The CIA and Wash. Post - 2001 interview w/Deborah Davis
Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 1:59 amThe CIA and Washington Post - 2001 interview with Deborah Davis
(In 1979 Deborah Davis's book about the owner of the Washington Post and the paper's CIA history was recalled and shredded. Davis had exposed Operation Mockingbird at the the Washington Post plus the intelligence careers of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward. Eventually, Davis was able to republish her book about owner Katherine Graham called, 'Katherine the Great.'
-HMW)
Originally on six webpages.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg1/
the real katharine graham: an interview with deborah davis
by Kenn Thomas (kennthomas@umsl.edu) - July 22, 2001
Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. An anthology of back issues, Popular Alienation (Illuminet Press, 1995), is also available.
Deborah Davis wrote Katharine the Great, which documented the intelligence agency ties of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward and reported on Phil Graham "suiciding" just after publically revealing the liaison between JFK and his acid mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer. The late great Kate sued over the book and had its entire first print run shredded. Katharine Graham is being held up as a role model for women and journalists, but the real such person is Davis, who ultimately had two later editions done by small presses.
Q: Tim Leary suggested that your book was originally censored and pulped because of references to Mary Pinchot Meyer. Do you feel that way and can you tell us a little bit about Mary Meyer?
A: Mary Pinchot Meyer was the sister of Ben Bradlee's second wife, Tony Pinchot. She was a very beautiful, talented artist who was living in Washington in the early '65 and she was the lover, I would say the principal lover, of John Kennedy, who was President of the United States. He was supposedly very much in love with her and wanted to divorce Jackie and marry her.
The Timothy Leary connection is interesting because at that time in the early sixties there was a group of society-type women in Washington who thought that if they could get men in power involved in mind?altering drugs they could see the world in a different way and this would end the Cold War and end all warfare. It was a very ambitious plan and a lot of them got their marijuana and LSD from Timothy Leary, who at that time was a professor of psychology at Harvard and had access to these drugs. At that time were very experimental and they were going around in a lot of the elite circles. It didn't have the same connotation that it has today of the hard stuff, of the cocaine and the heroin. This was all very beautiful and mind-expanding type stuff. So she was involved with Kennedy and they used to supposedly smoke marijuana together in Kennedy's bedroom and I think Leary said that she also gave him LSD, although I couldn't swear to that.
Anyway, she got murdered. She was murdered a year after Kennedy died. Kennedy was killed in November '63 and Mary Meyer was killed in 1964. She was walking her dog in Georgetown through a wooded area and she was stabbed to death. And they never found the killer. Some young black man was put in jail for ten months, held over until his trial and then he was acquitted because there was no evidence. And they've never found the killer but people who have investigated the case say that it had all the earmarks of a professional assassination.
Q: She was, of course, married to Cord Meyer, who was an intelligence agent.
A: She had been. She was divorced from him at the time she was with Kennedy. She had been with Cord Meyer in Europe when they were living. He was involved in a lot of counter-espionage over in Europe and she was supposedly a security risk because she tended to fall in love and have affairs with handsome men. She had an affair with one Italian count who was supposedly an intelligence agent and this constituted a security risk. And I suppose that their divorce was partly caused by the gulf between them because he really just couldn't talk about his work. Anyway, she was a very talented painter and very charming and beautiful and Kennedy was in love with her.
Q: Let's talk a bit about what exactly happened to your book. The first edition came out in the late '70s, right?
A: 1979. November '79.
What happened was all part of one great big, giant society that these people in Washington have created for themselves where the most important thing to them is putting forward this myth about themselves that they are supremely moral, supremely powerful, all-knowing, all-caring. They'll take care of the rest of us and anything that they do that is questionable they try to cover it up. You might ask why they're so afraid of having these things found about them because after all nothing that anyone knows about them is going to take away their money, their power, their friends, their influence or anything else. It's a sense that they want to maintain this myth about themselves, because that's the only way that people will buy into everything else that they do. You know, the newspaper that they put out, the whole aura that they create, that they are the ones who are in charge--not only in charge of things, but should be in charge, and it's because they're morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us.
Q: The book was pulped before it was distributed?
A: No, it was distributed and they recalled it from the bookstores and shredded the entire print run of twenty five thousand copies. A few copies that had been sold out of the bookstores and had gotten into private hands in the six week period before it was recalled, those books are still around and they are very valuable. The last I heard they were going for sixty dollars in used bookstores.
But the book came out in November '79 and right away there was an orchestrated attack on it by the people that have reason to try to make common cause with the Post. The Post itself didn't attack me. They didn't need to. They had people do it for them. David Ignatius, who is now the foreign editor of the Washington Post, was a young, ambitious reporter at the Wall Street Journal at that time. He did a very, very nasty, damaging piece about my book.
If any of your audience have read the new paperback edition of Silent Coup, it describes the same process going on for that book. In the back there's an appendix that talks about the campaign against that book. And there so much alike, so much the same what happened to me. Because they start this thing about "errors" in the book. This is like the worst thing you can say about a book, right?
Q: Right.
A: "Errors" in the book. And then the authors: who are they? How do they know these things? They're outsiders. They weren't there the way we were. They're just speculating. Silent Coup is about a 400 page book. They named four errors. One of them is that it got somebody's name wrong. Of course, the people doing the accusing are lying, so they're not really errors to begin with. This is the same thing that happened with me. Errors in the book. Errors in the book. This was like a flag that was being waved. That David Ignatius did it in the Wall Street Journal piece and then Alexander Cockburn did it in the Village Voice. So they were attacking me from the left and the right, right?
Q: You were right in the middle.
A: It was a non-partisan attack on me because the attack came from two people that were in different places in the political spectrum. This was supposed to be an objective evaluation now.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg2/index.html
Q: So we can assume that the authors of Silent Coup were on to something then, if the powers that be want to do away with the book. Am I mistaken in calling Silent Coup a pro-Nixon book? Isn't the issue here, what they're afraid of, is the story of Nixon's real fall from power as opposed to the way it was played in the media?
A: I don't think that characterizing it as a pro-Nixon book is very useful.
It's like the rationale Alexander Cockburn used for attacking the movie JFK because it's trying to bring back Camelot. I mean, that is sort of irrelevant. There is some merit to wanting to know the truth without having to say that it's furthering another agenda.
Q: Right. That's why I'm saying that isn't the real story, the thing that some people are afraid to get out, is the real reason that Nixon was run out of office, from whatever perspective?
A: Different people have different motives. The motive of the Washington Post in attacking Silent Coup was to protect the reputation of Bob Woodward because his reputation is what has earned the Post, and Woodward, and a number of people associated with him, many millions of dollars since then in book and movies and inflated salaries. I don't think the Post cares why Nixon was brought down. I don't think that that's what their interest is. Their interest is in closing ranks around Woodward and saying you can't question our golden boy because if you do the greatness of the Washington Post is all a lie.
