The idea was to seek some degree of editorial balance and enhance the paper's reputation for objectivity. In that sense, it was not precisely a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, although the editorial board was predominantly liberal, as indicated by their endorsements over the years. I cannot offhand recall on endorsement of a Republican with one notable exception, when Agnew ran against a buffoon who happened to have snagged the Democratic nomination, and was known to be overtly racist.
Here is an article that is apropos:
Philip Graham was a classical self-starter. His father-in-law felt so confident of Philip's abilities that he put him in charge of the Washington Post in his early thirties. He had little trouble making decisions, and he made many brilliant ones that would later pay off handsomely for the corporation, including buying television stations early in the game and acquiring Newsweek. Although the Post's official policy was not to endorse presidential candidates, Phil Graham was in the inner circle of Democratic-party politics. He is said to have been the man who pushed Senator Estes Kefauver to get the investigations of organized crime under way. Unfitting as it may seem for a publisher to do so, he wrote speeches during the Kennedy administration for the President and the Attorney General, as well as for Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
He was the love of Katharine Graham's life and its central tragedy. The tragedy was that Phil Graham was insane, apparently a manic-depressive, though never diagnosed as such till late in the day--wildly insulting on the one end, unable to get up from his bed on the other. Heavy boozing was part of his illness. At one point, he was prepared to leave his wife for a much younger woman, an Australian journalist. (Later Mrs. Graham would discover that there had been other women, too.) During an attempt at reconciliation, in 1963, he shot himself to death in one of the bathrooms of their country house.
Only with Philip Graham's death did Mrs. Graham become, including in her own estimation, a figure of significance. Pushing away outside offers to buy the Post, she took over as president of the company; eventually, she would serve as publisher, chief executive officer, and chairman. In her own account, hers was a story of education, of learning how to run a newspaper, a powerful corporation, a life lived in the glare of publicity.
Personal History is thus a fairly accurate title for Mrs. Graham's memoir, for it is in some ways less about the institution of the Washington Post than about the psychological development of the woman who came to run it and help make it an enormous commercial success. Yet it is also a curiously blind book. Although Katharine Graham was the beneficiary of a generous inheritance, on the evidence of these more than 600 pages she did not, I fear, inherit a terribly interesting mind. What she does exhibit is a representative mind; her book provides a useful portrait of a contemporary American type in what I suppose academics of another time will call the age of liberal intellectual hegemony.
One quality that marks Mrs. Graham as a product of liberal culture is her language, which frequently--usually at crucial points--lapses into a modified psychobabble. Attempting to account in her last pages for why she has not remarried, she notes that "I enjoy being around married people who really love each other, are constantly polite and caring about each other, and between whom you feel a real and supportive relationship." The Post's role in defying the government and (together with the New York Times) publishing the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war is characterized as "another extraordinary learning experience for me." Returning to life outside the Washington Post Company, she writes: "Perhaps with lessons learned from the women's movement, I began to have a happier time in my private life."
Another sign of conformity to the approved spirit of the day lies in Mrs. Graham's insistence on her own victimhood. For this multimillionaire's daughter and head of a Fortune-500 company, a woman once listed by U.S. News & World Report as the seventeenth most powerful person in the United States, what counts most is that she was not sufficiently encouraged by her parents and was then further suppressed by a brilliant, ebullient husband, with the patriarchal ancien regime left to finish the job.
Is it necessary to note, for the record, that Katharine Graham is hardly the pussycat she suggests she is or was? Just as she uses this book to establish her own virtue, so she uses it to settle a number of old scores with anyone who she feels has condescended to her, betrayed her, or in any serious way let her down. Despite all her talk of bad nerves and shaken confidence, she is one tough character.
The final mark of Mrs. Graham's conformism lies in her politics, which are best described as soft liberal, and, more important, in the way her politics were or were not reflected in the paper. Philip Graham had not been above using the Post to further his own views; this he did by suppressing certain stories, playing others in klieg lights. But Mrs. Graham, once in power, saw her function much differently. Although she seems to have had no difficulty thinking of herself as the boss in a business sense, as the publisher she says she tended to regard her role less as an opinion-setter than as a person in the middle, "the go-between between complainers, supplicants, and others of all kinds on the one hand and editors at the Post or Newsweek on the other. The editors," she adds, "are more often right than wrong.... "
Depends, I should say, on who the editors happen to be. Mrs. Graham's first important move was to appoint Ben Bradlee as editor of the Post. Though Bradlee's chief ambition was to edit a paper that had prestige equal to that of the New York Times, it was also Ben Bradlee who brought on Philip Geyelin to run the Post's editorial page, and it was Geyelin who turned the paper around on Vietnam, transforming it from an institution generally supporting administration policy to one sharply critical or antagonistic. This prompted President Lyndon Johnson, who had been a favorite of Phil Graham's, to exclaim in exasperation: "Well, by God, if I owned a goddamn newspaper, I ought to have some people around me who are going to do what I want."
But, as Katharine Graham tells it, Johnson missed the point:
"What the President never accepted, or even clearly understood--as most people don't understand--is the autonomy editors have, and must have, to produce a good newspaper. I used to describe it as liberty, not license."
Later, during Watergate, Mrs. Graham would write to Richard Nixon's staff assistant, John Ehrlichman: "What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings."
Can this be true? It both is and is not. Take Watergate. "Watergate no doubt was the most important occurrence in my working life," Mrs. Graham writes, "but my involvement was basically peripheral, rarely direct." She says she was in "constant conversation" with Ben Bradlee and Howard Simons, the editors in charge of the Post's news coverage, as well as with Philip Geyelin and Meg Greenfield, the two main editorial writers on the subject. But she also kept her distance, and even now she claims not to know the identity of "Deep Throat," the paper's chief informant. She summarizes her role thus: "What I did primarily was stand behind the editors and reporters, in whom I believed."
Another way of putting this is to say that she chose not to call off the dogs.
britannica.com
The editorial page had supported Johnson. It turned on him on Vietnam with essentially liberal criticisms of the war. The news division published the Pentagon Papers and took the Watergate story and ran with it. Are these the actions of a Republican mouthpiece? |
