“My kids are two and four,” MacPherson said. “You know I can’t work full time.”
“For Chrissake,” Ben said, “the last thing those kids need is you around the house full time.”
MacPherson laughed—then, and as she recounted the story to me. “I said, ‘Well gee, what’s it going to be called?’ He said, ‘It’s going to be called Style.’ No one had ever even heard of that as a concept. And I said, ‘As opposed to substance?’ ”
MacPherson signed on, joining the team that would incubate Style, including Laventhol and von Hoffman, who had been named “Culture Editor” but never did much to earn the distinction. In December of 1968, while the formative Style deliberations were still under way, MacPherson published an in-depth three-part series on abortion, which was then illegal, that ran on the front page of “for and about Women.” Like von Hoffman, MacPherson took on controversial issues but also took you into the room with people:
A pretty 17-year-old from North Carolina looked fixedly at a wall while her embarrassed, nervously smiling parents hovered nearby. A young married college student in bell-bottomed pants and vest read magazines along with her school teacher husband.…
A man in another room, who runs the two-year-old nonprofit, volunteer clinic … says he has felt compelled to help women with unwanted pregnancies ever since he saw a dying woman brought into a New York hospital four years ago—victim of her own attempt at abortion, a coat hanger imbedded in her uterus.
This was striking writing for a family newspaper in December of 1968, and particularly for the “for and about Women” section. It was the direction Ben was pushing in.
On January 6, 1969, with a polyglot editing and reporting team in place, the first edition of the Style section ran in the pages of the Post. The lead story, “WANTED BY THE FBI,” profiled a female kidnapping suspect and was intended both to attract attention and to announce the section’s departure from the old conception of women’s news. It wasn’t the world’s greatest story, but it was different, something that hadn’t been done before. Letters poured in from across the country, including from Ben’s former opposite number at Time, Hugh Sidey, who wrote in to say that he found Style to be “a splendid reading adventure between the Wheaties and the bacon—it’s got a lot of the magazine feel which worries me a bit—nevertheless. I like it and tip my hat to the editor.”
Ten days into the Style experiment, on January 16, the entire section was devoted to the concept of trains, including a somewhat garish picture of five trains that was supposed to make the reader feel as if the trains were coming at her. “If you wanted to make an announcement that this section is going to be different, the absolute antithesis of the society page, you couldn’t have done it any better,” von Hoffman told me.
Ben was thrilled; Kay was not.
“Kay hated the idea of the Style section,” von Hoffman said. “She fought it every inch of the way. She wanted nothing to do with it.” Kay liked the old women’s section, and so did her friends. As soon as Style got under way, disgruntled society matrons began bearding Kay at the various parties she attended around town, furious that the Post had done away with their section. When the issue with the trains came out, Kay blew her top.
“She had an absolute, total fit about this thing,” von Hoffman told me. “First Bradlee goes up there and God knows what transpires between the two of them. Next, Laventhol goes up there and God knows what transpires between the two of them. But he comes down bruised. And finally Bradlee looks at me and says, ‘Your turn.’ So I go up there and peek around her door, and she looks at me, and I go ‘Toot! Toot’ [imitating a train]. And she says, ‘Get out of here, you son of a bitch!’ ”
Kay landed on Ben particularly hard. In May of 1969, she wrote Ben and Eugene Patterson, whom Ben had brought in as his managing editor, a scalding memo:
[I]f you all think women no longer want women’s news—but better—there is an information gap. Bill and Don are Nick [von Hoffman] readers, but Garfinckel’s and Lord and Taylor don’t care and shouldn’t. I do want the Bill, Don and Steve group but I would also like the Post still to be here when they grow up.…2
I can’t see why we have to build ourselves a structure in which [I] have to fight and plead and beg to get into the paper (and I have never said this before in 5½ years) what I quite frankly want to have there.…
Enough for now, but could this whole thing please be among top priority now that we address ourselves to it with some of this in mind? Or am I wrong? I am still listening—sort of—but I hope it’s a two-way thing.
That she didn’t usually intervene so directly meant that Ben had to take her seriously. He tried to buy time, telling her that the section was coming along, sending her joking memos signed by “Ben (‘Where are you hiding the Women’s Section’) Bradlee.” But even by her own admission Kay kept coming at Ben like “a dentist drill,” writing him frequent memos and generally hectoring him about the direction of the section.
It built and built, until one day when they were together and Kay was leaning on Ben, in the heat of the moment he turned to her and snapped, “Get your fucking finger out of my eye.” He couldn’t do what he needed to do with her nibbling at him all the time.
The moment has since taken on a kind of legendary status among the old-timers at the newspaper—in terms of the Style section, but also in terms of Ben’s relationship with Kay and his autonomy as editor. Most people who know anything about Ben’s relationship with Kay can recite that phrase, often without prompting.
In hindsight, Kay was able to admit that she had overstepped. “You have always been patient, wise & deft in your strength,” she wrote to Ben privately a couple of years after the debut of Style, “and only once told me to get my finger out of your eye & I did.” This was the thing that Ben could do with Kay that nobody else could do, his magic trick. “Get your fucking finger out of my eye”: he alone could stand up to her and have her love him for it.
