Women of the Washington Press

Front matter

MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

MAURINE H. BEASLEY

Beasley, Maurine H. Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence. E-book, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tezz-wz81 Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Contents

Foreword by Sandy Johnson

Preface xiii One

Two

Index

Photographs follow page 178.

Beasley, Maurine H. Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence. E-book, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tezz-wz81 Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution

Foreword

Sandy Johnson

I was socializing with friends at the National Press Club in the summer of 2011, telling stories, as journalists do, over drinks at the bar. I walked down the hallway and chuckled as I passed the wall of fame, filled with stern portraits of the NPC presidents through the years. All men, of course, until 1982, when Vivian Vahlberg of the Daily Oklahoman broke the barrier. A few months later, I was attending the memorial service for my friend, Allan Cromley, who worked alongside Vahlberg at the Oklahoman bureau in Washington. Friends and colleagues told story after story about Cromley, an extraordinary journalist who had a sage suggestion and a kind word for everyone. Yet I cringed at one story. Cromley, so friendly to me in person, had fought tooth and nail to keep women out of the Gridiron Club. As one colleague recounted, even his wife finally had enough and asked, “Allan, when are you and the other dinosaurs going to climb out of the tar pits?” Everyone laughed. But there was a painful truth behind our smiles.

Only five years after my graduation from South Dakota State University, I was transferred to Washington. It was 1983, and the city was still very much a good ol’ boys town. On the day of my interview, my boss took me out to lunch at one of the stuffy, expensive K Street restaurants and proceeded to drink three Manhattan cocktails. As I nursed a glass of chardonnay, I wondered how I could compete journalistically if I couldn’t throw back liquor like the men did. But there were signs of change in the air. Helen Thomas covered the White House for United Press Inx FOREWORD ternational (UPI). Sara Fritz of the Los Angeles Times was elected the first woman president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Helen Dewar of the Washington Post was the dean of the Senate Press Gallery. And the first women had finally cracked the all-male Gridiron Club, dinosaurs be damned.

As I read Maurine Beasley’s wonderful book, I laughed, shed a tear, nodded in agreement, and shook my head in amazement at her ability to capture the trials and tribulations of generations of women journalists in Washington. Every woman’s story is unique, yet together they form a collective sisterhood of journalism in the nation’s capital. We have not only survived, we now thrive. For that, we stand on the shoulders of all the women who came before us, and we are humbled.

Every one of us has stories similar to those so well and insightfully chronicled by Professor Beasley. I had a boss who insisted on driving me home from a farewell party and then tried to kiss me at the doorstep. I had a boss who asked me, as part of an interview for a promotion, how I would balance my young family with the demands of being a senior manager. Would he have asked a male candidate that question? Of course not. I had a boss who unfailingly called me dear. I was never sure whether he couldn’t remember my name or was being condescending. I had a boss who asked me why I didn’t wear more skirts because I had nice legs and should show them off. I had a boss who, under pressure from a pending Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit against the company, said he was told to hire a woman—so he was going to hire a woman with the biggest tits he could find.

On the other hand, I also had bosses who mentored me and generously shared their knowledge and wisdom so that I could rise in my chosen profession. I recall with gratitude my very first boss, the news director of the public radio station at my college.

FOREWORD xi

He sent me out on assignments that no rookie could nail—city council meetings, zoning boards, even a murder trial—and then patiently taught me what I didn’t know. I am forever grateful. Another boss took me under his wing and taught me everything I needed to know about Washington, and then gave me the freedom to soar on my own. For several years, I secretly kept a note taped to my computer, “WWJD” (as in, “What would Jon do?”), as a reminder of his unflappable ability to see the forest for the trees in every story.

When I became assistant Associated Press bureau chief in charge of politics and national security, only one thing intimidated me: the leonine reporter who was the dean of the diplomatic press corps. I actually took a college course in nuclear proliferation so I could talk throw weights with him. (If the throw weights reference seems obscure, please Google “Donald Regan” and “throw weights” for another major sexist moment in the history of Washington.)

After one of my greatest tests as a journalist—refusing to call the 2000 election for George W. Bush even though all the TV networks had done so, a decision that was a Pulitzer finalist for public service—my boss wrote a letter of admiration that ended with the phrase, “You had brass ones when we needed them.” It amused me to picture his struggle to use the iiber-male phrase, “brass balls,” in the context of his very female bureau chief.

Washington was and still is a city whose power circles are dominated by middle-aged white males. But women are breaking those glass ceilings in every profession, including the news media. There was a golden moment when every network bureau chief in Washington was a woman—at ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and CNN—plus a goodly number of those directing the print media, too, including the Associated Press, Newhouse, and the New York Times. While a number of us were cooling our heels waiting for a meeting at xii FOREWORD the White House, I recall marveling at the collection of so many powerful skirts. Not suits.

When I was promoted to Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press in 1998, I chafed when the PR shop wanted to bill me as “the first woman.” Like so many others, I had been “the first woman” this and “the first woman” that many times. By the end of the twentieth century, weren’t we beyond that? Yet ten years later I secretly delighted in the team of top political reporters I trained to cover the 2008 presidential campaign. For the first time in the AP’s history, the political team was led by women—four strong, determined, hard-nosed, well-sourced reporters who beat the pants off “the boys on the bus” with regularity. For good measure, they reported to a political editor who was a woman and a bureau chief who was female, too. Six more cracks in the glass ceiling.

As Maurine Beasley so ably recounts, it has been a slow evolution. But as the newsrooms and clubs and back rooms of Washington have finally given up their all-male facade, perhaps it is a comfort to note that the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west—even with women in the room.