That’s what came to Katharine Graham. It turned out that taking over the
paper was the first in a series of trying and wrenching events that lasted for
nearly two decades.
Thomas Paine, remarking about George Washington, once wrote that there
is a “natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but
which,
when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude.” Graham seems to
have possessed a similar cabinet.
As she settled into her leadership position, Graham found that the paper’s
conservative board was a constant obstacle. They were patronizing and risk
averse and had held the company back. To succeed, she would have to
develop her own compass and not defer to others the way she always had. It
eventually became clear that she needed a new executive editor. Against the
board’s advice, she replaced the well-liked
good old boy with an unknown
young upstart. Simple enough.
The next turn of the screw wasn’t. Just as the company was filing to go
public, the
Post received a collection of stolen government documents that
editors asked Graham if they could run, despite a court order preventing their
publication. She consulted the company’s lawyers. She consulted the board.
All advised against it—fearing it could sink the IPO or tie the company up in
lawsuits for years. Torn, she decided to proceed and publish them—a
decision with essentially no precedent. Shortly thereafter, the paper’s
investigation of a burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s
headquarters—relying on an anonymous source—threatened to put the
company permanently at odds with the White House and Washington’s
powerful elite (as well as jeopardizing the government licenses they needed
for the TV stations the
Post owned).
At one point, Nixon loyalist and the
attorney general of the United States John Mitchell threatened that Graham
had so overreached that her “tit” was going to be “caught in a big fat
wringer.” Another aide bragged that the White House was now thinking about
how to screw the paper over. Put yourself in her shoes: the most powerful
office in the world explicitly strategizing, “How can we hurt the
Post the
most?”
On top of that, the
Post’s stock price was less than stellar.
The market was
poor. In 1974, an investor began aggressively buying up shares in the
company. The board was terrified. It could mean a hostile takeover. Graham
was dispatched to deal with him. The following year, the paper’s printers’
union began a vicious, protracted strike. At one point,
union members wore
shirts that said, “Phil Shot the Wrong Graham.” Despite—or perhaps because
of—these tactics, she decided to fight the strike. They fought back. At four
o’clock one morning came a frantic call: the union had sabotaged company
machinery, beaten up an innocent staffer, and
then set one of the printing
presses on fire. Typically, during printing strikes competitors will help
fellow papers out with their printing but Graham’s competitors refused,
costing the
Post $300,000 a day in advertising revenue.
Then, a suite of major investors began to sell their stock positions in the
Washington Post Company, ostensibly having lost their faith in its prospects.
Graham, pushed by the activist investor she’d met with earlier, decided her
best option was to spend an enormous amount of the company’s money to buy
back its own shares on the public markets—a dangerous move that almost no
one was doing at the time.
That’s a list of problems exhausting to read about let alone live through.
Yet because of Graham’s perseverance, it shook out better than anyone could
have possibly predicted.
The leaked documents Katharine Graham published became known as the
Pentagon Papers and were one of the most important stories in the history of
journalism. The paper’s Watergate reporting, which so incensed the Nixon
White House, changed American history and
took down an entire
administration. It also won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. The investor others had
feared turned out to be a young Warren Buffett, who became her business
mentor and an enormous advocate and steward of the company. (His small
investments in her family’s company would
one day be worth hundreds of
millions.) She prevailed in negotiations with the union and the strike
eventually ended. Her main competitor in Washington, the one that had
refused to come to her aid, the
Star, suddenly folded
and was acquired by the
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