Though Kay hated Style at first, eventually the sheer quality of the writing and reporting in the section began to define the paper in a way that straight news reportage never could have. Writers like von Hoffman and MacPherson and Sally Quinn, who joined Style in June of 1969 and would later become Ben’s wife, developed a hard-hitting, freewheeling way of writing stories—particularly political stories and profiles of prominent Washingtonians—that the staid National desk couldn’t ever hope to emulate.
As MacPherson put it with me, “We could hit and run.” Where the beat reporters had to develop relationships and respect boundaries, Style reporters could parachute into a national primary for two days, interview all the major players, and then write the truth of what they’d seen without fear of repercussions because they’d be on to the next story by the time the previous one had been set in type. National reporters brought home the facts, but Style reporters could capture mood, atmosphere, feeling. After Style took root, nearly every other newspaper in the country would copy it, because it made so much sense. (And yet no paper could truly copy it, because other papers didn’t have the center that Style had, which was the political life of the nation’s capital.)
In time, the Style section came to rival the front section of the Post in prominence and prestige. People would read page one of the paper and then flip to see what was on the front page of Style. When I asked von Hoffman when he knew that Style had arrived, he said, “The day I walked in and Bradlee told me that Art Buchwald wanted to be moved into the section.” Buchwald’s humor columns had customarily appeared on the op-ed page of the paper, at the back of the front section, but as of August 11, 1970—a year and a half after Style’s founding—his column would appear on the front page of the Style section, which more people read.
“On at least one occasion,” von Hoffman told me, of his more controversial pieces, “advertisers called up and said, ‘We’re killing our advertising.’ And Ben never mentioned it to me.”
Though Sally Quinn and others would create plenty of contr
oversy for Style and for the Post in later years, in the early days it really was von Hoffman who got people going. His columns routinely savaged sacred cows in Washington: military wives, whom he wasn’t afraid to call “sad and somewhat dumpy,” or racial hypocrisy, or duplicity in politics. Often, in the aftermath of a particularly vituperative von Hoffman special, a couple hundred outraged readers would call or write to the Post to cancel their subscriptions. Ben loved this; it was proof of von Hoffman’s effectiveness. (“And they would all come crying back the next day,” Ben told me.)
Kay didn’t love it, but she could abide it. Von Hoffman, she would write to complaining readers, “almost alone among American journalists, is telling us what it is in the minds of the vast youthful segment of our nation which we little understand but often greatly resent when its misunderstanding of us threatens the fabric of society.” She knew that he was pushing them in the right direction, even if she didn’t agree with him most of the time. Kay once threw a shoe at von Hoffman across the newsroom. And when he dared to write a piece about her hairdresser, she told him later, “If you hadn’t been kind to him I would have cut your balls off.”
But mostly Ben kept Kay at bay.
“People knew that Ben had absolute independence from Kay then,” Len Downie told me, of the era after the Style section got up and running, “in part because she complained about it all the time.”
Downie has as complete a view of the professional Ben as you can get. He started at the Post as an intern in 1964, a year before Ben’s return; he was a reporter under Gilbert when the battle for supremacy in the newsroom was waged; he edited Woodward and Bernstein during the tail end of Watergate; and he worked his way up the ladder and eventually replaced Ben as executive editor in 1991. Downie saw it all, from every angle. He’s the only other living person who knows what it’s like to edit the Post and to work so closely with both Grahams.
When I asked him what the most important part of Ben’s legacy was to him, he said, “The independence that he established with Kay right from the beginning.” He talked about how the role of an independent executive editor is “one of the last great dictatorships in American society.” Like Ben, he got used to hearing Kay or Don say, “It’s your call” and mean it.
“That’s a great freedom and a great responsibility at the same time,” Downie told me.
Downie never worked for the Style section, but in early 1969 he had an experience with Ben that echoed von Hoffman’s and presaged what was to come for the entire newspaper. He and Jim Hoagland had been working for months on a series about racial discrimination by savings and loan associations in D.C. They called it “Mortgaging the Ghetto,” and it ran over ten days, starting on Sunday, January 5, 1969—the day before the Style section premiered:
So one day when I’m hard at work on writing, Ben comes over to me and he says, “What are you doing?” And I started to explain, in my long-winded way, like I am right now, what it was that I was doing. And of course, Ben cut me off after about three sentences—Ben has a short attention span—he didn’t want to hear any more. He just said, “Well, these guys were just in my office a little while ago, and they said they represent all the savings and loans in town, and they said if we publish your series, they’re going to pull all their advertising from the newspaper.”
Well, I think my heart stopped. I just didn’t know what to say. I was worried about what Ben was going to say next. Long pause—maybe he did it dramatically for effect—he puts his hand on my shoulder and he says, “Just get it right, kid,” and walked away.
We did do the series, we did publish it, and the Post lost about a million dollars in advertising, which was a lot of money back then … and I never heard another word about it.
