(See Cover)
As Washington awakens each morning to a new day at the crossroads of history, the same familiar sight greets the sleepy eye. Across the presidential breakfast tray and over the coverlets and coffee cups of the most influential people in the world's most influential city looms the capital's most influential paper: the Washington Post and Times-Herald (circ. 381,687 daily, 412,121 Sunday).
The Post is not so complete a newspaper as the New York Times (which, with the Herald Tribune, also reaches President Eisenhower's bedside), or so good a paper as the Baltimore Sun, which also gets to Washington at breakfast time. Over the long haul, until last year, it has not been so successful as Washington's ad-fat evening Star (circ. 250,086), long favored by the home-grown Washingtonians, from the society-conscious cliff dwellers to the civil service folk, who do the Government's housekeeping.
But as the capital's only morning paper, the Post makes its impact on official Washington at both the right place and the right time—in the pause before the daily scurry through the bureaucratic and political brambles. "Of all the American newspapers," Britain's Lord Northcliffe (London Daily Mail) once said, "I would prefer to own the Washington Post because it reaches the breakfast tables of the members of Congress."
Material for the Memos. Northcliffe understated the case. The Post's reach goes beyond Capitol Hill and far deeper than the Senate subway. From Foggy Bottom to the fog on the Hill, Washington reaches for the Post as Broadway reaches for Variety or bankers for the Wall Street Journal.
Bureaucrats scan it for news of their own departments that may still be several memos away; except at the topmost layer, the city's 228,109 public servants depend mostly on the press for what they know about the Government and each other. Bigwigs examine the Post nervously to see how their speeches are played—or to find ideas for new ones. The Washington press corps studies it for tips, ideas and slants that often influence the 500,000 words that clack out of the capital every day to news media all around the world.
Out of its unique role the Post has fashioned one of the world's most influential journalists: Philip L. (for Leslie) Graham, publisher, who started at the top ten years ago without ever having covered a news story, written an editorial or sold an ad. Phil Graham, 40, is an energetic charmer whose facial furrows and tall, angular frame (6 ft. 1 in., 160 Ibs.) give him a Lincolnesque look. Lawyer by profession, politician by instinct, latter-day New Dealer by choice, he became a newspaper publisher by marrying the boss's daughter. He quickly showed that the boss, Multimillionaire Eugene Meyer, now 80, could not have picked a more quick-witted, smoothly forceful successor.