Washington Press Club Foundation

Eileen Shanahan: Interview #5

February 27, 1994 in Washington, D.C.

Mary Marshall Clark, Interviewer

Eileen Shanahan - February 27, 1994 Tape 1 of 2

February 27th, 1994
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Eileen Shanahan - February 27, 1994 Tape 2 of 2

February 27th, 1994
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Eileen Shanahan - February 27, 1994 Tape 1 of 1

February 27th, 1994
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: Okay. I wanted to ask you a follow-up question from our last evening's discussions about HEW. You mentioned that Joe Califano had called on you because of an episode he witnessed in which you were very tough during the Johnson administration. What was that episode?

Shanahan: It was in the latter days of the Johnson administration when the Vietnam War had become an enormous controversy. And Califano called meóor his secretary, I guessóand said, "Mr. Califano would like to see you," at some hour, 4:30, something like that. That sort of thing happened occasionally, when you worked for the New York Times.

So I went over and sat in what was then the press waiting room, right in the East Wing. And I waited and I waited and I waited. And the secretary came out a couple times to say, "Mr. Califano will be with you shortly." And then finally after well over an hour of waiting, a different secretary comes out and says, "The president will see you now."

It's the only time in my life I have ever been alone in a room with a president of the United States, and I'm here to tell you it's intimidating. Of course, Johnson could be intimidating. I knew him the way a reporter knows people, from his years as Senate majority leader. I had a lot of access to him, becauseóI think the reason that I had the access was that since I was covering economics and not what a whole bunch of other reporters were covering, my guess is that he saw me a lot because he knew I might be bringing him the first news of something he needed to know about: something that was going on in the House or something that was going on in the administration. Also, he liked smart women.

In any event, I knew Johnson. I had certainly not been in any small group with Johnson since he became presidentóor certainly not alone. And to walk into that Oval Office and realize, "There ain't nobody here but you and the president of United States," I think that would intimidate you even with a weak-personality president, if there is such a thing.

Anyway, he started talking about the budget, basically talking about the budget for the Vietnam War and what it was costing and was trying to make the case that it wasn't costing as much as people think. We're talking dollars here, not lives. And as he talked, I sort of knew his numbers were wrong, but I didn't have the numbers in my head because I hadn't expected to get into this with the presidentóor even Joe. I didn't know why Joe had wanted to see me but that sort of thing wasn't that rareónot with me but I knew that Califano often talked to reporters.

And Johnson went on at great length talking about, and giving me, all kinds of numbers. And I asked some questions that weren't terribly good questions because I wasn't able to say: But your own budget says X, because I hadn't looked at it in a long time. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how long I was in his office; it seemed like forever. It was probably on the order of fifteen or twenty minutes. And all this, by the way, he put this on a deep-background basis, which is a real trap for journalists.

Clark: What does that mean?

Shanahan: It means much more than merely that you can't say it's the presidentóthat would be on the record. You can't say even "a high administration official." You just have to write it on your own. Here are the facts. And then the facts, or alleged facts, they have given you. So it's a terrible trap if they aren't being truthful.

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But sometimes there's a real story in it and journalists do permit people to tell them things on deep background. Sometimes it illuminates another story later on.

In any event, I went back to the office very troubled and immediately dived into all my budget materials and found what I thought I would find, which was what he was telling me wasn't true, by his own documents, not some critic's documents. What to do? So I figured, well, I'm the palace favorite today. I will call Joe Califano and say, "I've some questions about what the president told me and I've got stuff here that indicates it's not accurate." So I called and left that message with Califano, who indeed called me back very promptly.

It's getting to be late. It's getting to be six or after six, and the deadline at that time to have a story done was ten minutes of seven. So it's getting crunchy. And I told Joe that. And he knew that; he was savvy about such things. I asked him my questions and he said, "I can't answer your questions but I will either get you answersó [Tape interruption.]

óor, he said, "I will get somebody to call you back."

So I sit down and start trying to write this story. And fairly promptly, ten or fifteen minutes or soóby this time, the switchboard was closed and all the calls came up to the main news desk. And the guy on the main news desk shouts down the length of the room, "Eileen, Secretary McNamara's on the phone." Gulp!

So I get on the phone with McNamara and I say, "I've talked to the president on a deep background basis and he has told me X and I've looked at the administration's own figures and they say Y." And he starts telling me, trying to persuade me that I'm wrong. One of the things I remember about that interview is that he kept talking about "my war in Southeast Asia." He used "my," "my." "I have to do this to protectóor defend or make sure ofó'my war.'"

In any event, we went back and forth, and back and forth. And I kept saying, "But your own budget documents show this," and so forthóback and forth about three times. And I finally said, "Mr. Secretary, we're on re-runs and it's getting late and I have to write." And he said, "Well, what are you going to write?" And I said, "I'm going to write that there's a dispute about the figures, that high administration officials"ówhich theoretically I wasn't entitled to do but I thought if I said it to him, I could do itó"are saying that this is the case, and documents show otherwise."

He came back at me one more time with his explanation. I'm watching the clock; I'm petrified about the getting this story done on time. And finally I heard myself saying to him, "Mr. Secretary, it just won't wash, and I've got to write. Thank you. Good-bye." And after I said, "Mr. Secretary, it just won't wash," I was just kind of almost shaken at my impertinence. I think I had said things like that before to secretaries of the Treasury that I knew quite well. But I'd never met McNamara and, of course, he was a looming figure in Washington. It kind of amuses me in retrospect that I did feel so astounded at my ownósome would say rudeness, maybe.

In any event, I wrote the story, wrote it straight, and wrote it. And there wasn't any real flare-up about it.

Clark: Why? Why do you think?

Shanahan: Because in a certain sense it was more of the same. It wasn't a trail-blazing story as a story because there was already a lot of stuff out there about the cost, the very thing they were trying to counter. And so the fact that I wrote a story, which in fact did run on page one of the Times, saying administration

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officials were trying to say X but their own documents indicate Yóit wasn't a sensational story at all. But I wrote it.

Well, after I had worked for Califanoóand Dan Schorr, as I mentioned, had told me that Califano wanted me in that job because he knew I would stop him from telling falsehoods and overpowering me, and that I would make him do right. After I had been there, I guess close to a year, he and I just happened to be alone on a trip, sitting in an airplane, seated together.

Clark: He meaning?

Shanahan: Califano, I'm sorry. And so I told him what Dan Schorr had told me he had said and asked if he really had said that and he said, "Yes, I did." And I said, "Why did you think that?" And he gave me a one-word answer. He said, "McNamara," which was a way of saying he remembered the whole episode.

Clark: Wonderful. Just to pull out a few more things out of that story, why do you think Johnsonówhy do you think they called on you? Why do you thinkó

Shanahan: I was the New York Times.

Clark: You were the New York Times.

Shanahan: I was writing about budget matters.

Clark: But given your reputation, how did he think he could possibly convince you?

Shanahan: I think Johnson was the great convincer. You know, Johnson leaned on people. Johnson intimidated people.

Clark: And he knew you were one of the linchpins. If he convinced youó

Shanahan: New York Times. If the New York Times said, "Hey, it's costing less than people think," that there would probably be, maybe, he thought that others would follow.

Clark: Had John Oakes started to write some serious critiques of the Vietnam War?

Shanahan: Oh, everybody was doing it. Max Frankel, who was then the foreign policy correspondent, and others. And long after people like Neal Sheehan in Vietnam and Charlie Mohr, who was with Time and subsequently with the Times, a lot of stuff about the expense. They were mostly talkingóthose reportersóabout the administration's false body counts of Vietnamese dead. But the issue of the cost was out there on the table, too, out there for public discussion at that time.

And I think that's it. Johnson had a lot of confidence in his ability to persuade and/or intimidate practically anybody, and probably should have known that he doesn't have much that he can do to a reporter, especially a reporter for the New York Times. If you're with a lesser paper, they can cut you off. I mean, if I'd been with the St. Petersburg Times then, first of all he wouldn't have done it because it doesn't have the wide national influence. But if he'd tried it, he could have issued an order that nobody was ever to talk to anybody from my paper again. And they do do that. There are ways around it. I don't like reporters who think that he can't ever write anything tough because they'll cut you off. Sooner or later, they need you more than you need them. You can find other ways to cover almost any story and I've always considered that an excuse of reporters who don't fight hard enough.

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And I suspect Johnson was surprised. For all I know, he chewed Califano out. Califano never told me. I never asked him if there was any fall-out or if Johnson had chewed him out over the lack of success of convincing me. But maybe he told Johnson. I don't know whether there was ever any discussion. I'll have to ask him that sometime.

