The Washington Post (1877– ) was the dominant daily newspaper in Washington, D.C., during the late twentieth and
easrly twenty-first centuries, and is perhaps best remembered for its dogged reporting during the Watergate scandal
of the Richard M. Nixon administration (1969– 1974). But
the Post was an influential paper well before the 1970s. Post
cartoonists coined the phrases “Remember the Maine” in
1899 and “McCarthyism” in 1950. The paper was a leading voice against President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “court
packing” effort in 1937. It was the first major newspaper to
hire an ombudsman to oversee editorial practices.
The Post won numerous national awards including at
least thirty-seven Pulitzer Prizes—two of which marked the
respective high and low points of Washington Post journalism. In 1973, the Watergate series won a Pulitzer Prize for
public service reporting. Then in 1981, the paper won the
Pulitzer for feature writing, but the prize was revoked after
Post editors discovered that the winning story was a fabrication. In 2007, the newspaper maintained strong readership and influence, and its corporate parent, the Washington
Post Company, controlled a wide array of media properties
including magazines, broadcasting stations, cable systems,
and online news outlets.
Early Years
The Washington Post was founded at the end of post-Civil
War Reconstruction by politically-minded journalist Stilson Hutchins, who wanted his “Democratic daily” to be an
influential voice in Washington. The paper’s first edition
on December 6, 1877, was a four-page issue printed on rag
paper and sold for three cents a copy. Within a decade the
Post gained circulation and credibility by upgrading equipment, buying out rival papers, and becoming the first city
paper to publish seven days a week. By the turn of the century, the Post had changed hands three times and performed
steadily, but by the 1930s it was in steep decline. The paper
was poorly managed, scarcely competitive, and on the brink
of bankruptcy—an especially vulnerable position in a city
with plenty of newspapers to fill any vacuum. By 1930, the
Post had the lowest readership of Washington’s five daily
papers, lagging far behind the Evening Star which was the
circulation leader in Washington and the city’s most influential paper.
By 1933 the ailing Post was in receivership, and a judge
ordered it sold at auction to satisfy creditors. At the June
1933 auction, two serious buyers—media giant William
Randolph Hearst, and the estranged wife of Edward B.
(Ned) McLean, the Post’s departing publisher—were outbid substantially by an agent for wealthy Republican financier Eugene Isaac Meyer. Like the paper’s original founder,
Meyer wanted a chance to exercise influence in the nation’s
capitol, and upon purchasing the Post (for $825,000) he
vowed to reshape it into an independent newspaper. Many
in Washington presumed Meyer would use the paper to advance his own business-oriented views, but he managed
largely to uphold his promise of independence for the Post.
Under Meyer’s leadership the Post gained ground as
its popularity and readership grew. It won its first Pulitzer
Prize in 1936 for editorial writing, and over time the paper
emerged as a serious competitor to the dominant Evening
Star—a paper that by World War II had more total advertising lineage than any newspaper in the country. Up to the
1950s the Evening Star was considered the “establishment
newspaper” and the strongest daily in Washington, and
some felt it had great political influence on Capitol Hill.
The Post was running third in a field of four daily papers,
but it was improving, adding talent like the much-admired
cartoonist Herbert L. Block (“Herblock”) who joined the
Post in 1946 and became a fixture on the editorial page. In
1954 Meyer bought out his rival morning paper, the TimesHerald, thereby securing a monopoly on the morning news
market and knocking the Star out of first place for good.
In the space of twenty years, Eugene Meyer had transformed the Post into a robust enterprise and the city’s
dominant news source. He shifted the emphasis from news
stories to the editorial pages, hoping to capture the attention
of politicians and power brokers. He made a series of smart
business decisions that turned the Post’s fortunes around
and brought both prestige and revenue to the organization.
In 1946 Meyer’s brilliant son-in-law, Philip K. Graham,
took over as publisher, with plans to turn the Post into a
“miniature New York Times.” When Meyer died in 1959,
Philip Graham took the helm of the Washington Post.
Graham, Bradlee, Pentagon, and Watergate
By the 1960s the Washington Post Company had grown
significantly and acquired a string of media properties.
Philip Graham purchased Newsweek magazine in 1961, and
launched a joint news service with the Los Angeles Times
in 1962. The Post was gaining influence even as publisher
Philip Graham began to exhibit the mental instability that
would end with his suicide in August, 1963. Following Graham’s death his widow, Eugene Meyer’s daughter Katharine
(Kay) Meyer Graham, took over the organization. After a
halting start she began to reshape the Post, changing the
editorial guard and redistributing financial resources. In
1965, Kay Graham hired Newsweek’s D.C. bureau chief,
Benjamin Bradlee, as a deputy managing editor of the Post.
