The Post first made its modern reputation as an ass-kicking defender of the public’s right to know by publishing the “Pentagon Papers” that supposedly revealed the hidden truth about the Vietnam War, fighting, and winning, a legal battle with the Nixon Administration that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. But the Post was very much the tail to the New York Times’ kite, which broke the story and had it as an exclusive for five days. Post editor Ben Bradlee, convinced that it would ruin the Post’s credibility to allow the Times to fight this “crusade” alone, managed to persuade Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the papers to the Times, to let him have a copy as well. In the ensuing court fights, Bradlee adeptly positioned the Post, himself, and Katherine Graham as the defenders of the freedom of the press. Because all the court decisions were occurring in Washington, it was easy for the Post to run photos of Bradlee and Graham attending various hearings, even though, of course, they didn’t need to.
As someone who read the initial series of the papers in the New York Times, written by Neil Sheehan, I was distinctly unimpressed. The fact that the Johnson Administration, and the Kennedy Administration before it, had always given a misleading picture of what was happening in Vietnam was scarcely news. JFK had once, rather famously, tried to get the Times to fire its Vietnam reporter, David Halberstam, for not reporting the story the way Kennedy wanted it to be reported. The Post, as Graham later admitted, had held off on reporting the full story in Vietnam out of loyalty to the Johnson Administration, unloading on Nixon once Johnson was out of the picture.
Watergate was, of course, the Post’s finest hour. The Post grabbed a little bit more credit than it deserved—Judge John Sirica, whose belligerent pursuit of the “truth” cast him in the role more of prosecutor than judge, was the one who really cracked the case, but the Post was on the story as no one else was, and, once again, Bradlee made sure that he, Katherine Graham, and the Post, got the credit. The fact that Nixon and his crew were guilty as hell didn’t hurt.
After that, things got a little ugly. In 1975 the Post set out to break its pressman’s union. It probably would have given itself a huge black eye, except that the pressman, after calling a strike, trashed the Post’s presses. The damage wasn’t severe, but it didn’t have to be. The pressmen came off as a pack of labor goons, and the Post was home free.
In 1979 a writer named Deborah Davis published, or tried to publish, a biography of Graham, Katherine the Great, charging both Graham and Bradlee with complicity in “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA’s massive media manipulation program, first exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967.† Bradlee and Graham instituted an intense campaign to prevent the book from being published. The publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, printed the book but then recalled it. Dixon sued to have the book published and ultimately won.‡
In the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, the Post more or less minted money, despite numerous embarrassing incidents involving DC’s black community. The Post helped elect Marion Berry to his first of three consecutive terms, and then helped replace him with the hapless Sharon Pratt. In both cases, the Post’s attempts to “think outside the box” ended disastrously for the city. Since every major American city with a large black population experienced the same problems—soaring crime, corruption and inefficiency—I can’t say that the Post caused Washington’s problems, but it did strongly promote the careers of two of DC’s worst mayors.*
Throughout this period, the Post was heavily staffed by old-fashioned liberals, but Graham herself was swinging conservative, particularly in foreign affairs. In 1988, she gave a speech at the CIA’s headquarters, coming up with this remarkable thought: “We live in a dirty and dangerous world…There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
Yes, Democracy works best when the people don’t know what’s going on.
Afterwords
I’ve commented often enough on the staggering incompetence of Katy Weymouth, so I’ll leave her alone on this one. Whatever you wanted to say about the Post in the old days, it was powerful. Today it isn’t. Jeff may need more of that $25 billion than he thinks.
*Marion Berry, still functional and still playing the race card, was and is a shrewd and cunning politician who probably could have made it without the Post’s help. Pratt was a total incompetent, in way over her head, and the Post did play a major role in her election.
†In 1977, Watergate Reporter Carl Bernstein published a 25,000-word story for Rolling Stone on Operation Mockingbird available here, soft-pedaling the Post’s involvement and paying little attention to the CIA’s efforts to manipulate public opinion in the U.S. Although Bernstein acknowledged that Newsweek did work closely to the CIA, he doesn’t even mention the name of Watergate hero Ben Bradlee, Washington bureau chief for Newsweek in the early Sixties before becoming editor of the Washington Post, who probably could have told Bernstein quite a bit if had felt like it.
‡I bought a copy in a gesture of support for freedom of the press. I found it slapdash and poorly written. Dixon made vague charges and lacked the information to back them up. It’s easy to believe that we’re still a long way from knowing the full extent of Operation Mockingbird.