Clark: Yes. That would be a very interesting follow-up.

Shanahan: So that's how.

Clark: In terms of your day-to-day workings with Califano, could you talk a little bit about how you assisted him specifically, for example, before press conferences?

Shanahan: Yes, I really haven't talked much about what I did day-to-day, which was managing a public affairs office of some four hundred people, counting all those people in all the various agencies. I didn't clear every press release. I had a very good careeróI had two deputies, one of whom was career, whom I had plucked out of the Public Health Service to be my deputy, having before I went in asked reporters I knew who covered HEW, who were the good ones? And this career guy at Public Health Service, John Blamphin. Everybody said, "Oh, he's the greatest."

So I met him and he cleared everything from all the vast reaches of the department, and brought me the stuff he thought I should see and, as far as I can recall, never made a mistake about letting something out without my seeing it that he should have brought to me. The routine was heavy, I don't know how many on an average day. We may have had three or four or five releases of one sort or another.

I tried to keep up with everything that was coming up through the department. And I did something there that I learned from Pierre Salinger when he was Kennedy's press secretary and I was in the Treasury. Before a Kennedy press conference, Pierre Salinger sent out the word to all the departmental PR people that there'd be a press conference Tuesdayóusually with several days' noticeóand please send him every anticipated question and suggested answer, on paper. It was a brilliant idea and not merely because it helped the president be up to speed on everything. In the meanwhile, the president was doing it, Kennedy, with his own department heads, so it was the same sort of instruction on two different levels.

But Salinger very toughly sent out the message to the assistant secretaries for public affairs in all the major agencies, "And if there is any question from your department that the president gets hit with and you haven't prepared him, your ass is in a sling."

Absolutely brilliant management technique for surfacing trouble and bad news. People don't like to tell the boss that something bad is happening. And I don't know whether Salinger understood what a brilliant management technique it was. He may only have thought of it as a way to protect the president from looking uninformed. In any event, in the Treasury there, I learned what a brilliant management technique it was because the people, having been told by my boss, the assistant secretary for public affairs at Treasury, that if the president ever gets hit with a question from your unit of the treasury department that he's not prepared for, your ass is in a sling.

So the very first week we goóthe first day after the inaugural was a Friday and we had the meeting I described earlier where he introduced us all to each other. And Joe wanted to have a press conference on Monday. I said, "No. We haven't got time to get prepared for it," and I suggested something like the following Thursday. Well, he said Tuesday. And Tuesday it was. Meanwhile, I went back after that staff meeting where he introduced us all to each other and summoned all of my heads of public affairs from the various subagencies and relevant people from my own staff, whom I hadn't hardly met, and said, "We've got to get ready for a press conference on Tuesday," and gave them some very tough talk about what they had to surface for me.

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They never saw anything like that before. And some, in fact, did not respond well, predictably. Ed [Education] did not respond well. But sooner or later, I had my own people in all of those jobs, some of whom were career people that I kept, others of whom were career people that I promoted into that job, some of which I brought in from outside. It was a mix. So that became a routine thing for me to do before a press conference, although that fragmented and moribund education side never did do it very well.

And then Califano would have a woodshedding, as they called it at the Treasuryómeaning a bunch of us would take Califano into the woodshed and beat him upónot just me but a lot of his key people, people like Ben Heineman, his executive assistant, who really kept trackóbrilliant guyóof everything that was going on in the department, people like Fred Bohen who was reading all the paper as it came through, people from the areas that were thought to be hot, the assistant secretaries or whatever they were, commissioners where you knew there was controversy, or maybe just action, maybe just energetic action that he wanted to put outówe would sit around the table and ask him questions. And were much tougher on him than press conferences were.

In his book, Califano said that he almost never was asked a question that I hadn't prepared him for, and that's not true. There was about one a press conference, two on some occasions, mostly from trade press where it was a sufficiently narrow issue so that I hadn't surfaced it and neither had the head of the agency. He was never mortified by looking uninformed, though. He has a prodigious mind. The guy's got an I.Q. of 180 or something, I think, brilliant. And he's a reader and he's serious. So he made himself informed.

So I did that in terms of preparing him for the press conferences. And he was stellar, no question about it. He also thought on his feet. Two of the most famous things he said, as far as I knowóthere are people who take credit for them, or one of them anywayóbut as far as I know, he thought them up on his feet at a press conference, one of which was "Smoking is slow-motion suicide," which several people claim authorship of, but I hadn't heard it in advance. The other of which I'm sure was his was "Welfare reform is the Middle East of domestic politics." [Laughter.] He was a brilliant guy and he thought of a lot of his own phraseology. He was a good writeróhe is a good writer.

In terms of managing public affairs throughout the departmentóthis isn't so much helping Califano except maybe finding some fires and putting them outóI did a lot of things. I forced reluctant agencies to kill duplicative magazinesóbig fight. I told Califano about it. I said, "These people may come to you and they may try and back-door me." He said, "Okay, Shanahan. I'll be ready for them." In fact, in the case I'm thinking about, they didn't because the word was out that the secretary would back me up. Tremendous difference. Hardly anybody has enough sense to treat a public affairs person the way he treated me.

Clark: I was about to say, it sounds very unusual.

Shanahan: It is unusual.

Clark: I mean, it seems to me that oftentimes public affairs people are used as "fall-guys" for every purpose.

Shanahan: I remember at those meetings that first Powell and then Walt Wurfel held at the White House of the agency public affairs chiefs. There was a guy who'd been around for years and years named Joe Laitin who was the Treasury PR guy. He and I worked together at United Press decades previously. And Joe Laitin was by then an old hand at government PR. He spent some time at the early Powell or Wurfel meetings telling the rest of us how to get information in our own departments, how if you kind of faintly hear a buzz and you can't figure out what it is, go to the secretary and tell him that you have a press inquiry. Make it up. I mean, I never had to do any of that. But most peopleóand of course, the secretary of the treasury at that time was a guy named Blumenthal who was a corporate guy, very smart, but with a corporate view of the public's right to knowóvery little. What was his name, Michael Blumenthal, who had tried to hire me, by the way.

Clark: A story untold as of yet.

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Shanahan: That is a funny, funny story. He had approached me through an intermediary. I forget what corporation he came out of and then he went back into a different corporation, a big one, maybe Allied Chemical or something, we can look it up. His corporate PR person called me up and asked me if I might be interested in the job as Blumenthal's PR. And I said yes, because I was looking for a way out from the New York Times. And he said, "Well, let's talk on such-and-such a date," several days hence. Meanwhile, I was with Califano.

This other guy, I talked to him, the PR guy. I had my appointmentóit was in that window where Califano couldn't see me because he was preparing for his confirmation hearingóduring that couple of days. But Califano had called me on the phone just almost the instant he heard that I might be interested. He called me personally. Blumenthal's corporate PR guy, who wasn't going to come into the government, was the one who dealt with me, and I very quickly decided, well, if I were to take that job with Blumenthal, probably the de facto PR chief would be his corporate fellow whereas Califano was dealing with me personally. Joe told me with gleeóit might even have been the day after the inauguralóthat in the reviewing stand the Cabinet members were in with the president, the one that's right next to the White House, for the inaugural paradeóhe happened to be seated next to Blumenthal, who wanted to know, "How come Eileen Shanahan was going to work for him when Treasury was the place I belonged?" That's where my background was, which was true enough. Califano was delighted; Blumenthal was utterly pissed.

Clark: Okay. You were about to tell me about some of your management strategies throughout.

Shanahan: It took me a while, as I mentioned yesterday, to really understand things like the need to have meetings, staff meetings. It took me a while to name my deputy, Cliff Sessions, and to name an executive assistant because I didn't know what I needed. I picked a career person for my executive assistant, a woman. And there were people who said, "Oh, you can't have a career person." I said, "Yes, I can. She knows the department inside out, she's been here"óa young woman, twenty years younger than me, one of the people I still see all the time. And she'd been throughóCivil Service is pretty good about training programs for the people it identifies as on the rise, and she was plainly one of those. She would have beenóI was fifty-two when I went into the department so she would have been thirty-two. She is exactly twenty years younger than I am. And she'd already been through several of those. She really knew how to control the paperwork flow to me. And she also had excellent judgment about what I needed to see and what I didn't. I was reading much too much in the early months before I finally realized that I needed somebody who knew how to handle bureaucratic paperwork.

But I was able to deal, as an assistant secretary with all of my peers, some of whomóbureaucrats are not just in the government, because the top people were all from outside. There was one guy, the head of the Health Care Financing Administration, who must have kept written records, because he made sure he came to my office, or summoned me to his alternately. We were of equal rank.

