About the Author
DAVE KINDRED has reported and written for newspapers and magazines for forty-five years. He has been a Washington correspondent, sports columnist, and general-interest columnist. His work has won the Red Smith Award, sports journalism’s highest honor, as well as a National Headliner award for general-interest columns. Kindred’s stories have been anthologized in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. He is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Sound and Fury, the dual biography of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell.
From The Washington Post
"Morning Miracle" is a love story, a tale of passion starring a faded beauty trying desperately to hang on in a rapidly changing world.
The object of author Dave Kindred's ardor is old-school newspaper journalism, deeply reported public affairs coverage, the kind that can make a difference in people's lives.
"I love the smell of newsprint in the morning, and my favorite time of day is thirty minutes to deadline," writes Kindred, who has spent more than five decades in the business.
In particular, Kindred loves the journalism at The Washington Post, where he once worked as a sports columnist. In "Morning Miracle," he paints a vivid picture of the paper, its people, its triumphs and its struggle to survive in a media landscape transformed profoundly and inexorably by the Internet. (Disclosure: I worked as The Post's deputy metro editor from 1984 to 1987.)
The book has an insider's feel, and no wonder: The Post opened itself up to Kindred, and he interviewed 155 people, most of them current or former Post staffers. After reading "Game Change," a relentlessly fascinating political page-turner packed with anonymous quotes, it was shocking -- in a good way -- to encounter a book consisting almost entirely of on-the-record material.
To illustrate why he thinks The Post is so special, Kindred devotes four chapters to different aspects of the newspaper's journalism. I found two particularly compelling.
The first focuses on the riveting series on awful conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center put together by reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull. It's a classic example of important investigative reporting in the public interest. Kindred traces the story from blind tip to powerful journalism via the tedious but essential back roads of shoe-leather reporting.
"Go there, ask questions, listen, watch, ask more questions," is the way Kindred describes the process. "Not many papers will give you months to do it, but the Post did. When you know the story, you write." This is the kind of work that is largely the province of professional news organizations. No matter how wonderful the blogger or citizen journalist, independent reporters are not very likely to pull back the curtain on a Walter Reed because such reporting often requires serious resources.
In another chapter, Kindred introduces Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent with a penchant for telling the stories of ordinary people affected by momentous events. Shadid, who was shot while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Boston Globe in 2002, went on to report from Iraq for The Post. Despite the costs of his commitment -- the physical danger, the toll on his personal life -- Shadid talked of why he did what he did: "This will sound cheesy, but it is an overwhelming experience when you're defined by a story to that degree. And that's when journalism can really be great, when that's who you are, you're here to report that story."
Like so many love stories, though, this one is fraught with complications, and the Shadid saga underscores that fact. In the book's epilogue, Kindred reports that the correspondent has defected from The Post to the New York Times. "I adore The Post and [Washington Post Co. Chairman] Don Graham is still an inspiration to me," Shadid says. "But they're going a different direction in foreign, a lot more about policy, not going head to head on daily stories."
And, indeed, "Morning Miracle" explores The Post's plight as digital moves to the fore. There's much about the paper's bad news: declining circulation, plummeting ad revenue, shrinking staff, soul-sapping buyouts and the overall diminution of a great American institution.
Kindred places The Post's struggles in the context of today's media cataclysm without letting its executives off the hook. "The newspaper's problems were partly of its own making, allowing editors to overspend, and failure first to anticipate the Internet and then to comprehend its impact. But most of the damage came when the Internet's rapid maturation coincided with the collapse of the national economy. No one could stand in that tsunami."
The book, which will be published this month, illuminates two potential turning points when The Post might have reacted more effectively to the digital revolution. The first dates all the way back to 1992, when then-Managing Editor Robert G. Kaiser had an epiphany on a fact-finding mission to Japan. Kaiser returned and wrote a memo calling on The Post to launch an electronic edition and plunge into the world of online classifieds. But the plan went nowhere.
Years later, after The Post had amassed a large national and international audience, almost by accident, thanks to the Internet, a task force headed by then-Managing Editor Steve Coll urged the company in 2003 to adopt "a somewhat more aggressive national and global Web strategy." But Graham rejected the idea on the grounds that the paper's emphasis was and should be regional.
Despite his affection for his subject, Kindred is by no means in the tank. He is merciless in his treatment of publisher Katharine Weymouth for her plan to host "salons" at her home, events for which high-rolling sponsors would pay handsomely for the privilege of mixing with Washington players and Post reporters at off-the-record sessions. After the plan became public and was widely criticized, as Kindred puts it, for "selling seats to representatives of special interests," Weymouth scrapped it and apologized to readers. Kindred also skewers Weymouth for expressing her distaste for "depressing" stories that advertisers don't like.
