Authors: Katharine Graham
A few days later, another letter arrived, from about eighty members of the
Post
unit of the guild. This letter included twenty specific questions to which they wanted answers. They acknowledged the damage done to the pressroom but pointed out that this issue was now in the legal justice system. The signers felt that, more than a month having passed since the beginning of the strike, there should have been further signs that the company was acting to settle the dispute. They added:
… we have subjected ourselves to punitive action by our own union and possibly split our ranks beyond repair.… While you may choose to think kindly of us when Guild negotiations come up next year, we would prefer not to have to rely on your benevolence but to go into contract negotiations as a strong union.…
Your response to the following questions will help us make up our minds. It is our feeling that through your response you may make a demonstration of good faith that would help rebuild the crumbling management-labor relationship at the Post.
Obviously my replies were going to be extremely important. The answers to the twenty questions were drafted and worked over at great length by Don, Meg, and me. From my point of view, some of the questions were irrelevant and silly—such as the reason for the amount of severance paid to Paul Ignatius when he left in 1971. Even so, this was a good chance for us to communicate our views. One important statement was this:
There is one crucial aspect of all this, however, that your letter leads me to believe you have failed to take into account. It is that the violence, both in the pressroom last month and in various episodes since, has profoundly altered and complicated our good faith search for a settlement. Before October 1, we had the luxury of being able to seek a gradual, phased solution to the problems in the pressroom.…
When I say we do not have the luxury now, I mean that it would in my judgment be the ultimate act of irresponsibility on our part to permit the pressmen to return under the old conditions. I could not myself in good faith preside over a building or an enterprise in which people who had worked faithfully and to the point of exhaustion for the company were in continuing physical danger from fellow employees, in which those who control a whole section of our building while those who had worked to repair the damage to the company and to get the paper out had to be transferred elsewhere to get them out of harm’s way, in which hiring and manning practices permitted not just the same kind of featherbedding, but also the same importation of men likely to commit the same kinds of violence should they be crossed. The pressmen in the early morning hours of October 1 made it impossible for us to set it as some future desirable goal that we should be allowed to have management supervisors present in the pressroom.…
We need a contract that is fair to our pressmen; we also need a contract that is fair to us. I would deceive you if I said this result would be easy to achieve or that it is a sure thing that it can be achieved at all. But we are trying. I want you to understand that.
I went on to answer each of the long technical questions: how the pressmen would be paid, what the
Post
’s new position on collective bargaining was, why I had set a profit goal of 15 percent, why we had trained management employees to operate the presses in the first place, why we let guild people help us, whether we were leaning on other publishers to get the pressmen blacklisted, what our position was toward indicted or convicted pressmen. We finally got our responses completed and sent our answers out, as well as posting them around the building on bulletin boards, where clusters of people immediately gathered to read them. One reader was overheard to murmur, “There is one question missing.” When asked what it was, he replied, “Mrs. Graham, how is your sex life?”
Guild members who were not working met together outside the building and called themselves the “rank and file strike support committee.” They issued at least fourteen pamphlets during the weeks of the
strike, trying to get the
Post
’s other guild members to come out with them. It seemed particularly ironic that we were questioned about whether we were negotiating in good faith but that they never asked the pressmen the same question.
T
HE
Star
, understandably, took every advantage there was to take. At one point, we learned that some of the pressmen who ordinarily worked at the
Post
—possibly as many as forty—were working at the
Star
. It didn’t make us feel better when we heard that the pressmen’s union said that most of the money these men earned there was being contributed to a central strike fund.
Yet, despite all that our competition was doing, we overtook the
Star
—at least in terms of pages published—on October 23, only three weeks after the strike began, and during the last week in October the
Post
became profitable again for the first time since October 1, a remarkable accomplishment. But also by the end of the month, the
Star
had gained $2 million in revenue over the year before and was up in advertising by two million lines—much had poured into the
Star
because the
Post
couldn’t print it. The
Star
ran in the black that October for the first time in sixty months. Its operating losses, according to an article in the
Post
at the time, had been running at a rate of nearly $1 million a month, so its advertising increase was certainly helping to offset the losses. We knew that the
Star
, despite its current surplus of revenues over expenses, had a more than $20-million debt, but we also knew that Joe Allbritton had deep pockets.
I felt we were being lambasted in the press for being Goliath to the brave little David, partly through what I thought were stories planted by our competition. I certainly believed that the
Star
was doing everything it could to hurt us. Nevertheless, because we had to live together in the same town—and, in fact, had helped each other in many ways over the last forty-plus years of my family’s ownership—I also believed in maintaining civil relations. Consequently, on December 3, I rushed back from New York, where I’d been for an ANPA meeting, to attend a reception at the Mayflower in honor of Joe Allbritton. I made the effort to go through the receiving line and tried to say something nice to Joe. However, on my way out, my breath was literally taken away when someone showed me a cartoon being circulated around the party. It was drawn by Oliphant, the
Star
’s cartoonist at the time, and used the famous Mitchell quote to depict me brutally with my breast caught and drawn out at length in a wringer, this one from a press. I found it terribly wounding, said nothing, and left.
One group or another started leaning on us to “be reasonable.” In mid-November, Mark, Don, Larry Wallace, and I went up to Capitol Hill
to meet with the local members of the House whose constituents were most affected. These representatives, two from Maryland and two from Virginia, and Walter Fauntroy from the District, wanted to offer their services to find out what the strike was about, and to step in. When they found out that the pressmen’s union was all-male and all-white (the one black pressman had been hurt and left the paper before the strike), their enthusiasm for supporting the union subsided somewhat.
