"It Has to Come from Within."

Howard Simons

Katharine Graham and Howard Simons / Getty Images/ Steve Northup...

Hello. I think you will want to watch the magnificent new documentary “Becoming Katharine Graham,” but you will also have to to fight down nausea because it is being streamed by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Prime. I don’t know if that’s a simple irony or a conscious effort to obscure the shame of the recent past. Either way, it sucks.

“Becoming Katharine Graham” is an extraordinary look back at a woman of character and vision and selflessness, at a time when newspapers still took pride in character and vision and selflessness. As the movie deftly chronicles, Mrs. Graham made decision after decision that boldly saved journalism and protected the country from a vindictive paranoiac and his willing henchmen, in defiance of their threats of her personal financial destruction. Or, as White House fixer Charles Colson sickeningly said to Richard Nixon in a recorded phone call advising him to punish Mrs. Graham for her insolence by denying her TV stations broadcasting licenses:

“I think it would fuck her.”

And:

Nixon: “She’s a terrible old bag.”

And Ambassador Walter Annenberg to Nixon:

“She’s a miserable bitch. This bitch has got it coming.”

Nixon: “Women are a pain in the neck for the most part. They’re very difficult to handle. And my point is, I doubt if they’re really worth the effort.”

Like all great leaders, Mrs. Graham had surrounded herself at work not with yes-men and yes-women, but with similarly principled people.

Many of you who are familiar with Watergate probably take your knowledge not from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1974 book, “All the President’s Men,” but from the 1976 blockbuster movie of the same name.

The film made some odd narrative choices — for example, Mrs. Graham wasn’t in it at all. But what they did to Howard Simons was, in a way, worse.

If you read the non-fiction book, you would recognize Howard Simons as one of the principal architects of the unraveling of Watergate, the fearless managing editor whose wisdom and unswerving encouragement helped the two reporters topple a corrupt presidency, and who coined the moniker “Deep Throat” for their key source. But if you only saw the movie, which was supposedly faithfully based on the book, you will remember Howard Simons as the cringing swine who looked exactly like beleaguered character actor Martin Balsam and whose thickheaded skepticism and cowardice almost singlehandedly torpedoed the whole project.

For dramatic purposes, to “raise the stakes” (as the cinema cliche goes), director Alan J. Pakula and writer William Goldman decided they needed a foil, a villain in the newsroom — an obstructionist — someone with clay feet who was highly dubious of the nobility of the newspaper’s mission. They turned that character into Howard, by name. He was cinematically expendable. Not a leading-man physical type. Not Ben Bradlee. Not Robert Redford.

Howard Simons was not a bitter man, but he was bitter about that portrayal.

Howard was a friend of mine. I met him in 1987, when he was the curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University, and I was one of 12 thirtysomething American journalists under his tutelage in the program. In a book I wrote many years ago, I described Howard as the sort of guy who was always the smartest person in the room, even if the other three people were Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nelson Mandela, and Confucius.

In 1989 Howard fell ill with pancreatic cancer, and it was clear he had only months to live.

Today, pancreatic cancer may be on the verge of a cure, via a new mRNA vaccine, thanks in large part to research grants given to the National Institutes of Health, the organization Donald Trump is trying to starve of grant money through his ignoramus HHS chief. Trump is being helped by collusions from the modern media, whose titans of the industry are lining up to flatter and reward him with shocking lack of oversight or outrage.

So.

After I learned of Howard’s impending death, I went to see him at Harvard. He was gaunt, but not yet in pain. I had not prepared for this meeting, and something weird just tumbled out. I asked him to give me a journalistic assignment — a goal, given by a great, dying editor to an admiring reporter, and I promised him I would do it, whatever it was. It was a naive, hero-worshipful sort of thing to say, very non-tough, very non-journalistic, and I regretted it the instant ir came out. I have not written about this before, I think out of embarrassment.

Howard just leaned back in his chair, blinked at me though his Coke-bottle specs, looked down at me over his aquiline, non-cinematic nose, and said, with a sad laugh, “It doesn’t work that way.”

Silence.

“It has to come from within.”

Yeah. Mr. Simons, right as always.

You listening, Mr. Bezos?

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Special pre-Easter Season Easter Egg:

Several years ago, The Washington Post unearthed a script from a lost scene of “All The President’s Men” that didn’t make the final cut. It was a scene, true to history, featuring Mrs. Graham and Bob Woodward, as reported by film critic Ann Hornaday. The Wapo recorded it as a podcast: Rachel Manteuffel played Mrs. Graham; Drew Goins, the future Jeopardy! champ, played Woodward. It’s funny. Here it is. Start at exactly 23:30.

Also, as I emphasize, it’s true.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Good, then. Now send me $200,000, or a $5 one-month subscription. Either would be fine.

Also, Questions and Observations: