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Outbidding Hearst, Meyer bought the Post anonymously at auction for a bargain $825,000 in 1933—four years after he had offered $5,000,000 and been turned down. He found it "mentally, morally, physically and in every other way bankrupt," the raddled plaything of oil-rich Playboy Edward ("Ned") McLean. A horse fancier, gaudy Publisher McLean once devoted three of the paper's four sports pages to agate tables on racing performances. He brought his mistress to editorial conferences (so his wife, Evalyn Walsh McLean, charged in a divorce action) and made the old Post building on Pennsylvania Avenue the scene of hard-drinking, all-night parties, including one in which he arranged for General John J. Pershing to head off into the dawn wearing the cap of a Western Union boy. At the end of the McLean regime in 1933, the Washington Post was a paper celebrated in song (by John Philip Sousa's march bearing its name) but $600,000 in debt for newsprint for its shrunken circulation of 51,534.
Eugene Meyer took over the decrepit Post and, as he said, "made all the mistakes in the book." He went on a buying spree, snapping up expensive but unsuitable executives, trained seals, special features and the syndicated columns that were then coming into vogue. (To this day the Post runs 15 syndicated columns, from Walter Lippmann to Walter Winchell, more than any other U.S. paper, plus no fewer than 35 daily comic strips.) Once, during his purchasing zeal, Meyer noticed general gloom over the standing of the Washington Senators baseball team. He called in Sports Columnist Shirley Povich and asked what was wrong. "It's their pitching," said Povich. Asked Meyer: "Can we buy a pitcher? How much do they cost?"
A Glut of Side Dishes. For all his first mistakes, Eugene Meyer, known affectionately to his staff as "Butch," worked wonders. He built a national bureau to cover the Government, patterned after the Washington bureaus of the big Manhattan dailies. He developed an editorial page that, under Felix Morley, began at once to show insight and vigor, gain national prestige. By 1946, circulation had more than trebeled to 168,345.
Yet in the first decade alone, Publisher Meyer lost $5,000,000. The hard fact was that Washington, with one-quarter the population of Chicago, had just as many papers. The Post's wobbly economic base was the toughest problem inherited by Publisher Phil Graham when Meyer stepped up to become chairman of the board.
In 1949 Graham and Meyer thought they had the solution: a chance to buy the gaudy but prosperous opposition, the Times-Herald, a year after Publisher Cissy Patterson's death. Instead, Cissy's seven heirs sold out to her cousin, Colonel Bertie McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. Graham saw no hope of competing from the Post's ramshackle old plant. So Meyer put up another $6,000,000 to build a new Post building (on L Street), complete with color presses and air conditioning.