Kay Graham and the Haldeman Snafu

By Thomas Griffith

The trickiest ethical decision in journalism so far this year might have been taken, but wasn't, by Kay Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co. Her Newsweek had the legal rights to the H.R. Haldeman book. Her Washington Post had got hold of a copy and wanted to scoop everybody. What was she to do?

Imagine the dialogue in her office. With expletives deleted and angry words softened, it might have gone like this:

Ben Bradlee (aggressive editor of the Post): We got the story. It's news. We're going with it.

Ed Kosner (aggressive editor of Newsweek): You can't. It's our exclusive. We've got a commitment. We're sinking more than $125,000 into it. We've increased our price 25-c- on the newsstands. We've gone to all this secrecy so that we can spread it out over two issues.

Bradlee: Tough luck, kid. But you can't copyright news. Remember, even the Attorney General of the U.S. couldn't stop us from printing the Pentagon papers.

Kosner: What've the Pentagon papers got to do with it? This isn't a freedom-of-the-press issue. If those Pentagon papers hadn't been printed, you might argue that the public was denied something it had a right to know. Nothing's being kept from the public here that entitles you to jump a book's publication date by four days.

Bradlee: You're trying to buy news and withhold it to suit your convenience.

Kosner: And you're avoiding the issue. We're two parts of the same company. There's a question of responsibility here. You're not some little hippie paper defying the Establishment. We're both part of a half-a-billion-dollar corporation that makes contracts and is expected to honor them. We signed up with the New York Times, and so did dozens of newspapers. We've all gone to a lot of expense to honor the release date together. Remember, the Times even agreed that Kay Graham could read an advance of the book. We're all part of a network of obligations, and I don't see how you can frivolously override them.

Bradlee: That's not my problem. We're trying to keep our Watergate momentum going. Think what the staff would say if I stopped it. So unless Kay rules otherwise

Most editors can imagine a conversation like that taking place in Mrs. Graham's office, and agree that it should have. But there was no such meeting. Kosner was not told that the Post had the book, and he was given no chance to argue the case for Newsweek. Contrary to earlier reports, Kay Graham did not even learn that the Post was publishing its story until it was already on the presses.

Bradlee speaks of a foul-up. The Post got the book on a Monday but did not publish until Thursday. In the intervening days, the paper's top editors were gathered in Florida at an annual editorial-planning meeting. Late Wednesday afternoon Bradlee had the final version of the 5 story read to him from Washington, then tried to reach Mrs. Graham. She was on a flight from Seattle to San Diego, he says, due in at 7:59 p.m. Actually, it was another Post Co. executive on that " flight, and Mrs. Graham never did hear from Bradlee. "I wasn't in San Diego," Mrs. Graham told me. "I was at Newsweek! It's not a great source of pride to me that the first word I heard was Sydney Gruson [executive vice president of the New York Times Co.] yelling at me. I did point out later that he seemed able to reach me even if the Post couldn't.

"We had a snafu. This is not the proudest moment of my managerial life--that's a fact. All I can say is the information process didn't work the way one would have liked." Did she feel the Post was hiding its plans from her? "They didn't rush to let me know. But nor do I think they were playing the game it looks like."

But had she had sufficient advance notice, would she have stopped the Post from publishing the Haldeman story? No. "I obviously didn't like it. It's distressing. I've thought it over. But times have changed. I think this is going to affect the future sales of memoirs when they depend on secrecy. But I hope Newsweek would still buy them, knowing it's a risk. It's like the Government trying to keep a secret; if you can't, you can't retrieve it."

The Washington Post's (or Bradlee's) insistent itch to be audacious and lively currently disturbs many members of the Washington press corps, including a few on the Post. Controversy turns on two recent gossipy stories about Hamilton Jordan, President Carter's chief factotum. The Post's Sally Quinn, fellow guest at a private dinner party, quoted Jordan as longing to see the pyramids of the Egyptian ambassador's wife, who was seated at his side; others at the party challenge the Quinn version. Then came Rudy Maxa's item about Jordan spitting a drink at a girl in a Washington singles bar; in the Post, one of its best reporters, Haynes Johnson, deplored the sloppy checking of this incident.

One engaging quality about the Post, in fact, is its readiness to print criticism of itself. Last week the paper's thoughtful ombudsman, Charles Seib, suggested that these Post stories violated an unwritten journalistic rule that off-hours conduct of an official becomes a matter for public attention only when it affects his performance on the job. "The pettiness and unfairness of gossip masquerading as news," wrote Seib, is one reason "the Washington press is seen by many Americans as vindictive, destructive and often irrelevant ... [It] can also undermine the press's own credibility, which is none too steady to begin with."

Seib raises an important question, and the Post's willingness to let him have his say isn't a sufficient answer. Brash Ben Bradlee is characteristically unfazed: "If the social behavior of as powerful a man on the Washington scene as Jordan isn't reportable," he says, "I've got to go back to school." This response, of course, does not address the accuracy of the Post's reporting.

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