On the other hand, I made a name for myself without even knowing I was doing it with a lot of people because I liked to get upóI can't sit forever. I have to get up and walk around. And so with lesser or even much lower-rank people, I would call them and say, "I want to talk to you about" whatever. And they'd say, "Oh, yes, well, I'll come to you." "Never mind, I'll come to your office." They were astounded.

Also I remember one day coming up to the lunchroom and seeing the only person I knew, or one of the few, the career top lawyer under the general counsel and deputy general counsel, one of these people who it took you forty minutes to get two minutes worth of information out of, but you needed that two minutes. He knew, he understood, but he'd walk all the way around the subject firstóa valuable man.

Anyway, I took my tray and said, "Hey, can I join you?" He was alone. And he said something to me about how unusual it was. He said political appointees, of course, will sit down with their own career people but they don't sit down with other people's career people. Well, what nonsense! But there are a lot of

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those rigidities. But I brought my journalistic habits in with me which was: Who are the folks that really know and get acquainted with them. And sometimes that served me very well because a lot of those people liked me, I think, just because I had identified them as valuable people, and without saying so, just in the way I treated them, they were aware of that.

Management is hard to describe, it seems to me. You know, I've been a manager mostly for all the years since then. There's much detail. I remember a very good book that I read. The great books about women in management didn't come out until after I was in HEW. The Managerial Woman came out very shortly thereafter. I wish I had read it before. I wish it had been out before. I learned a lot from that book. Then there was another book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who's a very famous person in this field and until lately has been the editor of the Harvard Business Review, and she stepped down from that job recently. She wrote a book called Men and Women of the Corporation.

Clark: Haven't heard of it.

Shanahan: That was her first book and I read her second book, too, The Change Masters. But I remember her writing that the most valuable thing a manager has in terms of winning the loyalty and the effectiveness of their own subordinates is power and a sense of power, the sense that your boss has power up the line and can get things done. And that was a great gift Califano gave me, because people did see me as somebody who walked right into the secretary's officeónot unannounced, to be sureóbut had great access to the secretary and therefore could get things done.

But basically everybody knew what my goals were. Well, I did somethingófunny how preparing yourself for a job you've never had before, it's an interesting process, and I've jumped into a lot of jobs that I look back on and think, "How did I have the nerve to think I could do that?" Starting Governing magazine was another one, HEW. I had sense enough to know I didn't know how to do this. And I talked to several people who had been the heads of public affairs whom I had admired as a reporter.

The one who gave me the very best advice was a man named Bill Greener, a Republican, whom I had first known when he worked for an undersecretary of commerce, a guy named Jim Lynn who subsequently became secretary of HUD, worked for him there, and then went into theóI guess the Ford White House, and whom I worked with, as a reporter and he as a PR person, in all those incarnations. I called him up and said I needed some advice. He said, "Okay. You and I will have breakfast tomorrow and I will tell you all my secrets."

The best advice he gave me was just wonderful, two things. He said, "If you can, within the first day if you can do it," and I did it the first day, right after that Califano staff meeting, "have a meeting of all your staff, secretaries, everybody. They'll have some friends in other parts of the department that they can have cover the phone. And if you can get him to do it, ask Califano to come in just for three minutes. Most of those people will never have been in the same room with a secretary and they will be thrilled."

Well, Califano in fact stayed for maybe ten minutes and said glorious things about me, but also gave a little First Amendment speech. That's how I'd really gotten to know him, not in the Johnson years. He did some work pro bono for the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, which sued to get reporters out of jail and stop public bodies from subpoenaing their notes and film and stuff like that. I mean, it dazzled them, yes, it dazzled them.

But also I remember I asked each of them to do two things and this was Bill Greener's other piece of advice. This was just my immediate office of the assistant secretary, which was then twenty-eight people when I came in, not all those 420 people all over the department. He said, "Ask each one of them to write you two thingsóand give them a deadline of just a few days distantóone, a little autobiography, a little resume, and that

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will include what it is they do now, and tell them, don't write it like you're bucking for a grade raise. If what you do is type and answer the phones, write that you type and answer the phones.

"And the other thing is to write down what you think we, the public affairs office, do well, what you think we do not-so-well," and second, what you think we should do more of and what you think we could safely do less of."

Clark: Oh, that's beautiful.

Shanahan: And to have it on paper. I went back and re-read those memos to me about every three months because there were things in them that I didn't understand the first time I read them, or I needed to be reminded of. It was the most brilliant piece of advice I think I've ever gotten in my entire life.

Anyway, so I asked them for that. And then I gave a little speech at the end about what I was hoping to accomplish in terms of getting information out. And I rememberóand I had thought through what I was going to say; I probably had notes, I don't rememberóthat my final sentence was, "I come in here as a journalist with, I believe, an unblemished reputation for integrity and I plan to have it when I leave."

And Judy Bekelman, who became my executive assistant and we became very good friends, told me a long time later, she said, "We had walked into this meeting with you, knowing you'd just been a reporter, and wondering if you'd be good enough. And we walked out of that meeting wondering if we'd be good enough."

I was thinking about something last night. My HEW experience was almost an unblemished triumph. And it was a very healing experience for me after the New York Times because inevitably when people pay you less than you think you ought to be paid and deny you promotions you think you should have had, I think almost anybody has times when you say to yourself, "Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm not as good as I think I am." Yes, I think it would take a person who is almost not normal not to have those doubts when people tell you, "Eh, we're paying you all you're worth."

And so HEW, which was a triumph, a personal triumph for me, was really also a great healing experience. I came away from there with tremendous confidence that I had jumped into something I didn't know anything about and just done wonderfully at it. Not without a lot of help! All those people around Califano who were so smart and who understood what he wanted from me and, with one or two exceptionsóI'm talking about the top people nowóreally helped me to do it. I didn't do it all by myself. And I had many good career people under me, too. But it was wonderful.

I've got to not be a hundred percent here, though. I thought about this overnight. Maybe this will be true of anybody who's writing their autobiography, orally or otherwise, that you tell the good parts and you kind of forget the bad parts. You tell when you were honorable and you don't tellóI did one truly dishonorable thing when I was at HEW, and I want to put it on the record.

I was ferocious about enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act. I brought it right into my own office. The way that act works, it goes to whatever agency whose documents somebody wantsónot just the press, other people can get documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Initially, there's either a grant or denial. When there's a denial, some people just go away. But there is an appeal process. And I made myself the appeals officer. Subsequently, after I had Cliff Sessions in there for a while, I let him handle a lot of the appeals, too. But if he was in doubt, he would bring them to me.

I personally read every appeal from a denial, or later on, either Cliff or I read them. I reversed a lot of them. There are variousóthere are nineóI think it's nine, seven or nineóspecified exceptions, like national security information and so on, from the Freedom of Information Act. And one of them is proprietary business information. And the Food & Drug Administration was denying practically everything that came down the pike,

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as trade secrets. At one time, I had occasion to count. I reversed 43 percent of those on appeal. They hated me.

But there came one time when I wantedóand you could just black out certain parts of a document, you didn't have to deny the whole document. In fact, that is what you were supposed to do if there were certain confidential parts. There was one internal memo that I had written inside the public affairs office in which I had gotten off a nasty crack about another Cabinet member.

Clark: Who was this memo addressed to?

Shanahan: My deputy, the other, my career deputy, John Blamphin. And some disaffected personóyou always have a couple of people who hate you and back-knife you, and I really had two in the immediate office of the assistant secretary, which wasn't too bad out of twenty-eight or thirty-two people. One of them thought she'd been denied a promotion and filed Freedom of Information requests for a whole bunch ofósought a whole bunch of stuff. And this document was relevant to her protest. And I knew if this crack about this other Cabinet official fell into her handsó

Clark: Can you tell us the details or would you ratheró

Shanahan: No, I'd rather not. I don't want to say which Cabinet official, obviously, living or deadóliving as of this moment. My view was that this Cabinet member was not incompetent, but boring, and not very well focused and not doing the important things, I thought, still think. I knew that the disaffected employee would leak it in an instant. So, I summoned one of the lawyers in the general counsel's office that I had dealt with, one of the main Freedom of Information people, and said, "We've got to find some legal basis for blacking out this section about this Cabinet member."

