Len Downie joined The Washington Post as a summer intern in 1964. His first major project, an investigation of the Washington area courts, made Downie a Pulitzer Prize finalist before the age of 30. Downie worked in several levels of management at The Post, including the supervision of the paper's Watergate coverage as the Deputy Metropolitan Editor, before being named the executive editor in 1991. 

Now retired, Downie has come to Arizona to promote his latest book, "Rules of the Game," and to join the staff of Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.

Downie is also involved in a Columbia University project to identify alternative funding methods for the nation's newspapers. He spoke with the Arizona Capitol Times about the challenges facing newspapers laden by ineffective economic models. 

Do you miss working at a newspaper?

That is interesting. I miss the journalism. I guess when all these interesting things are going on I would love to be in the middle of it. But at the same time, I have been doing it for a long time. There is a lot of stress that I had in the job I had for the last 17 years, and I don't miss that. Also, there are really new challenges facing the paper now, obviously: merging to two newsrooms, the print newsroom and the online newsroom, and figuring out new economic models. Those things were beyond what I did best, which is the journalism. I am glad there is someone 20 years younger than me doing that.

Have you been able to transition from a hectic life to retirement?

Well my life is just hectic in a different way. As my wife points out, I have dinner earlier than most evenings. It is a different kind of life. I am promoting a book, I am going to write another novel, I am going to be teaching here part of the year and I will be doing a project for Columbia University on how we are going to pay for news in the future, or at least assessing the alternatives for that.

Can you tell me more about the project?

The dean of the Columbia journalism school has enlisted me to do a one-year study of alternatives for how we are going to pay for news in the future given the complete breakdown of economic models of current organizations. I am going to be looking forward to everything from governmental support -which goes on in other countries – to nonprofit support, Web-only experiments and the combinations of current media forms and new forms. I don't know what the answers are, but I am supposed to write 25,000 words by the end of the year analyzing this and making some recommendations. 

Do any of the options stand out right now as potential solutions?

There are a lot of intriguing things. There is a lot of enthusiasm among certain things. There was an op-ed piece in The New York Times the other day on whether or not newspapers should become nonprofit and have endowments. But then a letter writer pointed out under the current law that means the papers couldn't endorse anyone for president or have editorial pages at all. There is a lot of enthusiasm about these Web-only startups, but as interesting as they all are, they have relatively small staffs. I am not sure they will really survive.

What the universities are doing interests me a lot. For instance the Cronkite News Service I think is going to become an increasing source of news about the state for all the news organizations in the state because they won't have the resources that the Cronkite does. That interests me.

There has been some criticism of newspapers relying on students for coverage …

That is a good question. I think if the Cronkite News Service is eventually going to become one of the primary sources of news about the state Capitol, it is going to have to become more professional. They are already going to add graduate students next year, but maybe you could add something onto that so eventually it becomes a more professional news organization.

This all comes down to questions of donors. If a donor proposes something, you try that. But that raises questions too. My friend is running a nonprofit investigative reporting project where reporters put together projects that they then give to other papers. The source of funding is a husband and wife who founded a savings and loan in California that was later sold to Wachovia and is the reason Wachovia failed and had to be sold to Wells Fargo. Where does that leave him? Are they going to look into what happened to the mortgage business when these people are their funding? Everything has promise and everything has drawbacks. That is what I am going to be trying to access.

During your time at The Post, was there a particular reporter you enjoyed working with the most?

Oh no, there were lots of them: Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate, a guy named Jim Hogan who was my partner on one of my investigative assignments and oh so many great reporters since then.

Is there one investigative report you worked on that you are particularly proud of?

The first thing I did, which was an investigation of the local courts in Washington in the mid 1960s, which made me a Pulitzer Prize finalist at the age of 26 and led to the abolition of that court and its replacement by the current D.C. Superior Court, was a big deal for me. Watergate, obviously, was a singular experience for me. We have had some really breaking stories to cover, including Sept. 11, which were very important and very memorable. I have supervised our coverage of every presidential election since 1984. A couple of them were kind of dull and forgettable, but a lot of them are pretty interesting, including this last one. I was fortunate to be our London correspondent when Margret Thatcher came into office. That was a great time to be a foreign correspondent.  There are a lot of good memories.

When you joined The Post as an intern did you feel intimidated?