Q: Let's question the golden boy a bit. Can you tell us what you know about Woodward?
A: Bob Woodward has consistently lied about his background ever since the first time anybody started asking who this person is. He came from Wheaton, Illinois. His father was a judge. He joined the Navy and became a communications officer, which is not Naval Intelligence per se. Naval intelligence is a separate organization. Communications officers are at the very highest level of receiving coded and top secret information from around the world and they get it before anybody else does. It's up to them to relay this information to the people in power.
In Woodward's case, first he was in the Navy serving somewhere in California for four years. At the end of his term he was in California, before that he was on a ship I believe. He's never said what he was doing in California. He just won't talk about it. But you remember that this was the time of the height of the anti-war movement and there was a domestic counter-intelligence operation going on called Operation Chaos, which was coordinating Army, Navy and FBI and CIA intelligence on the anti-war movement, spying on leaders and so on, trying to find foreign influence. And I believe that this is what Woodward was involved in at that time.
So after his four years were up he was eligible to leave the Navy, having completed his service. Instead he re-enlisted for another year and he came to Washington and he started working in a top secret Naval unit inside the Pentagon. Actually, they went between the Pentagon and the White House. This was during the first years of Nixon's presidency. And I believe that at this time he started working directly with Richard Ober, who was the deputy chief of counter-intelligence under James Angleton. He was the one who was running Operation Chaos and I believe that he was the one who was Deep Throat. I disagree with those people in Silent Coup, although it hardly matters who exactly it was because I know Woodward had many sources.
But the point is that at this time he was getting top secret information. He was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was briefing the National Security Council and he was briefing Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff. He was right in the very, very center of the Nixon White House in terms of the information that was being conveyed and the people he knew. After that, he decided for some mysterious reason that he wanted to be a reporter and he went to the Post and the Post has thousands of applications a year of experienced reporters, most of whom never get in. But instead they took this guy who couldn't write, who had never been a reporter in his life and they said, "You have to learn how to write better so go work on the suburban paper for a year and then we'll hire you." Now I don't know how they decided that he was somebody they wanted to cultivate or whether somebody had the word on him ahead of time or what. But after a year he came to the Post and right away Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, started giving him the choice assignments. They felt a common bond between each other because Bradlee had a very similar back ground in the Navy himself.
Carl Bernstein was coming from a whole different place. He was a very messed up person, you know, had a lot of trouble keeping his job at the Post. He would always fall asleep on the job, stay up all night and miss deadlines and he was just a mess. If it weren't for the newspaper guild rules about not firing reporters, he would have been fired a long time ago. But he had a sense about politics. He still does. He had a very good sense about politics and he hated Nixon because during the McCarthy era, when Nixon was a congressman, his family, his father and mother, who were very left-wing, had experienced a lot of persecution during the McCarthy era. So he associated Nixon with this. And he had his won reasons for wanting to do a story that he thought might lead to exposing Nixon and bringing down Nixon.
It's a very strange friendship. There was a lot of tension between Woodward and Bernstein and there's a very strong bond between them because each of them owes the other one the fact that they are now millionaires and can get book contracts for any amount of money they want.
Q: Let's get back to Ben Bradlee. I know part of what's in the book and part of what upset those forces that caused the withdrawal of its first publication is what you've said about Ben Bradlee and his connection to the Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg trial. Would you talk about that a bit?
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg3/index.html
A: In the first edition, the one that was recalled and shredded, I looked in State Department lists for '52 and '53 when Bradlee was serving as a press attache supposedly in the American embassy in Paris. This was during the Marshall Plan when the United States over in Europe had hundreds of thousands of people making an intensive effort to keep Western Europe from going Communist. Bradlee wanted to be part of that effort. So he was over in the American embassy in Paris and the embassy list had these letters after his name that said USIE. And I asked the State Department what that meant and it said United States Information Exchange. It was the forerunner of the USIA, the United States Information Agency. It was the propaganda arm of the embassy. They produced propaganda that was then disseminated by the CIA all over Europe. They planted newspaper stories. They had a lot of reporters on their payrolls. They routinely would produce stories out of the embassy and give them to these reporters and they would appear in the papers in Europe. It's very important to understand how influential newspaper stories are to people because this is what people think of as their essential source of facts about what is going on. They don't question it, and even if they do question it they have nowhere else to go to find out anything else. So Bradlee was involved in producing this propaganda. But at that point in the story I didn't know exactly what he was doing.
I published the first book just saying that he worked for USIE and that this agency produced propaganda for the CIA. He went totally crazy after the book came out. One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it was not true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said.
Q: You make a good point in the book that other people who have had similar kinds of--I don't even know if you want to call them accusations--but reports that they in some way cooperated with the CIA in the '5Os, that the times were different and people were expected to do that kind of thing out of a sense of patriotism and they blow it off.
A: That's right. People say, yeah, this is what I did back then, you know. But Bradlee doesn't want to be defined that way because, I don't know, somehow he thinks it's just too revealing of him, of who he is. He doesn't want to admit a true fact about his past because somehow he doesn't want it known that this is where he came from. Because this is the beginning of his journalistic career. This is how he made it big.
Subsequent to my book being shredded in 1979, early 1980, I got some documents through the Freedom of Information Act and they revealed that Bradlee had been the person who was running an entire propaganda operation against Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg that covered forty countries on four continents. He always claimed that he had been a low level press flack in the embassy in Paris, just a press flack, nothing more. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg had already been convicted of being atomic spies and they were on death row waiting to be executed. And the purpose of Bradlee's propaganda operation was to convince the Europeans that they really were spies, they really had given the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians and therefore they did deserve to be put to death.
The Europeans, having just very few years before defeated Hitler, were very concerned that the United States was going fascist the way their countries had. And this was a very real fear to the Europeans. They saw the same thing happening in the United States that had happened in their own countries. And so Bradlee used the Rosenberg case to say, "No this isn't what you think it is. These people really did this bad thing and they really do deserve to die. It doesn't mean that the United States is becoming fascist." So he had a very key role in creating European public opinion and it was very, very important. This was the key issue that was going to determine how the Europeans felt about the United States.
