The Pentagon Papers

by Katharine Graham

  Right after the election, with the atmosphere between the Post and the president at its most poisonous, the Watergate story dried up. Our having nothing new to report fed the idea that the whole story had been political to begin with—a baseless, biased attack on the president by the Post for the sake of influencing the election.

  According to Phil Geyelin, that was the only time that Ben actually asked him to think about writing editorials on the subject: “He told me, ‘It wouldn’t hurt if you just wrote an occasional editorial saying what the hell’s happened to this investigation and why isn’t it going forward.’ ”

  Editorials did appear. And on the news side, Harry Rosenfeld was nagging Woodward and Bernstein, hounding them to dig even deeper, to keep at the story, which, of course, they did. Later on, I added a note to the file about something Ben said that applied to this period when the story seemed to be going nowhere. His comment reflected his attitude then and always: “Low profiles are a lot of shit.”

  That fall, after the election, partly in response to the escalating campaign we felt was being waged against the reputation of the Post, I began to make more speeches defending the press in general and the Post in particular. One of the first big ones was to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, quite a conservative group. Meg led the team that worked on the speech, which was a strong defense of freedom of the press. I was in something of a panic about the question period to follow the speech, worrying that I would be quizzed on the minutiae of the Watergate story and not know all the players or the various events relating to it. Meg gave me a chronology of the complicated events that had been put together by the Democratic National Committee, and I took it with me to study on the plane on the way out. I settled into my seat for the cross-country flight and began to look over this document, but promptly fell asleep. I woke up as we landed, at which time the man across the aisle from me leaned over to say, “Hello, Mrs. Graham, can I help you with your bag?” I looked up into the eyes of Senator Dole and was immediately frozen with fear that he had seen me studying the Democratic Party–prepared document, since this was not long after his accusations that we were reporting Watergate because I hated Nixon. However, either he hadn’t observed it or else he was being polite, but he was very friendly, helped me off the plane, and did indeed carry the bag for me. We talked pleasantly, and I finally worked up my nerve to say, “By the way, Senator, I didn’t say I hated Nixon.” “Oh, you know,” he casually replied, “during a campaign they put these things in your hands, and you just read them.” His reaction amazed me, dismissing so lightly something that had had such a powerful effect on all of us at the Post, especially me.

  At the same time that the administration granted an exclusive interview to the Washington Star, it started a boycott of sorts on us—specifically, as an anonymous White House aide told Time magazine, “to screw the Washington Post.” The thinking was, Time reported, “How can we hurt the Post the most?” We were not to have our calls answered, not to be dealt with professionally in any way; administration people were not to come to editorial lunches, and certainly not to my house for dinner. A uniquely ludicrous, petty, and rather weird form of vengeance took place when the administration excluded our charming, much-respected, and even loved senior society reporter, Dorothy McCardle, then sixty-eight years old, from covering parties and made her sit alone cooling her heels in the pressroom, barring her from one social event after another. The strategy backfired, for Dorothy soon became something of a heroine to her colleagues in the Washington press corps. In fact, the Star gallantly ran an editorial supporting us and opposing the ban, stating that, if the Post couldn’t cover the parties, the Star didn’t want any favors: their social reporter, Isabelle Shelton, would join Dorothy in the pressroom, declining to attend the events as long as Dorothy couldn’t. I wrote Newbold Noyes, thanking him “for the nicest, most generous minded statement I can imagine in behalf of the competition….” Moreover, I wrote that I considered it “vitally important…in the light of all that’s going on, for the powers that be to know that we care about the ethics of our profession, and will stick together. Their divide and conquer attitude…seems very determined.”

  A few weeks later, David Broder reported in a piece in the Post that Richard Kleindienst, by now the attorney general, said that “he thought The Washington Post had exaggerated or distorted on occasions in its coverage of the case.” Kleindienst also said that he had told me that “the administration is being no more unfair to the Post”—in barring its reporters from some White House social events—“than the Post was to the administration” in some of its reporting on Watergate. Broder’s piece quoted Kleindienst as saying: “ ‘I told her, “Don’t get so upset. You’ve got a great paper. Go ahead and run the…thing the way you want. But don’t be surprised if the President gets a little upset and does something a little s——y to you in return.” ’…”

  Indeed, the administration was doing something a little shitty in return. It was embarked on a deliberate policy to undermine the credibility of the press, with—as it turned out—very good reasons for needing to do so. And although there was not a lot of concrete evidence, we at the Post were well aware of being the target of Nixon and the administration’s vengeance.

