The Washington Post That Was TAKOMA PARK, Md. - WHEN I arrived in 1970, The Washington Post had just achieved escape velocity. The executive editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee, and the publisher, Katharine Graham, had launched a shabby local paper into the orbit of fame, hipness, power and phone-slamming Kennedy-style pugnacity. Watch out, New York. Lotsa fun. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ... The newsroom wasn't happy - no newsroom is - but there was a rogue aristocrat's confidence that the luck of The Post could be taken for granted. No one imagined that the new élan would become a ghost haunting us years later, prompting people to ask, "Didn't The Post used to be better?" I was asked that so often as the decades wore on that I came up with a stock wisecrack: "It always used to be better." The Post that questioners remembered had yet to grow into its greatness, but its happy few gave it style, a sexy, ironic edge. It was liberal and Ivy League, Kennedy and Bogart. The hip female reporters strode around the newsroom and swore a lot - an F-bomb had to be dropped at every dinner party, it seemed. I had the feeling that any young man who showed up in Levis, loafers and a Harris tweed sportcoat would be hired instantly. Not everyone was like this - there was the usual newsroom ration of drunks and the copy editors who dined on thermoses of Campbell's Chunky Chicken soup. There were also admirable professionals, reporters and editors who knew everything about foreign policy or the District of Columbia police and ignored the zeitgeist. At the same time I sensed a slackness, the disorganization of very intelligent people with their share of the narcissism of the times. I also sensed a wariness of the big time, when the Grahams decided not to print nationally like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. They insisted that The Post was a local paper despite its national glamour. The Post even stopped sending bundles of papers to Manhattan every night, annoying the newspaper's stars, who wanted to be admired in the big city. Still, there remained an arrogance that seemed appropriate to an era in which the governing establishment had delegitimized itself with its lies about Vietnam and so much else. As for its own legitimacy, the newsroom derived a lot of it from the dynasty of the Graham family - the brilliant Philip, who killed himself, and then his tough and vital widow, Katharine, and later their son Don. Journalistic stature arrived for sure when The Post - along with The New York Times - printed the Pentagon Papers, revealing the fraud of the Vietnam War. And then Watergate, which took down a president. Bumper stickers in Washington read: "And Thank God for The Washington Post." Gotcha journalism replaced the New Journalism as the new thing. We were as gods. But then we weren't anymore. Journalistically, the paper thrived, but the glamour subsided. Readers seemed to resent media presumptuousness. I noticed in the "80s that sources were taking longer to return calls. There were scandals, too. In the most notorious, in 1981, Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for her story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. It turned out to be fiction, along with her résumé. She blamed the high pressure of the Post newsroom. Mr. Bradlee had a management theory called "creative tension." It kept his reporters and editors awake at night wondering whether they were in or out with him. It was a hard place to work. Labor wrangles erupted, and The Post hired consultants to do "attitude surveys." One surveyor was said to have been puzzled - he'd never seen a workplace where the morale was so low but the pride in the organization was so high. Mr. Bradlee was easy to forgive, with his feral good looks and Boston breeding that he wanted to reject, I think, given his romance with the ethnics in the newsroom. He'd put his Gucci loafer on the desks of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and swap wisecracks. A friendly gesture, that loafer, but I don't think they ever put their loafers on his desk. The creative tension dwindled in 1991, when Mr. Graham replaced Mr. Bradlee, who retired, with Leonard Downie Jr. He led the paper to still greater journalistic glory: 33 Pulitzer Prizes in fewer years than it took Mr. Bradlee to get to 17. Several of those prizes were for opinion writing or editorial cartoons, which are not under the newsroom's purview. But people nostalgic for earlier years could not forgive Mr. Downie's lack of glamour. Magazines wrote stories that seemed to be based on a dinner-party wistfulness for the days of we few. That moment had defined The Post, and ever after The Post would suffer by comparison. In recent years, it has become clear that The Post did, in fact, used to be better. Incompetents found their way into high places. Morale collapsed. Computers crashed. Circulation, stock price and ad revenues fell. Still, and as always, passionate journalists are succeeding, not because of management but in spite of it. Now a new owner, in the new Internet orbit, brings his own glamour to The Post. Good luck to you, Jeff Bezos of Amazon. The Post is dead. Long live The Post.