Some of the documents that I had showed him writing letters to the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs saying "I'm working for the head of the CIA in Paris and he wants me to come and look at your files." And this kind of thing. So in the second edition, which came out in 1987, I reprinted those documents, the actual documents, the readers can see them and it's got his signature and it's very, very interesting. He subsequently has said nothing about it at all. He won't talk about it all. He won't answer any questions about it. So I guess the point about Bradlee is that he went from this job to being European bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and to the executive editorship of the Post. So this is how he got where he is. It's very clear line of succession. Philip Graham was Katharine Graham's husband, who ran the Post in the '5Os and he committed suicide in 1963. That's when Katharine Graham took over. Bradlee was close friends with Allen Dulles and Phil Graham. The paper wasn't doing very well for a while and he was looking for a way to pay foreign correspondents and Allen Dulles was looking for a cover. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA back then and he was looking for a cover for some of his operatives so that they could get in and out of places without arousing suspicion. So the two of them hit on a plan: Allen Dulles would pay for the reporters and they would give the CIA the information that they found as well as give it to the Post. So he helped to develop this operation and it subsequently spread to other newspapers and magazines. And it was called Operation Mockingbird. This operation, I believe, was revealed for the first time in my book.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg4/index.html
Q: To get back to Phil Graham for a minute. There are two things that I'd like to bring up about him: first, he supported Alger Hiss, first, right? And he flip "flopped on that issue". But he was at loggerheads with Nixon on that and that was the beginning of this kind of life-long enmity between Nixon and the Post?
A: Yes, he supported Alger Hiss largely because he had been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurt. Frankfurt felt very strongly that Hiss was innocent. Hiss was accused of spying also. But Phil was interested in being a with-it kind of guy, very modern, up to the minute, involved in the thinking of his times. So the thinking of his times was the Cold War and was anti-Soviet and get all the domestic spies. He eventually gave in to this way of thinking, with the majority of his friends and associates thinking if Hiss wasn't a spy himself he should at least be made an example of because there were spies among us.
So he was instrumental in that, but before he did turn around on Hiss, I believe he accused Nixon of excesses in trying to prosecute Hiss. Hiss was one of the case was that Nixon made his reputation on as an anti-Communist and as an important national political figure. He was the one who was running around screaming about Hiss, so Phil Graham criticized Nixon for this.
Nixon takes things like that very personally and he never forgot it. So when he became president a number of years later, Phil Graham was dead, Katharine was the head of the Washington Post and she made her usual overtures to the incumbent president. You know, "Come over, get to know my editors, tell them how you want your stories covered." And Nixon, instead of accepting it, he rejected it because he was still angry about what happened fifteen years ago. So he rejected her overtures and then for her own reasons, I guess she had nothing to lose, went after him.
You see, everybody that was involved in that Watergate investigation was doing it from their own perspective. Woodward was doing it from the Naval Intelligence perspective, Bernstein was doing it from the perspective of being a reporter who finally wanted to do a story that would get him out of his suburban courtroom beat. Katharine Graham wanted to keep Ben Bradlee happy and Bradlee had his own sources of information about, you know, Nixon is going to be brought down and you're going to be the one to do it. And she didn't care because she hated Nixon by that time.
If she had had a close friendship with Nixon, if Nixon hadn't rejected her friendship, she would have protected him the way that she had protected Reagan. Because none of those Reagan scandals ever got pursued by the Post the way the Nixon scandals did. In fact, one of the first things that the Reagan people did when Reagan got into office was to make friends with Katharine Graham and that was precisely for that reason. They decided that Nancy should be best friends with Katharine Graham and they did it. They got her over there, they met her, they had her invited over to the White House, they just did all these things. And nothing bad about Reagan ever got in the Post unless it was somewhere else first They just had to do it to show that they were still a legitimate newspaper. But they never broke any stories on Reagan that were damaging and he sailed through eight years looking as good as she could keep him looking.
Q: Before we get too far from Phil Graham, I'd like to talk a little bit more about his suicide. Getting back to the article that Leary wrote, he seemed to suggest that there was a reason to believe that it could have been something more than suicide, that there's no indication or public record that Graham wasn't done in. And that the "suicide" happened shortly after this public event where Graham was talking about the JFK/Mary Meyer liaison. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
A: Phil died in 1963 and it's now 1992. There's still continuing speculation, 29 years later that he was murdered. In my book, I wrote it as a suicide because that's the way it's been represented and I didn't have any independent knowledge of anything else. If I were doing it today, or if I ever do another edition, I will probably expand on that and spend some time investigating it and finding out whether there is any evidence that it was murder. There were a couple of reasons why it could have been murder. One is the one you mentioned. The people that were protecting Kennedy might have done it because of he was a manic depressive. He was in and out of institutions and he was very mentally unstable. A lot of that probably had to do with the fact that he married into a wealthy family. He married the boss' daughter and they gave him the newspaper, but they were watching every move he made. So he did not react well to the fact that Katharine Graham's father had owned the Washington Post. He may have been killed for that reason, if he was killed.
He may have been killed because he had a mistress named Robin Webb. By that time he had moved out of Katharine's house and he was living with Robin Webb in another house and he was actually behaving as if they were married. He had dinner parties over there with her and invited various members of the Washington elite over there for dinner parties and making it very clear that this was the woman he preferred to Katharine. And at the same time, he was re-writing his will. He re-wrote his will three times. Edward Bennet Williams was his attorney. Edward Bennet Williams, who is very well-known as a Washington power broker. He recently died, but he was very much involved in this. Each time, he willingly, at Phil's request, wrote a will that gave Katharine less and less of a share of the Washington Post and gave more and more of it to Robin Webb. By the third rewrite she had nothing and Robin Webb had everything. And this was at a time when Katharine had pretty much given up on the marriage and realized that in order to save the newspaper, which she thought of as her family newspaper--her father built that newspaper and she didn't want to let it go to some mistress of her husband's--and she had come to the conclusion that she either had to divorce him and win the paper in a divorce settlement, or she had to have him declared mentally incompetent. Each of these alternatives was very unattractive to her. And so there's some speculation that either she arranged for him to be killed or somebody said to her, "don't worry, we'll take care of it" and there's some speculation that it might have even been Edward Bennet Williams.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg5/index.html
She took him out of the sanitarium one weekend and took him out to their farm in Virginia and this was where he blew his brains out with a shotgun. And the police report was never really made public. After my paperback edition was published this fall, I got a call from some woman who claims that she knew for a fact that it was murder. And if I ever do publish another edition, I intend to look into that.
This is the kind of talk that people live with in Washington, DC.
Q: Tim Leary's speculation seemed to be that if it was a murder it was connected with this public statement that Phil Graham made, apparently at a convention of journalists in Phoenix, Arizona. This is an extraordinary story to me considering the flap that one hears about JFK's liaisons with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer's name it's not a name that's brought up a lot. You indicate in the book that she had a diary and that it may still exist, that James Angleton took it. There's so much to this story that never gets talked about. May we explore it a little bit more?