  On November 13, Colson again attacked the Post, singling out Ben Bradlee: “The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivaling only ‘Gone with the Wind’ in circulation and ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ for indecency….Mr. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of…the tiny fringe of arrogant elitists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world.” It was just two days after this—we later learned from the Watergate indictments—that Colson had a telephone conversation with Howard Hunt about the need for more payments to the defendants in the trial.

  Another thing we found out only later was that at one point Nixon had a plan to get Richard Mellon Scaife—the “right-wing Pittsburgh millionaire,” according to reporter Nick Lemann, who discovered the notes Ehrlichman made on a meeting he had with the president—to buy the Post. The evidence that turned up in the Nixon Archives was Ehrlichman’s notes on a December 1, 1972, meeting he had with Nixon: “Post. Scaife will offer to buy it. (Assets.) Suit by public SH [shareholders] if she (60%) [who controls this much of the A shares] refuses. President can’t talk to him.”

  On December 4, Kenneth Khachigian, an aide to Pat Buchanan, then a White House speechwriter, sent Buchanan a memo that was highly specific about what was to be done with the Post as a target: “Colson called this morning with a project that the President wants done.” The memo went on:

  They want an article, magazine length, on the worst things the Washington Post has said about RN. The ad hominem stuff.

  It should go back as far as the fifties to point out their vicious opposition to RN. The story line would be that the Post’s 1972 vendetta was the ultimate frustration. After years and years of heaping scorn and abuse on RN, the public was overwhelmingly supporting RN—something the Post simply could not stand; thus the increasing stridency from them and the irresponsibility of Watergate.

  …Colson says it ought to be a “butcher piece”—perhaps for the New York Times magazine.”

  Obviously, the negative atmosphere between the Post and the Nixon White House had predated Watergate. My heated back-and-forth with Vice-President Agnew in 1969 and 1970 was part of the venomous mood. Several memos from 1970 were to come to light specifically detailing the administration’s dislike for the Post and its desire to hurt us.

  For example, after Nixon’s State of the Union message that year, and after the administration had reviewed the unfavorable editorial and columnar reaction to it, someone on the White House staff sent John Ehrlichman a memo saying: “[T]he following newspapers and columnists are individuals who are beyond appeal. He [Nixon] notes that we simply shouldn’t have our people spend any time with them: The New York Times, The Washin
gton Post, the Courier, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Nashville Tennessean, Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe, and Richard Dudman of the Post-Dispatch.”

  The following month, Haldeman drafted a memo for Jeb Magruder, then his aide, saying: “[W]e have got to move now in every effective way we can to get them working to pound the magazines and the networks in counter-action….Concentrate this on the few places that count, which would be NBC, Time, Newsweek, and Life, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Don’t waste your fire on other things.”

  Someone else, not identified, sent Magruder a talking paper that spelled out some actions to take against the Post:

  Put someone on the Washington Post to needle Kay Graham. Set up calls or letters every day from the viewpoint of I hate Nixon but you’re hurting our cause in being so childish, ridiculous and over-board in your constant criticism, and thus destroying your credibility.

  Lyn Nofziger should work out with someone in the House a round robin letter to the Post that says we live in Washington, D.C., read the D.C. papers, but fortunately we also have the opportunity to read the papers from our home districts and are appalled at the biased coverage the people of Washington receive of the news, compared to that in the rest of the country, etc….

  Two months later, in May 1970, Nixon himself got in on the act. He sent a memo to Haldeman:

  I would like for you to have a talk with Klein and Ziegler with regard to some very strict instructions on the handling of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I will make these instructions precise and I want them carried out precisely for the next sixty days.

  …With regard to the Washington Post I reaffirm the directive I gave two weeks ago but which has not been carried out. Ziegler under no circumstances is to see anybody from the Washington Post and no one on the White House staff is to see anybody from the Washington Post or return any calls to them. They are to be handled as part of the general press corps. This includes Kilpatrick, Oberdorfer, and everybody else. I realize the argument that has often been made that Oberdorfer one time out of ten gives us a good story. I [am] now reiterating the policy that I want followed out—just treat the Post absolutely coldly—all of their people are to be treated in this manner….If there is any exception to this directive you are to raise it directly with me and I will determine on a case by case basis, but under no circumstances will any individual on our staff, on his own, move in other directions. At the same time I want a policy in which the Washington Star, the Washington Daily News, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and, for the time being, the Los Angeles Times and others who may be competitive with the New York Times and Washington Post continue to receive special treatment when Ziegler and Klein may determine it is in our interest. They will not agree with this policy but it is one I have decided upon after long consideration and I want it carried out.