And the lawyer explained to me in some detail how there was no exception that covered it. And I said, "Look, come on, you know me. You've just got to do this." And I forget, after overnight thought, the lawyer came back to me and said, "Well, okay, go ahead. I've thought of a rationale," and told me what it was. I don't remember what it was now. All of which is to say I'm not a saint and that as passionately dedicated as I am to freedom of informationóI forgot to say something very important about this, which was that what I had said, it wasn't just that I was saying this, I was also quoting Califano as agreeing with it. That was really the crucial part, agreeing with me that this Cabinet officer had the following defects. So I wasn't just protecting myself. I should have mentioned that at the outset. Anyway, other than that, I don't think I did anything that I'm ashamed of.

Clark: In retrospect, do you wish you hadn't done that?

Shanahan: No.

Clark: You would do it again?

Shanahan: Yes, probably.

Clark: Would you do it if it just involved you, or would you do itó

Shanahan: No, it had to do with saying something truly nasty that I knew would leak because this person just was out to make trouble for me, for Califano, for anybody. I knew that it would be in the papers tomorrow, that Califano had said the following things about the fellow Cabinet member and I had written it to my deputy.

Stop, I think that's maybe enough. Something else occurred to me and I forget what it was. [Tape interruption.]

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Clark: Okay, we're back on.

Shanahan: The authority that Califano gave me was not good just because we got information out in volume, and it was straight. Sometimes the fact that I was known to have access to him and was known to be tough to deal with and all that had a more substantive effect. There were a lot of things that I got into where I feel I helped to change outcomes. I was allowed to butt into any policy thing and say, "Gosh, have you thought of X, isn't this a problem?" And very frequently, people would listen to me, partly, I guess, because I was recognized among my peers, the political appointees, as somebody with a lot of wide knowledge as journalists haveónot deep but wide. I don't apologize for lack of depth and presence of width.

But sometimes it had an even better effect of consequence. The episode I remember in particular in that regard had to do with something very frightening. All of a sudden late one day I was summoned to Califano's conference room, it was 6:30 or seven o'clock, to be told by himóthe health people were there, the Food & Drug Administration, the surgeon-general, some others. There had been a group of deaths of infants from sudden infant death syndrome somewhere in Tennessee, all in the same community. They were all right around the same age. It was the age that babies die from that, which tends to be aroundóI forget, maybe eight weeks or so. And it was March or February, and that's also the classic time of year, they think that's some kind of a monstrousóhuge viral infection is the current thesis, at least, I believe, or was then.

In any event, there had been death of eight babies in this very small region. And all had quite recently been given the triple inoculation that babies are given, theó

Clark: DPT.

Shanahan: DPT, exactly. All the health people were really certain that it was not that anything was wrong with the DPT. But it was known and they were afraid it was going to get out in the community. And not just in the community. Joe had instantly recognized, this was a hell of a front-page national story. If there was tainted DPT out thereófrom Abbott Laboratories was the producer.

He called me in, quickly saidóhe had theater tickets or somethingóand said, "Look, Shanahan, you figure outóthese people will stay and talk to you, I've got to go and you figure out what we have to do," the point being, of course, that everybody was petrified that if the word got out that somebody thought that the vaccine had killed these babies, every young mother in the country would be terrified to have her baby get shots, and then you would have kids dying of whooping cough again. So it was genuine crisis.

Anyway, he left and Donald Kennedy, the head of the Food & Drug Administration, whom one of my colleagues in HEW once said is the only man he had ever known who could make Joe Califano look humbleóarrogant, mean, smart son-of-a-bitch, I hated him before thisóbrilliant, he was subsequently president of Stanford Universityóvery high-handed and just with utmost contempt for this "reporter," what business did I have bossing anything, visible contempt for me and my background.

Anyway, Califano left. And there were things I didn't fully understand based on Califano's three-minute description, so I turned to Kennedy and I said, "Take me through this from the top. Tell me exactly what happened." He said, "I have exactly five minutes to tell you this." I said, "You have as much time as I need," and made it stick. And he knew it would.

Well, it turned out, he said, that they had no statutory authority to ask Abbott to pull this batch of vaccine off the market and tell all doctors that had it not to use it. They were all convinced that it wasn't the vaccine. I forget why but there were good medical reasons why they were convinced that it was some

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particularly virulent virus. And I said, "Well, but can't you get them to pull it anyway, even if that's what you think." No, he had no statutory authority to do that.

And I said, "Well, can't you just call them up and say, 'We will issue a statement saying we don't think it's the vaccine but just to retain public confidence, that your babies need to be immunized, need to get this triple shot?" And ask them to pull the batch. Nope, he absolutely wouldn't do it. And Julie Richmond, this lovely man, who was a pediatrician, a pediatric surgeon by trade, probably the kindest and nicest of all the people at the top of HEW, very quietly said, "Well, I can call them, Eileen," whereupon Kennedy said he would do it.

So Kennedy did. Abbott Labs immediately said yes, they would. And the story broke the following morningóthere was an AP wire service story out of Tennesseeóand we were already prepared with the statement.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Shanahan: Julie Richmond had stayed that night to help me write it because, you know, I could make a technical error and so on, and so I needed somebody. And he just sat right there in my office as I wrote and corrected anything I got wrong. So we had it ready to roll.

And nothing ever happened. The story never moved out of the state of Tennessee. And talk about lasting consequences, I think there are some babies who might have been dead if mothers had been afraid to have their children get this triple shot, if we hadn'tówith that kind of good action, quick action. But, as I said when I introduced the story, this was because Califano had given me the standing he had given me.

Clark: Yes. A good example. [Tape interruption.]

So you left HEW and your next job was withó

Shanahan: Assistant managing editor of the Washington Star which was quite widely, I'm tempted to say, almost universally considered the finest afternoon newspaper in the country, then and earlier and at the time of its death two and a half years later, in August of 1981. I went there in April of 1979. And as I mentioned earlier when you asked me why I left HEW, the reason was I had an opportunity to become an editor, as I had long wanted to. And I think I mentioned before, I had friends at the Star who knew I wanted to be an editor and who called me and said, "Get over here. They're hiring people."

Well, I sat down and wrote a letter to Murray Gart, the Time, Inc., the editor that Time, Incorporated had put in when they bought the Star, a short time before I went there, maybe six months or perhaps even a little less. By then, I had read books about assertiveness and so on. And I remember, it was a short letter, like maybe five sentences, which I took several days to write, saying that I wanted an editing job and I meant nothing less than assistant managing editor.

Well, he wrote or calledówrote me back, I guess, instantly, and said, "Yes, I'd love to talk to you and please call my secretary for an appointment," and very promptly it was clear he was interested in me. I was well-known in journalism from being at the New York Times. And also it turned out that both he and a guy who'd been his boss for a long time at Time, Incorporated, knew a lot and cared a lot about economicsóso I was a figure of some consequence to them.

I had an idea, though, that I believed in and I thought I could sell myself with, which had been born in my head one year while I was still at the New York Times. The Washington Post, which is a great newspaper,

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then and now, but like even great institutions can do dumb things, had taken the president's budget one year and gone out to South Bend, Indiana, to talk about how it would impact the community.

Now, why they didn't do that in Washington, when you had the city, a pretty typical center city in a lot of ways, with all of those problems of poor minorities and so on, and then various counties, Prince George's County, Maryland, a very blue-collar county, Montgomery County, Maryland, the second or third richest per capita county in the country, as is Fairfax County, Virginia, and more middle-class areas of Virginia. I mean, why they didn't do that, I'll never know. And I looked at that at the time and thought, "How dumb can you get?"

And so the idea I presented to Murray Gart as something I would like to do, among other things an assistant managing editor might doóthe duties of an assistant managing editor are not uniform. Nothing in newspaperdom is uniform. Some big papers have eight or nine assistant managing editors, some have one or two. So you can construct a particular group of things an assistant managing editor will be the manager of. I told them that I thoughtóhere we were in Washington, here the story was in Washington, with the feds doing all sorts of things, and to try to really systematically look at the impact of those things in our circulation area.

Well, for whatever reason I got hiredóand I'm not sure it was that proposal. I think it was because his boss thought highly of me from my economics reporting. I don't like the kowtowing to the boss that exists throughout corporate America, people don't speak up and they spend their whole lives thinking about how they're going to please the boss.

But at Time, Inc., boy, did they kiss ass! And I'm inclined to feel I might have been hired, not for this idea that I've presented but for that reason, that Gart's boss thought well of me.

The Star was a great paper. I had a lot of friends there. They were already restive under the Time management. I have to say flat out that in my life I have mostly had good and even great bosses who were great journalists and great people. I've had a few mediocrities. I've changed jobs a lot so I've had a lot of bosses, and I've had one or two that I didn't think were terribly bright. But Murray Gart is the only evil man I ever worked for. [Tape interruption.]

