December 29. A Monday. In the annual trough of the entre deux fêtes, The Washington Post, like every other daily paper in the land, obviously hasn’t got its starting team on the field. Bob Woodward and Len Downie are enjoying a well-deserved rest, and their otherwise eager pack of bloodhound reporters are all wassailing away with never a thought for the tax reform or child care initiatives that will soon be engaging their full attention. Probably they’re not even thinking very much about the trials of Terry Nichols or Ted Kaczynski. So who is in charge? I imagine the editorial night watchman to be a very bright and even more earnest twenty-six-year-old determined to make, as they say, “a difference” —a guy or gal with that special Washington Post kind of humorless self-righteousness for whom Mrs. Graham must have to troll the journalism schools with a fine-mesh net every couple of years. He or she could not have had more than a year or two’s worth of editorial experience. But just as our natural caution, diminished by the alcoholic relaxation of “the Holidays,” often allows the true man (or, of course, woman) to emerge, so in the fatigue of the twilight of the year, with all its stars beclouded, the Post was never more itself.

For it is not just your garden-variety, do-gooding liberal who could have made up a front page like this one. It would never occur to Gore Vidal or Victor Navasky to