1. BALLS AND GHOSTS Eugene Meyer''s first steps into newspaper history came on the staircase of his baronial country estate in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Meyer was a titan of American business, wealthy beyond an ordinary man''s dreams,and newly resigned from President Roosevelt''s Federal Reserve Board. At age fifty-seven, he had become worn and weary; his wife, Agnes, saw him at "death''s door." He had decided to retire and make way for the next generation, an idea that made sense in theabstract. In practice, however, it was hell. For a man accustomed to the frenzied swirl of political and financial action, a retiree''s regret set in quickly. Two weeks of sleep, rest, and nothing to do had made Meyer bright-eyed, alert, and restless.
As hedescended the curving staircase, running his fingers along the bannister, he felt dust. He murmured to his wife, "This house is not properly run." She answered, "Eugene, it''s time you bought the Post." The famous British publisher Alfred Charles Northcliffe had said, "Of all the American newspapers I would prefer to own The Washington Post, because it reaches the breakfast tables of the members of Congress." Agnes Meyer''s order to her husband was bornof prior knowledge, for Meyer had tried to buy papers in Washington and was still eager to own the Post. "If he succeeds," Mrs. Meyer wrote in her diary, "it will be a sensation and we shall have a reputation for Machiavellian behavior"--they had told friendsthey were done with Washington. As for the inevitable expense, she wrote, "what after all is money for if not to be used .
It is a great opportunity for E. to be a dominant influence in this formative period of the new America . a great chance to becreative." On this day in May 1933, The Washington Post was not the powerful, proud journal of Lord Northcliffe''s memory. It had fallen so far from grace that its very survival was in question. The newspaper''s owner was Edward Beale (Ned) McLean. He had inherited great wealth and married a woman even richer than himself. The fool''s one original idea in a lifetime of profligacy seemed to have been the jury-rigging of a handkerchief sling to steadyhis drinking arm.
His wife, Evalyn, the daughter of a prospector who found gold in the Rocky Mountains, spoke of Ned as "a queer, queer fellow" whose problems were "the natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands." As a measure of her ownself-indulgence, she lived with the adulterous sot for twenty years. They shared a mansion on I Street where Ned McLean kept a llama and a long-tailed monkey named Babe. "A mad place, truly," Evalyn wrote, "with a monkey in my bathroom, a llama on the lawn, and our corridors shrill with the curses of our parrot (learnedfrom a diplomat)." The monkey once "snatched from a table on the porch a tall glass of lemonade or something, and scampered up the side of the house by clutching vines and projections; and then everybody had forgotten about the little beast until it dribbledthe contents of the glass down on the striped flannels of President Harding." No one knew if his life of dissipation had ruined Ned McLean''s mind, or if his ruined mind led to the life of dissipation. He once swore under oath, in a lawsuit, that he did not urinate onto the leg of the Belgian ambassador, though undenied was the reportof a second stream directed into a White House fireplace. Inevitably, his newspaper''s best use was as a covering for the bottom of his parrot''s cage.
The Post ran fifth in a five-paper town and some days printed no more than twelve pages of its thin gruel.It did not send a reporter to cover the Lindbergh baby kidnapping/murder drama. It had no one in Chicago for the Democratic convention that nominated FDR. Its star White House man, Ed Folliard, covered Herbert Hoover''s renomination and then was fired to savemoney. The Post paid small notice to FDR''s promise of a "new deal" and even less to Hitler''s rise. McLean''s grandfather and father had built an empire on newspapers. Washington McLean was a Cincinnati boilermaker who got into politics in 1852 by making the Cincinnati Enquirer the loudest Democratic party voice west of the Alleghenies. His son, John,got rich a dozen ways before gaining control of the Post in 1905 and inviting Ned in.
The family connections gained Ned favor with the Ohio politician Warren G. Harding, later one of Babe the monkey''s targets. Ned and Evalyn Walsh met as children in a dance class in Washington. Her father, Thomas Walsh, after discovering gold, left a wooden shack in the Colorado outback to build a palace on Massachusetts Avenue. It cost $835,000 and had sixty rooms, a four-storyreception hall, an elevator, and a Louis XIV ballroom. A biographer called Evalyn "a wild, gay child with an early developed taste for alcohol . Her small face with large houri eyes framed by dark hair . was wistfully pretty .