His goals were evil and in part, he liked to break people. I'll talk about that. He loved to break people. As a chief of correspondents for Time I heard that he used to deliberately separate husbands and wives, for example, keep them in different countries.

I'll talk about Time a little and I'll narrow it back down to Gart. Overall the Star was not an unhappy experience for me because in the final analysis we defeated him. There were so many good journalists, people of integrity and skill and downright brilliant on that paper. They couldn't succeed in imposing their ways on us.

But let me tell you what was evil. It is my beliefóand I can't prove itóthat Time bought the Star when it came up for sale in probably early '81ópardon me, early '79 or maybe late '78óbecause with a Republican administration in Washington, they at last saw the potential for becoming a player in national politics. Time people and the news magazine people in general always felt sort of déclassé, and anybodyóI've heard this story a thousand times from foreign correspondents for the New York Timesówho would go hear somebody from Time magazine, sort of saying, "This is Joe Schmoo from Time [mumbles]," hoping people would think it was the New York Times.

They had this terrible struggle for respectability. It infected the place. And I think they thought, "Aha, at last we're going to be in. We're a conservative organization, we've got a conservative president in

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Ronald Reagan, and we're going to be major, major people on the scene." They were social climbers, too. They gave brilliant, expensive parties in gorgeous settings, like you know, lobbies of museums where they charge you an arm and a leg to throw a party there and some people pay for it because it is a wonderful setting. And they did a lot of stuff like that. Basically it didn't work particularly well for them but I think that was their goal. And they kissed a lot of ass and tried to get their reporters to do that.

I remember one particular problem I had with Murray Gart. Arthur Burns, the famous economist who was then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was someone Murray was cultivating. Nobody ever said Murray was dumb. Murray was brilliant. And he was cultivating Burns. And Burns, who loved publicity, was going to testify on a certain day before a Senate or House committee, I forget. Let's say House; it doesn't matter. And Murray came to me the night before and said, "Burns is testifying before the House Banking Committee tomorrow and that story goes on page one," without even knowing what the story was. He said, "I've talked to him and that story goes on page one." I said, "Wow, what's he going to say?" "The story goes on page one." He wouldn't tell me.

We had a very wonderful economics reporter whom I had competed against for years and really knew his quality very well, Lee Cohn. He was covering the hearing and in due course he filed a story. And I looked at it and the financial editor looked at itóSteve Aug who's now at ABC, he became a great pal. And we said, "Well, that's exactly what he said before the Senate committee last week. There's no news in this." And Murray was out of the building, Murray was off somewhere. And I said, "Well, we've got to do something with it. Why don't you off-lead the financial page with it?" That means the left-hand column. And Aug even protested that a little bit because it was really absolutely what we had reported a week earlier. So that's what we did for the first edition.

Murray came back and hit the ceiling, and said, "I told you that story went on page one." And I said, "It's exactly word-for-word what he said last week and which we had in the paper." Well, Murray put it on page one in subsequent editions. I think he had hadóI found out he had hadóI think he told me the night before, he had had dinner with Burns and Burns may have persuaded him that there was something really important he was saying, because the story the week before had been on the financial page, which is where it should have been. On its merits.

Well, that was the kind of thing that happened all over the place and just mortified us all. Some muckity-muck at Time, Incorporated, died, a person who may have been a distinguished journalist but who was unknown in Washington, and Murray put the obit on page one. We were just mortified. Somebody from Time, I can't remember who, was named an ambassador and the editorial page editor or somebody wrote an editorial saying he wasn't qualified. Murray made him write it over, saying, "He's wonderfully qualified." Just awful.

I am not one to knock my employers in public, never was, except in the sex discrimination case. But there were times when I had to say to people, "I agree with you about stuff like that," that they did at the Star, under Gart. When I was hired, there was some skepticism about me, I heard, because the staff had come to feel that anybody Murray Gart hired would have to be a villain. But as it happened, I had so many friends on the Star, people who had competed with me covering the women's movement, like my good friend Isabelle Shelton, and Lee Cohn and others who said, "Oh, no, don't worry, she's fine," that people were disposed to at least look and decide whether I was okay or not. And they obviously did decide I was okay.

Another villainy that Gart had engaged in: We had, as all larger papers do, a meeting every day at which the various top editors discussed the day's news and made some at least tentative decisions about what was going to go on page one, subject to change obviously, for late developments. And Gart would use that meeting to absolutely demolish somebodyóin front of your peers!

There was at that paper, as there was at all papers I've ever been involved in, a stated order in which the various editors spoke. It wasn't the same in every paper but any one paper it was always, for example,

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the metropolitan editor first, the national editor, business, sports, whatever. And Murray would go around the table, until going into that meeting, we were all totally tensed up. Who's he going to criticize, tear apart, denounce, humiliate in front of all the rest of us? And we'd sort of try and joke about it. And when he got to whichever person it was he was going to humiliate today, I learned something that I had read about before: How men under fire in a war experience a brief moment of joy when their best friend in that foxhole right beside them gets killed, because it wasn't them. I understand that from Murray Gart's meeting. If he trashed the metro editor, I knew it wasn't going to be me, except he'd double-cross you sometimes and do two in a meeting.

Clark: That's a very effective staff technique then, control technique to make staff really have the foxhole mentality of survivor glee with each other, so that your companion becomes your enemy.

Shanahan: Yes. Actually, it didn't last. I might add that then once in a while, just so people at the end of the table had to worry, he wouldn't do it at all. Maybe once every two weeks he wouldn't trash anybody at one of those meetings.

I remember one time when Steve Aug, the financial editor, whom I'd known and competed against when he was with the AP over a number of years doing economics, before he went to the Star and I was doing economics for the New York Times, a very good guy, a good journalist. There was some kind of a special project that Steve had; I forget what it was. And I read it. I had a few comments to make but basically it was fine. I thought it needed a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Murray asked me what I thought of it before I had a chance to get back to Steve. And I told him, you know, it's really fine. I'll ask Steve to add a little of this and a little of that.

And Murray told Steve that I had said it was junk and terrible and horrible and needed to be done all over again. And Steve came to me furious, just absolutely burst into my office and said, "What is this?" And it took me a couple of minutes to understand why he was so mad. I said, "I didn't tell Murray that, goddammit." And it took him a few minutes and all of a suddenóhe's kind of a big guy. And he was standing in front of my desk and I was sitting, and he was kind of looming over me and glowering. All of a sudden the light dawned and he said, "Oh! He was trying to make us mad at each other." I said, "Yes."

Well, he and I never got caught in that trap again. But when I say an evil man, this was an evil man. But we did some good things despite him.

And Time, Inc. was whoring for advertisers, too. And there are a couple of stories about that that are worth telling before I tell you some of the good stuff. The Burns story was an example of whoring for sources. But there was a woman who did a lot of freelancing for the food section. The food sections use a lot of freelancers. They pay them fifteen bucks apiece or something horrible, and get women who love to cook and can write and maybe when their kids are grown, want to go back into journalism or something, to write for them.

There was a woman named Goody Soloman who did a lot of freelancing for us. And she wrote a piece. At that time, what were known generically as green stamps, though that was just one company, was a premium that certain stores gave toóyou got ten books full of green stamps and you could get an electric mixer or something with it. And of course, it's true that any kind of freebie like that isn't really free, the cost of it gets added to the cost of what they sell. And she wrote a story that basically said thatóa lot of work went into the storyócomparing the prices in stores that were offering these stamps and the ones that weren't, demonstrating quite wellóand I think she was probably the first person to do such a pieceóthat, "Hey, if you think you're getting something for nothing, you're not."

And the story ran. Washington at that time and still today had two competing food store chains, one Safeway which is national and another one called Giant which is local. And Giant wasn't advertising in the Star

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and our advertising people were courting them. And Giant was offering these stamps. Murray Gart ordered that Goody Soloman was never to be allowed to write for this paper again, and he made it stick. Dreadful man.

And then there was the story of Howie Kurtz's apartment rental discrimination story. Howie Kurtz who's now the media critic for the Washington Post, just a terrific guy who was about twenty-six at this timeóa fabulous reporter then and now, has written a very good book, I think, about the pressówas assigned to go around with a black reporter on the staff, Hazel Robinson, to test the prevalence of discrimination. The idea was that they should just go around hitting some of the big rental housing places, apartment houses, to see whether they were discriminating.

