Page 162 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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WASHINGTON POST. As befits the major newspaper in the country's capital,
the Post is recognized as providing perhaps the best coverage of the federal
government. It was not always so. The Post, founded in 1877 as a partisan
Democratic newspaper, did not achieve eminence in its first 70 years. It was not
a great newspaper when Philip Graham took over as publisher in 1946, but he
started it on its way with the help of a great managing editor, Russell Wiggins.
Graham created the paper's first foreign bureaus, one in London and the other
in New Delhi. He encouraged investigative reporting and fought Senator Joseph
McCarthy's smear campaign.
When Graham committed suicide in 1963, his wife Katharine took over the
paper. She brought in Ben Bradlee, and he rose to the position of executive
editor. He made major contributions to both the appearance and the coverage
of the paper.
The Post is undoubtedly best known for its Watergate coverage. The story
was in their town, and their coverage kept it alive to the point that Richard
Nixon was forced to resign as president.
SOURCES: Michael Emery, America's Leading Daily Newspapers, 1983; John C. Mer-
rill and Harold A. Fisher, The World's Great Dailies, 1980.
Guido H. Stempel HI

WATERGATE. This upscale Washington, D.C, apartment complex will for-
ever be linked by name to the scandal that toppled the presidency of Richard
Nixon in 1974. A break-in interrupted at Democratic National Committee head-
quarters in the complex on June 17, 1972, led to the sequence of events that
ended in Nixon's resignation slightly more than two years later. The five bur-
glars, arrested with electronic "bugs," were tried and convicted in early 1973
after Nixon had been reelected in a landslide over Democratic challenger George