Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  “Dear Ben,” Kay wrote back the next day, “That’s the nicest Christmas present I have—and you are so great throughout the year that I have to send the news right back.”

  Thus began a tradition of Christmas letters between Ben and Kay, what they would later refer to as their “Mutual Admiration Society.” At the end of each year, they both sat down to collect their thoughts about each other, and about the paper, and then they sent them along. Aside from Kay’s extraordinary letter at Christmas of 1974, describing her recollections of how Watergate could ever have happened, the letters follow a predictable pattern: a brief reference or two to recent events, followed by encomia to how wonderful it is to work together.

  But as the malaise at the Post set in, in 1975, the letters begin to change:

  Christmas Eve 1975

  Katharine –

  Another unbelievable year that ends with my love and respect for you enhanced and vigorous.

  For Christmas, I want you to understand how valuable and strong and gutsy you have been at a time when the future of this great newspaper hung in the balance. You will never do anything more difficult, and you will never do anything with more grace and courage.

  For New Year’s, I want the turmoil ended, so that we can return to our task of putting out the best paper in the world without compromise and without menace.

  And for all of 1976 you should remember that down here in uncommon delight and constant anticipation sits your friend.

  B

  Dear Ben,

  Thank you for your letter which I love. My delay was due to both the wild rush & a Scrooge-mood.

  You have been a wonderful colleague, friend, support & pillar throughout these many years but especially this one. The great thing you do for the paper and for me is to be a critical voice of a gentle kind—an independent spirit but a collaborator extraordinaire, and a serious ear with a relievingly humorous tongue—& a refuge for me in a storm—

  I know how hard the last 3 months have been on you. It’s not what you are & should be about. It’s the contrary. Whereas I have been living most of the hours with people who were all together, you have been living each day with people who were all over the lot but who had to be—for essential reasons—calmed & hand held by you & Howie.

  Whereas I have been hoping for 8 years to turn this part of the building around—it’s constrained what you’ve been working to do for 10—& added to the post-Watergate problems too. And yet you’ve put your very understandable & deep worries aside to help us do this incredibly tough thing.

  Ben—I know it’s going to be good—better than you think from every point of view. I pray it’s over before too long but it would be fatal to try to push it faster than it can go—It was not looked for but was so desperately needed—In an odd sense it’s a business side Watergate that fell on our heads but then had to be pursued—

  One great thing is we’ve always believed & trusted each other—no matter how tough the going—& had fun too. So my end of the year letter to you is to thank you for this great gift & to send you my love.

  The “business side Watergate” was the pressmen’s strike, which began in October of 1975 and didn’t end until February of 1976. The strike was an inflection point in the history of the Post, and in Kay Graham’s ownership of it.2 Since taking the Post Company public in 1971, Kay had sought ways to make the operation more self-sufficient, and more profitable. Many in management felt that the craft unions at the Post, the people who actually fabricated the paper, stood in the way of those goals. The unions had gotten away with a series of sweetheart deals in the sixties and seventies because they could effectively close the paper down if they refused to work. (When composing-room workers were unhappy, they sometimes slipped phrases like “This paper is edited by rats” into the final edition of the Post, which drove Ben up the wall.) While the Post was still competing so heavily with the Star, the Post brass couldn’t afford to alienate anybody.

  But in the wake of Watergate, Kay and the corporate side of the company had the upper hand, and in essence they crushed the unions. The business side sent news executives and others out to a “scab school” in Oklahoma, where they learned how to run the presses and other basics of newspaper production. When the pressmen eventually walked out, on October 1, 1975—after doing an extensive but much-disputed amount of damage to several of the printing presses—those news executives stepped in and produced the paper themselves. Nearly all of the reporters at the Post crossed the picket lines to help put out the paper.

  John Hanrahan was a notable exception in all of this, a reporter who refused to cross the picket lines and who eventually left the paper as a result. He thought that the Post’s ruthlessness with the unions wasn’t merited purely because some pressmen had damaged the printing presses. “I was sympathetic to the pressmen with missing fingers and breathing crap in their lungs all the time,” he told me. He bore Ben no ill will, but he thought that most of the people who crossed the picket lines were hypocrites. “It’s very easy to take a liberal position when it’s happening someplace else,” he said. “If this were happening at some other place, all these reporters would be saying, ‘Boy, that’s terrible.’ ”

  During the roughly four months of the strike, everybody on the paper had to work two jobs. People slept in their offices. Management brought in catered food, and Ben and Kay both did stints taking classified advertising requests, with entertaining results:

  K: … One day everybody was really busy and this Mercedes dealer called in and he had six cars and therefore he had to go through, I said, listen, I’m new here, so please go slowly.… [P]eople weren’t aware that we were on strike. And so I didn’t wish to point out that I was replacing this person, so I just said, please go slowly because I’m new here and so I kept making him repeat, you know, because it goes a-c-d-c and all this stuff and then there were abbreviations for air conditioning.…

  I was writing away and he obviously thought I was retarded. And so he said, I think you’d better read that over. And so I read it over very fast and obviously accurately because at least I could take down what he was telling me. So he said, you sound over-qualified. He said, “You could be anybody, you could be Katharine Graham.” And I said, well, I mean, I’m so stunned, that I said, “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  When the strike ended, the Post Company was on significantly more profitable footing. And though the strike had been “crushed with methods and with a severity that are not usually accepted in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century,” as Henry Fairlie noted in The New Republic in 1977, the paper somehow managed to win the public relations battle, too.