They were about the same age. She's black, of course, and he's white. And they both said they were the same thing, they both said they were freelance writers who had an income of approximatelyówhatever the figure was, enough to rent the kind of apartment they were looking at, certainly. And she was frequently told, "Sorry. Yes, I know we advertised that apartment this morning but it's gone." And he'd come behind her and be told, "Oh, yes, you better sign up right now because you want to take this apartment." It wasn't every place they tried, but it was a significant number.

So Howie sat down and wrote the story, and detailed who said what, and had the names of the resident managers of the complexes, the buildings, the rental companies. It was a splendid story. It wasn't the first time in history that anybody'd done a story like that. But that kind of a story comes under the heading a friend of mine calls: When you know a good story, write it every once in a while. And it's worthwhile to do a story like that, even though it wasn't an original idea. And it was fine.

I was not in on the beginnings of that. Dennis Stern, the metro editor, had assigned it. And he'd read it and, you know, done a little light edit. It was fine. Howie was not the world's greatest writer at that time. He's turned into a very good writer. He was always a fabulous reporter. And Stern had made a few editing changes and he'd told Murray about it. And Murray didn't want to run that story because they were trying to get real estate advertising. I mean, this is corruption, pure and simple. Not common on daily newspapers. I subsequently learned to my shock how common it was on magazines.

So Murray gave it to me and said, "Look at this. I think it's a terrible job and we shouldn't run it." I read it. I did think that the second, or maybe it was third, paragraph should say "a number of places were happy to rent to Hazel Robinson and name the ones who said, "Yes, absolutely, sign here." And I told Howie, "You've got that down too low. The third paragraph, you have to come right in and say, 'Hey, this is widespread but by no means universal in the places we tested.'" It took two paragraphs to kind of explain the story or I'd have said second paragraph.

So I made Howie move the paragraph and I did a few other little touchings up, nothing big, and told Murray I thought it was fine, I thought it was ready to go. Well, he then went to the managing editor, a guy named Bill McIlwaine, came out of one of the Boston papers. [Tape interruption.]

And McIlwaine said, "Oh, it's just fine." He then took it to the executive editor, a guy named Sid Epstein who was a survivor during all the troubles of the Star, when it went from one owner to another and so on. Sid was the guy that kept it afloat and kept it going and got the paper coming out every day through all the cutbacks and changes in ownership. But he's not a scrapper and certainly not somebody to come up against this powerful editor. But even Sid Epstein said, "The story is fine."

Murray finally took it to George Beveridge, the ombudsman, another career Star person and who was also perhaps not a big fighter with authority. And he said it was fine. So Murray had to kill it himself. He tried to get every one of us to say, "Yes, you're right. It isn't any good. Let's not run it." But none of us would.

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Howie subsequently wrote about that in the Washingtonian magazine, for anybody who needs some more details.

But it wasn't a terrible experience, really, because we were still ableóthere were just so many of us who were there who wereóso many first-class journalists that we still put out a good newspaper. Murray changed it a lot and made it into much more of a hard news paper which you can't do with an afternoon paper, really, although we were lucky in a way, the whole Iranian hostage crisis, which given the time differential, always broke on PM's time, came along at that time.

Clark: That leads me to a question. What did the Washington Star accomplish that other newspapers didn't? What was it good at?

Shanahan: Well, different things at different times. In my childhood it was the paper, as afternoon papers were in those days before television. People didn't have time to get up and read a paper in the morning. But they came home from work at five or 5:30 and had time before dinner or after dinner, and there wasn't any television. Maybe you listened to a little radio but, you know, you listened to Fred Allen for an hour. You didn't spend the whole evening in front of the radio.

So there were all kinds of publications, including magazines, that were wonderful in those days. Television really killed them, in terms of luring away the audience and in terms of the advertisingónational advertising. There's almost no national advertising in newspapers any more. Airlines are about the only ones, because they have to tout local schedules.

But the Star was simply, for many, many years, a very solid, factual, newspaper with a conservative but not reactionary editorial page under the old family ownership. It was a comprehensive paper. It was the only newspaper I had ever held in my hands until college. We got the Star delivered, as everybody who lived in Washington did, so it seemed.

After TV came along and began making its inroads into newspapers and it was becoming clear that afternoon newspapers had a particular problem because an afternoon newspaper that's going to land on your doorstep at four o'clock in the afternoon, or even if you take the latest edition at 5:30 or so, so it's there when you come home, they have to close pretty early in the day. And I think thatóI don't remember any more exactly but the big home delivery edition of the Star closed at like 1:30, at which time you might have something pretty exciting from a morning congressional hearing or various things from around the world, but it was very hard to move the story past what had already been in the morning paper.

So afternoon papers, generallyópeople generally began to perceive that you had to give the reader something other than hard news. And the Star, before I was thereóI regret that I never worked for himóhad this wonderful man named Jim Bellows as its editor under the ownership of Joe Allbritton. And Bellows inaugurated a lot of stuff that people thought he was crazy. There was a Q&A thing that started on page one, bottom of page one, that ran seven days a week. And I must say I read all the way to the end of at least five a week for all those years after Bellows came and did that.

He had another big standing thing, a major feature that was always on page one. But he did a lot of stuff and a lot more interpretive stuff and so on, in the hope that people would see they still needed the Star even though they had the Post in the morning. And basically it didn't work very well. There are hardly any cities left anymore with a morning and an afternoon paper. The great old Philadelphia Bulletin went down shortly after we did, and so on, and there aren't many left.

And then Murray came in and, having been a magazine person all his life, didn't really understand what a daily newspaper needed to be. I can't tell you that going back to hard news on page one, leaving aside the special Time, Inc. promos, I can't really tell you that he hastened the death of the Star that way. He might have.

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I think the real reason Time, Inc. closed the Star was not the losses but that they saw that they weren't getting the entré and obeisance, which is what they were really after, in my opinion. But whatever we did, we did well. We had great people. And Time, Inc. couldn't make them ungreat, no matter how hard they tried.

Some of the stories that I remember most fondly, other than the couple I mentioned, were Ruth Marcus, who is now one of the two people covering the White House, two women covering the White House for the Washington Post. And if you think that doesn't delight me every time I pick up the paper, you're wrong. She was an intern. Well, I should back up and say I had two and sometimes three, well, four duties at the Star as assistant managing editor. I was the special projects editor, generating them, managing them, putting them together and so on. The financial section was under me although Steve Aug, the financial editor, didn't really need anybody to be his boss but we consulted all the time and had a lot of fun at it. I was briefly over the national editor, after Murray fired the national editor and didn't put in a new one yet. And then about the last eight or so months I wrote a twice-a-week column there, one of which appeared on the op-ed page and one of which appeared in the financial page.

That was an interesting and difficult experience. The short of it is, I found out how hard it was to write a column. Of course, some people write two columns a week and that's all they do. What I found out that I never really understood about column writing is that it occupies your mind like an enemy army. You're thinking about the one you're writing, you're reporting the one you're going to write next and you're trying to figure out what the hell you're going to write for the one after that. And I can see why it's a worthy full-time occupation, two columns a week. It sounds like a light task and it isn't. And when you think of people who used to, like Mary McGrory, write five or six a week. In the olden days there were sportswriters like the famous Shirley Povichóthat's a manóat the Washington Post who covered the top sports story of the day and wrote a column six or seven days a week.

Clark: Shirley Povich, the father of Maury Povich and Lynn Povich.

Shanahan: Yes.

Clark: Lynn Povich also being another interviewee of this project.

Shanahan: And Elaine Povich of the Chicago Tribune is a niece of his. But I digress. Where was I? Oh, Ruth Marcus.

I didn't have any staff of my own, which made doing special projects pretty tough on a paper that was already short-staffed because they were losing money and had been losing money for a long time. The city room was a wreck with these old beat-up desks and an old computer system thatóthey cannibalized different terminals for parts till there weren't enough terminals to go around and all sorts of things.

But one day, in '80 or '81, the Supreme Court came down with a perfectly scurrilous decision. A deaf person who had wanted to be a dentist and applied to a dental school somewhere and was told that he wasn't admitted because obviously a deaf person couldn't be a dentist. The Supreme Court said, "Yes, that's right," in effect, a deaf person can't be a dentist and this is not illegal discrimination against a handicapped person. Outrageous! Anyway, I saw that decision and I went up in smoke and I thought, well, let's find out what the universities in our primary circulation area are doing.

I went to the metro editor and said, "Can you lend me so-and-so and so-and-so to do this project?" Well, he didn't have anybody. No, he couldn't. And he wasn't being an SOB. He really didn't have anybody. But Ruth was there and you could already tell she was bright. I wouldn't have necessarily predicted she'd become the White House correspondent for the Washington Post, but I knew this woman was going to make it in journalism.

