The son of a food-company salesman who had poetry published in a local newspaper, Leonard Downie Jnr (right) grew up in Cleveland and, having worked as a summer intern at The Washington Post in 1964, arrived on the staff from Ohio State University the following year. At the Post, he has worked as an investigative reporter, written about business, been assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, the paper’s London correspondent, national editor, managing editor and, since September 1991, executive editor. At 64, “retirement is out there somewhere, but there’s no mandatory retirement age here. Obviously I’ m not going to go on forever, some time before I’m 70 I’ll retire. But it’s not around the corner yet”.

Leonard Downie isn’t going anywhere. The Post’s executive editor has been running the bulk of the paper – the editorial and comment pages are outside his remit – for 15 years. He is the longest serving editor of any major newspaper in the United States, yet remains largely anonymous outside the industry, perhaps because his predecessor, Ben Bradlee, was a high-profile player in the Watergate watershed and had immortality bestowed upon him by Jason Robards Jnr in All the President’s Men.

“If you see the movie, I’m a periphery character who, in news conference, is presenting other local stories in a kind of comical way,” says Downie reflectively. “You can see me in my office in the background, a kind of bespectacled, nerdy kind of figure.” Who played him? “Some guy who you’d never have heard of, because this character was seldom on the screen.” Book and web references do not list Downie as a character in the film, nor the actor who made him nerdy. But the executive editor does not regret his relatively low profile: “In terms of Ben’s fame and stuff, that’s not me, it never was me, it’s never going to be me. Ben’s still more famous than me and he hasn’t been editor for 15 years – and that’s fine.”

Although peripheral in the movie, in reality Downie was close to the centre of the Post investigation that brought down the President. If he is bored with constantly being asked about the story by visitors, he doesn’t betray it as he sits, shirt-sleeved, in his fifth-floor office adjacent to the Post newsroom.

Frequently in trouble

Downie became editor of the voluminous copy from the daily Senate Watergate hearings and then, in 1973 until Richard Nixon’s resignation, took over the editing of Woodward and Bernstein from city editor Barry Sussman: “There were a couple of [important] things I did happen to be involved in. I was standing over Bernstein’s shoulder, listening to his conversation with Attorney General Mitchell, when Mitchell made the remark about Mrs Graham’s titty getting caught in the wringer [if the Post continued its Watergate investigation]. The other was monitoring a conversation between Bernstein and his source to find out the truth after the one mistake they made, claiming Hugh Sloan [treasurer of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President] had given certain testimony in front of the Grand Jury when he hadn’t yet done so.”

Exciting times? “Well yes, but nerve-racking more than exciting, actually. We were always worried about making a mistake. We were worried about trying to figure out: what does all this info add up to at a given time? We became worried about competition, which didn’t exist originally. We were worried about the pressure on Mrs [Katherine] Graham [then publisher of the Post] from everybody around town, and after a time we became sort of spookily worried about sort of unthinkable things. Would the Government try to shut us down? Was somebody trying to frame Bernstein by offering him marijuana in a public street? When the Saturday-night massacre [Nixon’s decimating of the Justice Department] occurred and I was called at home and asked to come in and start working on that, would there be tanks in the street?

“In fact at one point close to the end there was a young army private who had stolen a helicopter from Fort Bragg and flown it on to the White House lawn. Today he’d presumably be shot up into a thousand pieces, but back then they didn’t have all that stuff. The night editor woke me up about 1.30 in the morning. I woke my wife and told her I was going to work because a helicopter had landed on the White House lawn, and she said: ‘Should I come with you, in case the military is taking over?’ There was that kind of bizarre thinking because the pressure was so great.”

The enormity of the story rarely entered that thinking, says Downie. “Carl would occasionally say, ‘D’you realise what this could really mean? The President could have to resign, or be impeached.’ And Bob would say, ‘We’re not going to think about that – don’t think about that.’ It was always at the back of our minds and yet at the same time seemed unrealistic. When the national desk took over the resignation story – we’d fended them off getting involved in the investigative story – those of us who had been working on the investigation weren’t able to work very much on the day of the resignation. We were just stunned that we were involved in something like that.”

Woodward and Bernstein told only Bradlee the identity of their major source, known as Deep Throat; it was not until last year that Downie and the rest of the world learned that former FBI deputy director W Mark Felt had been the whistleblower. Woodward, still with the Post as an investigations executive, was later to keep Downie in the dark over another matter, failing for two years to reveal that a senior Bush administration official had revealed to him the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal.

