Personal History (89 page)

A few weeks later, David Broder reported in a piece in the
Post
that Richard Kleindienst, by now the attorney general, said that “he thought
The Washington Post
had exaggerated or distorted on occasions in its coverage of the case.” Kleindienst also said that he had told me that “the administration is being no more unfair to the
Post
”—in barring its reporters from some White House social events—“than the
Post
was to the administration” in some of its reporting on Watergate. Broder’s piece quoted Kleindienst as saying: “ ‘I told her, “Don’t get so upset. You’ve got a great paper. Go ahead and run the … thing the way you want. But don’t be surprised if the President gets a little upset and does something a little s——y to you in return.”’ …”

Indeed, the administration was doing something a little shitty in return. It was embarked on a deliberate policy to undermine the credibility of the press, with—as it turned out—very good reasons for needing to do so. And although there was not a lot of concrete evidence, we at the
Post
were well aware of being the target of Nixon and the administration’s vengeance.

On November 13, Colson again attacked the
Post
, singling out Ben Bradlee: “The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivaling only ‘Gone with the Wind’ in circulation and ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ for indecency.… Mr. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of … the tiny fringe of arrogant elitists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.” It was just two days after this—we later learned from the Watergate indictments—that Colson had a telephone conversation with Howard Hunt about the need for more payments to the defendants in the trial.

Another thing we found out only later was that at one point Nixon had a plan to get Richard Mellon Scaife—the “right-wing Pittsburgh millionaire,” according to reporter Nick Lemann, who discovered the notes Ehrlichman made on a meeting he had with the president—to buy the
Post
. The evidence that turned up in the Nixon Archives was Ehrlichman’s notes on a December 1, 1972, meeting he had with Nixon: “Post. Scaife will offer to buy it. (Assets.) Suit by public SH [shareholders] if she (60%) [who controls this much of the A shares] refuses. President can’t talk to him.”

On December 4, Kenneth Khachigian, an aide to Pat Buchanan, then a White House speechwriter, sent Buchanan a memo that was highly specific about what was to be done with the
Post
as a target: “Colson called this morning with a project that the President wants done.” The memo went on:

Obviously, the negative atmosphere between the
Post
and the Nixon White House had predated Watergate. My heated back-and-forth with Vice-President Agnew in 1969 and 1970 was part of the venomous mood. Several memos from 1970 were to come to light specifically detailing the administration’s dislike for the
Post
and its desire to hurt us.

For example, after Nixon’s State of the Union message that year, and after the administration had reviewed the unfavorable editorial and columnar reaction to it, someone on the White House staff sent John Ehrlichman a memo saying: “[T]he following newspapers and columnists are individuals who are beyond appeal. He [Nixon] notes that we simply shouldn’t have our people spend any time with them: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Courier, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Nashville Tennessean, Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe, and Richard Dudman of the Post-Dispatch.”

The following month, Haldeman drafted a memo for Jeb Magruder, then his aide, saying: “[W]e have got to move now in every effective way we can to get them working to pound the magazines and the networks in counter-action.… Concentrate this on the few places that count, which would be NBC, Time, Newsweek, and Life, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Don’t waste your fire on other things.”

Someone else, not identified, sent Magruder a talking paper that spelled out some actions to take against the
Post:

1. Put someone on the Washington Post to needle Kay Graham. Set up calls or letters every day from the viewpoint of I hate Nixon but you’re hurting our cause in being so childish, ridiculous and over-board in your constant criticism, and thus destroying your credibility.
   
2. Lyn Nofziger should work out with someone in the House a round robin letter to the Post that says we live in Washington, D.C., read the D.C. papers, but fortunately we also have the opportunity to read the papers from our home districts and are appalled at the biased coverage the people of Washington receive of the news, compared to that in the rest of the country, etc.…
   

Two months later, in May 1970, Nixon himself got in on the act. He sent a memo to Haldeman:

All of this was the background against which Watergate unfolded. The pressures on us up to that point, however, were nothing to those that followed. On the very day of CBS’s first report, October 27, Colson sent a memo to another White House staffer: “Please check for me when any of The Washington Post television station licenses are up for renewal. I would like to know what the upcoming schedule is.” Coincidentally, but luckily for the administration, renewals for stations in Florida were due in early January 1973, and these licenses, as Colson well knew, were a sure way the government could hurt us. Of all the threats to the company during Watergate—the attempts to undermine our credibility, the petty slights, and the favoring of the competition—the most effective were the challenges to the licenses of our two Florida television stations. There were three separate challenges in Jacksonville and one in Miami, all of which—not coincidentally—were filed between December 29, 1972, and January 2, 1973, leading us to the easy conclusion that the four petitions must have been orchestrated. Out of more than thirty stations in the state of Florida up for renewal, our stations were the only ones challenged—some sort of record, particularly for stations whose news and community service ranked among the best in the United States.

