Leonard Downie Jr. - All About the Story: News, Power, Politics, and the Washington Post

I HAVE VERY SELDOM WRITTEN ABOUT MYSELF during my more than a half century as a journalist. I was raised in the Midwest by parents who taught me modesty as a fundamental virtue. I always thought that my job was to tell the story, not to be the story.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, attended public schools, and graduated from The Ohio State University in Columbus. All along the way, I wrote for and edited student newspapers, beginning in the fifth grade. I fell in love with journalism.

Eventuallyand somewhat accidentallyI landed an unlikely summer reporting internship at the Washington Post, right in the heart of the Eastern journalistic establishment. Unexpectedly for me, I was hired as a full-time reporter at the end of that summer. Although I was the youngest journalist in the newsroom, I was already married and had a child. It could not have been a more improbable beginning for what became a long, exciting, and fulfilling journey.

I became an investigative reporter in my twenties, an editor on the Watergate story in my early thirties, and a foreign correspondent in London. I went on to lead the Post newsroom for twenty-four yearsfirst as managing editor under the legendary Ben Bradlee and then as his successor as executive editor. I never became as famous as Ben was, and I never thought of myself as the story. Instead, as the top editor of the Post, I let the many momentous stories I oversaw to speak for themselves.

Nevertheless, people told me in recent years that I had a significant story of my own to tell. One of them, the redoubtable Bob Woodward, author of so many books himself, recalls, I urged you to write your story because it was a remarkable, historic time to edit the Post. And you did it so well. Take us there.

I thought about that. After all, I directed coverage of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other historic stories. I drove award-winning Post investigative journalism that brought about significant changes locally and nationally. I made decisions about reporting on the private lives of politicians and about revealing national security secrets. I dealt personally with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty. I clashed with government and corporate leaders over stories they opposed, and I agonized over whether some stories might endanger lives. I sometimes made mistakes that I still regret. More often, I believe, I produced journalism vital to American society. My mission was to seek the truth and hold the powerful accountable.

Much of my time at the Post turned out to be a golden age for American newspapers. They enjoyed all-time highs in readership, influence, and the advertising revenue that paid for it all. As the editor of one of the nations leading newspapers, I was among those who set the agenda for what was news for many years.

By 2008, however, in what turned out to be my last year as the Posts executive editor, everything was changing rapidly. News media, along with the rest of American life, were being transformed by the digital revolution. Print and broadcast news audiences were shrinking. Americans were being inundated with news, information, and opinionfactual and falsefrom countless cable channels, websites, and social media. New digital media were diverting advertising revenue away from newspapers, eroding their economic base. I was forced to begin to downsize the Post newsroom while trying to maintain the quality and impact of its journalism. But I was losing ground, and I was unhappily forced to retire as executive editor at the age of sixty-six.

I was not ready for leisure, and I am a lousy golfer. I decided to teach investigative journalism and write about the uncertain future of news and the deteriorating relationship between the American government and the press. Journalism had been my calling. My devotion to it had been an all-consuming, lifelong commitmentat times at a high cost to relationships and family. I was an outsider, a chronicler, and investigator rather than a player, always avoiding opinion or advocacy. Now, I was ready to get personally involved in the increasingly contentious political, philosophical, and practical issues of the role of the news media in our democracy. And I realized that my life and career were full of good examples and lessons.

This book is the story of my uncommon career in journalism, and what it illuminates about the past, present, and future of news. I will take the reader inside the Post to show how stories that helped shape history were initiated, reported, written, and edited in newsroom dramas usually hidden from public view. I will show how those stories illustrate values, habits, and issues of journalism that are relevant today.

I also will take the reader inside my own life as a journalist and visit the unexpected twists and turns in that journey from accidental intern to the top of the Post newsroom. Some of what I accomplished was serendipitous, as the reader will see, while I believe that much more of it was due to my unwavering pursuit of aggressive journalism that sought the truth and made a difference.