Woodward publicly apologised last year over a misjudgement that, says Downie, was “because he was hoping this investigation would go away and that he and his source would not be caught up in it. He should have told me about it, although I don’t think we would have done anything very much differently because, as we speak now, the source remains confidential – the source has still not allowed Bob to reveal who he or she is. But that’s not the point. The point is I should have known. I should have been told and it should have been my decision about how to proceed, not Bob’s alone”.

Internet, the biggest drain

The development of a muscular and totally free-to-user website and diversification into radio and television – the Post’s multi-media newsroom goes into action at 4.30am and reporters and editors continue feeding the web and various TV and sound outlets until late in the evening – has propelled the company into the 21st century. A smart freesheet, The Express, distributed outside stations on the City’s state-of-the-art Metro system, is judged a success with a circulation of 190,000 and makes a slender profit. Although advertisement revenue across all outlets is volatile, it’s showing a significant improvement on the web, and circulation of the print edition, while slipping, is still a formidable 690,000-plus during the week and not far short of a million on Sundays.

“Mass distribution is important to our particular advertising base, which is still predominantly local although increasingly national,” says Downie. “It’s different to British national papers. It’s important to have the circulation density as great as possible in the metropolitan area. Our circulation penetration – the ratio of papers sold to households – in the Washington area is more than 40 per cent daily and more than 60 per cent on Sundays. We are, of course, practically without competition – The Washington Times has a fraction of our circulation and the New York Times circulation in our area is an even smaller fraction.”

With the business in such apparent glowing health, why is the company tightening its belt by shedding staff – 70 in the newsroom and around 100 in other areas? “We still have economic necessities and the down-sizing of the newsroom is one of them. But it will still be quite adequate to the task,” claims Downie, who rejects the supposition that such cost-cutting will lead to falling journalistic standards: “We’ve nowhere near reached that point because, among other things, we’ve been adding so much in the newsroom in recent years. I can’t remember how many times the newsroom budget has multiplied since I became executive editor, but it’s two or three times at least. The economies we’re making now will take us back only two or three years.

“And the dedication of the Graham family to journalism as a public service, which you can see not just at the Post but at Newsweek and our Post/Newsweek television stations, which are of a much higher quality than most. And that makes a big difference. It made Watergate possible. It made a lot of what we’ve done that cost us advertising and cost us readership possible. And in terms of the quality of our core journalism, we still have plenty of resources to deal with that.”

The company was famously headed by Katherine Graham until her death in 2001; her son, Donald, 61, is now the COE, while the wonderfully named Boisfeuillet Jones Jnr, 60, a friend of Donald’s from their youth, is publisher of the Post. Downie convincingly claims that he experiences no editorial interference: “On the contrary, I am expected to make journalistic decisions, final decisions, independently. They – Katherine Graham less so, Donald Graham more so, and the current publisher, also – will keep me on my toes, they will have their views about how to go about certain things. And they don’t want to be surprised by controversial things, like the national security stories we’ve published, for example. But there are times when I’ve published things that Donald Graham has specifically said he would not publish if he were in charge, and times when I’ve withheld things he thought he would have published. What he wants me to do is listen to everybody, including him, and then make the best journalistic decision I can by myself. If they become unhappy with what I’m doing, then they’ll fire me.”

Although he is unavoidably involved in business decisions concerning the editorial operation and is responsible for the journalistic content and standards of the website, one feels Downie’s own dedication is directed towards running a giant locomotive of a news operation – he has a total of 800 staff working for him. The department controlled by editorials editor Fred Hiatt, who reports directly to the chairman – an editorial split untested in Britain – interests him not at all: “There’s a strict separation here between what we call church and State. I like to think of us as the State and Fred Hiatt as the church, but I don’t know how he views it.

No say in what we’re doing

“There are sometimes editorial positions that clearly are at variance with directions in our coverage. That’s life – that’s the way it is. I don’t care what their positions are editorially. I don’t agree or disagree with them. I don’t care about them. I will not take positions on issues and I have not voted since I became managing editor in 1984, because I don’t want to take a position on local candidates or political issues. If you come to work here [the newsroom], you agree to restrictions on your political rights. The only political act you can exercise in is voting. You cannot sign petitions, you cannot engage in demonstrations, you cannot give money to any political cause – not just political parties and candidates, but any political cause. You cannot engage in any political activity whatsoever. I think they have some similar rules back there [in the editorial dept], but that’s not my purview.”

