The Pentagon Papers

by Katharine Graham

  Nixon initially said that he would not resign, that he believed the constitutional process should be allowed to run its course. All ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment then announced they would vote in favor of at least the obstruction-of-justice article. We led the paper with the possibility of Nixon’s resignation, but made no predictions, despite speculation on every side.

  On August 8, President Nixon announced that he would resign the next day. I stayed at the paper all that day. Together, many of us watched Nixon’s television appearance about his decision to resign. Phil Geyelin had dinner at the Madison Hotel, across the street from our offices, and wrote on a napkin a rough draft of an editorial on the resignation. When it was typed, he sent it to me with a note: “This is one you probably would want to take a look at.”

  On August 9, the Post produced a twenty-two-page special section on the Nixon years. Along with a few people in my office, I watched the weird speech Nixon made before leaving the White House, fairly incoherently talking to his staff in the East Room about his mother, who seemed to be on his mind a great deal. The unreality of the whole thing hung all around us. After the long months that had stretched into years, it was so strange to be watching what none of us had ever imagined happening. It all seemed both world-shattering and confusing. A miracle of sorts had taken place—this country was about to change presidents in an utterly democratic way, with the processes that had been put into place two centuries before working in this unprecedented situation.

  At the Post, we received a lot of unpleasant phone calls, many readers expressing the sentiment that they imagined we were all popping champagne corks to celebrate the result we had wanted from the beginning—in short, the “I-hope-you’re-satisfied” school of thought. What I mostly felt was relief, mingled with anxiety. Until the smoking-gun tape had turned up, nothing had been certain; right up to the last few days of his presidency, it seemed possible that Nixon could hold on. Now the unease about where all of it was leading was over.

  Immediately after watching Nixon’s speech and before he’d left Washington, I returned to the Vineyard to continue my vacation. When I got back to the quiet of my house there, on the island that always gives me a sense of peace and remoteness from everyday life, I turned on the television and heard a voice referring to President Ford. It was quite shaking. Then and only then did I experience pure relief. I actually felt a weight leave my shoulders. It was over. Nixon was gone, Ford was president, and, indeed, “our long national nightmare” was over. The relief came from having a nice, open, honest, and nonthreatening president.

  One of the final touches to Watergate occurred just after Nixon had left Washington. Bob Woodward came to my office with the most wonderful present—an old-fashioned wooden laundry-wringer. It was signed by the six men who had worked throughout those years to keep the story alive: Ben and Howard, Bob and Carl, Harry Rosenfeld and Barry Sussman. I loved having this symbol, so indicative of the pressure we had felt during Watergate. An antique dealer had called Bob to say he would be willing to sell the old wringer in case he wanted to consider giving it to me. Ever cautious, Bob had asked how much. “Ten,” the man replied. “Ten what?” Bob asked. “Ten dollars,” came the answer. Bob snapped up the deal, and I received the much-cherished wooden wringer that sits in my office still, over twenty years later.

  —

  WHEN I RETURNED to Washington in September, I thought life might finally get back to normal after two solid years of constant stress over Watergate. Little did I realize that the “normal” I was thinking of had wholly changed. What I wanted was to be out of the limelight, and I wanted the paper to be out of it, too. But that was far from what happened. To begin with, we still had the challenges to our stations hanging over our heads. The denouement finally came at the end of 1974. The Miami challenge was withdrawn November 26, and one of the Jacksonville ones in January 1975. The other two were denied by the FCC in April and July 1975, the judge ruling that because of “overt deception practiced in the filing of the St. John’s application no finding could be made that the grant of its application would be in the public interest.” Again, we were fortunate that the challengers seemed so sure of winning through their political connections that they really never made any kind of a case.

  More even than Nixon’s resignation, this was the end of Watergate for us. By then we had been fighting this battle against venality for two years in the case of two of the challenges and two and a half in the latter two. We had paid a heavy price, not only in money but in concern, distraction, and erosion.

  On December 5, 1974, both Ben and I were invited to a dinner at the Ford White House, where I was seated at the table with the new president—an exciting symbol that the whole sad affair of Watergate was over. (An amusing sidelight on Ford’s elevation to the presidency came when tee shirts were printed with his picture on them, together with the caption, “I got my job through The Washington Post,” a slogan also used by our classified-ad department.) By then, Ford had granted a full, free, and absolute pardon to Nixon, which I thought premature, believing that he should have extracted at least some sort of admission of guilt for it. I suspected that more awful deeds lurked unexposed—now likely never to surface. I’m sure Ford was under a lot of pressure to get the whole disastrous affair “behind us.” But Nixon’s associates paid an even higher price than he did. Resigning the presidency was a high price indeed, but his associates mostly went to jail, whereas he was able eventually to work his way back into being some sort of elder statesman, even contributing to thinking about foreign policy in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

  By the end of 1973, we—the paper and certain individuals on it—began to get a number of awards. As I wrote someone, “It is a happy problem.” I picked up two of the biggest press awards, the John Peter Zenger and the Elijah Parish Lovejoy. I think some of these awards should have gone to others, particularly Ben, which I believe didn’t happen because a kind of reverse sexism was at work.

