Whipping The Post

WHERE HAVE ALL the heroes gone? Our era's cynicism and suspicion have seen more and more former idols rudely picked off their pedestals as they fall victim to literary sharpshooters armed with innuendo and calumny. Self-annointed revisionists continue to issue one-sided tracts condemning JFK's affairs, Elvis's drug addiction, and Hemingway's latent homosexuality. To err may be human, but to forgive seems well beyond today's all-consuming passion to wallow in the filth of others--especially when that filth is a residue of the rich and renowned.

That's the sort of perverse passion that motivates Deborah Davis's Katherine the Great. While other authors have at least waited until their respective targets were safely settled in their graves before knocking them off their pedestals, Davis spares no such restraint in her heedless rush to profit from the "sins" of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. Forget the tales about Graham risking the family newspaper to take on the house that Nixon built. From Davis's perspective, Watergate stemmed not from the dictates of journalistic integrity but from the arrogance of a woman piqued by a presidential spurning of her peacepipe.

The only thing great about Katherine Graham portrayed here is her ability to create "myth that lived on as history, ad truth"--in other words, to lie and get away with it. How does the author support such an audacious accusation? Davis disdains hard facts and instead relies on her own presumptuous brand of psychology. "Once a widow, always a widow" Davis's primer seems to say; and Graham's pruported insecurities are accordingly traced to her prolonged grief over husband Philip's suicide. She plays the party line because she craves the approval of her Presidents:

Supremely competent as a businesswoman, working at nothing except building a powerful news machine, Katherine reflected no more deeply on the purpose of such an instrument than to want it to express her loyalty to the politicians toward whom she felt ppke a sister or a wife. Ths vulnerability and the sublimation of her feelings into intellectual, emotional, and political alliances, seemed to be a fundamental aspect of her widowhood.

To pin the blame for Graham's supposed servility on one event, however traumatic, seems risky at best--irresponsible at worst. And Davis cannot produce any convincing evidence that Graham does dance to the Administration's beat. The Washington Post did smugly support Johnson's Vietnam policy on its editorial pages, but so did countless other newspapers. Calling Graham servile because The Post supported LBJ's Vietnam policy is patently absurd. Nor does Davis propound any solid evidence that Graham acutally bends her news coverage toward the pleasures of her "father figure" in the White House.

Qualities like honor, integrity, and courage don't own a place in Davis's lexicon of human motivation. She coins the term "mediapolitics"--which, we're told, signifies "the inseparable relationship between the media and the government"--and then assumes that such a relationship will turn cozy and manipulative, the press serving as lackey to the caprices of politicians. When the Red Threat loomed large in the '50s, the press (as Davis shows) did undoubtedly slant its news--not because it wished to gratify those in power, but in a misguided attempt to serve the national interest. Yet a press that now questions, if not attacks, every move of its leaders, bears little resemblance to its timid predecessor. The Fourth Estate has mushroomed into an institution powerful enough to engineer a President's downfall. Davis's failure to consider this development on the press's part (not to mention the Post's part) exemplifies her inability to reach beyond the biases and assumptions of conspiratorial politics.

Oddly enough, the individual who shines through all this sludge remains Graham herself. Davis's invective and insinuations dim, but never quite snuff out, the courage of a woman resolute enough to attain prominence in a Washington more accustomed to viewing its women in bedrooms than in boardrooms.

Nor do they succeed in suppressing her considerable intelligence. Early on, she saw Davis' book for what it became: Writes Davis, "I continued to work and she told her friends not to speak to me, as she feared the book would be a 'hatchet job.'"