I walked into the Washington Post building for the first time in the summer of 1981. Past the red linotype machine that marked the entrance to the Post’s Fifteenth Street headquarters for so many years and up to the fifth-floor newsroom, a cavernous space that looked just as it’s depicted in “All the President’s Men.”
I was fresh out of college and on my way to law school. Along the way, I’d worked at a small legal newspaper, where I found myself both interested in the subject and annoyed at being condescended to by lawyers about my lack of a degree. Bob Woodward, the Post’s Metro editor, had read some of my pieces and invited me in to talk. In fact, he tried to talk me out of law school. He told me that he had turned down Harvard to work for the Sentinel, a paper in Montgomery County, Maryland. Why not just come to the Post?
I gulped, and asked Woodward how old he had been then. Twenty-seven, he said. Great, I said, I’ll be twenty-six when I graduate from law school. I’ll be back. And I was, first as a summer intern, in 1982, and then as a full-time reporter, starting September 4, 1984, covering Prince George’s County, in suburban Maryland. I stayed for forty years, six months, and six days.
I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)
Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, here were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.
Graham’s own supreme act of loyalty to the Post was his painful decision to sell the paper, in 2013, to Bezos, who made his vast fortune as the founder of Amazon. The Graham family was hardly poor, but in the new media environment—and under the relentless demands of reporting quarterly earnings—they were forced, again and again, to make trims, at a time when investment was needed. Instead of continuing to cut and, inevitably, diminish the paper that he loved, Graham carried out a meticulous search for a new owner with the resources, the judgment, and the vision to help the Post navigate this new era. Bezos—the “ultimate disrupter,” as Fortune had called him a year earlier—seemed the right choice.
As a deputy to the late editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, I had the chance to see the drama of a new ownership play out up close. In the summer and fall of 2016, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battled for the Presidency, our editorial board, of which I was a member, was unsparing in its criticism of Trump. As the G.O.P. Convention concluded, in late July, Hiatt published an extra-long editorial that made it clear, even before Democrats held their Convention, that the paper could not support Trump.
“The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament,” Hiatt wrote. “He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.” That wasn’t the end of what we had to say. In September, 2016, we published a series of six editorials outlining “the clear and present danger of Donald Trump,” from climate change to the global economy to immigration.
We had every indication that Bezos shared this sense of alarm. Bezos and Hiatt held twice-monthly telephone calls, which I joined, along with the Post’s then publisher, Fred Ryan, and Hiatt’s other deputy, Jackson Diehl. These were not conversations in which the owner handed down instructions; they were more like dorm-room gab sessions, with a heavy dose of policy. We proffered morsels of Washington gossip and delivered our insights, such as they were, about politics and international affairs. Bezos talked about the need to find innovative ways to connect with readers—he mentioned something about an exploding watermelon that had gone viral on BuzzFeed, though I didn’t exactly follow how that applied to our work. When our humor columnist Alexandra Petri spoofed Samuel Beckett in “Waiting for Pivot: A GOP Tragicomedy,” featuring Vladimir Ryan and Estragon Priebus waiting for Trump’s shift to the center, Bezos suggested that we post a video dramatization. (Proving that immense wealth and sole ownership don’t always get you what you want, our video department balked.)
In my experience of that time, Bezos came off as charming, smart, and unpretentious. “Guys, this is always the most interesting meeting of my week,” he would often say, seeming to mean it. Or, “I know we’ve been going on for a while, but can I hold you for one more question?”—as if he weren’t the owner, and we weren’t at his beck and call.
Trump’s first election and Inauguration brought some inklings of trouble. Some sixty-three million voters had backed Trump, but even our conservative columnists—including George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Michael Gerson—were highly critical of Trump. Bezos pressed us to find more writers from the heartland, who might understand Trump’s appeal. This was entirely appropriate. More unsettling was his expressed desire, at the start of the new Administration, to have the editorial page find something, anything, positive to say about Trump. During Trump’s first term, the Post’s executive editor was Martin Baron. As Baron relates in his book, “Collision of Power,” Bezos “urged showing support for Trump on whatever issues he could. . . . Whenever the Post editorial board’s view coincided with Trump’s, why not say so?” Hiatt, Baron wrote, “feared that Bezos was anxious to smooth things over with the new occupant of the White House.” During one pre-Inauguration phone call, Bezos seized on a line from Trump’s first post-election news conference—“I have great respect for the news and great respect for freedom of the press and all of that”—as a promising sign. This was an exceedingly charitable interpretation, given that, at the same event, Trump had refused to take a question from “fake news” CNN, called the BBC “another beauty,” and denounced BuzzFeed as a “failing pile of garbage,” and we suggested as much to Bezos.
Still, we tried to give Trump, where possible, the benefit of the doubt. One example was an editorial published on January 18, 2017, outlining “five policies Trump might get right.” It noted that, despite the newspaper’s endorsement of his opponent, Trump’s “election was legitimate, and his inauguration is inevitable. All of us have a duty to oppose Mr. Trump when he is wrong, but also to remain open to supporting him when he and the Republican-majority Congress make worthy proposals.” In the end, we didn’t find much to cheer about in Trump’s first term—and Bezos never pressured us to go easy on him.
Four years later, the editorial board endorsed Joe Biden for President, warning that “democracy is at risk, at home and around the world. The nation desperately needs a president who will respect its public servants; stand up for the rule of law; acknowledge Congress’s constitutional role; and work for the public good, not his private benefit.” There was no disagreement from the owner.
So much changed—and long before Bezos’s eleventh-hour decision to kill the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024. Hiatt died suddenly in December, 2021. He was replaced by David Shipley (full disclosure: I applied for the job and didn’t get it), who, as an executive editor of Bloomberg’s opinion coverage, had experience dealing with, and channelling the views of, a billionaire owner. To read the paper’s 2024 editorials on Trump and Biden, and then on Trump and Harris, is to experience a once passionate voice grown hesitant and muted. (I left the editorial board in September, 2023.) Granted, Democrats offered voters two far from perfect candidates, but, to paraphrase Biden, we’re not comparing them to the Almighty here.
Certainly, Trump was not spared from criticism; in fact, there was no doubt which candidate the editorial board preferred. Yet the shift in tone was unmistakable. You would not know from the 2024 editorials that just four years earlier we had called Trump “the worst president of modern times”—and that was before the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. A September, 2024, editorial that purported to compare Trump and Harris on policy grounds concluded that “the substantive contrasts Ms. Harris draws with Mr. Trump generally make her look better. But should Americans settle?” Generally? Look at what Trump’s been doing since taking office—at his barrage of unconstitutional, small-minded, and cruel executive orders—and tell me that Harris was “generally” better.
It was becoming clear, as September gave way to October, that something was up with the endorsement. Those not in the know—which included almost all of us in the Opinions section, because the piece was unusually closely held—figured that the delay involved negotiating over tone and adjectives. Then, on October 25th, came the first of our self-inflicted wounds: the paper’s leadership announced that, in fact, we would not be issuing an endorsement in the 2024 Presidential race, and wouldn’t in future contests.