There are also rules concerning disclosure of any political activity engaged in by spouses, and strict guidelines for the staff of the business section: “They are allowed to have investments, but they have to disclose them annually to their editor and, if necessary, we wouldn’t use reporters in certain areas where their investments could create conflict. And we have sometimes discouraged members of the staff from buying investments that could create such a conflict that they couldn’t continue to work here.”

Is Downie really totally opinion-free? I ask his view of a recent Post editorial supporting a Tony Blair statement, from the White House, on Iraq. “I didn’t read it. I have no view.” Later I mention The West Wing, the political television series then nearing its denouement, and inquire whether Downie watched it. “Sure. It’s a good show.” And was the fictional, liberal Josh Bartlett a good President? “I don’t have an opinion on that,” he smiles.

He recognises the Post’s political clout, however, and the passions it arouses. “We are attacked by both the Left and the Right and more so than ever now, because the country is so polarised. I think everyone wants to read news coverage with their own bias, and so we pretty much piss off both sides equally without half trying,” he says cheerfully. “It doesn’t bother me at all – all I care about is accuracy and credibility. I do pay attention to my emails. I don’t pay attention to the ones that call me bad names, or the people who harp on the same thing over and over again, but even with the angry ones, I want to make sure if they are making a point about whether we have been accurate or not. That’s why we have a vigorous ombudsman, too, because being accurate and clear is extremely important to us – pleasing one side or the other in a debate isn’t.

“I think that all journalism is being held more accountable now than ever before and that’s great. That’s the business we’ve been in – holding everybody else accountable. It’s much easier for people to know now when you’ve made a mistake, if you plagiarise something, make something up, if you’ve been unfair, and that’s great, too. I think it is making all of us more accurate. It puts pressure on us and we should accept that – it’s the same pressure we put on government all the time.”

His time in London has left him with an interest in the British media exceeding that of most U.S. journalists. He believes what he saw as moves by some British papers to be “more American” have disappeared. “They were led by Andreas Whittam Smith, who claimed to be an admirer of the American press and conferred with many of us when he was starting The Independent. But that paper has now become something different to what it was when he founded it.

“Obviously the fact that British papers tend to have an ideological position is very different from papers in this country. And there is a general tendency in the British media [for writers] to be essayists rather than reporters. There’s a lot of detail that doesn’t appear in most British reporting – it’s more impressionistic, more analytical, and it’s less deep and less facts-seeking. I particularly admire the proper analysis and the level of intellectual engagement, which is very high. British journalists are very well educated, as are people in British public life, politics and government, and they use the language better. By and large, American journalists are more subject focused, they’re more craft focused, if you will. Some of the best thinkers in British journalism – when I was there, Peter Jenkins, for example – were real class.

Disturbed by the Lobby

“The depths of investigative reporting and accountability reporting in the U.S., and the premium on accuracy, is paramount. In Britain, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, for example, are both very aggressive newspapers right now, but every time they report something that interests us, the first thing we have to do is check it out. Just because they’ve reported it doesn’t mean it’s true. I would hate for people to see The Washington Post that way. Part of my role is verification.

“The Sunday Times before Murdoch bought it was probably the best British newspaper by far. It gave you more investigative reporting. Harry Evans is a person I admire a great deal and it was too bad that Murdoch bought it when he did – I think there might have been a different British journalistic tradition effected by The Sunday Times over a long period of time if the ownership hadn’t changed.”

Although none of his four children has been tempted into journalism, Downie does not subscribe to the theory that the trade has diminished in stature and shed much of its glamour. “There’s still a lot of glamour attached to journalism here in Washington – sometimes I think there’s too much,” he says. “There are a lot of television appearances and there are parties and receptions and political conventions and the hanging around the White House, recognition by important people and all that kind of stuff. There’s still a lot of glamour around this town. And at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, many of the guests, instead of just being government sources, are now people from Hollywood. You go to the reception and the dinner and you can see that the people from Hollywood are just as excited about being with Washington journalists as Washington journalists are excited by being with people from Hollywood.”

No, he recalls, he didn’t find replacing the glamorous Ben Bradlee – now the Post’s “vice-president at large” with an office on the seventh floor – at all daunting. “The only thing that was daunting for me was simply the size of the job and the high level of responsibility,” says the determinedly unglamorous Len Downie.