Although undisciplined,uneducated, semi-literate, her mind--unlike Ned''s--was sharp and alert, a quick if malformed intelligence." When Evalyn and Ned married, they treated themselves to a European honeymoon on their fathers'' wedding gift of $200,000. At Cartier''s in Paris, Evalyn bought the Star of the East diamond for $120,000. On a later trip to Cartier''s, with McLean co-signinga note, she committed $154,000 to buy the Hope Diamond, the blue stone of malevolent reputation that may or may not have belonged to Marie Antoinette, who in either case lost her head. Shortly, McLean''s cozy relationship with Harding ripened into scandal. He had been the president''s poker buddy, golf partner, and traveling companion. One Christmas, when Harding had received death threats, Evalyn insisted that the president stay at herI Street house. There he chewed tobacco and played poker until two in the morning.
Amused by the fuss, Harding said, "I am very grateful to my assassins for a very pleasant Christmas Day." After Harding''s sudden death in 1923, investigators discovered that officials in his administration had allowed private oil companies to tap into public reserves at the Teapot Dome field in Wyoming. The scandal snared Ned McLean. He had agreed to fakea loan for a friend under investigation who needed to explain $100,000 in his bank account. Then McLean lied about the deal. Finally, to avoid perjury charges, he told the truth to Congress. Two lines of eight-column type on the Post''s front page read: E.B.
MCLEAN ANSWERS CLEARLY AND FRANKLY ALL QUESTIONS OF SENATE OIL INVESTIGATORS Years later Post historian Chalmers Roberts called the headline "the most humiliating ever printed in a publisher''s own paper." That year, 1924, the newspaper began its slide into insolvency, which led to the public auction held June 1, 1933, on the stepsof the Post''s building at E Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. By that day, and for the rest of his days, Ned McLean was locked away in a private psychiatric hospital in suburban Washington. Though there were only three bidders at the auction, the Post reported that "important personages of the worlds of finance and journalism mingled with the merely curious." Evalyn McLean, there to bid, wore the Hope Diamond. William Randolph Hearst, ownerof the Herald, sent his executive editor. A lawyer, George E. Hamilton Jr.
, represented a secret bidder--Eugene Meyer, who stayed in New York lest his presence drive up the bidding. Twice before, Meyer had offered to buy Washington newspapers, first the Herald in 1925 and four years later the Post. But Hearst would not sell, and McLean turned down Meyer''s offer of $5 million. Now, at the auction, Evalyn McLean dropped out at $600,000.Hearst''s editor fell silent when Hamilton jumped every bid by as much as $50,000. The auction''s climax was reported by the Herald: A pleading note in his businesslike voice, the auctioneer exhorted: "Eight hundred thousand dollars bid. Do I hear 825? I have $800,000. Will you offer 25?" From Hamilton, wedged in the center of the throng, near the auctioneer, came an offer of $825,000.
Bidding ended at this point, but not until [the lawyer Nelson T. Hartson] had again run back to see Mrs. McLean. Impatient at this further delay, Hamilton threatened to withdraw his bid unless the sale was promptly closed. Three short words marked the passing of The Post into new hands: "Going, going, sold." For less than 20 percent of what he had offered four years earlier, Eugene Meyer was back to work--this time as owner of The Washington Post. Born in 1875, the first son of a French immigrant merchant who settled in Los Angeles, Meyer made himself a Wall Street financier and multimillionaire. Six presidents invited him into their administrations.
He did sixteen years of public service work,from World War I into the Depression. One admiring journalist called Meyer "a remarkable combination of amiability, pugnacity, reliable judgment, and special audacity." All those elements were present one night at the National Press Club when Fleming Newbold,a vice president of the Post''s afternoon rival, the Washington Star, complained of insomnia. "I think I can help you," Meyer said. "How?" Meyer said, "Don''t read your paper until you go to bed." Across the next decade he spent millions.