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Anyway, I said, "Can I have Ruth?" "Yes, you can have Ruth." She did a brilliant job. She not only went around toóI don't remember whether it was her idea or mine, it doesn't matterónot only went around to the various colleges in the area and found out what their policies were, she found three different handicapped people who were in college. There was a guy in a wheelchair who was doing computer programming. There was a blind womanóI forget what she did. So we had these wonderful sidebars to go with the story. Johns Hopkins was one of the worst. They went right along with the Supreme Court decision.

I believe in luck and I decided Ruth was born lucky. She finished the storyóit took a lot of editing but she was a kid, you know. You would expect it. There was no more editing than you would expect from a bright beginner and I was not in the slightest unsatisfied with her performance, quite the contrary. Anyway, I had it all finished to my satisfaction and we'd gone out and gotten pictures of the three individuals, and it was ready to go in a nice package. And somebody said it was too long and it had to be cut basically in half. And I fought and I lost.

But then that night the fates intervened. The Star, in this primitive computer system they hadóit was so primitive that there were really two separate systems because it just couldn't handle the words if it were a unified system. And there were points at which the two systems could talk to each other. You could transfer a story from one to the other but for the most part they were separate. Well, we were on System B and System A crashed, destroying everything that was in it for the Sunday paper. But Ruth's story was in System B. They were happy to have something they had thought was twice too long. So I've always thought Ruth was born lucky. And it was a wonderful piece. It was just a wonderful piece.

Another one I happen to particularly remember because the whole world copied it. One of the things Reagan tried to do with his budget cutting of social programs was to practically destroy the school lunch program and the school milk program for poor kids. And there was a young woman on the Star named Patrice Gaines Carter. She since divorced and is back to calling herself Patrice Gaines, a black woman who had been a student of mine in the Summer Program for Minority Journalists. She was out in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the zoned edition for that county. I got her sprung from her other duties for a few days. I said, "Let's find out how this is going impact."

Well, as it turned out, the editors in the other counties said they couldn't spare anybody. So the only county we did was Montgomery, a wealthy county by and large but which has some poverty pockets and some true working-class areas as well as upper middle-class areas. What she found out was that the real problem with what Reagan was trying to do to the program was not what would happen in the real poverty areas but what would happen in the schools that had some poverty population but not entirely. What he proposed would deny free or reduced price lunches and milk to kids in schools with that kind of mixed enrollment.

So she wrote the story. It was seen in Congress, of course, and they changed it. Well, they basically told Ronald Reagan to go fly a kite. I think they may have cut back some but they fixed the part that had this differential impact. That's one of the ones I especially remember because I think it had a good effect.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Shanahan: There's one other thing about the Star before I talk about its last days briefly, that comes to mind. It was the first time I ever handled a sexual harassment case. I had in common with most women until very recent years, in my youth suffered some myself, never from an employer but at the hands most ofóat the hands, yes, at the hands!ómostly of elected officials. And you told your friends in the ladies room and just said, "That's life."

But by the time I got to the Star, women were fighting back. And I was the only woman executive of any rank at the Star. And one day a woman I hadn't seen before appeared at my doorway, at my office door, in tears. It turned out she was a freelance photographer, getting, as she told me, more than half of her income

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from the Star and there was a photo editoróI told her, "Don't tell me the name. I don't want to know the name right now"ówho she said had driven her home once and forced his way into her apartment and made crude lunges and told her that if she didn't succumb, she'd never get another assignment from the Star. There was more to it than that, but that was the heart of the matter.

So I listened to her story and told her I had to think about how I wanted to proceed but, don't worry, this isn't going to die here, I will do something. I think I wentóbecause I felt like I needed some adviceóI went to a man I've mentioned before, George Beveridge, who was the ombudsman, whom I'd never known until I came to the Star. But he's just kind of a wonderful, senior, gray-beard in the best sense of an experienced person, who had been metro editor and as a reporter had won a Pulitzer prize, and was just a thoroughly decent guy and had become kind of a confidant of mine because he was an old Star person with all of the ethical principles and so on the old Star people had. And we kind of cried on each other's shoulders about Murray Gart, figuratively.

So I went to George and I told him what this young womanówho was stunningly good-lookingóhad told me, and told him I hadn't asked for the name. And he said, "I bet I know who it is." And I said, "Tell me." He said, "Well, I don't want to tell you right now." And then he saidóI guess I asked him to or maybe he volunteered, he wrote it on a piece of paper and sealed it and it put it in an envelope in his desk.

I kind of talked it through with him. I figured out the thing to do, first of all, as a photo assignment editoróhe was under the art director for the newspaper who was a particular buddy of mine, Eric Seidman, a genius at newspaper design, who had been the person who redesigned the New York Times financial section when I was there. And he and I had a love affair over the telephone because I love graphics and I have something of a head for them, too. And I'd have some statistic about the economy and I'd call him up and say, you know, "Make it look big because it really is big" or "Don't make it look big because it isn't big" because if you don't understand the figures, you don't know which way to do that. He did wonderful stuff.

And then, as it happened, we started at the Star on the very same day and became wonderful friends because I wasn't his boss and he wasn't my boss, so there were no constraints but we were living in the same atmosphere. And Eric would have been the boss of this guy. I guess maybe by then I knew who it was. And I went to him and I said, "I'm convinced she's telling the truth." And we talked about it and agreed that what we would do is that we would call him in, the two of us together, he the boss, me who I was, and to sit him down and say, "We have this complaint. We are not going to conduct an investigation as to whether it happened. If you wish to say it never happened, you may say it never happened. All we're saying is if we ever hear about it happening again, we will investigate and if we conclude the charges are true, you're in great big trouble."

Well, it worked. And he denied it and that was fine. I subsequently found out that George Beveridge had the right name in that envelope, which means people sort of knew the man was doing this kind of thing and didn't do anything about it. And George Beveridge was the decentest of men, but that's the way it used to be.

Anyway, I had two more while I was thereópeople came to me because I was the only high-ranking woman, and that's another one of the reasons why you need to get women through the glass ceilingóand handled them both the same way. One had to do with someone in the engraving department, that's the photo production department. One of the young copy girls, very pretty, news assistants who had to take stuff in and out of the engraving department because the news assistants were inside-the-building messengers in effect, and she was being hassled by a guy up in engraving.

I went to George because he knew everybody in the whole building, just to say, you know, "Who isó". And he said, "Well, I don't know the particular engraver she's talking about. But you go to the foreman of engraving. He's got six daughters and he'll go right through the roof. He'll take care of the guy. You won't have to." And that turned out to be right.

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That was a good lesson to learn about how to handle a sexual harassment case when somebody doesn't want to sue or wants any redress, they just want it to stop, that it can be handled that way. And that was a very good lesson to learn. I passed that on to a lot of women managers that I know, that unless somebody wants some kind of redress, if all they want is for it to stop, you can make it stop just that way.

Clark: Did you ever have cases where people wanted redress?

Shanahan: No, I did not. Those three cases weren't and I never had another one anywhere else I worked.

Clark: How did you handle the sexual harassment that happened to you?

Shanahan: Huh! Just sort of pretended it hadn't happened, in those days. I mean, I hadóI mean, there were United States senators who wouldóthere's a room off the Senate chamber, there's one off the House chamber, tooóthat's specifically set aside for reporters to call senators off the floor, who could come or not, as they choose, and sit down and talk to them, interview them. And there were senatorsóI used to try to avoid the couch, and sit thereóthere were great big leather overstuffed chairs and sometimes there were two together or one was next to a couch and I would make a beeline for one of those chairs so I didn't have to sit on the couch next to themóor particular ones.

There were thingsóI mean, if somebody put his hand on your knee or your thigh or something, and I'd drop my pen so I could lean over and pick it up and sort of pretend it hadn't happened, but got out of the way. There was all sorts of stuff like that in those days. But somehow you couldn't confront it openly. You couldn't say, "Take your goddam hand off my knee." I subsequently did and the person was one Bob Packwood.* It was years later and I must say I was in my forties, at least, by the time he was a senator, and this stuff doesn't happen to you much after about thirty-five.

He invited me to have a drink with him, and I was delighted. Not many senators do that because they doódespite the salary which looks high to ordinary people, they're maintaining two homes and traveling a lot, not all of which is publicly paid for and many of them feel kind of pinched for money. Anyway, he invited me to have a drink with him and we went over to a bar that senatorial staffs frequent. And he sat down beside me in the booth. Well, some people do that instead of sitting across. And next thing you know, there's a hand on my thigh.

