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The Pentagon Papers

Page 2

by Katharine Graham


  I had gone to Mount Kisco to visit her for the Labor Day weekend in 1970, and was awakened on September 1 by her maid, who told me she was worried because my mother had not rung for her breakfast. I sensed that she knew something was wrong, so I jumped up and ran in to find Mother in her bed, weirdly inert and already cold. Though I had been expecting her death for some time, it was still a profoundly moving shock when it became a reality. My mother was no longer there to love, to resent, to emulate, to rebel against.

  It has always mystified me that I am a weeper on other occasions but not at deaths. It seems almost inhuman to cry at superficial books and movies or when upset or angry but not when I’m deeply shaken, as I certainly was not only at my mother’s death but at Phil’s and my father’s, as well as my sister’s, and later at my brother’s, and since then at too many close friends’. I think that part of my reaction to my mother’s death was that I couldn’t believe she was gone. She had led a long and extraordinary life and left her distinctive mark in many areas—certainly on her children and grandchildren, and even on the two oldest great-grandchildren. I admire and am impressed by her increasingly with the passage of time.

  My brother, having finally broken up his long-term marriage, was another worry for me in these years. He seemed always to be ill and had innumerable back and neck operations, and had started taking pain-killing drugs as well as drinking more heavily. His loneliness was terrible. Later he, too, recovered and led a good life for many years.

  My son Steve was still another concern. He was lonely at home, since Bill, four years his senior, had left for college. Steve was a classic member of his generation—his class at St. Albans was the first really to confront drugs in school—and few of us parents knew how to cope with the social revolution that we saw reflected in our own homes. Unfortunately, since our house was the biggest and the least supervised, it became the place where Steve and his friends gathered, and his room became the local pot parlor. I would return home to find the windows all open in an attempt to get the fumes out and cover up the telltale signs of smoking. I begged him to stop, threatening that, if caught, he and his friends would find themselves right on the front page of the Post. It had little effect.

  My social life was escalating. Some of it had to do with new friends I was making within the industry, some with maintaining a life in two cities—Washington and New York. Much of it was work-related, but part I did from sheer enjoyment. There remained an element within me of disbelief that I would be included by people I thought remote and glamorous. I wasn’t pursuing either famous or wealthy people, but my son Bill later told me that he remembered thinking on occasion that there were too many famous people around the house. I suppose that I fell somewhere between the way I had grown up and the way my children now live.

  High fashion was certainly new to me. Betsey Whitney and Babe Paley had suggested that I try Halston as a dressmaker—he had set up his own designing establishment after leaving the hat department at Bergdorf Goodman. I did try him, and our relationship was a great success: for fourteen years, until he went out of business, he made my clothes. I felt I looked better than I ever had.

  Rudi Serkin was one of my good friends at this time. For a weekend each summer, I went to Marlboro, the music festival and school that my parents had helped him start. I remember watching Casals conduct a Schumann symphony, the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. And we attended rehearsals, much the best part of visiting Marlboro. More important to me, even in our short time together each summer Rudi and I developed a real friendship, which grew over the years. I loved his stories of his youth, his teachers, growing up in the Adolph Busch household and falling in love with Adolph’s daughter Irena when he was only fifteen—and she was four! My one weekend every summer at Marlboro was never enough for Rudi. He always lamented the lack of music in my life, shaking his head sadly about the few concerts I attended or records I played, and saying, “How can you live a life without music?” I felt I made up in part for this deficiency by soaking it up so intensely while I was there.

  I also saw something of Jean Monnet in these years. He had remained a friend from the time Phil and I had first met him in the early 1940s. The thrill for me of being with him never disappeared as long as he lived. He was energetic and interesting, and I can testify to his virility. I especially loved the way he used the English language and his insightful comments on the American political scene. I recall his once telling me, after he had lunched with Bobby Kennedy, that he had been very impressed, saying, “The president had authority—Bobby has strength.”

  I also developed a friendship with Clay Felker. We fell into instant conversational rapport. I had never met anyone like him, and I appreciated his ideas, his obsession with editing, and even his preoccupation with New York City and with New York magazine, which he had successfully launched. I never got used to Clay’s odd estrangement from the human race, but I grew to be and remain very fond of him. He changed my New York life from one of solemn dinner parties to one of great fun, taking me to ethnic restaurants or to the theater. He often came to Washington, and we went to Glen Welby for occasional weekends. On one of these I brought him together with Rupert Murdoch, feeling sure that they would become friends, which they did. But it turned out to be an unfortunate friendship for Clay, since he talked to Rupert freely over that weekend, even about his having badly alienated his own directors on the magazine. Rupert ended up taking over Clay’s company.

  —

  IN THE SPRING of 1971, Fritz Beebe [chairman of the Post] came to me with a critical decision to be made. He thought our situation was such that we had to take the company public, as some other, bigger companies—Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder, for instance—had already done. If we didn’t, he felt we had to sell one of our assets—something big, like our television station in Jacksonville. According to Fritz, we were strapped for cash. Phil had handed out stock options fairly freely, and since we were a private company we were required to buy the stocks back at a valuation determined by Price Waterhouse. By this time, the price of the stock had risen far more than had been foreseen, and we were having to spend cash for these options as people left or retired.

