Personal History (103 page)

One day during those particularly agonizing first few weeks, I was sitting in my office brooding when Meg came in and quickly realized how sunk I was. I knew I could discuss my real feelings with her, because I trusted her discretion, and I told her I literally thought I couldn’t stand the tension; I was paralyzed with fear, and thought I might break. She said something that sounds strange, but in fact gave me comforting relief. “Don’t forget, there is an alternative,” Meg said. “You can give up. You are in control of that decision. And keeping that in mind can help you stay in as long as you want.” Neither one of us thought this a serious alternative, but the very idea relieved my desperate sense of being trapped. Somehow, acknowledging that I had an alternative, however horrible, lessened my dread.

Another tremendously helpful friend was Warren, who arrived within the first week and came to stay with me periodically throughout the strike. He later confessed that he came almost at once because Mark Meagher and Don had realized what personal tension I was under and had suggested he come. Warren was at my house on the second Sunday morning of the strike when the
Post
was delivered. We were like two children, standing at the door, amazed to think that we had printed nearly 650,000 copies of the paper in our own plant, only about fifty thousand short of the normal press run. As an eighty-eight-page paper, it looked fairly respectable, too—although less than one-fourth of its normal size.

Our satisfaction and pride were short-lived, however, because the
Star
arrived a few minutes later, while we were still smiling, so thick with advertising that we could hardly lift it. It was 192 pages, more than twice the size of its Sunday paper on the week before the strike. “It was a whopper,” Warren recalled. “There was no question about it.”

In addition to being constantly supportive, Warren offered substantive
advice. “Look,” he said, “I’ll watch it for you. If I ever think you are in danger of losing and have to give up, I’ll tell you.” That was a great comfort: I knew that his judgment on this, as on so much else, would be right. He was watching for what he called the “tipping point.” As he later explained it, “When you’re down for one day it doesn’t change anything. If you’re down for a year, you’ve lost your whole enterprise. Where in between do the lines cross?” What he was watching for was that line-crossing point. Looking back, he admitted, “You didn’t come near that point where you were in serious danger of losing the company, but it’s like looking for a cure for cancer; you either find the cure or you die in six months. And if you find one in the fourth month, you say there was nothing to it.”

Warren told me later that he knew it was, for me, “life or death. Yet at the same time you can’t look to the troops or do anything as though you aren’t in control of yourself. But if you really understand the situation you know you shouldn’t be in control of yourself, so you face that terrible dilemma.” That expresses better than I can why, even though the pressures on me eased as we grew in capability and pages, the basic tension never receded.

Another pillar on whom I knew I could rely was Jack Patterson. He had been ill with a blood clot in his leg and was not supposed to be on his feet too long, much less lifting heavy bundles, but he was in charge of the very complex problem of delivering the papers from all the small plants, and later from the mailroom, to the waiting trucks of the distributors, in the face of all kinds of violence against the drivers, including being shot at.

My son Don also helped me—not to mention the paper—enormously. Mark Meagher bore the overall responsibility for the company’s planning in the strike, and did so superbly. But, needing to look at the larger picture and having his hands more than full planning our strategy, our negotiations, and our outside public relations, he had handed to Don the very difficult job of running the paper day to day. It was a heavy obligation for Don—at the age of thirty—to have thrust on him, but he rose to the occasion magnificently, and getting his hands on the actual machinery used in putting out the paper taught him a lot.

Finally, the people inside the building working to get out the paper were heroic. However, they added to my pressures by saying, “We don’t mind doing this, but don’t let us down”—meaning, “Don’t let the pressmen back, don’t give in,” as the
Post
had done too many times in the past.

B
Y
O
CTOBER
12, nearly two weeks into the strike, we were able to print our entire pressrun from our own plant. We now had four presses fixed, but were still printing only a forty-page daily paper. Probably because we were beginning to get back on our feet sooner than I had thought
possible and to an extent that I would not have believed when I first saw the damage to the presses, I began to be more hopeful. Clearly there was progress on some fronts, however gradual. Our press crews were doing an amazing job. There were small milestones. For the October 15 paper we had replated the front page for a later edition, giving readers news about the World Series and an automobile accident President Ford had been in.

By October 16, we had gone to forty-eight pages, the most we could publish without using a kind of printing called a “collect run,” which requires more people and longer pressruns. We made a big leap forward when we started running “collect.” The advertising executives were on the presses and knew we were having to turn down advertising because we couldn’t go up in pages. At first Don was reluctant to let them do it, because it was trickier to pull off, and even dangerous for amateur press people, but they prevailed.

By Sunday, October 19, our final edition had nine sections and 206 pages. We had eight men working in the stereotyping operation. For the October 23 paper, these eight men made nearly six hundred plates for the presses, including three replates for a story on Franco, who was ill and assumed to be dying. The usual nonstrike stereo staff consisted of forty people.

Other than meeting constantly with Mark and Don and others to assess how we were doing, I spent most of my time working at various jobs in the classified department, taking circulation complaints, and keeping up in the mailroom. Many women were working in the reel room, making the “flying pasters” that permit newspaper presses to keep running when one of the huge newsprint rolls runs out. This, as we said at the time, was very likely “the first time in modern newspaper history that women have been in this job.” If you didn’t prepare the new roll just right, the paper tore and stopped the press automatically. The process required a great deal of dexterity, and I was leery of the responsibility for breaking the web, which was extremely onerous to reweave. To my shame, I was unskilled enough to be reduced at times to picking up accumulated trash. But on the whole we were growing really proficient at all our additional jobs, and the process of putting out the paper was getting more predictable.