I ran into Arthur Goldberg, the windy, prolabor “expert,” at the home of a prominent civic leader in Washington, at one of the few dinners I attended during the strike. He assured me that in a strike everyone had to give and that it had to be settled; he had arbitrated an airline strike and would be glad to step into ours. I responded rather sharply that we were doing fine, and I saw no need for his intervention then or ever.
Other worries abounded. Though the paper was growing and we were printing from our own plant, fourteen of our circulation “route dealers” filed a class-action suit against us, complaining about our transition from independent contractors to an “agency system” of distribution. The Maryland attorney general’s office launched an antitrust investigation of the paper.
The strike had occurred just four years after we had gone public, and we were still a relatively small company. Pending the outcome of the strike, industry analysts were withholding their assessments of our financial performance as a company—at best—or, at worst, reducing their estimates of our per-share earnings for the year, which clearly affected stock purchases. Larry Israel, Mark Meagher, and I told a New York financial analysts’ meeting that the strike would cause the first earnings drop we had experienced since we’d gone public.
T
IME WAS AN
odd factor throughout the strike. If someone had told me at the beginning that four and a half months later we would still be working at our regular jobs while helping out in departments everywhere in the building to produce a daily paper, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would not have thought we could endure. Sometimes it’s better not to know. I remember the first time I heard someone mention Thanksgiving; my immediate thought was, “That’s impossible; we can’t still be here by Thanksgiving, doing what we’re doing under this strain and uncertainty.” But Thanksgiving came and went, and the first time someone mentioned Christmas, I thought the same thing.
As we began to experience more and more success and to settle into the routine reality of putting out the ever-growing paper, the early euphoria diminished, a process helped along by fatigue and even boredom, both of which contributed to an erosion of spirits and morale. One editor on the presses said he began to understand what blue-collar workers felt
like, constantly performing a tedious and thankless yet difficult job while the white-collar executives upstairs made decisions that affected their lives and their work.
Although the pressure did decrease a bit as we became more successful, there was still no way to tell when it would all end and how it would turn out, so the anxiety and the grinding quality of life remained. I worried incessantly that the total exhaustion of our small work force—particularly because it was getting harder to obtain the extra help we were using in small but essential quantities—would force us to give up in the end.
Certain industry friends, especially Frank Batten, chairman of the private Landmark Communications Company, and Stan Cook of the
Chicago Tribune
, came in periodically to talk the situation over with me. I remember Stan encouraging me to stay the course: “You just have to keep up the steady pressure, like leaning on a gate to gradually shut it.”
And despite everything there actually were some lighter moments. Phil Geyelin sent me a note in early December saying that he was so pleased that Natalie Panetti—the manager of employee services for the
Post
, who had become the
de facto
assigner of jobs—had just informed him that, in addition to his regular duties on B press, he had been designated an Assistant Supervisor of Stuffers. His note said, “This is just to tell you how honored I am by this assignment and the expression it conveys of your confidence and trust in me. Upward mobility is the hallmark of a great newspaper. I will do my darndest to be worthy of this latest opportunity you have provided me to serve you in new and interesting ways.”
As time wore on for those of us doing the dirty and seemingly interminable tasks in the mailroom, in order to divert ourselves from the tedium, we started writing notes to people on the front page. I believe it is illegal to write notes on second-class mail, but that didn’t occur to us—or, if it did, we didn’t care—as we scribbled away to whatever name turned up who might be a friend or even an acquaintance. Who knows what these people thought when they got their Sunday
Post
along with a message: “Help, I’m a prisoner in
The Washington Post
mailroom.”
Through all this time, of course, negotiations with the pressmen’s union were continuing. From the beginning, as Mark said, we were willing to maintain their high incomes, even counting the overtime they had earned in the past due to absurd work rules, but what we wanted was to bring under control those featherbedding practices that were severely affecting our capacity to produce a quality paper. In short, as Larry Wallace summarized, we were trying, through collective bargaining, “to regain some measure of control over the operation of the pressroom in order that there will be a more efficient, more productive, less costly and less wasteful operation.”
Our earlier offer was on the table, and at one point in mid-November
a meeting was set at which the pressmen were scheduled to make a counterproposal. When the session convened, they said they had changed their minds and would not produce one. We were astonished, since by this time we were publishing marginally profitable newspapers and were surprised that the pressmen still seemed to think that no movement on their part was required. Talks were recessed until the mediation service believed they could be useful. In the meantime, we tried to negotiate with the other unions, but they gave precedence to a settlement between us and the pressmen, so we were stalemated.
During this period, those who had been charged with the violence and damage in the beginning of the strike were called before a grand jury. Every one of them pleaded the Fifth Amendment, as did Dugan, who said he had no personal knowledge of the violence in the pressroom. From the beginning, he claimed that the riot was unplanned, “a simple emotional outburst by craftsmen who felt frustrated and were overwrought.” Prosecutors were considering granting selective immunity in exchange for information and threatened to prosecute the pressmen for contempt if they continued to refuse to testify.
We were now in December, with virtually no movement, although we had put forth another offer which the pressmen had ignored. The strike had been going on for nine weeks, during which we had made several offers of generous benefits and certain job guarantees and securities in exchange for modification of unacceptable work practices. Finally, the pressmen made their first offer—orally, not in writing—proposing only one minor change in work practices, for which they asked an additional $37 a week. Obviously we were still far apart.