Slightly because they hired mostly Ivy Leaguers back then. It was a small newsroom. The summer intern program itself was only in its second year. Now it is a competition. We get hundreds of applicants for a couple dozen spaces at most. Back then it was only in its second year and by and large it was the sons and daughters of people who knew senior editors at The Post that got the positions. So, I did feel a bit intimidated in that group as the only one from a land-grant college in Ohio. It created a rivalry between myself and another intern named Bob Kaiser from Yale. We had a very lively rivalry that summer. Neither one of us lacks self-confidence. At the end of the summer, we had tied for the most front page stories out of all of the interns, and actually had more front page stories than many members of the staff, and were both offered jobs.

When you started pursuing journalism, did you want to be an editor?

That is interesting. I started in journalism at the age of 11 when the English teacher in my elementary school started a paper. In the fifth grade I was a reporter, and I really enjoyed the reporter part, being a journalist. In the sixth grade I was an editor and I really enjoyed bossing people around. Then I was the co-editor of the junior high paper. I did the high school paper. I was managing editor of my college paper and the sports editor at each paper along the way. But when I became an investigative reporter as a professional, being an editor kind of receded from my mind. Editors were those difficult people you had
to deal with to get your story in the paper. I was in love with being a reporter. Actually, I was dragooned into being an editor again onto the city desk as an assistant city editor in 1970 by a new metro editor who thought investigative reporting projects took too long. That rekindled my interest in working with good reporters. I wasn't a very good writer. It was so interesting to see all the different writing abilities different writers had. And it was fun to be the boss and have so much influence on what went into newspapers. I came to realize, particularly as a London correspondent, that as good of a reporter as I was, and as much as I had improved as a writer, I wasn't a great writer and would never be a great writer. My writing talents had a limit to them, but my talents as an editor did not have a limit to them, and I could sense that.

What talents does being an editor require?

Obviously spotting talent and enabling talent to thrive. It is very difficult to describe. It is different than other kinds of management. Working with talented journalists is a push-pull way of dealing with them and what they produce and having an influence over the directions of the journalists. It involves lots of things, from story suggestions to setting story priorities to being able to push and encourage the best work out of highly talented, high strung people. I usually describe my role as that of a catalyst. I enable things to happen without directing them to happen.

Did prefer your reporters to focus on investigative projects?

I did focus on investigative projects as an editor. Sometimes they took too long, and I would speed them up if could. Also part of my role was to say "this isn't ready yet" or "this needs to be done in a different way."

Do you think it is a mistake for editors to discourage investigative projects because of the time dedication involved?

Yes. I think one of the most important functions of American journalism is accountability journalism, holding the powerful accountable to everybody else. I admire those editors and publish that, as they shrink their staffs, try to preserve accountability journalism, as many have. Others have not and I think that is a tragedy. I think it takes away some of their reasons to be read. I think they will have fewer readers as a result and their demise may be hastened if they are not doing work that is unique to that community and that holds the powerful accountable.

I know the facts of the Watergate coverage, but what was it like on a personal basis to be the lead in the story coverage?

It was scary. I came in indirectly. The break-in occurred when I was finishing up a fellowship abroad. I came in as the deputy metro editor, so initially I was directing all the rest of our local coverage while others focused on Watergate. Then, I gradually got involved in the chain of command by reviewing the stories before they went in the paper. Then, starting with the Senate Watergate hearings, I directly edited coverage. It was tiring, too, that was another aspect of it. It was very, very long hours. Our hearing coverage took up many pages in the newspaper every single day. The story itself was usually two or three pages long, and then there was a partial transcript of the hearing that I also edited. That grew into the direct editing of Bob and Carl.

What made the experience scary?

We were afraid of making a mistake. For a long time, we were alone in the coverage. Not until Walter Cronkite called attention to our coverage in an unusual and completely purposeful move from him, essentially putting his stamp of approval on what we were doing, were we joined by some competition. People were telling us we were crazy and we were going to loose our business. We were very concerned about making a mistake. But as Nixon vs. the rest of Washington began to develop we became irrationally concerned about one's well being. The night of the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon wanted to fire the special prosecutor, I was called at home at 11:30 p.m. to handle the story, and I really wondered if there would be troops in the street or something. It was a strange time in Washington.

Did you know the identity of Woodward's source at this time?

No, only Ben Bradley knew among the editors. I knew who Deep Throat wasn't, because all of their sources had to be named. Every single interview they conducted they had to write a memo about, because this was such high-stakes business, and put the source's name at the top.

