Personal History. - book reviews

Progressive, The, June, 1997 by Norman Solomon

When Washington Post owner Katharine Graham's memoirs appeared early this year, the media accolades were profuse. "Extra-ordinary," wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times. "You chew your nails down to the nub for her." In the Sunday Times, Nora Ephron praised Personal History as a "riveting, moving autobiography" -- "wonderful" and brimming with "candor and forthrightness." NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air featured reverential interviews with the author. Even Time magazine, assessing the work of the owner of arch-rival Newsweek, called it "disarmingly candid."

Readers glimpse some of Katharine Graham's most painful memories: her bittersweet upbringing with distant parents; sorrows that came with early adulthood, including the loss of her first child at birth; the descent of her husband Philip Graham into years of manic-depression that ended when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1963. Her lifelong quest to overcome sexism and gain self-esteem provides a crucial narrative thread.

Personal History is also a yarn about cozy, corporate journalism. But few reviewers have bothered to tug on it.

"I don't believe that whom I was or wasn't friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham writes. However, Robert Parry -- who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s -- has a different take. He says he witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national-security figures."

Among Parry's examples: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation." (The 1996 memoirs of former CIA director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had it right all along.)

"Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper -- Bob McNamara and Henry Kissinger come immediately to mind -- but grew over time into relationships whose core had nothing to do with politics or work," she writes.

Graham also portrays many business titans as near-saints. Graham intimate Warren Buffett -- a major stockholder and board member of the Washington Post Company -- comes across as blend of Mister Greenjeans and Albert Einstein, only with an impish zest for acquiring billions: "What he loves is business -- thinking and reading and talking about business." The Post's coverage of Buffett, a corporate raider now ranked as the country's second-richest man, has been effusive. "He burps and he's in the newspaper," says Ralph Nader.

The higher-ups at the Post look after their financial interests. "They represent the corporate conglomerate that they are," says Nader. "They have a party line on globalization. They refuse to examine the shibboleth of free trade." As early as 1989, Nader was contending that "one of the best-kept secrets in journalism is the transformation of The Washington Post into a rightwing newspaper." His current appraisal? The Post "is becoming more and more corporatist." Nader condemns the managers of the Post for "their lack of critical coverage of corporate power in this town. ... They're very much official-source journalism." The Post, he concludes, is "part of the oligarchy."

During the NAFTA debate in 1993, pro-NAFTA sources quoted in the Post's news coverage out-numbered anti-NAFTA sources by 71 percent to 17 percent. Among scores of opinion pieces, the pro-NAFTA ratio was 6-to-1. Later, during the GATT battle, Post editorials pushed hard for approval of the global trade pact, and Post publisher Donald Graham (Katharine's son) personally lobbied Congress and the executive branch. As it happened, the Washington Post Company had millions of dollars at stake in the GATT decision.

Corporate solidarity has led the Post to close ranks -- in editorials and in federal court -- with foes of product liability. In a May 1996 letter to the editor (which the Post declined to print), Public Citizen's president Joan Claybrook noted that the Post Company "has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting limits on punitive damages in civil lawsuits, although this fact was not disclosed in the Post's many editorials on the subject."

The Post has grown particularly conservative on economic issues, as The Washington Monthly showed in November 1995. Writer Amy Waldman (who now works for the Post) documented the corporate slant pervading the paper, including the financial pages -- where "much more of the business coverage serves as a press-release-based bulletin board for company profits, mergers, and personnel moves." Meanwhile, consumer reporting has become sporadic; the vigorous reporter on that beat for decades, Morton Mintz, retired nearly ten years ago. The Post has done little to fill the gap.