Washington, Deceit

Abstract On a quiet Saturday afternoon in August 1963 John Corry was working the desk at the Washington bureau of the New York Times when word came that the Washington Post’s publisher, Philip L. Graham, had committed suicide. Having recently transferred from New York, Corry was surprised when the reporter to whom he had assigned the story demurred, saying that he could not bring himself to call the bereaved family for details. Then call the police, said Corry. The nonplused reporter replied that he had never before had to contact the Washington police, leading Corry to wonder whether anyone on the Washington staff could find the nearest police station. The only courts that reporters at the Times’s bureau covered were federal, and not much had changed by June 1972, when police arrested five men inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. To Fred Graham, who covered the Supreme Court for the Times, the burglary seemed like the sort of local police story that “the nation’s leading newspaper did not normally pursue.” The next day’s New York Times ran a short unsigned piece deep inside the paper, in contrast to the Washington Post’s first Watergate story, which made the front page.