After many years went by, I decided I would try to guess who Deep Throat was. I was convinced it was Elliot Richardson. First of all, Richardson was in the Navy, as was Bob. I thought there might have been some kind of Navy connection. Richardson was also one of the people who resigned in the Saturday Night Massacre, so he clearly had a conscience about Watergate. He would have had access to all the information that Deep Throat had. And later, as a private citizen, he was someone who was always giving us tips, so he had that bent of mind. I told Bob, ‘I think it is Elliot Richardson,' and he, of course, didn't react. But then Elliot Richardson died and it wasn't Elliot Richardson.

My next guess was L. Patrick Gray, who was also not a named source and was briefly the director of the FBI. He got sort of squeezed out during Watergate so he would have had a motive to give Bob his story. But he died, and it wasn't him.

So, I thought really hard. I had dealt with Mark Felt briefly once as an investigative reporter myself when the FBI was being run by J. Edgar Hoover and Mark Felt was number three. It was clear he was a trustworthy guy and he was running the FBI. He, of course, had access, and I had eliminated everybody else. I decided this was my last guess and wrote the name on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and handed it to Bob not to be opened until Deep Throat died.

Bob has always been giving lectures in colleges and he was always asked about Deep Throat and would say he couldn't divulge the name until the source had died. He started to say in his speeches ‘well, you will probably know pretty soon because he is very ill.' When I heard that I pulled Bob in and said ‘if he is very ill we got to get ready for this and prepare what stories we are going to write." Bob told me he had written a book about it, and I said I had to see the book. He had me over to breakfast, brings out the book and it is Mark Felt.

You were also involved in discussion of whether to publish the Unabomber's manifesto. What were those conversations like?

The most important conversation, out of many, was at FBI headquarters to meet with Janet Reno, the attorney general. It was striking. The FBI had done a really good job with the technical part of the case. They reconstructed all his bombs, including the woodwork he did. On the other hand, all the stuff about who he might be was crazy. The profiling stuff they do had convinced them it was someone in the liberal part of California. They had this idea that if we published the manifesto, they could have FBI agents in stores where they thought he lived in Northern California and nab him when he came in to buy the newspaper, which of course turned out to be ridiculous.

There was obviously reluctance to join with the government in doing something like this. Don Graham, our publisher, came up with the idea, which was acceptable to me, to publish it in a separate section of our newspaper, in an entirely different type and in tabloid form so it was part of the coverage of the newspaper. This accomplished two purposes: the Unabomber would know we did publish it and hopefully not kill the other people he said he was going to kill if we didn't publish it, and if there was going to be a clue at all as to who it was, there it would be in the newspaper. Don and I took
some criticism in going ahead with this, but we didn't want to knowingly harm human life in our decision making. We thought there was a pretty high chance he would blow somebody up if we didn't publish it. And, of course, there was the added advantage that his brother lived in the Washington area, saw it in ~The Washington Post~ and recognized that those were words like his brother's words and came forward. 

Absent publishing the manifesto as a separate publication, would you have opposed meeting the Unabomber's demand?

No, I was open-minded about what we should do. I was uncomfortable with the notion that we could be forced into publishing something. This had actually happened to us before. A group of Eastern Europeans had commandeered an airplane and threatened to blow it up if we didn't publish something. What we did was publish it only in a few fake newspapers and gave it to them. They were stupid and gave themselves up. We knew we couldn't do that again because that was known and, obviously, the Unabomber was brilliant.

I was not eager to have it be part of the regular newspaper, and I was pleased with the suggestion of making it a separate part of the newspaper.

More recently, you worked on an investigative report on the existence of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. Is it true that President Bush asked you personally not to publish this article?

A number of officials, including the president, in a number of meetings argued against publication. When they realized we were going to go ahead and publish it, they were concerned with us naming the countries that some of the prisons were located in. They made a good showing, I felt, at the senior levels of the government that if we named those locations in ~The Washington Post~ that it probably would interrupt other anti-terrorism activities we had in those countries that were above reproach. I decided in the end not to name those countries but to go ahead with the story itself. Afterward, members of the CIA were still upset with us for running the story because it forced them to shut down the prisons and interrupted some of the other things they were doing in terms of apprehending terrorists. I did not think that was too high a cost to pay for something we now know has become rather significant.