A particularly poignant episode in the book is the departure of longtime Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., an accomplished and widely respected journalist who succeeded the great Ben Bradlee. (Says Kaiser, "Ben created the Post. Len perfected it.") Weymouth had taken over as publisher, and she was looking for a more Web-focused editor to oversee the much-needed merger of The Post's print and online operations. But Downie, who started his Post career in 1964, didn't see it coming. He was particularly upset to get the word not from Graham, his longtime partner-in-Post, the man who had named him to the top newsroom job, but from Post Co. Vice Chairman Boisfeuillet "Bo" Jones Jr.
Kindred describes a surreal scene when Graham and Downie finally met at Graham's house. Graham was newly separated, and the furniture was still covered with sheets. The two went to a second-floor bedroom and sat on the only uncovered chairs in the house. "For both men, it was a wrenching moment," Kindred writes. "The future, once theirs, now belonged to others. They wept."
But the book doesn't end on a note quite that melancholy. Kindred envisions a future where indefatigable young journalists produce great work, just as a young Bob Woodward improbably did so many years ago as a rookie reporter during something that became known as Watergate.
Let's hope he's right.
bookworld@washpost.com
Reviewed by by Rem Rieder
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
BALLS AND GHOSTS
Eugene Meyer's first steps into newspaper history came on the staircase of his baronial country estate in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Meyer was a titan of American business, wealthy beyond an ordinary man's dreams,and newly resigned from President Roosevelt's Federal Reserve Board. At age fifty-seven, he had become worn and weary; his wife, Agnes, saw him at "death's door." He had decided to retire and make way for the next generation, an idea that made sense in theabstract. In practice, however, it was hell. For a man accustomed to the frenzied swirl of political and financial action, a retiree's regret set in quickly. Two weeks of sleep, rest, and nothing to do had made Meyer bright-eyed, alert, and restless. As hedescended the curving staircase, running his fingers along the bannister, he felt dust.
He murmured to his wife, "This house is not properly run."
She answered, "Eugene, it's time you bought the Post."
The famous British publisher Alfred Charles Northcliffe had said, "Of all the American newspapers I would prefer to own The Washington Post, because it reaches the breakfast tables of the members of Congress." Agnes Meyer's order to her husband was bornof prior knowledge, for Meyer had tried to buy papers in Washington and was still eager to own the Post. "If he succeeds," Mrs. Meyer wrote in her diary, "it will be a sensation and we shall have a reputation for Machiavellian behavior"--they had told friendsthey were done with Washington. As for the inevitable expense, she wrote, "what after all is money for if not to be used . . . It is a great opportunity for E. to be a dominant influence in this formative period of the new America . . . a great chance to becreative."
On this day in May 1933, The Washington Post was not the powerful, proud journal of Lord Northcliffe's memory. It had fallen so far from grace that its very survival was in question.
The newspaper's owner was Edward Beale (Ned) McLean. He had inherited great wealth and married a woman even richer than himself. The fool's one original idea in a lifetime of profligacy seemed to have been the jury-rigging of a handkerchief sling to steadyhis drinking arm. His wife, Evalyn, the daughter of a prospector who found gold in the Rocky Mountains, spoke of Ned as "a queer, queer fellow" whose problems were "the natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands." As a measure of her ownself-indulgence, she lived with the adulterous sot for twenty years.
They shared a mansion on I Street where Ned McLean kept a llama and a long-tailed monkey named Babe. "A mad place, truly," Evalyn wrote, "with a monkey in my bathroom, a llama on the lawn, and our corridors shrill with the curses of our parrot (learnedfrom a diplomat)." The monkey once "snatched from a table on the porch a tall glass of lemonade or something, and scampered up the side of the house by clutching vines and projections; and then everybody had forgotten about the little beast until it dribbledthe contents of the glass down on the striped flannels of President Harding."
No one knew if his life of dissipation had ruined Ned McLean's mind, or if his ruined mind led to the life of dissipation. He once swore under oath, in a lawsuit, that he did not urinate onto the leg of the Belgian ambassador, though undenied was the reportof a second stream directed into a White House fireplace. Inevitably, his newspaper's best use was as a covering for the bottom of his parrot's cage. The Post ran fifth in a five-paper town and some days printed no more than twelve pages of its thin gruel.It did not send a reporter to cover the Lindbergh baby kidnapping/murder drama. It had no one in Chicago for the Democratic convention that nominated FDR. Its star White House man, Ed Folliard, covered Herbert Hoover's renomination and then was fired to savemoney. The Post paid small notice to FDR's promise of a "new deal" and even less to Hitler's rise.
McLean's grandfather and father had built an empire on newspapers. Washington McLean was a Cincinnati boilermaker who got into politics in 1852 by making the Cincinnati Enquirer the loudest Democratic party voice west of the Alleghenies. His son, John,got rich a dozen ways before gaining control of the Post in 1905 and inviting Ned in. The family connections gained Ned favor with the Ohio politician Warren G. Harding, later one of Babe the monkey's targets.