The whole newsroom knew that Ben was willing to stand by a young reporter who had put in the work to get something right, regardless of the business consequences.
“They were both finding themselves,” Downie told me, of Ben and Kay as Style and the paper as a whole really started to fly. “Remember, it was assumed that she wouldn’t run the paper. She’s finding herself. She’s trying to figure out how to do this. And she’s putting a lot of faith in Ben. And Ben is finding himself in a way that he’ll never be able to articulate, but could be seen. He’s trying things out.
“So there had to be, whether it was spoken or unspoken between them,” Downie went on, “they had to both understand that they were experimenting together. And they were both going full blast.”
* * *
1 K: I don’t know who came up with “Style.”
B: I did.
K: You did?
B: As a throwback from “Lifestyle.”
K: No wonder it won.
B: Well … as I remember, one of your suggestions was “Treats and Giggles.”
[Eugene Patterson told me that B. J. Phillips, a female reporter who would go on to write the section’s first lead story, actually came up with the name, but so many people have claimed credit for it that it’s easier just to stick with Ben.]
2 The “Bill, Don and Steve group” referred to her children, the younger generation who liked the hipness of the writing.
GEMSTONE
This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.
—White House counsel John Dean, August 16, 1971
From the time G. Gordon Liddy was appointed CRP [Committee for the Re-election of the President] General Counsel in December 1971, his principal efforts were devoted to developing, advocating, and implementing a comprehensive political intelligence-gathering program for CRP under the code name “Gemstone.”
—Senate Watergate Report, 1974
If you are expecting me to tell you about the elections, only 27 days away, I am going to disappoint you.
I tried that 20 years ago, when I was covering my first national campaign while working for Newsweek magazine.
For some reason that I have conveniently forgotten, I was talking to a group of hotshot businessmen in Detroit at the Economic Club.
After I had talked for a few minutes, there were questions from the audience. They wanted to know who I thought was going to win.
I demurred. Reporters shouldn’t predict. I was too green. The election was too close. And on top of all that, I didn’t know.
But they insisted. And, finally cornered, I allowed as how, if I had a gun at my head, I thought, maybe, Jack Kennedy would just squeak in.
Afterwards, a stubby little guy—turns out he was a General Motors vice president with a salary of $250,000 a year (and I was making nineteen five)—came up to me and poked a stubby finger hard into my chest, and said:
“Listen, sonny boy, if you want to amount to anything in your business, you just stick close to Dick Nixon.”
Which, of course, I did.
—BCB prepared speech text, Wittenberg University,
Springfield, Ohio, October 7, 1980
We drive along Route 114 from East Hampton to Sag Harbor in two separate cars. When we arrive at the restaurant, we’re led to a tight but beautifully set table near the front windows, overlooking Sag Harbor’s main drag. My wife shoots me an eyebrow as she takes her seat for the evening, between Bob and Carl.
It’s Ben’s eighty-ninth birthday, Thursday, August 26, 2010. The big party at Grey Gardens isn’t until the weekend, but today is Ben’s actual birthday, and Bob has made the announcement that he wants to take the entire house out to celebrate. Given how nice the restaurant is, and how many of us there are—twelve in all—this is not a low-value proposition.
The first bit of wine sets in, and the talk turns to Watergate. Elsa, Bob’s wife, leads the discussion, asking people questions and saying she wants to focus on “old times,” but the truth is that Bob and Carl and Ben don’t seem to need much prodding. Bob an
d Carl play off each other in their well-worn way, clearly enjoying the opportunity to tell stories about Ben with Ben himself sitting there. Everybody at the table is well aware of my role, and so the stories take on a kind of grandstanding quality, with style points at a premium.
I haven’t brought my notebook. I’m there to have fun, not to take notes or make people self-conscious. But as the wine flows and the stories start to spill out I begin to rue my decision. Nobody is saying much that’s historically new; it’s more about how they’re saying it than anything else. Sally mentions offhand that I really should have brought my tape recorder, and after a couple of people around the table reiterate that idea I contemplate the possibility of putting the phone in my pocket to inconspicuous use. A night like this won’t happen again, at least not for me.
As the phone’s recorder cuts in, the conversation has just turned to Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, the former attorney general and campaign manager for Nixon who eventually went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. Martha was famously gabby and difficult to control, and in the first days after the break-in at the Watergate she enjoyed calling reporters (notably Helen Thomas) to deliver her opinions on developing events. As the story goes, during one of these calls on June 22—five days after the break-in—one or some of the security men around Martha ripped the phone out of the wall while she was still talking. Later, she alleged that she had been “forcibly sedated” when those around her feared she would reveal too much. She was a strange bird, a kind of canary in the coal mine of Watergate, and after her husband left her she took the odd step of inviting Woodward and Bernstein up to her apartment in New York:
BW: She said, “Are you and Mr.…”—she always said Mr. Bern-STINE—“busy?” And I said, “Well, what’s going on?” And she said, “The son of a bitch finally left me.”
Yours in Truth Page 13