Why I Left the Washington Post

I walked into the Washington Post building for the first time in the summer of 1981. Past the red linotype machine that marked the entrance to the Post’s Fifteenth Street headquarters for so many years and up to the fifth-floor newsroom, a cavernous space that looked just as it’s depicted in “All the President’s Men.”

I was fresh out of college and on my way to law school. Along the way, I’d worked at a small legal newspaper, where I found myself both interested in the subject and annoyed at being condescended to by lawyers about my lack of a degree. Bob Woodward, the Post’s Metro editor, had read some of my pieces and invited me in to talk. In fact, he tried to talk me out of law school. He told me that he had turned down Harvard to work for the Sentinel, a paper in Montgomery County, Maryland. Why not just come to the Post?