  I wish I had understood the whole thing better than I did. My learning paths were more in editorial and management, and I still knew little about business and simply took Fritz’s word for the problem and assumed we had only two choices: either go public or sell WJXT. I wasn’t sure what being a public company entailed, but I knew there would be obligations and disciplines that were not imposed on private companies. I also knew that we would have to be open with information to shareholders. Yet, thinking that it might be good for us to have to run our businesses in a more disciplined and profitable way, I decided that we ought to go public. All my instincts said we should go forward, not back.

  What I didn’t understand—since the day of the takeover had not yet dawned—was that there was a risk we might be taken over by any of these larger companies that had sent out feelers and had remained in a friendly, courting kind of stance. Thank heaven, Fritz and his Cravath partner George Gillespie did understand this. They created a situation in which we went public with two classes of shares—the A shares, about one million, which were all owned by the immediate Graham family, and the B shares, of which there were ten million, owned by the public, by my brother, and by the profit-sharing fund started for employees. I controlled the majority of A shares, and my four children owned the rest. People bought the B shares knowing the company was family-controlled.

  Warren Buffett, whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought about 10 percent of the company’s B shares in 1973, later told me he didn’t think we really had to go public but was glad we had. In fact, I was glad we had, too, although I still dislike some of the responsibilities being public entails. The advent of Warren was only one of the positive things that resulted from our going public. It gave us some proper discipline about profit margins, although I worry about the overemphasis at times on th
e price of the stock. It also gave my children who were not working for the paper a certain amount of flexibility in their own financial management.

  The date of the stock offering was set for June 15. In a ceremony on the floor of the American Stock Exchange, I bought the first share for $24.75, and we went public at $26 a share. This important step in the life of The Washington Post Company coincided with some heightened tension with the Nixon administration. As it happened, the June date turned into one of the most dramatic times of my life, but not because we went public.

  In May of 1971, the Post had had another of those dust-ups with the White House which got quite shrill over nothing. Tricia Nixon was going to be married to Edward Cox at the White House in June. We had assigned Judith Martin to cover the wedding and the activities preceding it, but almost a month before the wedding, the White House barred Judith, claiming that while covering Julie Nixon’s wedding a few years earlier she had crashed a closed reception at the Plaza Hotel. A spokesman from the White House said, “The First Family, quite frankly, does not feel comfortable with Judith Martin.”

  Despite my success in maintaining some kind of relationship with a few people in the White House, I had never tried with H. R. Haldeman. He made my blood run cold, and I felt sure the feeling was reciprocated. The only time we ever met on an informal basis was one night at a dinner at Joe Alsop’s when I sat next to him. I had suggested that he call me if he ever had problems he wanted to talk about, and the one time he did call had to do with Tricia’s wedding. Amazingly, someone had prepared a “talking paper” for him on the points he should go over, which came to light only a few years ago:

  As you probably know, there’s been considerable discussion back and forth between your people and our people regarding the assignment of Judith Martin to cover the Tricia Nixon wedding.

  I just wanted you to know that the decision not to provide Judith Martin with credentials for the wedding was in no way a matter of the White House dictating who is to cover events, or a punishment of any kind.

  It’s a matter of principle in the same sense as breaking a backgrounder would be. Out of the 350 some reporters who covered Julie Nixon’s wedding, all but two followed the ground rules that were laid out….The two that broke the rules were Judith Martin and the other reporter from the Post….

  I’m sure you’ll understand the reasoning behind this and will agree that, under the circumstances, it was the logical action for us to take.

  I trust that you also will understand the desire of the Nixon family to have the wedding conducted and reported in as wholesome and positive a fashion as possible, since it is completely a personal event, not an official one, and one that means a great deal to all of the family—especially to Tricia.

  Haldeman phoned me on May 13. Little seems to have escaped the taping system in the White House, since our extended conversation was taped and a transcript made, which turned up in the Nixon Library. It ends:

  KG: I wonder if there isn’t some way we can just cool it….But, if you can think of anything more ridiculous. I’m not even sure Larry Stern knew when he assigned her that—you know, he wasn’t here when the first thing—I don’t suppose he even thought of it….I just hate to let it get bigger….You know, it doesn’t really matter to you or to us, does it?

  H: No, it probably doesn’t, probably doesn’t.

  KG: I mean (laughter) it really doesn’t matter….I’m just really thinking out loud to see if there isn’t some way we…usually there’s some way of getting both sides off the hook. If we just think about it, unless you just want to leave it stand…I’m just afraid it will be the ridiculous [sic]….

  H: Well.

  KG: So, the thing is that they’ve made an issue and I don’t think they can back down….I’ll try to calm our fellows down—that’s the best I can try to do and I may come back to you pounding the table but I don’t honestly care….

