Sally Quinn won’t return my emails. Perhaps Quinn, the doyenne of Washington, D.C., and the widow of the Washington Post legend Ben Bradlee, is overwrought. As she recently lamented in The New York Times, her city is under siege:
This spring Washington is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. It’s as if the fragrant air were permeated with an invisible poison, as if we were silently choking on carbon monoxide. The emotion all around—palpable in the streets, the shops, the restaurants, in business offices, at dinner tables—is fear. People have gone from greeting each other with a grimace of anguish as they spout about the outrage of the day to a laugh to despair. It’s all so unbelievable that it’s hard to process, and it doesn’t stop.
Nobody feels safe. Nobody feels protected. This is a city where people seek and, if it all goes well for them, wield power. But today in Washington, those who hold—or once held—the most power are often the most scared. It is not something they are used to feeling. I lived through the paranoia and vengefulness of Watergate. This time in Washington, it’s different. Nobody knows how this will end and what will happen to the country. What might happen to each of us.
The kind of ersatz fear Quinn is describing sounds like the actual terror I experienced in 2018, when The Washington Post, her newspaper, tried to destroy me—and turned the city I was born in and love into a horror movie. At the time I reached out to Quinn, for whom I had written several articles when she was editing the “On Faith” section of the Post. I needed some help salvaging my reputation after I was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of being a witness to Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged assault of her. I emailed Quinn and asked her why the Post was not making available to the public the dozens of articles I had written for the paper in the 1990s—pieces about art, music, religion, and a full-page profile of the historic Howard Theatre. The media was a cyclone of activity and wanted to know everything about me. The Post ran story after corrosive story slandering me. So why not produce what I had written for them and for Quinn? Why bury my work?
Quinn never replied. The pieces I had written for her “On Faith” section were gone. The only one I could find was reproduced in Bill Bennett’s compendium The Book of Man.
Quinn has all kinds of “resistance” courage now, but she had none when it mattered. In 2018, I was swept up in a nightmare when the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of having committed sexual assault at a 1982 high school party. His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, claimed I was in the room when it happened. The Post broke the story. The reporter, Emma Brown, failed to mention that there was an exonerating witness, Leland Keyser. Ford claimed that Keyser was at the party where the assault took place, but Keyser denied being at any such party and said she didn’t even know Kavanaugh. Though Emma Brown knew of Keyser, she left these details out of the story. Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal noticed this, asking on Twitter: why is there no mention of Leland Keyser in the piece?
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