The Warring Ghosts of Watergate

Legendary Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham

The Washington Post’s investigative reporting of the Watergate scandal had forced President Richard Nixon’s back to the wall.

The existence of a secret taping system in the Oval Office had been disclosed, and Nixon knew that if the criminal conspiracy on those tapes were to come to light, his presidency would be destroyed. So he launched what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was honest and intractable, so Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, so Nixon fired him and ordered Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and was fired in turn. The next official in line, Robert Bork, turned out to be craven enough to do Nixon’s bidding and fire Cox.

The facts that Nixon was desperate cover up all confirmed the truth of what the Washington Post had been reporting, but the truth was what many Americans still didn’t want to hear.

“The Post remained under attack — and the attack was becoming much more public,” Publisher Katharine Graham recalled in her autobiography, Personal History. “By this time I had warmed up to a degree of toughness of which I probably wouldn’t have been capable the year before.”

“At some point, I even engaged in a behind-the-scenes back and forth with Clare Boothe Luce,” Graham recalled, referring to the acid-tongued author and ambassador who was the widow of the founder of Time Magazine.

“Personally I admired her, but I was not in accord with her extremely conservative views,” Graham said. “She sometimes overdramatized things in speeches. In a major address to the Newspaper Publishers Association, she said she had written a speech but was troubled about it and, thinking about it, she went to bed. That night, she said, the spirit of her late husband, Henry Luce, came to her and told her to tell the truth about Watergate. She then attacked the Post for our reporting and for hiring ‘enemies’ of the president.”

After Luce’s speech, Graham remarked drily that her own late husband, publisher Phil Graham, had appeared to her in a vision and told her to tell Clare Booth Luce to shove it.