I'd forgotten all about this. It was such a minor episode. I literally had forgotten all about it until all those women went public with Packwood's sexual harassment and then I remembered it. And the hand is on my thigh and I reachedóI was through with the years of pretending it didn't happen, by then. I touched his hand or grabbed his hand with the intent of moving it. And he apparently thought I was responding affirmatively and gave me a little squeeze.

And I said, "Senator, I wasn't trying to hold your hand. I was trying to move it. Move it!" Which he did. And a moment later, his press person appeared, a woman. And whether she knew he was with me and thought it might be trouble and she'd intervene or whether she really needed him for something, I don't actually know. But anyway, I made my getaway shortly thereafter.

But basically that's just what you did. You just ducked it and avoided it as best you could.

Clark: So it was so ordinaryó

______________________ * Senator Robert Packwood (R-Ore.) was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee for his alleged sexual harassment of female employees and staffers.

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Shanahan: It was so common.

Clark: óin a way, that you didn't think about it? You didn't think about how you would respond to it? You didn't talk about it?

Shanahan: Oh, we talked about it. As a matter of fact, before I was a reporter, while I was still a dictation girl at United Pressóand this was World War II when for the first time, there was a substantial group of women who were reporters at the Capitol, at Congress. A bunch of them got together and made up what was known as the "pinch list," oróthis was House membersó"members you don't go to see without you take a friend" was the subheading. And it was a list of who were the ones who made crude lunges right at your breast or whatever.

And it leaked somehow. I forget how it leaked. It caused quite a stir. And so, you know, you'd run into somebody in the ladies room who would say, "Oh, Christ, I've got to go talk to Sparkman," who was one of the worst ones, chairman of the Banking Committee.

Clark: Who?

Shanahan: John Sparkman of Alabama, a Democrat, a Southern Democrat from Alabama who was in virtually all respects a very admirable senator back in those days, in the fifties, maybe early sixties. As a guy from Alabama, he couldn't overtly be for racial equality in any form. But he did a lot of pro-poor things, especially housing and so on, and was as liberal as he dared to be, which was quite liberal. He was quite an admirable guy in most respects but boy, was he a leche.

I had a very terrible time with him when I blundered into an office, his hideaway office. Well, I suppose it's worth telling a story, in a way. He was a good source. He was one of the few members of Congress I've ever known that I learned if he tells you something, it's accurate, you don't need to check it any further. And he was high-ranking, subsequently chairman of the Banking Committee which I covered a lot. He was also the chairman of the Small Business Committee. He was on Foreign Relations, too, which I didn't get into much but occasionally.

And one time I called him off the floor and I probably got the usual thigh grab, I forget. But there was a report that was supposed to be pretty hot and critical coming out of either Banking or Small Business that I asked him about. And he said, "Oh, well, I've got a copy of that draft down in my office. I can't leave the Senate floor now. But why don't you meet me in my hideaway office at six o'clock?" Well, all the senior senators had little offices that didn't have any name on the door, anything, where they could hide out from whomever they wanted to hide out from, and perhaps conduct liaisons as well. "Liaisons," there's wonderful old-fashioned word.

So he told me where the hideaway office was, down in the basement of the Capitol. And in due course, at six o'clock, I come down the corridor and I see him coming down the corridor in the other direction and pulling keys out of his pocket. And it suddenly occurs to me that maybe there's nobody else in the office. But, uh-oh! But I go in, he gives me the report and then came the really crude lunges. And I no longer pretended it wasn't happening. He actually tore a button off my blouse, trying to get at me. And I remember saying to him, "You do one thing more and I will file charges of attempted rape, and I'm not kidding." And he said, "Oh, don't be like that," and so forth.

And I pulled myself together as best I couldóand remembered to pick up the reportóand walked out. And I didn't try to talk to him again. And one timeóit wasn't much later, maybe three weeks lateróI happened to encounter him in the main corridor of the Capitol, he was going one way and I was going the other. And he summoned me, or said, "Eileen, come here, I want to talk to you." And there were a lot of people around, to the point where I didn't want to just stalk off. So very nicely he said, "You've been avoiding me? Don't do that. Let me tell you what happened in the Foreign Relations Committee this morning," or something like that.

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So that after that I would very sparingly, only when I was desperate to get some information, I would call him off the floor. I never went to that hideaway office again.

I told people the story at the time, some friends, as you did. But it was just a hazard of life.

It's interesting to me that that never happened to me anywhere in the executive branch. There were times when, say, a big, hot tax bill that had the topóyou know, the assistant secretary for taxation or maybe the secretary of the treasury himself working six and seven days a week when I needed an interview and the only time they could see me wasóI remember going in at six a.m. on Saturday morning once or 8:15 at night. I'd be alone in the office, the secretaries would be gone, maybe alone in the building with this one official, and nothing of the sort ever happened. They had much more opportunity, the executive branch people, but there was a difference of temperament there.

You would think the members of Congress would be afraid to do that, that it would get to the people back home. But apparently not, or they were so compulsiveóI ultimately came to believe that the same personality that impels men, maybe women, too, today, to put themselves before the voters and prove that they are lovedóvotes are love, I came to that conclusion. Votes are love. And they had to prove that they were beloved by putting themselves up before the voters and that also, they also had to prove that any woman would succumb.

The votes are love thing came to me in part because of that and in part because of something else which anybody who's ever dealt with a former member of Congress who was defeated will tell you. The ones that retired may kind of regret it but if they retired voluntarily, it's not a scar. The ones who were defeated, if you talk to them, I don't care what you start talking to them about, in five minutes, you're talking about the campaign they lost. They just have to try and expiateóis that the right word?óthey just have to sort of get rid of it, that they've been rejected, none of which excuses the behavior.

That's all I've got to say on the subject.

Well, the Washington Star died in August of 1981. And that is very sad because it was a great newspaper right to the end, despite everything. And it's always sad when a newspaper dies. I rememberóand Time, Inc. decided to close it down. They had said they would come and stay for five years oróthere was a dollar figure and I forget what it wasóor until they'd lost X millions. And they closed it down after three years, a little less, and about half as many millions as they had said they were willing to lose on it.

I can't tell you that if they had hung in a little longer it could have become profitable. There were some signs. There was some advertising coming back. All you can say is maybe. I can't say they killed the Star needlessly. But it was a very sad day. And I remember the morning it was announced. Murray called all the editors in at 6:30 in the morning to announce that Time, Inc. was closing the Star two weeks hence, hoping a buyer would turn up, which none didónot to anybody's surprise, none did. And then it was announced officially at, I think, 8:30 in the morning.

And then the next day when I arrived in the morningóthat was the biggest story in town. It made all the network news and everything because the Star, everybody in journalism knew what a great paper the Star was. There was a TV crew out front interviewing people coming into work. And they stopped me. I don't think they knew who I was but they stopped me and found out who I was. And I talked about what a great paper it was and how bad it was that it should die. Whoever was interviewing me said something about, "Well, you weren't there very long. How long were you there?" I said, "Two and a half years." "So why do you care so much?"

I said, "You know, even a bad newspaper, it's sorry to see it die, it's too bad to see it die because a newspaper is like a person. Even if it's bad, there's a possibility that it could become good as long as it's alive. And when it's already a wonderful paper"óand about that point, I was standingóthere was a great big

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commercial-size mailbox in front of the Star building and I had put my books or whatever I was carrying, my purse down on the mailbox. And I couldn't get any farther. I put my head down on the mailbox and cried. The ABC network put it on the air, I was told.

But that is true. I almost cry right now thinking about it. Every newspaper is unique, like every human being.

Clark: It was an ensemble of so many unique human beings, a newspaper.

Shanahan: Yes, that's right. And all of its history. And all the potential people see for it. And each one is unique.

And also, as a practical matter, every day, the Star, understaffed as it was compared to the Post, we had something they didn't have, virtually every day, sometimes quite major. And if the Star hadn't reported it, maybe the Post never would have found it, so that there was a loss to public information. And then there are things TV can't do. TV doesn't have a letters column. Very important, letters to the editor, especially when you have a fine paper that attracts fine letters to the editor, good points argued by informed people, sometimes very fine writers.

There are other things that you lose forever. When you're in a competitive situation, you move a little faster and a little tougher because you worry about those folks down the street might be ahead of you.

Well, it was a glorious experience even though it ended sadly. I made lifelong friends there. And that was part of the cement of fighting against Murray Gart and of being the underdog newspaper, showing those high-handedówe all had good friends on the Postóbut showing those high-handed folks at the Post what we could do. Wonderful spirit.

Clark: Thanks.