A: Mary Pinchot Meyer, after she divorced Cord Meyer, moved to Washington and she was living in Ben Bradlee's garage, which had been made into an art studio and this is where she was living. And when she was killed on this tow path, James Angleton showed up at the garage at the studio. There's two versions of the story that I've heard. One is that he searched for the diary and found it and took it away, and the other is that Ben Bradlee handed it to him and he took it away. Supposedly he burned it, but people that knew Angleton say he never burned anything, he saved everything. So supposedly it still exists. Angleton is dead now, so if anybody has it it's probably his widow.
Q: There's no Freedom of Information way of accessing it I guess.
A: Not unless it's in official government files. It's a sketchbook. Bradlee talked about this in an interview with David Frost a couple of months ago and he said that it was just a sketch book and he's seen it and it only has sketches in it and a few pages of writing, but it wasn't a diary per se. Now I trust Bradlee about as far as I can throw him.
Q: NBC did a series on the JFK assassination this week and the last thing they did was roll a list of people who had been killed that were somehow connected to the JFK assassination and there Mary Meyer's name rolled by.
A: She was alive for another year. I don't know what went on in that year.
Maybe she was trying to expose something. That's something that also worth looking into. There's a man right now doing a book on Mary Meyer which should be very interesting. His name is Leo Damore and I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. I'm sure it's going to have a lot of new information in it. It's not out yet but it will be soon.
Q: Let's turn the conversation back to this term that you coined in the book, mediapolitics, the political uses of information. Is there a way that any average person who picks up the paper to read it and judge it against what is just a regurgitation of a government report or press release and what is actually true?
A: The way to read the Washington Post, and I suppose this applies to any newspaper in any city that you live in, is certain reporters of certain beats. They develop certain contacts with certain politicians, and if you know that and if you know who they're talking to every day and you can just sort of know by whose by-line is on the story where their information is coming from. So you don't read it as this reporter's story, you read it as the politician using this writer to say something. In the case of the Post, even Katharine Graham has described it this way, that the Post is the internal memo system of the U. S. government. I mean, politicians try to get things in the Post to talk to each other. To say, "I have something on you, if you don't play something my way I'm going to leak more of this. This is just a taste of what I know about you." This kind of thing. So that goes on all the time and you have to kind of spend some time studying who your reporters are and who their sources are.
I look at the Washington Post and I see a Bob Woodward piece in there and I say, "Oh, OK," like when he did the series on Dan Quayle. A seven part series on this complete non-entity, all about what a decent human being he is and even though he doesn't have brains, his wife does. It took up more column inches probably than any story they've done since Watergate, and it was Bob Woodward doing it. I thought, "OK, now either he has gotten the word to push Dan Quayle or he's gotten the word that Dan Quayle is going to be it and he wants to get on the band wagon and look like he's in on the big thing." That's the only two ways you can read it with Bob Woodward. And depending on what you know about the reporter, you can understand that.
Now some people are very independent and they won't really probe all with their sources. They'll ask hard questions and not just be a cipher for letting the politician say whatever he wants through them. But these people tend to lose their access and the sources tend to get mad at them and not talk to them anymore and start giving the good stuff to reporters who will tell it their way. They know that the reporters have a job and they've got to fill a certain number of inches everyday or they're in trouble. You just don't have time to go running around digging. That's why I personally never really wanted to be a reporter because I like to spend my time developing stories for as long as it takes. So it's just a way of looking at the newspaper where it's not facts but it's people fighting to get their points of view out to you through using the reporter as a vehicle.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg6/index.html
And if you're interested, if you're really interested in the story, you make phone calls and ask your own questions. The publications that really want to be in the big time are the ones that are most suspect because they are the ones that are most vulnerable to blackmail or withdrawal of prestige or that kind of thing, like the Post and the Times. They are also the ones that are in a very strong position to go against the grain if they really want to because they are financially independent and don't need to be worried that they're going to lose their advertisers or lose readers if they do something courageous once in a while.
It's ironic because it's the very function of being so inside, and playing the game so well and getting so much money and so much power that they can occasionally turn against the establishment and really do something courageous if they only want to. But they don't want to do it too often because they don't want to make a habit of it and they don't want to get a reputation of being like that. After the Watergate stories, the first number of speeches Katharine Graham made were all about getting back to business. She didn't want the reporters to think that they were always going to be against the government, that they were always going to exposing politicians. That was her first concern. She didn't want to be like that ever again. That was it. That was an aberration. She wanted her reporters to understand that. And to underline this, she withheld a contract for three years, a Newspaper Guild contract. She made them work without a contract, no raises, made them very vulnerable to being fired or being moved to night assignments or out of town if they didn't do what she wanted in the way of just cooling it in terms of the way of antagonism to the powers that be.
Q: Had your book been given the push that they originally intended to give its original edition, how do you assess what kind of impact it would have had back then, in the late '75? I wasn't familiar with the second edition, I'm not sure who published it or how well known it is, and this third edition, the publisher is Sheridan Square Press. The editions have all been much smaller than they would have been had there not been such a reaction to its original publication.
A: The first edition was their biggest book for that season. The first printing was 25,000 and it was sold out before publication. And they were already into a second printing and it was a Literary Guild selection and it had a publisher in London and it had seven paperback houses bidding on it at the time they pulled the book off the market. I think it would have had a very big impact because it was the first book about the truth underneath the myth of the Washington Post which had come out ever since Watergate. And these people were at the height of their power, the height of their glamour and nobody really thought twice about who these people were. I think it would have had an enormous impact.
Q: And you sued, right?
A: I sued Harcourt Brace for breach of contract for taking my book off the market.
Q: And won.
A: And won, yeah.
Q: Who published the second edition?
A: A little publisher called National Press in Bethesda, Maryland. That was out for a year or two but they didn't promote it. And the third edition is now out with Sheridan Square Press, which is small but a very good publisher. And they're the people that published the Jim Garrison book that became the JFK movie.
Q: On the Trail of the Assassins.
A: That's right. And they're very sharp politically and they're very courageous and I like them a lot.
Q: What you do now? You've got the book out. Are you a reporter?
A: I'm writing a book on Henry and Clare Booth Luce, which is going to be a further investigation of mediapolitics. But it's going to be a much broader scope book. It's going to be about Time magazine and how it transformed American culture. And it's going to be a psychological portrait of Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce and how these people projected their own needs to be powerful on to this enormously successful, influential magazine. It is really one of the most-- I want to use the word Thought Control--it really worked on peoples' minds in a way that nothing else had before it.
Q: If that book is any bit the eye opener that your current book is, it's certainly going to be interesting reading.
A: Thank you.
