Page 61 - Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

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DEVELOPING THE LEADERSHIP MESSAGE
CHAPTER 3
efforts. To her the Washington Post was family, and the strike was very painful
for her. When rogue elements in the union vandalized the presses, she took it
as a personal affront, and it stiffened her resolve. After more than 4 months,
during some of which time she was personally vilified by members of the
union, the strike was settled. She learned also that “when management . . . for-
feits its right to manage, only trouble can result.” She resolved to improve
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“communications within the company.” With the labor issues settled, the
company prospered. In 1991, when she handed the reins of the company to her
son, Donald, the company’s revenues had grown from $84 million to $1.4 bil-
lion. 13
LEADERSHIP UNDER FIRE
She had the final say on editorial and publishing decisions. In 1971, when her
paper, along with the New York Times, published the Pentagon Papers (gov-
ernment documents about the United States’ involvement in Vietnam that
were leaked to the public by Daniel Ellsberg), it was her name that was on the
injunction brought by the Nixon administration. It was a risky decision, not
just because she was going against the administration, but because it coin-
cided with the Washington Post Company’s going public. Publicity of this sort
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would not be helpful. Graham persevered. She quotes Bradlee as saying that
it marked a “graduation of the Post into the highest ranks” of news organiza-
tions. 15
Graham’s will would be tested a short time later during the Watergate
investigation. From the moment of the burglary at the Watergate complex on
June 17, 1972, to President Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1973, it
was the Washington Post that led on the story, keeping it alive after Nixon’s
landslide election in November 1972, when few other papers had any interest.
Bradlee, as executive editor, was front and center on the coverage, but Graham
supported him. It was important to her. Watergate “was a conspiracy not of
greed but of arrogance and fear by men who came to equate their own politi-
cal well-being with the nation’s very survival and security.” This is an apt
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statement about Watergate, and also about any other political scandal in Wash-
ington or any other capital.
And it points up the reasons why our nation needs a vigorous and free
press as well as strong independent leadership at the helm of such media. Ulti-
mately, as Graham wrote in her autobiography,

The credibility of the press stood the test of time against the credibility
of those who spent so much time self-righteously denying their own
wrongdoing and assaulting us by assailing our performance and our
motives. 17