Personal History. - book reviews

When Washington Post owner Katharine Graham's memoirs appeared early this year, the media accolades were profuse. "Extra-ordinary," wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times. "You chew your nails down to the nub for her." In the Sunday Times, Nora Ephron praised Personal History as a "riveting, moving autobiography" -- "wonderful" and brimming with "candor and forthrightness." NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air featured reverential interviews with the author. Even Time magazine, assessing the work of the owner of arch-rival Newsweek, called it "disarmingly candid."

Readers glimpse some of Katharine Graham's most painful memories: her bittersweet upbringing with distant parents; sorrows that came with early adulthood, including the loss of her first child at birth; the descent of her husband Philip Graham into years of manic-depression that ended when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1963. Her lifelong quest to overcome sexism and gain self-esteem provides a crucial narrative thread.

Personal History is also a yarn about cozy, corporate journalism. But few reviewers have bothered to tug on it.

"I don't believe that whom I was or wasn't friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham writes. However, Robert Parry -- who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s -- has a different take. He says he witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national-security figures."

Among Parry's examples: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation." (The 1996 memoirs of former CIA director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had it right all along.)

"Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper -- Bob McNamara and Henry Kissinger come immediately to mind -- but grew over time into relationships whose core had nothing to do with politics or work," she writes.

Graham also portrays many business titans as near-saints. Graham intimate Warren Buffett -- a major stockholder and board member of the Washington Post Company -- comes across as blend of Mister Greenjeans and Albert Einstein, only with an impish zest for acquiring billions: "What he loves is business -- thinking and reading and talking about business." The Post's coverage of Buffett, a corporate raider now ranked as the country's second-richest man, has been effusive. "He burps and he's in the newspaper," says Ralph Nader.

The higher-ups at the Post look after their financial interests. "They represent the corporate conglomerate that they are," says Nader. "They have a party line on globalization. They refuse to examine the shibboleth of free trade." As early as 1989, Nader was contending that "one of the best-kept secrets in journalism is the transformation of The Washington Post into a rightwing newspaper." His current appraisal? The Post "is becoming more and more corporatist." Nader condemns the managers of the Post for "their lack of critical coverage of corporate power in this town. ... They're very much official-source journalism." The Post, he concludes, is "part of the oligarchy."

During the NAFTA debate in 1993, pro-NAFTA sources quoted in the Post's news coverage out-numbered anti-NAFTA sources by 71 percent to 17 percent. Among scores of opinion pieces, the pro-NAFTA ratio was 6-to-1. Later, during the GATT battle, Post editorials pushed hard for approval of the global trade pact, and Post publisher Donald Graham (Katharine's son) personally lobbied Congress and the executive branch. As it happened, the Washington Post Company had millions of dollars at stake in the GATT decision.

Corporate solidarity has led the Post to close ranks -- in editorials and in federal court -- with foes of product liability. In a May 1996 letter to the editor (which the Post declined to print), Public Citizen's president Joan Claybrook noted that the Post Company "has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting limits on punitive damages in civil lawsuits, although this fact was not disclosed in the Post's many editorials on the subject."

The Post has grown particularly conservative on economic issues, as The Washington Monthly showed in November 1995. Writer Amy Waldman (who now works for the Post) documented the corporate slant pervading the paper, including the financial pages -- where "much more of the business coverage serves as a press-release-based bulletin board for company profits, mergers, and personnel moves." Meanwhile, consumer reporting has become sporadic; the vigorous reporter on that beat for decades, Morton Mintz, retired nearly ten years ago. The Post has done little to fill the gap.

On its op-ed page, conservative ideas rule. A quarter of a century ago, there was much symbolism in the Post's embrace of George Will, who chose to become a syndicated Post columnist rather than continue as a speech writer for Jesse Helms. Today, Will -- who also graces the back page of Newsweek -- has plenty of ideological companionship on the Post's op-ed page, where veteran rightist Robert Novak holds a steady berth alongside newer conservative recruits such as James Glassman, Robert Samuelson, and Charles Krauthammer.

The dominant debate on the page pits pro-corporate reactionaries against pro-corporate centrists.

When the Post fired the exceptional columnist Colman McCarthy last winter, managing editor Robert Kaiser said that the paper had opted to "take a cue from the marketplace"; the number of papers buying McCarthy's syndicated column had dropped. The Post also recently canceled Jack Anderson's column, a fixture in the paper since the 1960s; his product was hardly leftwing, but it stepped on enough big-money toes to unsettle management.

Robert Parry says "the Washington Post Company is protective of the national-security establishment." That's nothing new. The Post's entanglements with government policy makers go back a long way.

Publisher Phil Graham, a frenetic powerbroker who aided his buddies Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy, maintained warm friendships with CIA officials. He knew about plans for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. But he kept this -- and other secrets -- out of the paper.

Katharine Graham, for her part, omits mention of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. She had been president of the Washington Post Company for almost a year by the time her newspaper ran the front-page headline on August 5, 1964: American Planes Hit North Vietnam After second Attack on our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt Neggression. Considering the consequences of the precooked Congressional Tonkin Gulf resolution that followed days later, the coverage -- which presented dubious Administration claims as absolute facts -- might have merited a few words.

Graham's book avoids much introspection about the Vietnam War and the Post's role in covering it. As the Johnson Administration escalated the war in August 1966, she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page: "We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but that we couldn't be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been."

