The Pentagon Papers by Katharine Graham

Author:Katharine Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

I genuinely meant what I wrote Ehrlichman. I have a faint memory of talking to Stew Alsop once about how, as the months progressed, I was certainly feeling more and more negative about Nixon, but I had no such personal feelings about Nixon as a politician and couldn’t imagine that I had said anything like Dole’s quote in his speech, much less that my feelings toward the president would inspire the Post’s editors and reporters.

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THOUGH THE editorial-page editor and his deputy and writers were certainly not in agreement with George McGovern’s views and policies, the Post’s editorial page, which didn’t endorse, had vaguely seemed to favor McGovern—partly because it was so unsympathetic to Nixon. Candidate McGovern had used the Watergate story only somewhat tentatively. Ironically, he, too, felt that the coverage he received in the Post had not been ample enough or accurate or fair—a feeling shared by almost every candidate about almost every paper anywhere and at any time.

To no one’s surprise, President Nixon was re-elected by a landslide, with 61 percent of the vote and forty-nine out of fifty states—evidence of how little impact Watergate had had and how very powerful were these angry and vindictive men in the White House and connected with the president elsewhere. However, instead of becoming more secure with his victory in hand and working to unite the country, Nixon immediately turned to vengeance and to strengthening his hold on power. In a speech at his victory dinner with members of the administration, he mentioned The Washington Post several times. He asked everyone in the upper echelons of his administration to resign and set out to replace anyone—even “good Republicans”—who might not agree with him implicitly. One of the first victims was Pete Peterson, who was politely fired soon after the election. The Wall Street Journal ran an article at the time speculating openly on what had been on all our minds, that Peterson might have been knifed by the White House inner circle. The article quoted someone from the White House as saying, “How can you trust a guy who has dinner with Kay Graham?” Tom and Joan Braden had a goodbye party for Pete, which was reported in the Post by Sally Quinn. At the party, Pete, by this time fed up with the treatment he’d received from the administration, gave a highly irreverent response to the toasts. He described being sent for to go to “Mount David” and being quizzed about his dubious friends in a loyalty test. “Finally, Peterson told the guests,” according to Quinn, “he failed the physical test. His calves were too fat and he could not click his heels.”

Right after the election, with the atmosphere between the Post and the president at its most poisonous, the Watergate story dried up. Our having nothing new to report fed the idea that the whole story had been political to begin with—a baseless, biased attack on the president by the Post for the sake of influencing the election.

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