It's ironic because it's the very function of being so inside, and playing the game so well and getting so much money and so much power that they can occasionally turn against the establishment and really do something courageous if they only want to. But they don't want to do it too often because they don't want to make a habit of it and they don't want to get a reputation of being like that. After the Watergate stories, the first number of speeches Katharine Graham made were all about getting back to business. She didn't want the reporters to think that they were always going to be against the government, that they were always going to exposing politicians. That was her first concern. She didn't want to be like that ever again. That was it. That was an aberration. She wanted her reporters to understand that. And to underline this, she withheld a contract for three years, a Newspaper Guild contract. She made them work without a contract, no raises, made them very vulnerable to being fired or being moved to night assignments or out of town if they didn't do what she wanted in the way of just cooling it in terms of the way of antagonism to the powers that be.

Q: Had your book been given the push that they originally intended to give its original edition, how do you assess what kind of impact it would have had back then, in the late '75? I wasn't familiar with the second edition, I'm not sure who published it or how well known it is, and this third edition, the publisher is Sheridan Square Press. The editions have all been much smaller than they would have been had there not been such a reaction to its original publication.

A: The first edition was their biggest book for that season. The first printing was 25,000 and it was sold out before publication. And they were already into a second printing and it was a Literary Guild selection and it had a publisher in London and it had seven paperback houses bidding on it at the time they pulled the book off the market. I think it would have had a very big impact because it was the first book about the truth underneath the myth of the Washington Post which had come out ever since Watergate. And these people were at the height of their power, the height of their glamour and nobody really thought twice about who these people were. I think it would have had an enormous impact.

Q: And you sued, right?

A: I sued Harcourt Brace for breach of contract for taking my book off the market.

Q: And won.

A: And won, yeah.

Q: Who published the second edition?

A: A little publisher called National Press in Bethesda, Maryland. That was out for a year or two but they didn't promote it. And the third edition is now out with Sheridan Square Press, which is small but a very good publisher. And they're the people that published the Jim Garrison book that became the JFK movie.

Q: On the Trail of the Assassins.

A: That's right. And they're very sharp politically and they're very courageous and I like them a lot.

Q: What you do now? You've got the book out. Are you a reporter?

A: I'm writing a book on Henry and Clare Booth Luce, which is going to be a further investigation of mediapolitics. But it's going to be a much broader scope book. It's going to be about Time magazine and how it transformed American culture. And it's going to be a psychological portrait of Henry Luce and Clare Booth Luce and how these people projected their own needs to be powerful on to this enormously successful, influential magazine. It is really one of the most-- I want to use the word Thought Control--it really worked on peoples' minds in a way that nothing else had before it.

Q: If that book is any bit the eye opener that your current book is, it's certainly going to be interesting reading.