With the exception of Watergate, Graham has not allowed her media outlets to rock the boat. During the 1980s, the Post sidled up to the Reagan Administration. When the paper endorsed Edwin Meese for confirmation as attorney general (with a regulatory break a real possibility for the Post Company), this was too much for Joe Rauh, a liberal strategist and old friend of Graham. Rauh submitted a contrary op-ed piece to the newspaper. When the editors rejected it, Rauh pleaded his case at a meeting of the editorial board but got nowhere. In an interview with Graham biographer Carol Felsenthal, Rauh recalled what Katharine's son Donald Graham had said as they walked to a taxi outside the Post building: "Mr. Rauh, you have to remember one thing: This is not the liberal paper that you remember."

Acknowledging none of this in her book, Graham skips over the Post's rightward direction. That's appropriate, since the company line remains denial. When, this year, I asked managing editor Kaiser about the Post's move to the right, he insisted that it had never occurred.

Katharine Graham is truly a bipartisan spirit. She recalls that two of her maids watched a limousine pull up when Ronald Reagan came over for dinner soon after winning the Presidency: "They saw President-elect Reagan step out and embrace me, kissing me on both cheeks." During the 1980s, she and Nancy Reagan became pals, their lunches often joined by Post editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield. In December 1992, Graham threw a dinner party for President-elect Bill Clinton and Al Gore. As the guests of honor beamed, Graham raised her glass in a toast. "These occasions have value," she declared. "They create relationships beyond the office."

For Graham, those relationships entail special burdens, including keeping the public uninformed. "There have been instances," stated years ago, "in which secrets have been leaked to us which we thought were so dangerous that we went to them [U.S. officials] and told them that they had been leaked to us and did not print them." In November 1988, speaking to senior CIA officials at the agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, she said: "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."

This remark did not make it into Personal History.

But the book devotes dozens of self-righteous pages to the pivotal 1975 strike by Post press operators. Graham stresses the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began, and "the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike."

Graham portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. "Only a handful of guild members had gone out for reasons I respected," she writes. "One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn't cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired."

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union), the admiration is far from mutual. "The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting, `re-placement-worker' strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers," he says. This was the same strategy that "corporate America -- in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone, and other strikes -- used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and nineties."

The strike at the Post ended after management hired scabs and broke the pressmen's union. During the several months of the strike, the Post had actually turned a profit. But the real yields for management were yet to come.

"Without the groundwork laid by the strike, we would not have been able to build and to grow," Graham says. And she reports: "Even those publishers who denounced the so-called liberalism of the Post's news and editorial pages applauded our actions on the management side."

The Washington Post Company came of age as a major corporation during the 1970s. Early in the decade it went public under an arrangement that allowed the Grahams, as A" class stockholders, to retain control of the firm. Going on the American Stock Exchange "gave us some proper discipline about profit margins," Katharine Graham writes, "although I worry about the over-emphasis at times on the price of the stock."

Graham announced in the mid-seventies that she expected profits of at least 15 percent -- and this became, de facto, the Graham family "politics." Now, with eighty years behind her, Graham is lossening her grip on a media empire left to Donald Graham and investors hungry to maximize profits.

Preoccupied with such concerns as "the "price of the stock," the company persists in distancing itself from independent journalism. Meanwhile, the Post's role in helping to set the national media agenda is immense. The news it reports and the opinions it showcases have enormous repercussions; so do the everyday refusals to include perspectives of those who stray from the corporate line.

For a book so widely touted as a feminist parable, Personal History is notably bereft of solidarity for women who are not as privileged as Graham. They barely seem to exist in Graham's range of vision; wrenching realities of class and race are dim, faraway specks. She does not seem inquisitive about why the Post has encountered so many formal complaints about racial and gender bias. And Graham's 642 pages make no mention of former Washington Post staff writer Jill Nelson -- whose book Volunteer Slavery, published four years ago, is a blunt account of working in the Post's newsroom between 1986 and 1990. Nelson's grim experiences as a black woman contradict Graham's upbeat version of conditions at the paper.

Graham gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous. Even activists who made history are mere walk-ons. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded book.

Today, Katharine Graham's Post continues to play favorites. When two wellknown men died in Washington within ten days of each other this spring, the contrast was revealing. The death of sports magnate Jack Kent Cooke set off massive and adulatory coverage in the Post, which ran dozens of articles eulogizing him as a heroic figure. But the passing of the D.C. Council's longtime chairman David A. Clarke was marked by a few restrained news items. Clarke's decades of grassroots efforts for the poor and dispossessed of the city, and his twelve years as D.C.'s number-two elected official, seemed to count for little. In the judgment holding sway at the Post, the life of Cooke -- who amassed several hundred million dollars -- was much more worthy of celebration.

The big media's laudatory response to Katharine Graham's autobiography testifies to their eagerness to celebrate one of their own. The Post and Newsweek represent what legions of journalists and media executives wish to emulate. Her fervent embrace of corporate power is hardly conspicuous; on the contrary, it is an affirmation of shared faith. "I was and am a centrist," Graham writes: a mass-media applause line if ever there was one.

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing," Aldous Huxley observed a half-century ago. "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." Katharine Graham's book is filled with such silence.

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