  The reason the strike is an inflection point in the history of the paper is less due to the particulars of its handling than to the indication it provided that Kay Graham’s mission was changing, her own sense of purpose. They had scaled the journalistic heights, and now—by her own admission—she wanted to scale the corporate heights. The greatest publisher in the world coveted the title of “greatest businesswoman,” and so a business side Watergate was just what she had hoped for. The defeat of the unions improved the Post’s standing on Wall Street, but it also changed the cast of the company. During some of the Post’s formative years, Kay Graham, like her father before her, had been willing to sustain major losses in advertising and a lower profit margin in order to produce the journalism that had changed the course of history.3 Now her focus was different, and you can see it in the Christmas letters:

  December 1977

  Katharine:

  This has really been your year—in a way that all your other years have not been. The year when your decisions and your actions and your commitments have come spectacularly together. I think you got your Pulitzer in business at last.…

  When the real history of this paper is written, I think a definite, post-Watergate dimension will emerge—not doldrums, as we thought, but digestion. Our new notoriety had to be digested, then the strike had to be fought and won, all at the sam
e time. Now, 1977 was the first time that these two processes were completed and life returned to something like normal.

  According to the notations of one of her researchers, she kept the original copy of this letter of Ben’s in her desk drawer, apart from the others.

  As kind as Ben’s letter might have been, this was a moment at which there were significant strains on their relationship, and on the paper. These were the tough years that Kay spoke of in her memoir, the years when Ben and Howard and the others were “out to lunch,” or at least perceived to be, the years when Kay considered moving Ben out. In her memoir, Kay makes only vague references to her dissatisfactions, but in a confidential memo to Ben in June of 1977, she lays some of them out quite plainly:

  Ben, we all make mistakes in choosing people for promotions, and I am the one who can write a very long book about it. But we have to learn from mistakes, what is wrong with the process which led to them. With the best process you are still going to go wrong at times.…

  Superb as is your record and your net effect, it has been despite the decision-making process which has led us to things like Bagdikian, Rosenfeld,4 Patterson.… This is not to discount the many right decisions.…

  I have to say something personal in closing. When I send down the mail, the complaints, or even my own views when Howard is away, I do not feel that people’s views or even my views are truly listened to before being rejected. I do not feel legitimate requests are followed up, or that I get an answer whether it has or whether it hasn’t.…

  You are right that I would never do what Joe Allbritton did—just order something killed or changed. It’s not the way to do things most productively for the paper, and obviously you wouldn’t work that way from your point of view.

  But in order for our system to work, both sides have to listen to each other.

  For another thing, if I don’t feel I get a hearing, I wonder what people under all of you feel?

  That’s the ominous dangling end of the memo, reminiscent of Kay’s displeasure during the early days of the Style section. In her Christmas letter at the end of that same year, she would refer again to the finger Ben had told her to keep out of his eye:

  At times—& recently—I can get in periods where I come on like a dentist drill & am a trial to people around me & to myself I must say.…

  I have a feeling that this year has been a particularly hard one for you & that my finger may have loomed larger or different because of other pressures.

  If that is so nothing is more important than for you to know—really to know—how central & how essential you are to this paper, to the people on it all over, not just the 5th floor—& to this person on the 8th.

  Ben says that he never for one second had the thought that Kay was going to move him out. But it’s clear from the confidential memo, and then from Kay’s letter afterward, that she had been upset with some of his management decisions and ultimately felt that she needed to reassure him about his importance to the paper and to her. Most of the other letters have pat references to their closeness, but this letter stands out because the reassurance feels so real, as if Ben actually needed it:

  If the year has been tough on you for whatever reasons, I sure want to help & not be part of the problem. It’s what we’ve always done for each other. That way we’ve come an incredibly long way & we have a long way to go. The all important thing is to continue to have fun en route. I send you a big hug, a kiss & a goose.

  At Kay’s funeral in July of 2001, Ben’s was the only speech to receive an ovation—spontaneous, long, and loud. In it, he mentioned how Kay had closed this letter to him as evidence of what fun she had been to work with. Ben doesn’t tend to remember unimportant things. Though the big hug, the kiss, and the goose were certainly a playful expression of the dynamic that they shared, it seems likely to me that he remembered this letter so favorably because it had come at a time of uncertainty for him—whether he knew it or not.