Have you ever regretted not revealing the name of the countries?

No, in fact we still have not today. The European Union even commissioned and investigation and named them, but we still have not. It wasn't necessary because the impact of the story was just the same whether we named the countries or not.

Have there ever been decisions you made as an editor that you do now regret?

Not in terms of journalistic integrity. There are arguable ones. I decided not to publish the news of Bob Dole's affair 28 years before he ran for president. I can argue that either way, but I do believe I made the right decision. Newspapers are one of the last dictatorships outside of Russia, so in that instance, for example, every editor except me wanted to publish. I decided not to, and my vote counted. I still feel that is the right decision, but if I had made it the other way I would have felt comfortable with that too.

Were you in support of incorporating the Web into the newsroom and reporting?

I was in favor of that. I was in favor of our Web site being independent originally, a subsidiary of the newspaper with its own executive director, because I knew I didn't know enough about it and way too many people in our newsroom were hostile to it. We would not have had as "webby" a Web site, if you will, if we had not done it that way. For example, we were the first big news Web site to let readers comment on all of our stories. If the newsroom had been running the Web site, we probably still wouldn't have done that now. The newsroom wasn't comfortable with that and didn't understand why. We also have a lot of money sunk into video on our Web site. The page dues for that were always small for the longest time and the reporters were always complaining about investing in that while I was cutting the size of the newsroom. My answer to that is that this is going to matter down the road. One of my theories is that newspapers that are dynamic on the Web could replace local television news broadcasts because we have bigger and better newsrooms than they do.

I probably was more uncomfortable with the challenges the Web site provided than I should have been. It took me to come around. I was kind of slow moving on it. But I saw the value of it. I was also one of the early advocates that we put the two back together, which is now happening.

You have written five books, correct?

Right.

One of these was a look into the nature of investigative reporting. Has much changed since that book's 1970s publication?

Only that there is a lot more investigating reporting. That was the beginning of the era when I wrote that book, and I think that book still stands pretty well. The Internet has greatly expanded the research of all the investigative reporters, but a lot of the techniques in there are still used today.

This most recent book, is fiction correct?

Yes, it is a novel.

Have you written fiction before?

No, and I didn't even know if I could write a novel. This was hobby, and I did it for my enjoyment. Also, I wanted to bring readers into how journalism really works and what politics is like. Fiction was a good way to do that.

Are there elements of the novel pulled directly from your experiences?

Yes. There is decision about whether or not to publish a story about a politician's affair many years before he is running for president. There is a scene in the CIA and a scene in the White House that I have lived through. It was funny because the fact checker doing checks on the book was looking at a lot of real places in the book and deciding "yes that is located there" and so on. Then it came to the CIA, where I describe what it is like to walk in and what the director's office is like and she told me "I cannot find that in the data base." I wrote back and said "it's OK, I've been there."

What challenges to writing fiction pose?

Well, for instance, in journalism you are not supposed to read people's mind. You can't say, writing about me, that I was feeling really guilty about coming to ASU because you can't prove that. But in fiction, you are supposed to do that. If I were writing a scene about what we are doing right now, I would have to write about how you are reacting to me, and how I feel about how you are reacting to me. I had to learn that. The first draft through was very journalistic and absent an interior dialogue, motivation and all that stuff about real life that you can put in fiction.

You will be teaching here at ASU part time, correct?

Well, it is a full-time position. It is an invention of the very clever dean here. Beginning in the fall semester, I will mostly work with the professional programs, the Cronkite News Service and News 21. That will only be part of the time. In the spring semester I will be living here and teach a full course load.

Which assignment are you best looking forward to?

Oh, both of them. However I can help with the Cronkite News Service program by mentoring students on their stories. The same with News 21. That will be very interesting. I am also looking forward to teaching, and the research aspect of teaching. 

What courses are you teaching?

We are pretty much in agreement that I will be teaching a course on journalistic ethics and decision making.

Are there aspects of journalism school now that
are significantly different than when you went through the programs?

There are a number of things, and that is actually a concern of mine. Many journalism schools have become communication schools. They are very academic and not involved in professional journalism, which I think is a shame. It is like having medical school only being about theories and not how you operate on people.

What do you bring to the classroom?

I guess a lot of it is based on my experience and that I am obviously a student of the profession. I think I relate pretty well to people, after dealing with all the big egos at The Washington Post.