(In 1979 Deborah Davis's book about the owner of the Washington Post and the paper's CIA history was recalled and shredded. Davis had exposed Operation Mockingbird at the the Washington Post plus the intelligence careers of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward. Eventually, Davis was able to republish her book about owner Katherine Graham called, 'Katherine the Great.'
-HMW)
Originally on six webpages.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg1/
the real katharine graham: an interview with deborah davis
by Kenn Thomas (kennthomas@umsl.edu) - July 22, 2001
Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. An anthology of back issues, Popular Alienation (Illuminet Press, 1995), is also available.
Deborah Davis wrote Katharine the Great, which documented the intelligence agency ties of Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward and reported on Phil Graham "suiciding" just after publically revealing the liaison between JFK and his acid mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer. The late great Kate sued over the book and had its entire first print run shredded. Katharine Graham is being held up as a role model for women and journalists, but the real such person is Davis, who ultimately had two later editions done by small presses.
Q: Tim Leary suggested that your book was originally censored and pulped because of references to Mary Pinchot Meyer. Do you feel that way and can you tell us a little bit about Mary Meyer?
A: Mary Pinchot Meyer was the sister of Ben Bradlee's second wife, Tony Pinchot. She was a very beautiful, talented artist who was living in Washington in the early '65 and she was the lover, I would say the principal lover, of John Kennedy, who was President of the United States. He was supposedly very much in love with her and wanted to divorce Jackie and marry her.
The Timothy Leary connection is interesting because at that time in the early sixties there was a group of society-type women in Washington who thought that if they could get men in power involved in mind?altering drugs they could see the world in a different way and this would end the Cold War and end all warfare. It was a very ambitious plan and a lot of them got their marijuana and LSD from Timothy Leary, who at that time was a professor of psychology at Harvard and had access to these drugs. At that time were very experimental and they were going around in a lot of the elite circles. It didn't have the same connotation that it has today of the hard stuff, of the cocaine and the heroin. This was all very beautiful and mind-expanding type stuff. So she was involved with Kennedy and they used to supposedly smoke marijuana together in Kennedy's bedroom and I think Leary said that she also gave him LSD, although I couldn't swear to that.
Anyway, she got murdered. She was murdered a year after Kennedy died. Kennedy was killed in November '63 and Mary Meyer was killed in 1964. She was walking her dog in Georgetown through a wooded area and she was stabbed to death. And they never found the killer. Some young black man was put in jail for ten months, held over until his trial and then he was acquitted because there was no evidence. And they've never found the killer but people who have investigated the case say that it had all the earmarks of a professional assassination.
Q: She was, of course, married to Cord Meyer, who was an intelligence agent.
A: She had been. She was divorced from him at the time she was with Kennedy. She had been with Cord Meyer in Europe when they were living. He was involved in a lot of counter-espionage over in Europe and she was supposedly a security risk because she tended to fall in love and have affairs with handsome men. She had an affair with one Italian count who was supposedly an intelligence agent and this constituted a security risk. And I suppose that their divorce was partly caused by the gulf between them because he really just couldn't talk about his work. Anyway, she was a very talented painter and very charming and beautiful and Kennedy was in love with her.
Q: Let's talk a bit about what exactly happened to your book. The first edition came out in the late '70s, right?
A: 1979. November '79.
What happened was all part of one great big, giant society that these people in Washington have created for themselves where the most important thing to them is putting forward this myth about themselves that they are supremely moral, supremely powerful, all-knowing, all-caring. They'll take care of the rest of us and anything that they do that is questionable they try to cover it up. You might ask why they're so afraid of having these things found about them because after all nothing that anyone knows about them is going to take away their money, their power, their friends, their influence or anything else. It's a sense that they want to maintain this myth about themselves, because that's the only way that people will buy into everything else that they do. You know, the newspaper that they put out, the whole aura that they create, that they are the ones who are in charge--not only in charge of things, but should be in charge, and it's because they're morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us.
Q: The book was pulped before it was distributed?
A: No, it was distributed and they recalled it from the bookstores and shredded the entire print run of twenty five thousand copies. A few copies that had been sold out of the bookstores and had gotten into private hands in the six week period before it was recalled, those books are still around and they are very valuable. The last I heard they were going for sixty dollars in used bookstores.
But the book came out in November '79 and right away there was an orchestrated attack on it by the people that have reason to try to make common cause with the Post. The Post itself didn't attack me. They didn't need to. They had people do it for them. David Ignatius, who is now the foreign editor of the Washington Post, was a young, ambitious reporter at the Wall Street Journal at that time. He did a very, very nasty, damaging piece about my book.
If any of your audience have read the new paperback edition of Silent Coup, it describes the same process going on for that book. In the back there's an appendix that talks about the campaign against that book. And there so much alike, so much the same what happened to me. Because they start this thing about "errors" in the book. This is like the worst thing you can say about a book, right?
Q: Right.
A: "Errors" in the book. And then the authors: who are they? How do they know these things? They're outsiders. They weren't there the way we were. They're just speculating. Silent Coup is about a 400 page book. They named four errors. One of them is that it got somebody's name wrong. Of course, the people doing the accusing are lying, so they're not really errors to begin with. This is the same thing that happened with me. Errors in the book. Errors in the book. This was like a flag that was being waved. That David Ignatius did it in the Wall Street Journal piece and then Alexander Cockburn did it in the Village Voice. So they were attacking me from the left and the right, right?
Q: You were right in the middle.
A: It was a non-partisan attack on me because the attack came from two people that were in different places in the political spectrum. This was supposed to be an objective evaluation now.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg2/index.html
Q: So we can assume that the authors of Silent Coup were on to something then, if the powers that be want to do away with the book. Am I mistaken in calling Silent Coup a pro-Nixon book? Isn't the issue here, what they're afraid of, is the story of Nixon's real fall from power as opposed to the way it was played in the media?
A: I don't think that characterizing it as a pro-Nixon book is very useful.
It's like the rationale Alexander Cockburn used for attacking the movie JFK because it's trying to bring back Camelot. I mean, that is sort of irrelevant. There is some merit to wanting to know the truth without having to say that it's furthering another agenda.
Q: Right. That's why I'm saying that isn't the real story, the thing that some people are afraid to get out, is the real reason that Nixon was run out of office, from whatever perspective?
A: Different people have different motives. The motive of the Washington Post in attacking Silent Coup was to protect the reputation of Bob Woodward because his reputation is what has earned the Post, and Woodward, and a number of people associated with him, many millions of dollars since then in book and movies and inflated salaries. I don't think the Post cares why Nixon was brought down. I don't think that that's what their interest is. Their interest is in closing ranks around Woodward and saying you can't question our golden boy because if you do the greatness of the Washington Post is all a lie.