  When you read these letters, you come away with the feeling that there was slightly more to the relationship than either of them lets on. They were both pursuing agendas, each in their own ways. Kay was focused on the growth of the Post Company and seemed intent on finding a way to voice her displeasure about the direction of the paper without upsetting Ben or pushing him away. And Ben, whatever he says about it, was plainly trying to stay in her good graces. He has insisted at various points that the reason he survived Kay’s capriciousness as an executive was that he wasn’t afraid of her, that he was willing to call her on things, that he didn’t kiss ass. True, up to a point, but it has to be said that Ben really did kiss ass—it’s just that only Kay saw it:

  December 21, 1978

  Dear Katharine:

  Another fabulous and fascinating year needs to be formalized by another love letter from me to you. And the first thing to say this time is that there will be a next time, that my next letter will be just as thankful as this one for your support and your presence and your kindnesses and your humor. Dammit, we do have fun together, you & I, and that is one of the particular joys of working in this joint.

  This year a particular kindness from you to me needs memorializing: your treatment of Sister Quinn & her social life. In a real way it was your acceptance of us that made our life together as OK as it was & thus as fine as it is. Thank you for that.…

  There is something so warm and comfortable about the sight of you striding pridefully across the city room of your paper.

  For it really is your paper, Katharine. It bears your mark, as it bears no other. You were a better publisher than Phil; you know that. And I suspect better than your father—because you brought less baggage to the job, less mindset. I don’t worry five minutes about Don, but don’t you forget for five minutes that you did all this, you got us here and gave us such a wonderful time en route.

  Remember that, dear friend, if the blahs should rear their ugly head at some dreary, winter time.

  Love

  High praise, and an admittedly deserved benediction: 1978 was Kay’s last year as publisher of the Post. Earlier that year, she had decided to step aside and to move Don in to succeed her, starting officially in January of 1979.5 But there’s still some undeniable ass kissing going on here. Note also that they have covered some distance since the previous year’s troubles: “The first thing to say this time is that there will be a next time …” He had survived.

  “I don’t know exactly when,” Jim Hoagland told me, “but Kay fell in love with Ben. But it had to be unrequited, and they both understood that.” Hoagland was one of Kay’s favorites at the paper, and for a time her presumptive choice to succeed Ben as executive editor. Though Kay would write in her memoir that her relationship with Ben “always seemed to be depicted in exaggerated ways,” Hoagland did not appear to be exaggerating.

  I told him a story about my first trip to Grey Gardens, in the summer of 2007. After too much wine, I had made the mistake of saying in front of Sally and Ben and some friends that I didn’t see how Kay could have avoided having a crush on Ben. Sally lit up. “Of course she was in love with him!” she cried, and as she launched into her theory about it I glanced over at Ben. He looked visibly uncomfortable for a moment or two, and then he stood up from the table without saying anything and walked upstairs. It was the only time in all my experience with him that anything like this ever happened.

  “That is truly odd to me,” Hoagland said. “Because, look, Kay developed crushes. This was, I think, probably the most serious one, ever. Except for Phil, and stories I don’t know about. So I’m surprised at Ben’s reaction.”

  The record of Ben’s life is littered with uncomfortable answers to questions about Kay. “Do you find Kay Graham attractive?” an interviewer once asked him.

  Ben was smart enough to realize, and then to respond, “That’s a no-win question.”

  “They’ve gone through about five publishers at The Washington Post, endless editors at Newsweek, but Ben Bradlee and only Ben Bradlee has sur
vived,” Robert Kaiser told David Halberstam in the late seventies:

  And [Kaiser] thinks it is almost sexual. And he says it’s very important that Ben was the person who said to Kay about Phil in that traumatic moment—let him have the divorce. A kind of honesty there. And he says of Ben Bradlee, he is the person who brought Kay into the modern world, and literally and figuratively taught her to say “fuck.” He was wonderful at playing her, no one could play her better. He plays her perfectly, he plays her yet he seems to be outside her reach.

  “Everybody does think she loved you, but that’s okay,” I said to Ben in his office one afternoon, revisiting the same topic I’d brought up with him so many times before.

  “I think she loved me in the most platonic way,” he said. “We loved each other. It’s hard to say it, because people would take that as an admission of all the terrible things that they think.”

  I told him people had often said things to me about her being in love with him, but I’d never heard anybody allege that he would have or could have reciprocated.

  “I’ve never felt that I had to defend myself in that,” he said.

  From Ben’s perspective I think that even factual statements about Kay’s obvious fondness for him demean their relationship, reduce it to its lowest common denominator. To him, and to history, the most important aspect of their relationship isn’t whether Kay was always, semisecretly, a little bit in love with him; it’s what they were able to accomplish at the newspaper. Those of us who stand on the outside of that relationship naturally have some curiosity about Kay’s feelings, and about Ben’s, but the truth is that only the two of them really know what kind of bargain they struck. What matters is that it worked.