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Washington imposes severe working conditions on its newspapers. The only industry to speak of is the Federal Government—which does not advertise. To snare what ad accounts there are—mostly from local merchants and department stores—a daily in the nation's capital must appeal to a broad readership: the lady and her maid, the U.S. Senator as well as the unknown worker in Washington's vast army of civil servants. While he lived, Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham liked to describe the Post as "an egalitarian paper." The description fits. The Post says that it carries more comic strips than any other newspaper in the U.S., but for Washington officialdom, the Post also runs the most carefully wrought—and the most widely read—editorials in the nation's capital. In all branches and at all levels of Government, it is regarded as compulsory reading; one Post survey showed a near-saturation circulation in both houses of Congress and among 812 executives at the top of U.S. federal agencies. The paper's letters column, opposite the editorials, bristles with the names of Cabinet members, foreign diplomats and U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Graham also said of the Post that it was "a good paper that needs a lot of improvement." That description fits too. Its Washington coverage is often superior, and farseeing. It exposed and then led the fight against Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court-packing bill. Concerned by the rising gangster influence on U.S. politics, Phil Graham handed U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver the idea for a congressional investigation. A Post editorial campaign helped assure civilian control of the Atomic Energy Commission. Measuring the paper's direct impact on Government, the late Lord Northcliffe, publisher of the London Daily Mail and other papers, once said: "Of all the American papers, I would prefer to own the Washington Post."
* If that was where Gibson was going with the Herald, he never got there. The paper was sold in 1863, and disappeared.