The Watergate Watershed: A Turning Point for a Nation and a Newspaper

I particularly loathed reports that personalized the whole dispute, implying that some sort of personal vendetta had poisoned the relationship between The Post and the administration. I had already begun to hear a chorus of rumors concerning my own feelings about Nixon, a chorus that warmed up with some help from Sen. Bob Dole, who made a charge, picked up and carried all over the airwaves, saying I had told a friend that I hated Nixon. Dole made the leap to saying that that was the reason The Post was writing all the negative Watergate stories.

After the election, partly in response to the escalating campaign we felt was being waged against the reputation of The Post, I began to make more speeches defending the press in general and The Post in particular. One of the first big ones was in San Francisco. As my plane landed, the man across the aisle from me leaned over to say, "Hello, Mrs. Graham, can I help you with your bag?" I looked up into the eyes of Sen. Dole. He was very friendly, helped me off the plane, and did indeed carry the bag for me. We talked pleasantly, and I finally worked up my nerve to say, "By the way, Senator, I didn't say I hated Nixon." "Oh, you know," he casually replied, "during a campaign they put these things in your hands, and you just read them." His reaction amazed me, dismissing so lightly something that had had such a powerful effect on all of us at The Post, especially me.

That fall, at the same time that the administration granted an exclusive interview to the Washington Star, it started a boycott of sorts on us. We were not to have our calls answered, not to be dealt with professionally in any way; administration people were not to come to editorial lunches, and certainly not to my house for dinner. A uniquely ludicrous, petty and rather weird form of vengeance took place when the administration excluded our charming, much respected and even loved senior society reporter Dorothy McCardle, then 68 years old, from covering parties and made her sit alone cooling her heels in the pressroom, barring her from one social event after another. The strategy backfired, for Dorothy soon became something of a heroine to her colleagues in the Washington press corps. In fact, the Star gallantly ran an editorial supporting us and opposing the ban, stating that, if The Post couldn't cover the parties, the Star didn't want any favors; its social reporter, Isabelle Shelton, would join Dorothy in the pressroom, declining to attend the events as long as Dorothy couldn't.

We found out later that at one point Nixon had a plan to get Richard Mellon Scaife, the conservative Pittsburgh millionaire, to buy The Post. The evidence that turned up in the Nixon Archives was Ehrlichman's notes on a Dec. 1, 1972, meeting he had with Nixon: "Post. Scaife will offer to buy it. (Assets.) Suit by public SH [shareholders] if she (60%) [who controls this much of the A shares] refuses. President can't talk to him."

At one point, Nixon himself got in on the act. He sent a memo to Haldeman:

"Ziegler under no circumstances is to see anybody from the Washington Post and no one on the White House staff is to see anybody from the Washington Post or return any calls to them . . . -- just treat the Post absolutely coldly -- all of their people are to be treated in this manner."

Did the White House actually encourage or even originate these challenges? In light of all the threats and memos that have since surfaced, it's easy to believe that Nixon and his co-conspirators were behind them, but we never found a paper trail leading to a direct connection. Maybe we didn't have to, so closely tied were many of the prominent figures to the White House or the CRP.

No doubt there was a mixture of motives among the challengers -- the perception of blood in the water, easy pickings, and understandable thinking that the atmosphere was right given the Nixon-dominated FCC. There was also dissatisfaction, if not real dislike, on the part of some of the challengers for our strong, aggressive news organizations. We could see why some groups didn't like the performance of the two stations: Both had played a not insignificant role in the passage of Florida's corporate income tax and the Florida sunshine law.

Nixon's close friend Cromwell Anderson was one of the leaders of a challenging group in Miami. Another member was Edward Claughton, whose home Spiro Agnew had stayed in during the 1972 Republican Convention. Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that The Post would have "damnable, damnable problems" about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House.

The timing of these challenges made them potentially devastating, coming not only in the thick of Watergate but also just a year and a half after the Pentagon Papers and after the company had gone public with its stock.

Among the worst effects was the sharp decline in our stock price that naturally ensued, from $38 a share down to $28 in the first two weeks after the challenges, and continuing on down to $16 or $17, decreasing the value of the company by more than half. As for the direct effect on our finances, the legal costs of defending the licenses added up to well over a million dollars in the 2 1/2 years the entire process took -- a far larger sum then than now for a small company like ours.

My apprehensions about the whole Watergate affair were evident. "Is it all going to come out?" Woodward reported that I asked anxiously. "I mean, are we ever going to know about all of this?" As Bob later wrote, he thought it was the nicest way possible of asking, "What have you boys been doing with my newspaper?" He told me then that they weren't sure all of it ever would come out: "Depression seemed to register on her face. `Never?' she asked. `Don't tell me never.' "