The ambitious Bradlee took over as managing editor within
the year, and the newspaper entered a vigorous phase of
growth and innovation that would lead to its now-legendary
role in the Watergate affair.
Ben Bradlee brought energy and savvy to the Post and
soon gained the full trust of Katharine Graham. One of Bradlee’s innovations was the “Style” section, launched in 1969
and instantly provocative. He wanted to replace the Post’s
predictable women’s section with something that would
chronicle a changing American culture for both genders.
“Style” gave the Post an outlet for non-traditional news, for
lifestyle stories, and for a kind of subjective writing traditionally unacceptable on hard-news pages. Readers and
competitors were skeptical at first, but eventually “Style”
became a much-imitated success for the Washington Post.
Graham and Bradlee saw their paper as fully able to
compete with the New York Times. Bradlee had reshaped the
newsroom and recruited journalists from papers and magazines around the country, forging a top-flight news staff.
He rewarded gutsy journalism and encouraged competition
among reporters—strategies that made for a vibrant but
often cut-throat newsroom atmosphere. Then in 1971, in the
thick of public protest about the war in Vietnam, Bradlee’s
Post was utterly scooped when the New York Times published the “Pentagon Papers”—a series of stories based on
a highly classified government report chronicling decades
of U.S. strategy and folly in Indochina.
The Pentagon Papers saga was a turning point for American journalism, and for the Washington Post. In 1971,
former defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked a classified
Pentagon report to the New York Times. The seven thousandpage report made it clear that the U.S. had been involved in
Vietnam far longer than most Americans realized, and that
many administrations had erred and stumbled in their handling of the burgeoning conflict. The report was explosive,
and the Times had the exclusive story but kept it wraps until
June 13, 1971, when it ran a series of articles based on the
secret report. Nixon’s Justice Department got a court order
forbidding the Times’ to publish more Pentagon stories,
which the Times appealed in federal court. Meanwhile, the
Post got hold of its own copy of the Pentagon report, raising
the competitive ire of the Times.
With a court order in force against the Times, the Post
had either to hold its own stories, or publish them and risk
a federal contempt citation. Post management had recently
decided to take the company public, and any criminal liability would jeopardize the stock offering and hence the company’s financial future. After much tense discussion and
argument, Bradlee decided to publish the Pentagon stories
and Kay Graham gave the go-ahead. After the Post’s stories
were published, a federal court issued another injunction
against the paper. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that the injunctions against the Times and Post had violated
the First Amendment. For the Post, its decision to publish
was a triumph of journalistic responsibility and courage.
One year later that courage set a course for the Post
after two of its junior reporters got wind of a burglary at
the Watergate Hotel. What began as a minor local story
(the burglary got barely a mention in the Times) eventually grew into the biggest news story of the era, as reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein followed the trail
of thieving, spying, wiretapping, and deceit all the way to
the Nixon White House. Watergate cost Richard Nixon his
presidency and catapulted the Post to national and international prominence, and the paper rode the wave of Watergate fame for many years.
Then in 1981 the Post had something of a course-correction. A talented young reporter, Janet Cooke, wrote a riveting feature story about an eight-year-old inner city heroin addict. Despite some uncertainty inside the newsroom about
the story’s veracity, Bob Woodward nominated “Jimmy’s
World” for a Pulitzer, and it won the 1981 prize for feature
writing. But eventually Cooke’s tale unraveled and the Post
had to accept that the story was fabricated—as was much
of Cooke’s resumé. The affair launched an investigation of
Post editorial practices by the National News Council, and
a somber self-assessment by the Post itself.
Modern Times
In the early twenty-first century, the Washington Post was
part of a mature news organization. Katharine Graham and
Ben Bradlee both retired in 1991, the same year Kay Graham
passed the publisher’s torch to Donald E. Graham who had
spent years working in the ranks of the Post organization.
In 1993, Donald Graham became chairman of the board for
the Washington Post Company. Katharine Graham’s memoir, Personal History, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography
in 1998. Under Donald Graham’s leadership the Post Company moved into new territory—Spanish language papers,
youth publications, and Internet news, acquiring the popular online zine Slate.com in 2004. The company’s flagship
newspaper, the Washington Post, remained an influential
and respected publication, and still informed a significant
part of the mainstream American news content.
Further Reading
Bradlee, Ben. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Bray, Howard. The Pillars of the Post: The Making of a News
Empire in Washington. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980.
Broder, David. Behind the Front Page. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987.
Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York: Vintage Books/
Random House, 1998.
Kelly, Tom. The Imperial Post. New York: William Morrow &
Company, 1983.
Roberts, Chalmers. In the Shadow of Power: The Story of the
Washington Post. Cabin John, MD: The Seven Locks Press,
1989.
Wendy E. Swanberg