The Washington Post | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The story of the Washington Post is really the story of three family members and one outsider who, over a period of four decades, took a somnolent and bankrupt newspaper in the capital of the United States and turned it into an icon of good journalism. The four people are Eugene Meyer, his son-in-law, Philip Graham, Meyer's daughter and Graham's wife, Katharine, and the man Katharine hired to be the executive editor, Ben Bradlee. It is also the tale of two Pulitzer Prizes, the yin and yang of the Post's rise to fame.

The Washington Post, born in 1877, was undistinguished as a journalistic organ for a good part of its first century of life. Eugene Meyer bought the bankrupt paper in 1933 for $825,000 at an auction, a time when there were four other more substantial dailies in Washington and the premier paper was the Star. In fact, the Post's early history under Meyer does not suggest that anything but disaster was in the cards because the paper continued to lose money, upwards of a million dollars a year. But Meyer, who was independently wealthy, stuck with the paper through thick and thin, saying: "In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good." His daughter one day would show the same resolve for the good of truth and to the paper's benefit.

The daughter, however, did not start out to become a newspaper publisher. When Katharine Meyer graduated from the University of Chicago in 1938, she went to work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. But within a year, her father ordered her home to work at the Post, although not with the intention that she would be groomed as his successor. She eventually married Philip Graham, who became publisher in 1947; he was 31 and Katharine was 29. Katharine immediately took on the role of dutiful wife.

Her husband, in the meantime, following in his father-in-law's footsteps, got very involved in politics, and became something of a king maker, which creates complications for reporters who are trying to cover all sides of a story, not just the boss's side. Shortly after Graham took over, a young reporter named Ben Bradlee resigned from the Post and joined the Washington bureau of Newsweek. The Post continued to prosper, and Meyer bought out and shut down another daily in Washington, reducing the number of dailies to three. In 1961, the Post purchased Newsweek.

Two years later, Philip Graham killed himself—he was a manic depressive—and Katharine Graham was thrust into the role of publisher of her late father's newspaper. She was a quick study. Realizing she needed to put her own team in place, she hired Bradlee and put him on the fast track to become executive editor. The Post was on its way.

The Post lived in the shadow of The New York Times, which had a much longer tradition of journalistic greatness. The Times, a paper that covered the federal government thoroughly, was a direct competitor for the Post, and it showed that one day in 1971 when it started to publish a series of stories about a top secret report that became popularly known as "The Pentagon Papers," in effect, scooping the Post in it own backyard. The Post rose to the occasion, got its own copy of the papers, and published parts unavailable to the Times, thereby regaining its dignity, and also showing a measure of journalistic skill not seen before. When the federal government, through the courts, enjoined both papers from publishing, the papers united to fight in the Supreme Court for the right to publish and to maintain a sacred constitutional principle that the government does not have the right to censor. The newspapers won.

The Post reached national stature on its own a year later when it began almost exclusive coverage of a break-in at Democratic National Committee in a building called "The Watergate." Essentially, it was a local cops beat story that took on added importance when the Post discovered that some of the Watergate burglars had worked for CREEP—the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Not only was it a great story, but the Post's methodical unraveling of the machinations of President Nixon's henchmen set high standards for reporting. Two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, sometimes aided by an unidentified source in the executive branch who became known as "Deep Throat," dug through records and interviewed hundreds of people to produce a series of stories that helped lead to Richard Nixon's resignation as president and to the Post's winning a Pulitzer Prize. The Post endured tremendous pressure to back off the story (its material fortunes were threatened), but Katharine Graham stood by her embattled newsroom and was eventually vindicated.

It has become part of the lore that Woodward and Bernstein brought down a president, but that overlooks all that was going on around President Nixon at the time. For example, one Watergate burglar, threatened by a judge with a long jail sentence, in effect, turned state's evidence on his friends. Then there was a Senate committee investigating what went on, and eventually, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. There was also the revelation that Nixon had taped many of his Oval Office conversations, and when the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to yield the tapes, he resigned. The Post did not single-handedly bring down the president, but if it had ignored the break-in story, the other facilitators might not have assumed their important roles.

As happens with so many on the way up, the Post became a victim of is own hubris when it published in 1981 a story about an 8-year-old boy named Jimmy, who supposedly used heroin. It was a dramatic story, written by a young reporter named Janet Cooke and published on the front page. The story created a controversy not because the Post had published it, but because it had not tried to help the boy; there was also churning inside the Post because the story had been published on the word of the reporter—no one asked for her sources and there was none of the double-checking that had made the Watergate reporting an exemplary effort. It was only after the reporter won a Pulitzer Prize that other journalists started to check her credentials and discovered that she had lied about her education and her degrees. And in her story, "Jimmy" was a fictional character, not a real person. The Post returned the Pulitzer, and Cooke resigned.

The Post, however, has continued to be a great newspaper. It made its mark with Watergate and stubbed its toe with Janet Cooke, but its owners and editors knew which way they wanted the paper to go and kept it on that track. Ironically, none of the newspapers that circulated in Washington when Eugene Meyer purchased the bankrupt Post survived beyond 1981. The Post had proved itself.

Bray, Howard. The Pillars of the Post: The Making of a News Empire in Washington. New York, W.W. Norton, 1980.

Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York, Alfred A.Knopf, 1997.

Kelly, Tom. The Imperial Post: The Meyers, the Grahams and the Paper That Rules Washington. New York, William Morrow, 1983.

Roberts, Chalmers M. The Washington Post: The First 100 Years. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Ungar, Sanford J. The Papers and the Papers. New York, E.P.Dutton, 1972.

This is the complete article, containing 1,249 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).