Category: American History

‘Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story’

by Carol Felsenthal

Putnam, $29.95

“There’s one word that brings us all together here tonight,” Art Buchwald announced at Katharine Graham’s 70th birthday party in 1987, “and that word is `fear.’ “

A pithy statement, but an apt salute to the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, Newsweek, and several other newspapers and television stations. Often described as the most powerful woman in America, Graham is the subject of a competent, occasionally compelling, new biography by Carol Felsenthal.

She was the daughter of Wall Street millionaire Eugene Meyer, who ran the Federal Reserve and World Bank and later purchased and ran The Post. Meyer never intended, however, that his daughter run the newspaper: her husband, Philip, was the heir apparent. A former president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Phil Graham was called by some the most outstanding man of his generation.

He also was tortured by manic depression, and when he committed suicide in 1963, Kay Graham replaced him at The Post. Uncertain and lacking self-confidence at first, Graham soon emerged from the shadows of her husband and father and in the next two decades built The Post into a newspaper of international stature.

At the same time, her power has not been limited to the newspaper. Along with good friend Meg Greenfield, The Post’s editorial-page editor, Graham brought an end to a longstanding Washington dinner-party tradition of the men retiring for cigars, brandy and old-boy networking, leaving the women to entertain themselves. After Graham and Greenfield stomped out of one such gathering, the tradition has rarely been repeated in the capital’s circles of power.

The inside story of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, at precisely the same time as The Washington Post’s initial public offering of its stock, reminds the reader of Graham’s guts in pursuing the story. The subsequent exposure of the Nixon administration and its fall during the Watergate investigation confirmed the newspaper’s power.

Although Felsenthal’s biography is well-written and the story she tells is fascinating, it also is incomplete, leaving out some of the more interesting episodes in recent Post history. In the 1980s, for example, the newspaper suffered a million-dollar libel verdict, and although The Post ultimately was vindicated on First Amendment grounds, it took nothing less than Edward Bennett Williams’ last appearance before the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict. But you won’t learn that story from this book.

Even with such omissions, the book remains a worthy portrait of a talented woman who has learned how to exercise power and privilege, even fear.

‘It Doesn’t Take a Hero’

by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Peter Petre Bantam, $25

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, in his eagerly awaited autobiography “It Doesn’t Take a Hero,” writes the way you would expect a career military man would: straightforward, more than a little corny in places and chock full of the “can-do” spirit that pervades the general’s public image. The story, though, is almost as fascinating for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

The 500-page book, for which the charismatic commander of the Gulf War received a multimillion dollar contract, is a cradle-to-retirement overview of Schwarzkopf’s life. He describes a childhood shattered by an alcoholic mother and an absent military father. Like many children of alcoholics, Schwarzkopf took refuge in withdrawal and, in the sixth grade, a military boarding school. He later joined his father, then stationed in the Middle East, and recalls meeting kings and princes in the area in which he would later lead many of the world’s armies.

After graduating from West Point, his military career began in earnest. At least 200 pages of the book are devoted to a description of each of his various assignments. At each, it seems, he arrived to find the situation in disarray and, one or two years later, departed with things firmly in control.

Schwarzkopf served two tours in Vietnam – one early in the war and another toward the end. He describes well the frustration of those in the military who felt scorned for serving their country, even though politicians, not officers, had “chosen the enemy and written the orders.”

But he reserves his harshest criticism for pompous or incompetent officers. His description of surreal poetry recitals held in colonial mansions by officers who were being served by drafted soldiers highlights many of the war’s absurdities. At the same time, his compassion for his troops and commitment to equality shines through. He routinely required his officers to dine with their troops and, in one poignant passage, describes waiting for dinner in the rain with his troops rather than eating in an officers’ mess hall.

Schwarzkopf was also present during the Grenada invasion. He describes in some detail the awkward conduct of the invasion. In one remarkable instance a Marine colonel refused to fly Army troops in Marine helicopters until forcefully ordered to do so – all because of interbranch jealousy.

By the time of the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf had been promoted to the top ranks of the military. Despite his obvious familiarity with the Middle East and its politics, Schwarzkopf’s discussion of the war is remarkably incomplete. Not a word in the book is devoted to the recurrent allegations that the Bush administration had been supplying military hardware and components even after it became aware of Iraq’s hostile intent and determination.