Q: Let's question the golden boy a bit. Can you tell us what you know about Woodward?
A: Bob Woodward has consistently lied about his background ever since the first time anybody started asking who this person is. He came from Wheaton, Illinois. His father was a judge. He joined the Navy and became a communications officer, which is not Naval Intelligence per se. Naval intelligence is a separate organization. Communications officers are at the very highest level of receiving coded and top secret information from around the world and they get it before anybody else does. It's up to them to relay this information to the people in power.
In Woodward's case, first he was in the Navy serving somewhere in California for four years. At the end of his term he was in California, before that he was on a ship I believe. He's never said what he was doing in California. He just won't talk about it. But you remember that this was the time of the height of the anti-war movement and there was a domestic counter-intelligence operation going on called Operation Chaos, which was coordinating Army, Navy and FBI and CIA intelligence on the anti-war movement, spying on leaders and so on, trying to find foreign influence. And I believe that this is what Woodward was involved in at that time.
So after his four years were up he was eligible to leave the Navy, having completed his service. Instead he re-enlisted for another year and he came to Washington and he started working in a top secret Naval unit inside the Pentagon. Actually, they went between the Pentagon and the White House. This was during the first years of Nixon's presidency. And I believe that at this time he started working directly with Richard Ober, who was the deputy chief of counter-intelligence under James Angleton. He was the one who was running Operation Chaos and I believe that he was the one who was Deep Throat. I disagree with those people in Silent Coup, although it hardly matters who exactly it was because I know Woodward had many sources.
But the point is that at this time he was getting top secret information. He was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was briefing the National Security Council and he was briefing Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff. He was right in the very, very center of the Nixon White House in terms of the information that was being conveyed and the people he knew. After that, he decided for some mysterious reason that he wanted to be a reporter and he went to the Post and the Post has thousands of applications a year of experienced reporters, most of whom never get in. But instead they took this guy who couldn't write, who had never been a reporter in his life and they said, "You have to learn how to write better so go work on the suburban paper for a year and then we'll hire you." Now I don't know how they decided that he was somebody they wanted to cultivate or whether somebody had the word on him ahead of time or what. But after a year he came to the Post and right away Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, started giving him the choice assignments. They felt a common bond between each other because Bradlee had a very similar back ground in the Navy himself.
Carl Bernstein was coming from a whole different place. He was a very messed up person, you know, had a lot of trouble keeping his job at the Post. He would always fall asleep on the job, stay up all night and miss deadlines and he was just a mess. If it weren't for the newspaper guild rules about not firing reporters, he would have been fired a long time ago. But he had a sense about politics. He still does. He had a very good sense about politics and he hated Nixon because during the McCarthy era, when Nixon was a congressman, his family, his father and mother, who were very left-wing, had experienced a lot of persecution during the McCarthy era. So he associated Nixon with this. And he had his won reasons for wanting to do a story that he thought might lead to exposing Nixon and bringing down Nixon.
It's a very strange friendship. There was a lot of tension between Woodward and Bernstein and there's a very strong bond between them because each of them owes the other one the fact that they are now millionaires and can get book contracts for any amount of money they want.
Q: Let's get back to Ben Bradlee. I know part of what's in the book and part of what upset those forces that caused the withdrawal of its first publication is what you've said about Ben Bradlee and his connection to the Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg trial. Would you talk about that a bit?
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg3/index.html
A: In the first edition, the one that was recalled and shredded, I looked in State Department lists for '52 and '53 when Bradlee was serving as a press attache supposedly in the American embassy in Paris. This was during the Marshall Plan when the United States over in Europe had hundreds of thousands of people making an intensive effort to keep Western Europe from going Communist. Bradlee wanted to be part of that effort. So he was over in the American embassy in Paris and the embassy list had these letters after his name that said USIE. And I asked the State Department what that meant and it said United States Information Exchange. It was the forerunner of the USIA, the United States Information Agency. It was the propaganda arm of the embassy. They produced propaganda that was then disseminated by the CIA all over Europe. They planted newspaper stories. They had a lot of reporters on their payrolls. They routinely would produce stories out of the embassy and give them to these reporters and they would appear in the papers in Europe. It's very important to understand how influential newspaper stories are to people because this is what people think of as their essential source of facts about what is going on. They don't question it, and even if they do question it they have nowhere else to go to find out anything else. So Bradlee was involved in producing this propaganda. But at that point in the story I didn't know exactly what he was doing.
I published the first book just saying that he worked for USIE and that this agency produced propaganda for the CIA. He went totally crazy after the book came out. One person who knew him told me then that he was going all up and down the East Coast having lunch with every editor he could think of saying that it was not true, he did not produce any propaganda. And he attacked me viciously and he said that I had falsely accused him of being a CIA agent. And the reaction was totally out of proportion to what I had said.
Q: You make a good point in the book that other people who have had similar kinds of--I don't even know if you want to call them accusations--but reports that they in some way cooperated with the CIA in the '5Os, that the times were different and people were expected to do that kind of thing out of a sense of patriotism and they blow it off.
A: That's right. People say, yeah, this is what I did back then, you know. But Bradlee doesn't want to be defined that way because, I don't know, somehow he thinks it's just too revealing of him, of who he is. He doesn't want to admit a true fact about his past because somehow he doesn't want it known that this is where he came from. Because this is the beginning of his journalistic career. This is how he made it big.
Subsequent to my book being shredded in 1979, early 1980, I got some documents through the Freedom of Information Act and they revealed that Bradlee had been the person who was running an entire propaganda operation against Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg that covered forty countries on four continents. He always claimed that he had been a low level press flack in the embassy in Paris, just a press flack, nothing more. Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg had already been convicted of being atomic spies and they were on death row waiting to be executed. And the purpose of Bradlee's propaganda operation was to convince the Europeans that they really were spies, they really had given the secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians and therefore they did deserve to be put to death.
The Europeans, having just very few years before defeated Hitler, were very concerned that the United States was going fascist the way their countries had. And this was a very real fear to the Europeans. They saw the same thing happening in the United States that had happened in their own countries. And so Bradlee used the Rosenberg case to say, "No this isn't what you think it is. These people really did this bad thing and they really do deserve to die. It doesn't mean that the United States is becoming fascist." So he had a very key role in creating European public opinion and it was very, very important. This was the key issue that was going to determine how the Europeans felt about the United States.
