All the President's Enemies

It took The Washington Post 100 years, and Watergate, to make it into the bigtime among American newspapers. With the rise of Woodstein and the fall of Richard Nixon, The Post has become more widely read and more influential than ever before, partly because two best-selling books and a motion picture have turned a pair of its young reporters into millionaires and folk heroes.

But The Post has not always been heroic--and for a long time it wasn't even a very good newspaper. In "The Washington Post: The First 100 Years," Chalmers M. Roberts tells the story of how The Post pulled itself out of sensationalism and bankruptcy earlier in this century to become the Pulitzer prizewinner it is today. Roberts, who wrote for The Post from the 1930s until his retirement in 1971, wrote The Washington Post as that paper's official centennial history. He has masterfully avoided the dullness that marks many commissioned histories, and his book is a fascinating, straightforward account of how The Post watched America grow during the last century.

When a St. Louis newspaper man named Stilson Hutchins first came to Washington in 1877 to found the city's sixth daily newspaper, he intended his fledgling Post to be a Democratic daily. The paper was certainly Democratic--it called then-president Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, "the bogus president"--and it was moderately successful until Hutchins sold it in 1889. But under a succession of owners, The Post became more and more sensational and relied on the wire services and the New York papers for most of its serious news coverage.

The worst came in the 1920s, though, when post publisher Ned McLean was found to have lied to a Senate committee to help cover up a bribe that his friend, Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, and accepted in the Teapot Dome scandal. From then on The Post went downhill, and McLean went bankrupt. The paper was sold at auction in 1933--and when none of its reporters even bothered to cover the sale, The Post ran an Associated Press account the next day.

Since then, the story of The Post has been one of a steady upward climb in respectability and circulation, and in 1959, it surpassed The Washington Star in advertising and circulation figures, to be Washington's leading paper. The struggle to overtake The New York Times in national reporting has been more difficult, though, and only in the past ten years or so has The Post had the resources necessary for such an effort.

Whether or not The Post will ever take The Times's place as the leader of American journalism, it has definitely established itself as an important force in government and society. Roberts's history comes at a convenient time for examining how The Post has gotten to the point where it can affect, even indirectly, the course of the American government. Roberts makes no attempt to analyze The Post's rise to journalistic greatness, and his strictly chronological approach to the paper's history may disappoint those who wonder what it means for society that in 40 years a bankrupt newspaper may grow to successfuly challenge the authority of a too-powerful President. But for those who want to know more about The Post than is shown in All The President's Men, Robert's book is worth reading.