Sam Smith
Whatever happens to the Washington Post
under its new owner, it won’t be the paper whose story over the past
decades would, from time to time, cross my own.
It began in
the 1940s when two young boys went to public elementary school together.
One later became a mainstream journalist and was the son of a man who
would become managing editor of the Washington Post. The other became a
journalistic rebel and editor of this journal.
My relations
with the Post were never neat. I admired Post managing editor Alfred
Friendly Sr. greatly but visiting his house as a young radio reporter, I
was shocked to hear him tell how he had discussed with the White House
how to handle the story of Walter Jenkins, the gay White House aided
just found sexually engaged at the YMCA. I didn’t think journalists cut
deals like that.
And I got along pretty well with Don until the
day I told him what I thought about the pressmen’s strike. It was always
a little tough after that.
I even dated his sister Lally –
mother of the current Post publisher – a couple of times, which is how, I
suppose, I got to go to one of the most remarkable events of my life.
Just
before I left for my first assignment as a Coast Guard officer, a party
was given at a farm in Middleburg, Virginia for Liza Lloyd Mellon.
Prior to the ball, I was invited to the farm of Phil and Katherine
Graham.
Arriving at the Grahams about an hour before sunset, I
found drinks being served on a lawn overlooking dark green hills. There
were only a few debutantes around but there were Mr. And Mrs. John
Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bobby
Kennedy, the William Paleys and Joseph Alsop. In a letter later I noted
that "Mrs. Paley looked like the eleventh best dressed woman in the
United States trying to make the list of the ten best dressed women in
the United States. This was quite unnecessary since she is already on
it."
On a hill near the Mellon's home were about a score of
brightly colored tents of medieval design, sleeping quarters for the
male guests. Each tent had a wooden raised floor, 15 cots, and an
ashtray for every occupant. Several of the tents had been made into
heads with showers and electric outlets for shavers included. Another
tent housed two separate catering operations. There was room in this
canvas city for 268 male souls. The local Episcopal rectory had been
renovated for the women.
The main house contained not only the
Mellons but an art gallery whose properties ranged from Renoir to
Pissarro to Picasso. A large society orchestra alternated with Count
Basie's band until six a.m. The fastest omelet maker in France, flown in
for the evening, was equally indefatigable. A half-hour of fireworks
and a brief visit by Jacqueline Kennedy (who seemed more interested in
Rousseau, Pissarro and Picasso than in the other names present) gave a
redundant gloss to the evening.
Towards six am we wandered
towards a large yellow tent to rest. My old grade school buddy, Al
Friendly Jr, crawled onto a cot still in his white dinner jacket,
pulling the covers up as if he bedded down in this fashion every night,
and went to sleep.
By eight I was up for breakfast: a bottle of
beer and scrambled eggs. One of the caterers told me he had never seen
anything like this, either. As our minute Agincourt came to life and
spirits returned, we took off again for the Grahams and a swim in their
pond. Upon arriving on the second floor to change into a swimming suit, I
found Joseph Alsop crawling on his knees searching for something in the
hall. He got up, mumbled, "I can't seem to find his shoes" and returned
to his bedroom.
After a morning in the sun, we went back to the
Mellons for lunch. A hefty buffet had been laid out and twin pianos
played for the benefit of those still strong enough to dance. As I left
at three-thirty, the omelet maker was still hard at work.
By the
late 1960s things were alot different. I was editing an alternative
paper and Graham, just out of the military, came around to my office to
discuss what he was going to do with his life. One of the options was to
join the police department. I attempted to discourage him but to no
avail. He took the job and ended up in my own precinct and with my own
office on his beat. He and his partner would show up occasionally to
chat, a bit embarrassing for the editor of a 1960s underground
publication. I assumed Graham was filing reports about me with someone.
In any case, Officer Don Graham would continue to ignore my advice in
his later employment as publisher of the Washington Post.
I
might have ended up at the Post myself, because I was offered a job that
I turned down - afraid that I would have to resign from the 1960s.
Over the years I would have friends and non-friends at the Post. Bill
Raspberry and Coleman McCarthy were more than kind to me; others seem to
think I was a nut.
One of the columnists for the DC Gazette
(forerunner of the Review) was Tom Shales. In one of his columns he
wrote, "Of course, the Post is so riddled with flaws and shortcomings,
it is hard to know where to start, and I'm beginning to wish I hadn't.
From its snobbishly inadequate under-coverage of the District itself, to
the helter-skelter disorganization of national and international news
within the paper, the Post is a compendium of journalistic ambiguity and
short-shifts to the community one assumes it is supposed to serve."
Shales
would later be hired by the Post, eventually becoming its Pulitzer
Prize winning TV critic, but would, for some time, continue writing his
Gazette column under the pseudonym of Egbert Sousé . . . until he is
discovered and ordered to cease.
I even wrote an occasional op
ed piece for the Post, but with the arrival of the Clintons that all
ended. An article I wrote in May 1992 suggesting that the Democrats dump
Clinton while there was still time was not well received by my liberal
colleagues. Earlier that same spring I ran into Don Graham on 15th
Street. He asked me whom I was supporting in the Democratic primaries.
When I said Jerry Brown, the publisher of the Washington Post grabbed my
arm and waved it in the air shouting to the cars and pedestrians, "I've
found one! I've found a real live Brown supporter!"
As I
continued to cover the Clinton scandals, I was dropped as a guest by Fox
Morning News. A Washington Post reporter told me casually that, yes,
she guessed I was on that paper's blacklist. There was an end of
invitations to C-SPAN after two appearances were canceled at the last
minute, presumably by someone more powerful than the host who had
invited me. My speech during the first protest over Bosnia was the only
one deleted from C-SPAN's coverage of that event - even a folk singer
saying that she was the "warmup band for Sam Smith" was left in. I
received a long phone call from the host of a local Pacifica talk show
berating me for what I written about Clinton, I was banned from the
local NPR station and was graced with mocking suggestions by other
journalists that I was a conspiracy theorist and becoming paranoiac.
They didn’t bother coming up with any proof.
From 1967 to
today. I or the Review have been cited 110 times in the Washington Post,
but only two of those times were in the past decade. When you fall out
of grace with the Post you fall hard.
One other thing. In 2004
I gave up our print edition because of what the Internet was doing to
traditional publishing. It only took Don Graham nine more years to catch
up with me.