Some of the documents that I had showed him writing letters to the prosecutors of the Rosenbergs saying "I'm working for the head of the CIA in Paris and he wants me to come and look at your files." And this kind of thing. So in the second edition, which came out in 1987, I reprinted those documents, the actual documents, the readers can see them and it's got his signature and it's very, very interesting. He subsequently has said nothing about it at all. He won't talk about it all. He won't answer any questions about it. So I guess the point about Bradlee is that he went from this job to being European bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and to the executive editorship of the Post. So this is how he got where he is. It's very clear line of succession. Philip Graham was Katharine Graham's husband, who ran the Post in the '5Os and he committed suicide in 1963. That's when Katharine Graham took over. Bradlee was close friends with Allen Dulles and Phil Graham. The paper wasn't doing very well for a while and he was looking for a way to pay foreign correspondents and Allen Dulles was looking for a cover. Allen Dulles was head of the CIA back then and he was looking for a cover for some of his operatives so that they could get in and out of places without arousing suspicion. So the two of them hit on a plan: Allen Dulles would pay for the reporters and they would give the CIA the information that they found as well as give it to the Post. So he helped to develop this operation and it subsequently spread to other newspapers and magazines. And it was called Operation Mockingbird. This operation, I believe, was revealed for the first time in my book.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg4/index.html
Q: To get back to Phil Graham for a minute. There are two things that I'd like to bring up about him: first, he supported Alger Hiss, first, right? And he flip "flopped on that issue". But he was at loggerheads with Nixon on that and that was the beginning of this kind of life-long enmity between Nixon and the Post?
A: Yes, he supported Alger Hiss largely because he had been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurt. Frankfurt felt very strongly that Hiss was innocent. Hiss was accused of spying also. But Phil was interested in being a with-it kind of guy, very modern, up to the minute, involved in the thinking of his times. So the thinking of his times was the Cold War and was anti-Soviet and get all the domestic spies. He eventually gave in to this way of thinking, with the majority of his friends and associates thinking if Hiss wasn't a spy himself he should at least be made an example of because there were spies among us.
So he was instrumental in that, but before he did turn around on Hiss, I believe he accused Nixon of excesses in trying to prosecute Hiss. Hiss was one of the case was that Nixon made his reputation on as an anti-Communist and as an important national political figure. He was the one who was running around screaming about Hiss, so Phil Graham criticized Nixon for this.
Nixon takes things like that very personally and he never forgot it. So when he became president a number of years later, Phil Graham was dead, Katharine was the head of the Washington Post and she made her usual overtures to the incumbent president. You know, "Come over, get to know my editors, tell them how you want your stories covered." And Nixon, instead of accepting it, he rejected it because he was still angry about what happened fifteen years ago. So he rejected her overtures and then for her own reasons, I guess she had nothing to lose, went after him.
You see, everybody that was involved in that Watergate investigation was doing it from their own perspective. Woodward was doing it from the Naval Intelligence perspective, Bernstein was doing it from the perspective of being a reporter who finally wanted to do a story that would get him out of his suburban courtroom beat. Katharine Graham wanted to keep Ben Bradlee happy and Bradlee had his own sources of information about, you know, Nixon is going to be brought down and you're going to be the one to do it. And she didn't care because she hated Nixon by that time.
If she had had a close friendship with Nixon, if Nixon hadn't rejected her friendship, she would have protected him the way that she had protected Reagan. Because none of those Reagan scandals ever got pursued by the Post the way the Nixon scandals did. In fact, one of the first things that the Reagan people did when Reagan got into office was to make friends with Katharine Graham and that was precisely for that reason. They decided that Nancy should be best friends with Katharine Graham and they did it. They got her over there, they met her, they had her invited over to the White House, they just did all these things. And nothing bad about Reagan ever got in the Post unless it was somewhere else first They just had to do it to show that they were still a legitimate newspaper. But they never broke any stories on Reagan that were damaging and he sailed through eight years looking as good as she could keep him looking.
Q: Before we get too far from Phil Graham, I'd like to talk a little bit more about his suicide. Getting back to the article that Leary wrote, he seemed to suggest that there was a reason to believe that it could have been something more than suicide, that there's no indication or public record that Graham wasn't done in. And that the "suicide" happened shortly after this public event where Graham was talking about the JFK/Mary Meyer liaison. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
A: Phil died in 1963 and it's now 1992. There's still continuing speculation, 29 years later that he was murdered. In my book, I wrote it as a suicide because that's the way it's been represented and I didn't have any independent knowledge of anything else. If I were doing it today, or if I ever do another edition, I will probably expand on that and spend some time investigating it and finding out whether there is any evidence that it was murder. There were a couple of reasons why it could have been murder. One is the one you mentioned. The people that were protecting Kennedy might have done it because of he was a manic depressive. He was in and out of institutions and he was very mentally unstable. A lot of that probably had to do with the fact that he married into a wealthy family. He married the boss' daughter and they gave him the newspaper, but they were watching every move he made. So he did not react well to the fact that Katharine Graham's father had owned the Washington Post. He may have been killed for that reason, if he was killed.
He may have been killed because he had a mistress named Robin Webb. By that time he had moved out of Katharine's house and he was living with Robin Webb in another house and he was actually behaving as if they were married. He had dinner parties over there with her and invited various members of the Washington elite over there for dinner parties and making it very clear that this was the woman he preferred to Katharine. And at the same time, he was re-writing his will. He re-wrote his will three times. Edward Bennet Williams was his attorney. Edward Bennet Williams, who is very well-known as a Washington power broker. He recently died, but he was very much involved in this. Each time, he willingly, at Phil's request, wrote a will that gave Katharine less and less of a share of the Washington Post and gave more and more of it to Robin Webb. By the third rewrite she had nothing and Robin Webb had everything. And this was at a time when Katharine had pretty much given up on the marriage and realized that in order to save the newspaper, which she thought of as her family newspaper--her father built that newspaper and she didn't want to let it go to some mistress of her husband's--and she had come to the conclusion that she either had to divorce him and win the paper in a divorce settlement, or she had to have him declared mentally incompetent. Each of these alternatives was very unattractive to her. And so there's some speculation that either she arranged for him to be killed or somebody said to her, "don't worry, we'll take care of it" and there's some speculation that it might have even been Edward Bennet Williams.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg5/index.html
She took him out of the sanitarium one weekend and took him out to their farm in Virginia and this was where he blew his brains out with a shotgun. And the police report was never really made public. After my paperback edition was published this fall, I got a call from some woman who claims that she knew for a fact that it was murder. And if I ever do publish another edition, I intend to look into that.
This is the kind of talk that people live with in Washington, DC.
Q: Tim Leary's speculation seemed to be that if it was a murder it was connected with this public statement that Phil Graham made, apparently at a convention of journalists in Phoenix, Arizona. This is an extraordinary story to me considering the flap that one hears about JFK's liaisons with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer's name it's not a name that's brought up a lot. You indicate in the book that she had a diary and that it may still exist, that James Angleton took it. There's so much to this story that never gets talked about. May we explore it a little bit more?