  All of this was the background against which Watergate unfolded. The pressures on us up to that point, however, were nothing to those that followed. On the very day of CBS’s first report, October 27, Colson sent a memo to another White House staffer: “Please check for me when any of The Washington Post television station licenses are up for renewal. I would like to know what the upcoming schedule is.” Coincidentally, but luckily for the administration, renewals for stations in Florida were due in early January 1973, and these licenses, as Colson well knew, were a sure way the government could hurt us. Of all the threats to the company during Watergate—the attempts to undermine our credibility, the petty slights, and the favoring of the competition—the most effective were the challenges to the licenses of our two Florida television stations. There were three separate challenges in Jacksonville and one in Miami, all of which—not coincidentally—were filed between December 29, 1972, and January 2, 1973, leading us to the easy conclusion that the four petitions must have been orchestrated. Out of more than thirty stations in the state of Florida up for renewal, our stations were the only ones challenged—some sort of record, particularly for stations whose news and community service ranked among the best in the United States.

  By this time we were so embattled at the paper that I, and most of us at the company, viewed the challenges as entirely politically motivated by people sympathetic to Nixon or even associated with CRP. Did the White House actually encourage or even originate these challenges? In light of all the threats and memos that have since surfaced, it’s easy to believe that Nixon and his co-conspirators were behind them, but we never found a paper trail leading to a direct connection. Maybe we didn’t have to, so closely tied were many of the prominent figures to the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President.

  No doubt there was a mixture of motives among the challengers—the perception of blood in the water, easy pickings, and understandable thinking that the atmosphere was right given the Nixon-dominated FCC. There was also dissatisfaction, if not real dislike, on the part of some of the challengers for our strong, aggressive news organizations, especially in Jacksonville, to which the conservative nucleus that ran the city was unused. We could see why some groups didn’t like the performance of the two stations: both had played a not insignificant role in the passage of Florida’s corporate income tax and the Florida sunshine law.

  No doubt, too, some of those in the challenging groups also misunderstood the complex FCC process and underestimated the legal costs involved. Few of the challengers had any broadcasting experience. Of course, the groups had ensured that there was the required sprinkling of minorities, who would profit mightily from being given a few shares in order to lend diversity. One common element of the challenging groups was that each tried to depict itself as the local, civic-minded small team versus the large, out-of-state corporation, making the challengers appear valid in contrast to the “outsiders,” as we were branded in both cities, even though we had operated in Jacksonville for twenty years and my husband’s family had long been prominent citizens of Miami. Though there were plenty of declarations of a high-minded desire to bring the stations under local management, it’s significant that no challenge was raised against another station, owned by Rustcraft Broadcasting Company in New York.

  In Jacksonville, one challenger was the Florida Television Broadcasting Company, whose big players included George Champion, a personal friend of Nixon’s who had been the chief Florida fund-raiser for his 1972 re-election campaign. It also included the powerful Ed Ball, a close business associate of the national vice-chair of Democrats for Nixon in 1972 and one of Florida’s wealthiest financiers.

  Another group challenging the license, the Trans Florida Television Company, included Glenn Sedam, former general counsel of CRP and deputy general counsel of the 1973 Presidential Inauguration Committee.

  The third group, St. John’s Broadcasting, consisted of businessmen thrown together hastily and knowing nothing about broadcasting.

  Nixon’s close friend Cromwell Anderson was one of the leaders of a challenging group in Miami. He had participated in an earlier challenge there against WPLG, late in 1969, one that was withdrawn after seven and a half months, when Post-Newsweek Stations agreed to pay the challengers $67,000 in legal fees under an FCC provision then applicable but now no longer in effect—and he led the fight to mount another challenge now. Anderson had been a neighbor of Nixon’s, had sold him his Key Biscayne property, and had introduced him to Bebe Rebozo. Another member of the group in Miami was Edward Claughton, whose home Agnew had stayed in during the 1972 Republican Convention. Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month when Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that the Post would have “damnable, damnable problems” about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House. To my sorrow, Phil’s old friend George Smathers and George’s brother, Frank, aligned themselves with the Miami challengers.

  Norm Davis had gone to WPLG to be deputy to General Manager Jim Lynagh just as the challenge there had gotte
n into full swing. These two men decided to meet with the challengers to size them up. What they heard was vituperative and bitter diatribe, much of it focused on me, as reflected in someone’s calling me the “Dragon Lady.” “They didn’t even know you,” Norm recalled, “not one of them had met you, but in their minds you were somebody sinister who was pulling the strings.”

  Much of my time—and certainly a great deal of my energy and emotional strength—was taken up with activities in relation to this threat and in listening to grievances from some of the powerful and influential members of each community who threatened to join the challengers. I flew down to Jacksonville more than once to meet with such people in an effort to mollify negative feelings about the station.