mail, and I was constantly defending him. Herb has been one of the great—and most relentless—assets of the
Post
for half a century. His cartoons are so powerful that they’ve sometimes made me gasp. His strong feelings come through in every drawing. I would try to reassure furious readers by reminding them, “The nature of cartoons is to exaggerate to make a point.” I also often reminded readers that a great cartoonist is an artist, with all the temperament that that implies. Herblock is undeniably a great cartoonist, and as I wrote to one reader, “It seems to us that he has therefore earned a certain license. He could not continue to be as good as he is if he were subjected to censorship or control by those who do not share his particular genius, by somebody constantly telling him to be more careful, to pull his punches, to do
it some other way.” To another reader, I summed up the situation by saying: “You either live with him or without him—the latter of which is unthinkable to me.”

The war in Vietnam and the
Post
’s and
Newsweek
’s position on the war also caused a great deal of dismay on the part of readers—naturally, from both ends of the political spectrum. Mostly I tried to explain our stance and to remind readers that we didn’t dictate government policy or unduly influence anyone. On April 4, 1968, by which time the paper had turned away from its largely supportive position on the war, and after LBJ had announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election, I wrote a
Post
reader, “We simply believe the policy of automatic escalation had been tried and had failed. We suggested rethinking our policy in Viet Nam. I can only deduce that the President too has come to this conclusion. Neither of us, I am sure, did this under any subversive influence.”

In 1970, the
Post
—only the second paper to do so—started employing an ombudsman, whose job it is to receive and review complaints about what appears in the paper. Even corrections can be troublesome, particularly when attempting to rectify some egregious error only compounds the original problem. In a sense, we in the media are all ombudsmen, trying to lessen the feeling some people have that they are helpless and without hope of a hearing.

Most of all, what I know I did well in these years was to care about the company. I took an inordinate interest in all that we did, an interest that was once described accurately (if in a sexist way) as “compounded of equal parts of house mother and cheerleader.” I tried to create an atmosphere that gave people the freedom to do their jobs, an environment in which good ideas would always be heard. I think I shared the highs and the lows, the failures as well as the successes.