By this time we were so embattled at the paper that I, and most of us at the company, viewed the challenges as entirely politically motivated by people sympathetic to Nixon or even associated with CRP. Did the White House actually encourage or even originate these challenges? In light of all the threats and memos that have since surfaced, it’s easy to believe that Nixon and his co-conspirators were behind them, but we never found a paper trail leading to a direct connection. Maybe we didn’t have to, so closely tied were many of the prominent figures to the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President.

No doubt there was a mixture of motives among the challengers—the perception of blood in the water, easy pickings, and understandable thinking that the atmosphere was right given the Nixon-dominated FCC. There was also dissatisfaction, if not real dislike, on the part of some of the challengers for our strong, aggressive news organizations, especially in Jacksonville, to which the conservative nucleus that ran the city was unused. We could see why some groups didn’t like the performance of the two stations: both had played a not insignificant role in the passage of Florida’s corporate income tax and the Florida sunshine law.

No doubt, too, some of those in the challenging groups also misunderstood the complex FCC process and underestimated the legal costs involved. Few of the challengers had any broadcasting experience. Of course, the groups had ensured that there was the required sprinkling of minorities, who would profit mightily from being given a few shares in order to lend diversity. One common element of the challenging groups was that each tried to depict itself as the local, civic-minded small team versus the large, out-of-state corporation, making the challengers appear valid in contrast to the “outsiders,” as we were branded in both cities, even though we had operated in Jacksonville for twenty years and my husband’s family had long been prominent citizens of Miami. Though there were plenty of declarations of a high-minded desire to bring the stations under local management, it’s significant that no challenge was raised against another station, owned by Rustcraft Broadcasting Company in New York.

In Jacksonville, one challenger was the Florida Television Broadcasting Company, whose big players included George Champion, a personal friend of Nixon’s who had been the chief Florida fund-raiser for his 1972 re-election campaign. It also included the powerful Ed Ball, a close business associate of the national vice-chair of Democrats for Nixon in 1972 and one of Florida’s wealthiest financiers.

Another group challenging the license, the Trans Florida Television Company, included Glenn Sedam, former general counsel of CRP and deputy general counsel of the 1973 Presidential Inauguration Committee.

The third group, St. John’s Broadcasting, consisted of businessmen thrown together hastily and knowing nothing about broadcasting.

Nixon’s close friend Cromwell Anderson was one of the leaders of a challenging group in Miami. He had participated in an earlier challenge there against WPLG, late in 1969, one that was withdrawn after seven and a half months, when Post-Newsweek Stations agreed to pay the challengers $67,000 in legal fees under an FCC provision then applicable but now no longer in effect—and he led the fight to mount another challenge now. Anderson had been a neighbor of Nixon’s, had sold him his Key Biscayne property, and had introduced him to Bebe Rebozo. Another member of the group in Miami was Edward Claughton, whose home Agnew had stayed in during the 1972 Republican Convention. Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month when Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that the
Post
would have “damnable, damnable problems” about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House. To my sorrow, Phil’s old friend George Smathers and George’s brother, Frank, aligned themselves with the Miami challengers.

Norm Davis had gone to WPLG to be deputy to General Manager
Jim Lynagh just as the challenge there had gotten into full swing. These two men decided to meet with the challengers to size them up. What they heard was vituperative and bitter diatribe, much of it focused on me, as reflected in someone’s calling me the “Dragon Lady.” “They didn’t even know you,” Norm recalled, “not one of them had met you, but in their minds you were somebody sinister who was pulling the strings.”

Much of my time—and certainly a great deal of my energy and emotional strength—was taken up with activities in relation to this threat and in listening to grievances from some of the powerful and influential members of each community who threatened to join the challengers. I flew down to Jacksonville more than once to meet with such people in an effort to mollify negative feelings about the station.

Since I wanted to do anything helpful to the stations, I was pleased when one of my very few friends left in Jacksonville, a moderate Republican civic leader, Roger Main, called me. He was the head of the St. Luke’s Hospital Association, which had suddenly lost its speaker for its annual dinner, and to my astonishment, he asked me for help in getting Attorney General Kleindienst to come to speak—and if not Kleindienst, Representative Gerry Ford. Kleindienst was one of the few administration officials who had always been reasonably friendly to me, so I agreed to try, and he accepted. Roger Main invited me to the dinner at the Jacksonville Civic Auditorium, and I accepted with alacrity—an excuse to see the whole group. The evening was not an easy one, however. Only Roger and another friend, Ed Lane, were even polite to me. I somehow got through the reception and dinner, but after dinner the leading lights said good night to me and took Kleindienst off to a party, so I didn’t win many points for providing their speaker.

The timing of these challenges made them potentially devastating, coming not only in the thick of Watergate but also just a year and a half after the Pentagon Papers and after we had gone public. More important, Fritz had been working hard to acquire the company’s fourth television station, in Hartford, Connecticut. We were naturally concerned that the Travelers Insurance Company, the seller, would get cold feet in the face of the challenges, and that the sale wouldn’t go through, but Travelers stayed true to its word and didn’t hesitate. That company’s relationship with Fritz was solid, and the deal was closed.