The Washington Toast
Unlike some other conservatives, I can’t help feeling saddened by rumors of imminent mass layoffs at the already deflated Washington Post — including the entire sports department. Even though the people running the paper helped guarantee that fate. The Post was always liberal but not until this century, a liberal rag. Today, the entire newspaper is the width of the ad supplement I used to stuff in it every Sunday morning as a DC suburb paperboy. For a hundred years before then and decades after, it was the shining star for news, entertainment, and education. The Washington Post improved my mind and changed the course of my life. Yet too many of my ideological allies celebrating its demise fail to see the epic tragedy.
Everybody else was liberal from Bradlee down to my fellow copy-aides — including the only girl I’d ever loved, a beautiful radical feminist.
The Post made a major cultural splash with great fanfare, literally, in 1889, inspiring a classic tune by the great John Philip Sousa, The Washington Post March. Yet the paper struggled until the mid-1940s, when owner Eugene Meyer hired a brilliant lawyer, Philip Graham, to work for it. With his marriage to Meyer’s daughter, Katharine, Philip took control of the paper, making it a Washington — and national — powerhouse.
In 1963, the mentally disturbed (now known as bipolar disorder) Graham shot himself in the head with his shotgun. His widow Katharine took over the Post, becoming one of the first women to run a newspaper. Her wisest move was hiring Ben Bradlee, a true Hemingwayesque hero, as Managing Editor.
Bradlee had joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, serving as a destroyer communications officer in the Pacific. After the war, he became a beat reporter, then a Newsweek foreign correspondent during the most turbulent decade of the Cold War. Newsweek promoted him to Washington Bureau Chief in 1957. As such, he befriended young Senator John F. Kennedy, who gave Bradlee unprecedented access to his inner circle pre and post Election 1960. This caught the notice of Katharine Graham, who eventually elevated Bradlee to Executive Editor of her paper.
Under Bradlee’s reign, the Post became as powerful and influential as the “paper of record,” the New York Times — more so after Watergate. The investigative journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to the resignation of the Left-despised President Nixon — and the bestselling book and superb movie, All the President’s Men — became the gold standard for every young aspiring reporter. They didn’t know the whole thing was a liberal fabrication to get Nixon. Neither did I as a kid right out of college and new Washington Post copyboy in 1983.
It was the media Camelot at the time, and the legends were still there — Graham, Bradlee, Woodward (now Head of Investigative), Howard Simons (played by Martin Balsam in the film), a few others but not Bernstein (being ripped by ex-wife Nora Ephron in her bestselling novel, Heartburn) — and we awestruck youth darted in and out among them. We all wanted the same thing — to be the next Woodward. Or Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously. That’s how crazy we kids were — vying to cover a violent revolution in some Third World hellhole as a good career move.
The Post editors wouldn’t send us to Nicaragua but they did let us write local stories the staff reporters didn’t want — Boy Scout jamborees, vintage theater closings, etcetera — and to be on the lookout for fast-breaking ones. We strutted around Washington with our green press badges ready to pounce on anything of interest. And what we wrote was read all over town, mine with the byline by Lou Aguilar, Special to the Washington Post.
I turned out to be one of the best writers among my peers. So various editors would drop into the copy-aide station where we slung mail and assign me to cover more events. Bob Woodward liked me, enough to take an interest in my stories and kid around with me.
But Ben Bradlee was inaccessible. He radiated power like Jason Robards did portraying him so wonderfully. I once rode up the elevator with Bradlee and three bigshot editors. He made a semi-joke about the elevator lights and the editors chortled like it had been a Don Rickles line.
I discovered something at the Post. Everybody else was liberal from Bradlee down to my fellow copy-aides — including the only girl I’d ever loved, a beautiful radical feminist (I fictionalized and updated that story in my semiautobiographical novel, Paper Tigers). I was the only Reaganite there.
I remember Election Night 1984. We were ordered to work late supporting the editors and reporters. My good, now late, friend Bob grimaced. “Who wants to go to the Wake,” he said, meaning for Walter Mondale. Yet we were all friends and lovers before the Left went nuts — and destroyed the Washington Post. Today it’s a woke madhouse.
In 2022, Post owner Jeff Bezos, himself a liberal yet a good businessman, hired political centrist Robert Winnett of the UK Daily Telegraph as Executive Editor to save his sinking ship. The Post staffers went ape, lashing out on social media and threatening to quit, as if the British were coming again. Winnett naturally withdrew rather than hose down the lunatics like Bezos should have.
But that was nothing compared to the rebellion that followed Bezos’ decision that the Post not endorse Kamala Harris in the last election. Resignations actually ensued. Some unknown Post columnist named Karen Attiah called it “a stab in the back.” She’ll probably be one of the many layoffs. But the Post will never be what it was. And I get no joy from that.
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