  It’s disconcerting to see all this in print, and I’m sure I would have handled the whole thing differently later, but I was in an embarrassing position. I had grave concerns about some of the stiletto party coverage that “Style” seemed to produce, and, knowing how sharp Judith’s pen could be, I actually had wondered privately why we had to take on this battle when we were engaged in so many more serious ones. My view was that Judy was an able, even brilliant reporter, but I wasn’t sure I’d want her to cover my own daughter’s wedding. She had, for instance, already compared Tricia to a vanilla ice-cream cone. I didn’t mind defending us under most circumstances, but when I had my own doubts about the rightness of our position, the situation grew more ambivalent.

  In the end, because the Post was denied credentials to cover the wedding, the paper had the best coverage of the event, since, as a form of protest, reporters from other papers all gave Judy their notes, placing at her disposal the finest pool of material available to any reporter in town. The story in the Post appeared on page one with no byline.

  Much more important was a piece that appeared on the same day, June 13, about a study of the Vietnam War that The New York Times had found out about and was publishing. Ironically, it was at another wedding—also on that Saturday in June—that I first learned about what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

  Don, Mary, and I had gone down to Glen Welby for the weekend to attend the country wedding of Scotty and Sally Reston’s middle son, Jimmy. The wedding was a casual event, and while we were talking to Scotty, he told Don and me that the Times would be publishing, starting the next day, articles about a super-secret history of the decision-making that led us into and through Vietnam, labeled the “Pentagon Papers,” but more formally titled “History of the United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy.”

  Unbeknownst to President Johnson, the review had been commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sometime in the middle of 1967, before he left the Pentagon. McNamara later said he had started the study “to bequeath to scholars the raw material from which they could re-examine the events of the time.”

  Don and I were unclear what it was the Times had, but we knew that, whatever it was, it was important, and that editors and reporters there had been working on it for some time. And, important for us, whatever it was, The New York Times had it exclusively. When we got back to Glen Welby, I called the Post’s editors, who immediately started calling around, to no effect. Ben [Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post] had heard rumors, starting in the early spring, that the Times was working on some kind of “blockbuster,” but was not able to find out anything about it until he read it in the paper himself.

  On Sunday morning, I sent to Warrenton for ten copies of the Times, since there was a sizable group staying at the house over the weekend. Most of us spent much of the day poring over the six pages of news stories and articles in the Times that were based on the Pentagon Papers, and in discussing their content and their possible impact.

  What emerged was that the Pentagon Papers had turned out to be in large part just what McNamara had envisioned—a massive history of the role of the United States in Indochina, which he had intended to be “encyclopedic and objective.” We learned of a year-and-a-half-long study that had resulted in a three-thousand-page narrative history with a four-thousand-page appendix of documents—forty-seven volumes in all, covering American involvement in Indochina from the Second World War to May of 1968, when peace talks on the Vietnam War began in Paris.

  Later we understood that there had been a bitter fight at the Times over whether or not to publish these so-called top-secret documents, with Scotty and other editors arguing for publication. Scotty believed always that this was a question not merely of legality but of a higher morality: a vast deception had been perpetrated on the American people, and the paper must publish. The lawyers for the Times—Lord, Day and Lord—felt so strongly against publishing that they ultimately refused to handle the case. But the Times went ahead and delivered their bombshell on that Sunday morning in mid-June.

  B
en Bradlee anguished over being scooped. He had worked so hard to build up the paper, not just to be competitive with the Times but to be taken as seriously, to be “out there” with them, to be mentioned in the same sentence. Now the Times had landed this big one on us, and Ben, mortified but unbowed, set to work to try to get the Papers for the Post. Meanwhile, he swallowed his pride and rewrote the stories that appeared in the Times, crediting the competition with their original publication.

  The next day, Monday, I was in New York and ended up having dinner with some friends, including Abe Rosenthal, managing editor of the Times. When we had settled down with a predinner glass of wine, I congratulated Abe on the publication of the Papers. Soon afterwards, before we had been served dinner, he got word that the government was asking the Times to suspend publication. In fact, Attorney General John Mitchell and Robert Mardian, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s internal-security division, had dispatched the message, with the president’s approval, that if the Times did not comply the government would seek an injunction. Abe left immediately, and I used the headwaiter’s telephone to phone Ben and tell him what was going on.

  Meanwhile, the Times “respectfully” declined to cease publication of the series, sending the paper on its path through the courts. By an odd coincidence, when Scotty heard about the government’s reaction he and Sally were dining alone with Bob McNamara, whose wife was in the hospital. Scotty asked McNamara what he thought of the Times’s defying the government, and McNamara considered the issues in his usual objective way and, despite his distaste for the early publication of these documents, nevertheless encouraged the Times to go ahead. He even went over with Scotty the message that the Times proposed to send back to the government, responding to Mitchell’s message. It was Bob who suggested altering the proposed sentence that the Times would abide by the “decisions of the Courts” to read “the highest Court.” In fact, a compromise was reached by which the Times agreed to abide by “the final decision of the Court.” Scotty later recalled that, had it not been for McNamara’s intervention, the Times would have been committed to stop printing by the adverse decision of any court. So, half an hour before its deadline, the Times recovered from a careless and potentially harmful mistake, courtesy of the former secretary of defense.

 

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