Over the months we settled into a certain routine, more or less holed up in the building, with many people camped out, essentially living in their offices. Morale was high—especially in the first weeks, long before we ever thought the strike might stretch on as it did—and we did whatever we could to keep it that way. We served food on the ninth floor three times a day. After the pressrun at night, we also had food and light drinks available, and there was always a large gathering at which those who had produced the paper could get rehabilitated. The hired caterers, as part of
their normal operation, wore black-tie uniforms at night, and it introduced a note of incongruity when they appeared amid the din and confusion of the pressroom with juice and milk and sandwiches.

Upstairs, we had a piano, and several people played. Jake Lester, one of the electricians, often played his banjo while people sang along. Whatever entertainment we had was a way to release all the tension, but the
Star’s
gossip columnist attacked us savagely, accusing me of entertaining strikebreakers with music and waiters serving gourmet food. I deeply resented people who didn’t understand what we were going through or how much people were sacrificing to get the paper out. Staying in the building was no picnic. Conditions were difficult and exhausting. Every person was doing at least two jobs: his or her own regular job during the day, plus helping to put out the paper at night. Spouses were under great strain trying to make do at home alone—and often receiving threatening phone calls. Those living at the
Post
rarely saw their husbands or wives or children. Some shaky marriages broke under the strain of having people live in the building, and—it has to be admitted—some romances started there as well.

Many people came and went in their efforts to help us. My brother, Bill, more or less moved into the Madison Hotel across the street from the paper and worked at various jobs around the building, as did his daughter Ruth and her husband. Lally came down from New York with my granddaughter Katharine, then nine years old, who stood on a box one Saturday night in the mailroom, helping to wrap papers.

But though certain activities had settled into a kind of routine, the worries remained constant. One of the biggest was whether we could keep the guild working. The guild leaders attacked us for a statement I had made earlier that the company’s profits should rise to 15 percent, pointing out that we were the area’s largest business and Washington’s only corporation in the Fortune 500. Brian Flores called the company a “wealthy conglomerate.” They kept up a steady drumbeat on their members, trying to get them to honor the picket line. Only a handful of guild members had gone out for reasons I respected. One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired. As for most of the other guild members who didn’t work during the strike, I must confess that I would have been happy to see them never come back.

Flores said that the guild would attempt to fine all its members who crossed the picket line 125 percent of everything they earned during the strike, and he threatened to expel those who had—this at a time when a majority of his union members repeatedly voted not to honor the picket line. The guild leaders worked hard to influence various organizations around the city toward its position. For example, Flores sent a telegram to
the Washington Redskins urging the players not to talk with
Post
reporters—with notable lack of success.

Flores also attacked me personally. In a citywide bulletin issued on the day I was to receive the Profiles in Courage Award (for the
Post’s
reporting of Watergate) from the John F. Kennedy Lodge of B’nai B’rith in Chevy Chase, Maryland, he said, “One can’t help but feel that any portrait of Kennedy should be turned to the wall while an award is presented to the commander of the forces which seek to wipe out labor unions at
The Washington Post,”
adding, “Enjoy your dinner, Ms. Graham, while 2,000 of your employees are on strike or honoring picket lines. They too have the courage to fight for what they believe in and back it up with great personal sacrifice for them and their families. If JFK were alive I am sure he would rather have dinner with them than you.”

At the same time, he stepped up the pressure on guild members inside the building to come out, which, indeed, five members of the foreign desk agreed to do. Other guild members, however, actually resigned from the guild to protest the position the guild’s executive board took toward the strike.

The pressmen, too, stepped up their attacks, including personal ones on me. In one flyer they circulated toward the end of October, titled
“The Washington Post
Cover-up,” they said that the owners of the
Post
hoped to “get away with the biggest cover-up this town has seen since Watergate.” I was accused of having hired Larry Wallace, whom they tried to depict throughout the strike as some sort of union-buster and described as “fresh from his vicious attack on the workers at the
Detroit Free Press.”
They alleged that he then presented me with a Gordon “Liddy-like plan to destroy
The Post’s
unions,” which I, according to them, had approved.

We also worried about the constant threat of violence. At one point, three holes were made in the fifth-floor glass windows of several editorial offices, evidently caused by a powerful air gun firing metal pellets. Roughness on the picket line became habitual. Many people who drove their cars to work found them with flat tires caused by nails and large tacks spread across the alley entrance. Others were followed to their cars and harassed. Finally, with the idea of safety in numbers, we began to use a large van to transport people to other locations throughout the city where they could pick up their cars or get a bus. Spouses were regularly called and threatened violently and obscenely. One employee’s wife was actually told, “We’re going to kill you and the baby if we see you on the street.” An older woman, a union-exempt employee, was told that she had better sleep with her eyes open, and, on another occasion, that she was going to have her head blown off. Once when Jimmy, my driver, was at the wheel of my car, several picketers stopped the car as we were crossing the line and rocked it back and forth.

The pressmen also increased their efforts on other fronts, including picketing our advertisers, for which we filed an unfair-labor-practice charge alleging a secondary boycott. Among the other negative things the union was doing were passing out handbills for a consumers’ boycott and trashing the stores of advertisers by dumping goods off shelves. In one case, several striking pressmen poured oil into a store’s fish tank, killing all the fish.

In addition to the constant threat, if not reality, of violence, we had several other worries as the strike dragged on into November. The city room began to get even more edgy. Many reporters were suffering deeply from pangs about crossing the picket line. I received two communications then from guild members who were still working. One, addressed to both Larry Wallace and me, was signed by forty-one people. They were writing to ensure that their presence in the building wasn’t taken as blanket approval of the
Post
management’s conduct of its labor relations and demanding reassurance that we were continuing to bargain “in good faith.” I assured them that we were, and that we wanted all the unions back with the exception of those pressmen who had engaged in the violence.