A: Mary Pinchot Meyer, after she divorced Cord Meyer, moved to Washington and she was living in Ben Bradlee's garage, which had been made into an art studio and this is where she was living. And when she was killed on this tow path, James Angleton showed up at the garage at the studio. There's two versions of the story that I've heard. One is that he searched for the diary and found it and took it away, and the other is that Ben Bradlee handed it to him and he took it away. Supposedly he burned it, but people that knew Angleton say he never burned anything, he saved everything. So supposedly it still exists. Angleton is dead now, so if anybody has it it's probably his widow.
Q: There's no Freedom of Information way of accessing it I guess.
A: Not unless it's in official government files. It's a sketchbook. Bradlee talked about this in an interview with David Frost a couple of months ago and he said that it was just a sketch book and he's seen it and it only has sketches in it and a few pages of writing, but it wasn't a diary per se. Now I trust Bradlee about as far as I can throw him.
Q: NBC did a series on the JFK assassination this week and the last thing they did was roll a list of people who had been killed that were somehow connected to the JFK assassination and there Mary Meyer's name rolled by.
A: She was alive for another year. I don't know what went on in that year.
Maybe she was trying to expose something. That's something that also worth looking into. There's a man right now doing a book on Mary Meyer which should be very interesting. His name is Leo Damore and I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. I'm sure it's going to have a lot of new information in it. It's not out yet but it will be soon.
Q: Let's turn the conversation back to this term that you coined in the book, mediapolitics, the political uses of information. Is there a way that any average person who picks up the paper to read it and judge it against what is just a regurgitation of a government report or press release and what is actually true?
A: The way to read the Washington Post, and I suppose this applies to any newspaper in any city that you live in, is certain reporters of certain beats. They develop certain contacts with certain politicians, and if you know that and if you know who they're talking to every day and you can just sort of know by whose by-line is on the story where their information is coming from. So you don't read it as this reporter's story, you read it as the politician using this writer to say something. In the case of the Post, even Katharine Graham has described it this way, that the Post is the internal memo system of the U. S. government. I mean, politicians try to get things in the Post to talk to each other. To say, "I have something on you, if you don't play something my way I'm going to leak more of this. This is just a taste of what I know about you." This kind of thing. So that goes on all the time and you have to kind of spend some time studying who your reporters are and who their sources are.
I look at the Washington Post and I see a Bob Woodward piece in there and I say, "Oh, OK," like when he did the series on Dan Quayle. A seven part series on this complete non-entity, all about what a decent human being he is and even though he doesn't have brains, his wife does. It took up more column inches probably than any story they've done since Watergate, and it was Bob Woodward doing it. I thought, "OK, now either he has gotten the word to push Dan Quayle or he's gotten the word that Dan Quayle is going to be it and he wants to get on the band wagon and look like he's in on the big thing." That's the only two ways you can read it with Bob Woodward. And depending on what you know about the reporter, you can understand that.
Now some people are very independent and they won't really probe all with their sources. They'll ask hard questions and not just be a cipher for letting the politician say whatever he wants through them. But these people tend to lose their access and the sources tend to get mad at them and not talk to them anymore and start giving the good stuff to reporters who will tell it their way. They know that the reporters have a job and they've got to fill a certain number of inches everyday or they're in trouble. You just don't have time to go running around digging. That's why I personally never really wanted to be a reporter because I like to spend my time developing stories for as long as it takes. So it's just a way of looking at the newspaper where it's not facts but it's people fighting to get their points of view out to you through using the reporter as a vehicle.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1415/pg6/index.html
And if you're interested, if you're really interested in the story, you make phone calls and ask your own questions. The publications that really want to be in the big time are the ones that are most suspect because they are the ones that are most vulnerable to blackmail or withdrawal of prestige or that kind of thing, like the Post and the Times. They are also the ones that are in a very strong position to go against the grain if they really want to because they are financially independent and don't need to be worried that they're going to lose their advertisers or lose readers if they do something courageous once in a while.
It's ironic because it's the very function of being so inside, and playing the game so well and getting so much money and so much power that they can occasionally turn against the establishment and really do something courageous if they only want to. But they don't want to do it too often because they don't want to make a habit of it and they don't want to get a reputation of being like that. After the Watergate stories, the first number of speeches Katharine Graham made were all about getting back to business. She didn't want the reporters to think that they were always going to be against the government, that they were always going to exposing politicians. That was her first concern. She didn't want to be like that ever again. That was it. That was an aberration. She wanted her reporters to understand that. And to underline this, she withheld a contract for three years, a Newspaper Guild contract. She made them work without a contract, no raises, made them very vulnerable to being fired or being moved to night assignments or out of town if they didn't do what she wanted in the way of just cooling it in terms of the way of antagonism to the powers that be.
Q: Had your book been given the push that they originally intended to give its original edition, how do you assess what kind of impact it would have had back then, in the late '75? I wasn't familiar with the second edition, I'm not sure who published it or how well known it is, and this third edition, the publisher is Sheridan Square Press. The editions have all been much smaller than they would have been had there not been such a reaction to its original publication.
A: The first edition was their biggest book for that season. The first printing was 25,000 and it was sold out before publication. And they were already into a second printing and it was a Literary Guild selection and it had a publisher in London and it had seven paperback houses bidding on it at the time they pulled the book off the market. I think it would have had a very big impact because it was the first book about the truth underneath the myth of the Washington Post which had come out ever since Watergate. And these people were at the height of their power, the height of their glamour and nobody really thought twice about who these people were. I think it would have had an enormous impact.
Q: And you sued, right?
A: I sued Harcourt Brace for breach of contract for taking my book off the market.
Q: And won.
A: And won, yeah.
Q: Who published the second edition?
A: A little publisher called National Press in Bethesda, Maryland. That was out for a year or two but they didn't promote it. And the third edition is now out with Sheridan Square Press, which is small but a very good publisher. And they're the people that published the Jim Garrison book that became the JFK movie.
Q: On the Trail of the Assassins.
A: That's right. And they're very sharp politically and they're very courageous and I like them a lot.
Q: What you do now? You've got the book out. Are you a reporter?
A: I'm writing a book on Henry and Clare Booth Luce, which is going to be a further investigation of mediapolitics. But it's going to be a much broader scope book. It's going to be about Time magazine and how it transformed American culture. And it's going to be a psychological portrait of Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce and how these people projected their own needs to be powerful on to this enormously successful, influential magazine. It is really one of the most-- I want to use the word Thought Control--it really worked on peoples' minds in a way that nothing else had before it.
Q: If that book is any bit the eye opener that your current book is, it's certainly going to be interesting reading.
A: Thank you.
Thanks MinM.
