I started at The Washington Post in late January 1969. The Post then was a good, but not yet great, newspaper. Ben Bradlee had been at The Post since 1965, first as managing editor, then as executive editor. He was making a lot of changes. I suppose I was one of them.

The first time I came into the newsroom as a reporter, I thought I had entered a carnival. It was crowded, noisy, phones ringing, typewriters clacking, people shouting. Chaos. I had worked for two other papers—the Louisville Times (not the Courier-Journal by the way) and the Times-Herald Record in Middletown, New York. Both were good papers, but they weren’t The Post.

In fact, The Post wasn’t The Post then. Not yet. This was pre-Pentagon Papers, pre-Watergate. The Post had a bureau in New York but not yet Los Angeles. There were reporters in Vietnam for The Post but not yet the worldwide coverage it would have.

The newsroom was packed: I worked in Prince George’s County, and when I came into the paper, I didn’t have a desk of my own. If I wanted to make a phone call, I had to ask an operator to dial it for me, as did everyone else except Bradlee and the managing editor, Eugene Patterson, who had arrived only a month before me. There was nowhere to hang my coat. The entrance to the building, through a tiny lobby, was on L Street.

I was home.

The publisher of the paper was a 41-year-old widow who had spent much of her adult life as a housewife, living in the shadow of her brilliant husband, Philip Graham, Harvard Law graduate, former Supreme Court clerk. He died in 1963 by his own hand.

Bradlee and Mrs. Graham were distant figures for me. I wasn’t in the newsroom much, needing to be out in Prince George’s, “PG,” as we called it. The local staff, though, was coached to be aggressive, to hustle. Local stories, except for the occasional District of Columbia story, were rarely on the front page; and when they were our editors went over them as though we were preparing a Supreme Court brief.

I had grown up in Chicago, rooting for the White Sox, hating the Yankees. I loved the Dodgers. For me, The New York Times was the Yankees. I made up my mind early on that I didn’t want to play for the Yankees. I wanted to work for The Washington Post, the Dodgers of journalism. We tried harder. We hustled.

My first big front-page story came as the county school board, without any notice or briefing before or after, adopted a complicated, federally mandated desegregation plan for the county’s high schools. I wrote the story on deadline, re-wrote for the second edition and continued working on it until we ran out of deadlines. I didn’t leave the bureau for home until somewhere before midnight. But I had acquitted myself under fire.

I had other big stories: riots at the University of Maryland, the attempted assassination of George Wallace, the Watergate break-in trial, the Senate Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon’s impeachment and others.

Those were heady days, but I wasn’t a journalistic zealot. Some days I was ambivalent about the importance of my role as a journalist, with moments of doubt. During Watergate, though, I had no doubts. I awoke each morning confident of my purpose in a democracy, understanding my role under the Constitution, holding power to accountability. We did our job with honesty and integrity, and we had reason to be proud of our effort.

When I came back from a two-year leave of absence to write a book, Bradlee took me to lunch to ask me what I wanted to do. He had just turned 60; I was about to be 40; Ronald Reagan was President and the oldest man ever to hold the job. I said I wanted to cover the subject of aging in America. “I like it,” Bradlee said.

“Do you want to hear my other ideas?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “I like that one.”

For the next year that was what I did, with one front page story after another, including a first for American newspapers, a two-part series on the front page about a disease called Alzheimer’s.

When Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14^th Street Bridge on January 13, 1982, I watched senior reporters put on their coats to walk in a driving snowstorm the two miles from The Post to the crash site to cover the story. I wanted to go with them but wasn’t allowed. I had been assigned to write the main story and had to stay put.

The Post was a good daily paper, but it was a great crisis paper. I sat gathering staff reports as reporters phoned in, but we had no important information about the plane. Our transportation reporter was on maternity leave; his predecessor, Douglas Feaver, was home, but on vacation. I was asked what I needed. “Doug Feaver,” was my response. Doug had been the transportation reporter, and he knew volumes about airports, airplanes and air travel. Two hours later, Doug was sitting next to me, talking to his contacts in the control tower at National Airport, debriefing the air traffic controllers.

I don’t know how he had come to work. The Metro subway system had had its first fatal accident when a train derailed in a tunnel at almost the same time as the plane crash. The system wasn’t functioning. Doug normally rode his bike in from Virginia, but there was a blizzard. He might have driven, but the bridge was closed. I don’t know how he got there, but he did, and we got as much information as there was for our story—first edition. I was there past midnight that night, and early the next morning for days.