  Fortunately, who got what award didn’t cause any kind of problem in Ben’s and my relationship. In fact, when, early in 1974, a media-industry newsletter named me “outstanding newspaper executive,” with Ben as runner-up, I found it especially ironic since I was still having nothing but travail as a newspaper executive. I realized, however, that Watergate was on everybody’s mind at the time, and the editors of that report didn’t look at the overall picture.

  In fact, my relationship with Ben was solidified forever by Watergate. I relied heavily on him throughout. More than ever he was the gung-ho, charismatic leader, remaining cool and courageous no matter what we were hit with. As Woodward later said, “There was always a sense that Bradlee’s our leader. He’s the guy who’s planting the flag.” Ben’s personality was and is so “up” that I would go to see him sometimes just because a visit was reassuring. In addition, I almost always learned something new from him.

  Rumors swirled around us that I was going to get rid of him, that he had gone too far in reporting Watergate. When this kind of rumor circulates, denials win you nothing; the rumors get recycled even though the person stays on and on. There were also numerous sexist comments on our relationship. Somehow it always seemed to be depicted in exaggerated ways. For example, I wrote Tom Winship after a piece had appeared in the Boston Globe on Ben Bradlee and Abe Rosenthal, complaining, “[W]hy is it if a female publisher and a male editor get along, he is accused of stroking and she of being susceptible to manipulation?” The fact is, I always loved working with Ben, and this period—even with its many strains—was probably the most rewarding time of all.

  In keeping with our established tradition of writing each other end-of-the-year letters, I wrote to Ben at the end of that momentous year of 1974. This letter summed up many of my innermost feelings about what we’d been through together:

  This year I’m not going to wait for yours—because I began to think while dressing about the past year and by the
time I got to my shoes I had to grab the pad and begin—as I thought of your remark yesterday afternoon that it was that time of year.

  The first thing you and I have to do is separate myth from reality because after this year the myth will start to grow and reality will start to diminish even in our minds.

  The reality is so much less pretentious but so apparently impossible to describe. And it really is much nicer because it’s human. You are now supposed to be a hero and I a heroine by many and the opposite by many. I think heroes and heroines are both vulgar and boring and usually lead that kind of lives. But when you tell people you were just doing your own thing in an admittedly escalated situation, they say, Ah, yes, etc.

  So what are the realities?

  They are so complicated of course because we have known each other and our lives have impinged on each other with almost Proustian coincidence, both closer and more distant than they’d think.

  Closer because I am thinking of the shared Walter and Helen Lippmann type memories, the first tour at the Post, Phil and me seeing you and Jean in Paris, leading up obviously to the drama of Newsweek, followed by the horror years viewed so differently at the time and then Phil’s death. You have to remember at that time we hardly knew each other and certainly not in reality or very favorably either.

  How could the rest have happened? It couldn’t ever again. We were still small enough as a company, still private, and so the impossible happened….I with nothing more than a family feeling, a passion for newspapers and this newspaper in particular, (not the slightest clue about business, broadcasting or Newsweek—only negative vibes about the latter which was associated only with madness in my mind) took over this peculiar and charismatic entity.

  Two years later you knocked—typically brashly, intuitively, humorously, rudely, perceptively, farsightedly, ballsily, and pushy as Hell. And because this was a not unfamiliar syndrome to me—and one whose merits and drawbacks I knew—I nodded a feeble assent (I guess that’s slightly exaggerated I say hastily for all those future fucking Columbia Journalism Review stories). But there’s a kind of core truth to the scene.

  Then came another—the years of learning, of stumbling, of fun, of some achievement, progress, mixed with big smelly eggs on the floor—laid and cleaned up or just shoved under the rug until the stain soaked through. The fascinating thing—and the thing to remember, is that if you have enough going for you in the way of momentum and luck, everyone looks at the developing pattern on the rug whether it’s an Oriental design or the stain from the egg, and says, “What a beautiful rug.” And pretty soon we’re telling ourselves, “It’s a hell of a rug we’ve made”—and even funnier, it is. But let’s always remember the stains, the unfinished work, with the total effect and the fun—my god, the fun. It’s unfair, who else has fun? And that’s my Christmas thanks to you, kid—more than even the Watergates, although that, too.

  The things that people don’t know—that I know—are style, generosity, class and decency, as well as understanding of other people’s weaknesses….

  It was out of all these many things that Watergate evolved for you and for me and for the way it worked.

  If there was one thing I thought of at the time it was a high wire over a canyon in which I almost couldn’t pull at your coattails and say “Are we all right, because if we’re not, look below.” It was sort of like trying to talk to the pilot during a hairy landing. Not that I didn’t—and that you didn’t respond to the feverish “are we all rights?” and “whys?”…

  And maybe one of the things it’s easy to forget in 1974, is that the answer was, we were not all right—we were righteous but mercifully stupid. We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it. Well, who could have counted on that? Not you and not me.

