Expansionist Spree in Washington

"This place is overorganized," complains a Washington Post newsman. "Too many new people are running around doing God knows what."

They may not all know what they are doing, but their frenetic activity is paying off handsomely for the Post. By financing an uninhibited hiring spree, Kay Graham, 49, has pumped new life into the paper she took over from her husband Philip after his suicide in 1963.

Post circulation -- now 456,000 -- has been climbing steadily since 1954, when it bought Colonel McCormick's Times-Herald and became a morning monopoly. In ad linage, the paper ranks third in the nation, behind only the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. "I don't play girl editor," says Mrs. Graham, who has demonstrated a knack for putting the right person in the right job.

"I don't tell people what to do all the time. I'm interested in finding people, developing them, giving them leeway and backing them up."

Freed from Routine. She has done all that and more for her new managing editor, Benjamin Bradlee, 45, whom she took from his post as Newsweek's Washington bureau chief in 1965.

Faced with a somewhat stodgy paper, Bradlee ordered a brisk series of changes. To replace the rambling, disorganized pieces that often glutted Page One, he prescribed straightforward news stories that come quickly to the point.

He prodded his reporters out of their clock-watching work habits and freed them from routine beats. Today a Post man is encouraged to pursue a story wherever it leads without worrying about stepping on a colleague's toes.

Even before Bradlee arrived, the Post's international news coverage had begun to show marked improvement; it has had an expanded foreign staff to call on ever since 1962, when it set up a joint news service with the Los Angeles Times. But the glamour of the big stories -- whether national politics or events abroad -- does not distract from home-town coverage. Post reporters track down local stories from the city's southwest slums to the bedroom suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

The result is a paper in which Washingtonians can read just about all the news--local, national and international. The trouble is, say many critics, that the news is often hard to find. The Post has yet to solve the manifold problems of makeup, especially on its ad-rich back pages. A story on the treatment of U.S. prisoners of war in North Viet Nam, for example, may well be lost among the food ads.

Psyche Killer. Such problems are compounded as Bradlee hires more talent to file more stories. With Kay Graham's backing, he has raided other newspapers and magazines. His catch includes the New York Times's crack Political Reporter David S. Broder and the Saturday Evening Post's Stanley Karnow, whom Bradlee has sent to roam Southeast Asia. Nicholas von Hoffman was brought to town from the Chicago Daily News and now travels from one ghetto to the next to assess the miseries of slum life. Hired from the New Republic, Wolf von Eckardt provides some of the most perceptive daily-newspaper comment on city planning.

The new arrivals have joined a staff that is already studded with respected bylines. Al Friendly, whom Bradlee replaced as managing editor, has returned to reporting and will travel those parts of the world--Spain, North Africa, Scandinavia--which the Post never bothered to cover in the past. In his 32 years on the police beat, Al Lewis has proved as skillful at promoting new police techniques as he has at uncovering scandals among Washington's finest. Cartoonist Herblock, who, it is said, has "destroyed more psyches in Washington than any other individual," remains as scathing as ever.

The pride of the Post, however, is its editorial page, which reflects the paper's nondoctrinaire Democratic liberalism. Under James Russell Wiggins, a onetime Post managing editor, a group of scholarly writers achieve a force and clarity that stand out in sharp contrast with the inconclusive, ambiguous prose of most of their competitors. Combining a passion for civil liberties and humanitarian legislation with an appreciation of the U.S. need to assert its power overseas, Post editorialists have often done a better job of explaining President Johnson's Far Eastern policies than the President himself. Without a trace of truculence, they have argued the propositions that, like it or not, the U.S. is an Asian power; that in order to preserve freedom along with order in the world, the U.S. must see the Viet Nam war through to an honorable conclusion. "The editorial policies of a great paper stand in the shadow of previous days," says Wiggins, who tries to see that one editorial builds upon another. "You can't be so impetuous as to stand your readers on their heads every day."

Down the Middle. The Post's impulse to expand shows no sign of slackening. By 1970 the paper will move into a $25 million plant that will double its present cramped space. After four years of operation, the supplementary news service has not yet shown a profit, but it has been picking up clients at the rate of two a week for the past six months. It now has 170 subscribers and is catching up with the New York Times news service, which has almost 200. Still in the market for new acquisitions after purchasing Newsweek in 1961, the Post bought a 45% interest in the Paris Herald Tribune last August.

As for the Post itself, Kay Graham, for one, is convinced that whatever its remaining faults, her paper is winning and stimulating readers as never before. For evidence, she has only to cite President Johnson, who reads the Post's first edition the last thing before going to sleep, then reads the last edition the first thing on waking up. For a President who is not known for his love of the press, he pays the paper a rare compliment. It plays the news, he says, "right down the middle."

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