One day shortly after the crash, I was sitting at my desk early in the morning working on an update of our coverage. Bradlee came out of his office, maybe on his way to get coffee. He passed my desk without saying anything, but as he passed, he patted me on my back. He might as well have pinned a medal on me.

Bradlee had built The Post from a mediocre local paper into a world class institution, recognized everywhere. The staff had grown, and grown with quality, and not just for political or international coverage with bureaus on five continents. The Post also had arguably the best sports coverage of any paper in America with writers like Shirley Povich, Tom Boswell, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Ken Denlinger, David Aldridge, Sally Jenkins, Christine Brennan, John Feinstein, Dave Kindred, David Remnick and many more.

Now The Post no longer has a sports staff. Who will cover the Nationals, the Commanders, the Wizards, the Capitals, college basketball and football? The Metro staff, covering the District, Maryland and Virginia has been gutted. How will area residents know who their government officials are, who is running for office, where crimes are occurring, when taxes are raised, etc.?

During Watergate, Katharine Graham was acutely aware of The Post’s vulnerability. The Washington Post Company owned television stations which had renewable licenses to operate from the federal government. Mrs. Graham knew the licenses could be given to others, forcing The Post to sell. Nonetheless, she didn’t back down during the conflict over The Pentagon Papers and she didn’t prevent The Post from pursuing the Watergate investigation.

Ben Bradlee, a charismatic leader, was one of two great men I was lucky enough to know in my life. Post reporters knew that Bradlee had their back. When a Post reporter was working on an unflattering story about a Washington bigshot, the story’s subject complained to Ben. He waited to tell the reporter about the complaint until after the story ran. And that was it. Behind Bradlee’s swagger was a firm belief in the responsibility of a free press. Once, when Katharine Graham objected to Bradlee’s breaking an embargo to publish a government report before the release date, he wrote her:

” Katharine. . . Our duty is to publish news when it is news and that means when we learn and when we have checked its bona fides and when      we have secured the information legally and when we have checked for libel and when we have assured ourselves that publishing is not against the national or public interest. . . A newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures takes a sure step — perceptible however small — out of the newspaper business . . . each such step yields the independence we all cherish to someone else. Often, in this town to a President or his representatives . . . a newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures sacrifices one of (its) most precious assets — the vitality and commitment and possibly the respect of its reporters.”

The Post was profitable then, and Katharine Graham let Bradlee spend millions to make it the great paper it became. He wanted a paper that was fair and accurate, of course, but also exciting and fun to read. He had great instincts as well. When a Post journalist won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story that subsequently turned out to be a fake, Bradlee returned the prize and then assigned The Post’s ombudsman to investigate, interview anyone on the staff, and they were instructed to cooperate, and write the complete account of what had happened and why. The story, all 15,000 words of it, ran on a Sunday for maximum readership.

Bradlee isn’t around to tell Jeff Bezos what the job of a publisher should be. Bradlee famously said that a newspaper publisher can’t afford to have conflicts of interest. Katharine Graham, and later her son Don had their priorities right. None of them was perfect, but when push came to shove, they did the right thing. Jeff Bezos, obviously, not so much.

Bezos has been silent throughout this process. He clearly has his own priorities, and The Washington Post evidently isn’t at the top of his list.

Times change. Technology changes. The Washington Post, under Jeff Bezos, initially seemed to be up to the task, growing its digital capability—offering video and audio on-line as well as text and first-rate coverage, foreign and especially domestic, locally and nationally. The Post had first-rate coverage of the first Trump administration, and when Congress initially failed to investigate the January 6, 2021 insurrection, The Post did, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its effort.

That was then. The Post’s reporting staff understood its mission and continued to perform admirably under increasingly difficult conditions. Now we have a newspaper still owned by one of the world’s richest men that’s losing money, managed by other men who seem to have no idea how to turn the business around other than by firing employees.

It’s obviously sad and disheartening to see a proud and storied institution that has done so much for its city and country fallen on hard times. The loss isn’t just for The Washington Post, however. America will be poorer, less secure, less free from potential autocrats and corruption, less democratic and poorer materially and, more important, spiritually, with one less guardian of the public interest there to shine a light on the dark corners of our society.

That was The Washington Post; that still could be The Post, and that should be The Washington Post. All that’s needed is the will to make it so.

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