Schwarzkopf includes at the end of the book a short and rather defensive section posing and then answering the four questions he is most commonly asked. It is astonishing that not one of them is: Couldn’t this war have been avoided entirely by a more competent foreign policy?

(In answering one of the four questions, he says the allied forces did not continue on to Baghdad in search of Saddam Hussein because it was not authorized by the United Nations, nor was it an objective.)

Schwarzkopf does devote a large portion of the book to the war. His description of the behind-the-scenes action is fascinating. At one point a high-ranking British official took notes of a detailed briefing on ground war strategy on a laptop computer. The officer gave the computer to his assistant, who left it in his car while shopping and it was stolen. It was only two days later that the contents of the hard drive were reconstructed and the loss was determined to be not as significant as feared.

Perhaps most significant, Schwarzkopf notes the pressure from Washington to launch the ground war prematurely. The passage from the book, reported widely when it was leaked last week, describes a heated discussion between Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Schwarzkopf. Powell, informed by Schwarzkopf that a two-day delay may be necessary because of weather conditions, responded by arguing, “I’ve already told the President the twenty-fourth. How am I supposed to go back now and tell him the twenty-sixth? You don’t appreciate the pressure I’m under . . . . My President wants to get on with this thing. My secretary wants to get on with it. We need to get on with this.”

Schwarzkopf responded: “What if we attack on the twenty-fourth and the Iraqis counterattack and we take a lot of casualties because we don’t have adequate air support? And you’re telling me that for political reasons you don’t want to go in and tell the President that he shouldn’t do something that’s militarily unsound?” Fortunately, the weather cleared before the confrontation had to be resolved.

The book is entertaining and does succeed in describing events from Schwarzkopf’s perspective. But his failure to include a more complete and balanced description of the Gulf War, its context and its aftermath, distort the book.

It was certainly not Schwarzkopf’s task in the military to question policy judgments. But it is precisely because of his policy position in the book that makes what he does not say as telling as what he does.

‘Chief: My Life in the LAPD’

By Daryl F. Gates with Diane K. Shah

Bantam Books, $22.50

Daryl F. Gates, the soon-to-be-retired chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, is not a man to mince words. From Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, on down, Gates takes issue in no uncertain terms with virtually everyone who ever disagreed with him. It is hardly a surprise: If one thing is clear from his just-published autobiography, it is that Gates and his mouth are no strangers to controversy.

The book, as one might expect from an autobiography, paints a sympathetic picture of Gates’ career and promotions from rookie police officer to head of the force. Gates explains well the difficult position police often find themselves in: serving a public that often seems neither to understand nor care about the constant danger threatening the police.

But Gates, too, fails to appreciate the view of a public that holds its public servants to a high standard. Gates, for example, notes with a smirk that the Los Angeles Police Department continued to bug private homes “for our own edification” even after the California Supreme Court declared it an unlawful search and seizure in the ’50s. And he concedes that his controversial policy of harassing patrons of questionable “massage” parlors probably was “bordering on civilly improper practices, if not restraint of trade.” But he “refused to back down.”

Gates also proudly notes his use of military vehicles and near-use of grenade launchers and fragmentation grenades in his near-literal version of the “war on drugs.” He describes how he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, in his view, casual drug users “should be shot.” In a subsequent Los Angeles Times interview he was asked, “Chief, you really didn’t mean that we should take casual drug users out and shoot them, did you?” “Yeah, Ron,” he replied, “I did.” Gates then expresses astonishment that anyone would be upset by the comment.

Gates also describes his running feud with Mayor Bradley, most liberal politicians and, especially, the American Civil Liberties Union, which he describes as “self-serving hypocrites.”

The book apparently was written after the Rodney King beating but before the jury rendered its acquittal of the defendants. Gates devotes a couple of short chapters to the incident, expressing horror over the officers’ conduct and detailing the ensuing eruption within the city government.

Describing an incident that occurred just after his appointment as chief, Gates, after making it clear that one of his officers was at fault, gratuitously notes that “taking the blame is part of being the boss.” He describes part of his job as “to take the heat for it.”

Curiously, these same sentiments are notably absent from his discussion of the Rodney King controversy. Far from it, he makes it clear that he would not accept responsibility, nor allow Bradley to force his resignation. Rather, he battled the Police Commission over the issue for nearly a year before finally submitting his resignation. By that time, he notes, “11 months after Rodney King, harmony in the city had finally been restored – at least for the moment.”

If only things had been that simple.