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The serious side squirmed and printed a lame editorial claiming the right to publish a rumor that it found "utterly impossible to believe." Many readers assumed that lawyers had cobbled together this apologetic phrase, hoping to mitigate libel damages. Not so, says Publisher Donald Graham, 36. The responsibility was his. Defending the editorial soon became more awkward than defending the gossip item. It infuriated the paper's national desk. As for Bradlee, he disclaimed any part in the editorial and seemed to be reliving the days of Deep Throat; he had been "eyeball to eyeball" with the gossip columnist's source, who got it from "two members of the Carter family—the personal family." Let them sue; the Post's countersubpoenas would fly. After the retraction, a chastened but unrepentant Bradlee insisted that, alas, "my source changed his number on me, from bugged to taped"; the item couldn't be defended.
Could gossip itself be defended?
"I've been hearing from the highest-principled people in the world," Bradlee says sarcastically. "They raise the question: Is a gossip column fit for human consumption in Washington, D.C.? Gossip is the biggest industry in town! I don't want to edit the dullest, stuffiest, intellectualist paper around."
The Post, with its 730,000 circulation, has to appeal not only to its most intelligent readers but to "quite different people—the old mass- vs.-class editor's problem." But mass vs. class makes a poor defense in the case of the Post's gossip column called the "Ear," which ran in the Washington Star until that paper folded last August. It is so full of innuendo, knowledgeable references to a lot of people who are not household names and condescending intimacy toward the well-known that the masses would need a decoder to follow it.
In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger makes a much better case for gossip. To him, Washington social life is a brutal place, "geared substantially to power, its exercise and its decline ... the topic of who is 'up' and who is 'down' is all consuming." People in Government meet formally by day but get to know one another only at night: "It is at their dinner parties and receptions that the relationships are created without which the machinery of Government would soon stalemate itself." This suggests that gossip is too important to be left to gossip writers, who occupy a rather lowly place in journalistic hierarchies. Gossip writing requires snoopy eavesdropping, a delight in malice and a readiness to go into print with one side, or one piece of a story. A double standard exists for gossip: it doesn't have to be as thoroughly documented as a news story. One question Bradlee has difficulty answering is why, if he believed the Carter bugging story to be true (and he had personally cleared it before publication), had he not assigned a reporter to develop it into a front-page story, instead of settling for a smirky little gossip item? From his experience, Publisher Graham has concluded that reportorially "there can be only one standard for the entire paper."