Dave Kindred - Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life  

For
Dan Foster, Deborah Howell, Barry Lorge,
John Mashek, and Van McKenzie,
who loved the life

We ought to call this thing The Morning Miracle.
Its a miracle we get it out every morning.

Ben Bradlee, during his tenure as executive
editor of The Washington Post

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

21.

Len Downie made this book possible. He also made the work a pleasure. Don Graham is every newspaper persons idea of a dream owner; he also is every inquiring reporters idea of a frustrating interview (so much there, so little said), and yet he kindly accepted my appearances at his office door. Bo Jones, Katharine Weymouth, Marcus Brauchli, and Jim Brady answered every question, even the impertinent ones. To them all, and to everyone in the Post and Washingtonpost.com newsrooms who made me feel welcome, thank you.

My agent, David Black, was again expert in every phase of the game. At Doubleday, editor Phyllis Grann showed a hopeless romantic that less is more; copy editor Rosalie Wieder did work invisible to the reader and priceless to the writer; and associate editor Jackeline Montalvos grace matched her efficiency.

Extraordinary news people allowed me into their lives and work: Dana Priest, Anne Hull, Gene Weingarten, Anthony Shadid, David Maraniss, Sally Jenkins, Steve Fainaru, Walter Pincus, Omar Fekeiki, Tony Reid, Deborah Howell, Eli Saslow, Bob Kaiser, Dan Balz, Ben Bradlee, and Bob Woodward. All were generous, and I am forever grateful.

Gary Pomerantz, Jane Leavy, Tom Callahan, John Feinstein, and Verenda Smith are great friends from my newspaper days. They picked me up every time I stumbled. Working overtime, Verenda took notes on Bradlee at the Illinois Prize dinner, and she stood in the street at dawn to flag down the Pakistani who delivered her Post.

In the summer of 2009, I returned to Atlanta, Illinois, for the fiftieth reunion of my high school graduating class. It was also my fiftieth year as a newspaperman. Better yet, for the fiftieth consecutive summer, I went to the movies with the prettiest girl in school, Cheryl Ann Liesman. She has made my life possible.

In retirement since 1991, the editor who came to fame with the Posts coverage of the Watergate scandal kept an office alongside the newspapers corporate executives. As to what he did as a vice president at large, Bradlee nodded to an open door and said, Im a stop on the tour.

Such a look on the man: silver-haired, chesty, the jawline square and strong. Every rough-cut line in his face suggested a rogues mischief. He might have been a pretty-boy boxer who quit only when his nose got busted a fifth time. In my reading, I noticed the year 1933 was important to him. He was eleven years old and in the tender care of a nubile Swiss governess who practiced public nudity so spectacularly that sixty years later Bradlee wrote, I shall always be grateful to the highest authority that hers were the first breasts I ever saw. Now, even at eighty-eight, Bradlee gave everyone reason to think newspapering could be sexy. Women blushed in his presence and men straightened up.

So, I said, is the Post in trouble?

I dunno, the old lion roared. But I know, whatever happens, therell always be a few of us, a band of brothers, or a band of sistersa band of people, damn itwho call themselves journalists, who will write what they believe the truth to be.

On an election night, I would have stepped inside David Broders office except there was no room for a second person. It was a tiny mess of a space with paper everywhere, scattered and stackednewspapers, books, letters, documents, five large plastic U.S. Postal Service crates, and eleven cardboard filing boxes filled to bulging. It seemed to have been arranged by an explosion. There remained one open space near the door. By turning sideways, Broder folded himself into a chair at his computer. Surrounded by the residue of a pundits research, Broder resembled a slight, wizened Yoda figure. He was seventy-eight years old, a Pulitzer winner, a Washington monument. His hands and head trembled. He wore orthopedic shoes.

The office, he allowed, is a little out of hand now.

Broder knows newspapers. A piece of his 1979 Pulitzer speech ought to be on every newspapers front page, up there in the ear where every wingnut can read it. He said:

Instead of promising All the News Thats Fit to Print, I would like to see us sayover and over, until the point has been madethat the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past twenty-four hoursdistorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labeled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: But its the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected and updated version.

A thirty-year-old political junkie working in print and online, Cillizza represented the future of journalismif the future wore blue jeans and vowed not to shave its beard until the presidential campaigns had chosen their candidates. Along with the pollsters and other pundits, Cillizza had foreseen a victory for Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary. When Hillary Clinton won, Cillizza popped out of his chair to declare, I know nothing about politics! NOTHING!

At nights end, the poor misguided political junkie asked if I wanted to go with him.

Where to?

Doing Larry King Live from midnight to one.

At that hour, apparently, a guest who knows nothingNOTHING!becomes an oracle.

I chose TiVo.

Big-time executive editors of sustained excellencethe legendswere not always stars beyond reach. Len Downie was a high school sportswriter whose column appeared in the John Marshall Interpreter under the headline Downies Drivel. At Ohio State, he was the Lanterns sports editor. This sports journalism helps explain one thing.

In 1977 there was a maniacal fan courtside at a Washington Bullets basketball game. When upset with a referees call, this man executed several dance steps at hyperkinetic speeds. He raised one leg Rockette-style. Balanced there, he rotated his arms with a velocity that might have achieved flight had he not simultaneously brought the raised leg down against the floor with a crash. These movements were accompanied by loud shoutings of a disagreeable kind.

I asked the Posts basketball man, Who is that?

Our Metro editor, Paul Attner said. Len Downie.

Thirty years later, I said, Len, at Bullets gameswhat was that about?

Laughing: When I wasnt a sportswriter anymore and could root, I just lost it.

Now chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Washington Post Company, Graham started at the newspaper as a general assignment reporter and became sports editor before moving to the business side. When I told him this book would show reporters and editors at work, his response was curious. He said, Making the sausageisnt that boring? Like that movie, all that newsroom stuff, wasnt that boring? He meant