  Thank god for the reality, it will never be in any book or any cruddy movie. It’s much too good for that….

  Ben’s letter to me at the end of that year concluded: “We probably won’t live to see another year like 1974.” He was quite right.

  —

  EARLIER, in the spring of 1974, at a time when the story had advanced considerably but was still months short of its dramatic conclusion, Woodward and Bernstein had published All the President’s Men, their first book on Watergate. The paperback rights alone sold for $1 million. Ironically, the million dollars came their way at the time of a strike by The Newspaper Guild. I vividly recall watching a news broadcast that showed the two of them leaving the building with their files, and I caused a stir with a rather acid remark about their being the only two people ever to have made a million dollars while on strike.

  From the beginning there had been talk of a movie. Once Woodward and Bernstein sold the movie rights to All the President’s Men to Robert Redford, who intended to play Bob Woodward, there was a great deal of fun and funny speculation, both in the Post’s newsroom and elsewhere, about who would play whom in the movie. I jokingly told a group of circulation managers at an association meeting that I had been assured by the editors “that my role will be played by Raquel Welch—assuming our measurements jibe.”

  In many ways, the idea of a movie scared me witless. Despite Redford’s assurances that he wanted to make a good movie about the First Amendment and freedom of the press, I was naturally nervous about having the image and reputation of the Post in the hands of a movie company, whose interests did not necessarily coincide with ours. I couldn’t visualize how he and his producers would deal with as complex an issue as press freedom in a dramatic story on the big screen.

  Someone had to set the ground rules for what they could and couldn’t do. I was particularly concerned about the effect of the movie—and our portrayal in it—on the political scene. As public people, which by then many of us at the Post were, we had no control over the use of our names, but there was a great deal of discussion in the beginning among all of us, our lawyers included, about whether the name of the Post should be used. Many of those on the business side of the company said no. Ben’s argument in favor of its use was one with which there was widespread agreement in the newsroom: “Whatever we’re going to get, we’re going to get whether they call it the Post or the Bugle.”

  To help calm my nerves and provide some assurances that the producers had every good intention, Bob and Carl brought the Redfords to breakfast at my house in May of 1974, just as plans for the movie were getting under way. I should have been pleased and interested to meet Redford, but we didn’t get along, thanks partially, I’m sure, to my own defensive crouch—the result of all my concerns, however real or imagined. He knew how much I wanted to keep a low profile both for me and for the paper. On the other hand, Alan Pakula, the director, and I became great friends and have remained so.

  Redford later gave an interview describing our meeting at breakfast:

  It was brittle, that’s the best way I can describe it. She was gracious but tense. There was a definite tight-jawed, blueblood quality to Graham that cannot be covered by any amount of association with Ben Bradlee or other street types….She said she did not want her own name or that of the Post used. I told her that was impossible. She was a public figure and in its own way so was the Post. I respected her for not wanting her privacy invaded…but we weren’t interested in her personal life. And I was puzzled. If she wanted to maintain so low a profile, why did she keep making speeches and accepting awards?

  Ben sent me a copy of this acerbic interview, to which I responded, “I don’t want to be too neurotic but it reinforces paranoia, no?…He’s got a point about my ambivalence, which was and is real.”

  I was already worried about the effect of the use of the Post’s name when I opened a magazine one day and read that the movie would be filmed in the Post’s city room. Within minutes, I was on the phone to Bob Woodward, to whom I exploded with outrage at the idea of our newsroom as a backdrop for the movie. Among all the evils I was imagining was how little work would get done unde
r such circumstances. Bob told me he’d never heard me so angry. In the end, we didn’t allow filming in the newsroom; Redford’s people had arrived independently at the conclusion that it would be too disruptive for them as well. Instead, an exact duplicate of the Post’s newsroom, including the stickers on Ben’s secretary’s desk, was created in Hollywood (for a mere $450,000, it was reported), and in the interests of authenticity, several tons of assorted papers and trash from desks throughout our newsroom were shipped to California for props. We did cooperate to the extent of allowing the filmmakers to shoot the entrance to the newspaper building, elevators, and certain production facilities, as well as a scene in the parking lot.

  At one point, I got a message from Redford that they had decided not to shoot the one scene in the movie in which I was to be portrayed. I was told that no one understood the role of a publisher, and it was too extraneous to explain. Redford imagined that I would be relieved, which I was, but, to my surprise, my feelings were hurt by being omitted altogether, except for the one famous allusion to my anatomy.

  The next I heard from Redford was a phone call saying he was sending a preliminary print of the film for us to see, and that we could still ask for changes, which I felt was a charade. In March 1976 several of us went to the viewing in Jack Valenti’s screening room at the Motion Picture Association. Because we were all so nervous, we sat in pockets around the room. When the movie ended, there was dead silence. Finally, Redford got up and said, “Jesus, somebody say something. You must have some reaction to it.” Then there was a lot of nervous babble.