Ned and Evalyn Walsh met as children in a dance class in Washington. Her father, Thomas Walsh, after discovering gold, left a wooden shack in the Colorado outback to build a palace on Massachusetts Avenue. It cost $835,000 and had sixty rooms, a four-storyreception hall, an elevator, and a Louis XIV ballroom. A biographer called Evalyn "a wild, gay child with an early developed taste for alcohol . . . Her small face with large houri eyes framed by dark hair . . . was wistfully pretty . . . Although undisciplined,uneducated, semi-literate, her mind--unlike Ned's--was sharp and alert, a quick if malformed intelligence."
When Evalyn and Ned married, they treated themselves to a European honeymoon on their fathers' wedding gift of $200,000. At Cartier's in Paris, Evalyn bought the Star of the East diamond for $120,000. On a later trip to Cartier's, with McLean co-signinga note, she committed $154,000 to buy the Hope Diamond, the blue stone of malevolent reputation that may or may not have belonged to Marie Antoinette, who in either case lost her head.
Shortly, McLean's cozy relationship with Harding ripened into scandal. He had been the president's poker buddy, golf partner, and traveling companion. One Christmas, when Harding had received death threats, Evalyn insisted that the president stay at herI Street house. There he chewed tobacco and played poker until two in the morning. Amused by the fuss, Harding said, "I am very grateful to my assassins for a very pleasant Christmas Day."
After Harding's sudden death in 1923, investigators discovered that officials in his administration had allowed private oil companies to tap into public reserves at the Teapot Dome field in Wyoming. The scandal snared Ned McLean. He had agreed to fakea loan for a friend under investigation who needed to explain $100,000 in his bank account. Then McLean lied about the deal. Finally, to avoid perjury charges, he told the truth to Congress. Two lines of eight-column type on the Post's front page read:
E.B. MCLEAN ANSWERS CLEARLY AND FRANKLY ALL QUESTIONS OF SENATE OIL INVESTIGATORS
Years later Post historian Chalmers Roberts called the headline "the most humiliating ever printed in a publisher's own paper." That year, 1924, the newspaper began its slide into insolvency, which led to the public auction held June 1, 1933, on the stepsof the Post's building at E Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. By that day, and for the rest of his days, Ned McLean was locked away in a private psychiatric hospital in suburban Washington.
Though there were only three bidders at the auction, the Post reported that "important personages of the worlds of finance and journalism mingled with the merely curious." Evalyn McLean, there to bid, wore the Hope Diamond. William Randolph Hearst, ownerof the Herald, sent his executive editor. A lawyer, George E. Hamilton Jr., represented a secret bidder--Eugene Meyer, who stayed in New York lest his presence drive up the bidding.
Twice before, Meyer had offered to buy Washington newspapers, first the Herald in 1925 and four years later the Post. But Hearst would not sell, and McLean turned down Meyer's offer of $5 million. Now, at the auction, Evalyn McLean dropped out at $600,000.Hearst's editor fell silent when Hamilton jumped every bid by as much as $50,000. The auction's climax was reported by the Herald:
A pleading note in his businesslike voice, the auctioneer exhorted: "Eight hundred thousand dollars bid. Do I hear 825? I have $800,000. Will you offer 25?"
From Hamilton, wedged in the center of the throng, near the auctioneer, came an offer of $825,000.
Bidding ended at this point, but not until [the lawyer Nelson T. Hartson] had again run back to see Mrs. McLean. Impatient at this further delay, Hamilton threatened to withdraw his bid unless the sale was promptly closed.
Three short words marked the passing of The Post into new hands: "Going, going, sold."
For less than 20 percent of what he had offered four years earlier, Eugene Meyer was back to work--this time as owner of The Washington Post.
Born in 1875, the first son of a French immigrant merchant who settled in Los Angeles, Meyer made himself a Wall Street financier and multimillionaire. Six presidents invited him into their administrations. He did sixteen years of public service work,from World War I into the Depression. One admiring journalist called Meyer "a remarkable combination of amiability, pugnacity, reliable judgment, and special audacity." All those elements were present one night at the National Press Club when Fleming Newbold,a vice president of the Post's afternoon rival, the Washington Star, complained of insomnia.
"I think I can help you," Meyer said.
"How?"
Meyer said, "Don't read your paper until you go to bed."
Across the next decade he spent millions raising the levels of the Post's talent and resources. Though far from the breakfast-table necessity of Lord Northcliffe's imagining, the paper did turn a profit in 1943. Soon, Meyer thought in terms of legacy.His daughter, Katharine, had worked briefly as a reporter. Her husband, Phil Graham, a lawyer who had imagined himself in the U.S. Senate, became th...
