The Situation: In Praise of Ruth Marcus

The Situation on Friday called on all Americans to stand with a large powerful law firm.

Today, I want to talk about Ruth Marcus—who resigned yesterday from the Opinions section of the Washington Post.

As you have probably read, Ruth resigned because the Post spiked a column she wrote objecting to the new editorial policy, under which owner Jeff Bezos declared that the paper would run op-eds only supporting individual liberties and free market principles. The column, which Ruth described in her resignation letter as “respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict,” was spiked by Bezos’s henchman, Sir William John Lewis, whose title of “publisher” of the Post masks his actual function, which seems to be reducing the paper’s capacity to publish quality work. 

Ruth and I worked together very closely at the Post for a number of years. We didn’t always get along. We didn’t agree about a bunch of things that seemed important to both of us at the time. She was more liberal than I was—or something like that—and I was more credulous than she was about certain aspects of conservatism.

But even when we disagreed, I always admired Ruth a great deal. She was, as I’ll explain, a truly diverse talent. And the differences between us have, as with so many people, rounded to zero as The Situation has arisen. She is a truly formidable talent, and it says a whole lot about the state of the Washington Post that she felt the need to resign.

Ruth emerged over the last two decades as one of the very finest opinion writers in America. Her column is—or perhaps I should now say was—always compelling and challenging. And it often noticed things that others missed that became important. (To cite only one example, it was Ruth who first noticed that the immunity motion in the Trump Jan. 6 case was likely to stall the whole case pre-trial for a trip up to the Supreme Court.) Her book on the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, which is scrupulously fair and careful, is the only truly must-read document on the subject. Her work at the Opinions section in the wake of Fred Hiatt’s death was a model of institutional stewardship.

Ruth is that very rare thing—a first-rate reporter who never stopped reporting when she became a columnist, who is also a first-rate legal analyst, a great prose stylist, and a keen observer of politics and policy. She can talk details of the budget with the best OMB watchers and then turn around and spar with Supreme Court clerks over an oral argument that happened two weeks ago.

Ruth has not had a lot of employers. She has worked for the Post since 1984—basically her whole professional life. And if she were someone else, I would worry about her. What do you do after writing a column for the Washington Post for 20 years? What do you do after you have left a brand like the Washington Post after working there for four decades and never really having done anything else?

But the truth of the matter is that I’m not the slightest bit worried about Ruth. She will be fine. She will continue to write what she writes and people will continue to read it, in whatever publication she decides to write it. If she carved her thoughts onto rocks, people would find them and pick them up and read them.

I am, rather, deeply worried about a Washington Post that cannot keep Ruth—a person whose commitment to the institution was as intense as anyone’s I have ever met and who desperately did not want to do what she did yesterday.

I’m worried about a Post that cannot keep Bob Kagan, Shane Harris, Ashley Parker, Charles Lane, Ann Telnaes, Rosalind Helderman, Josh Dawsey, and a long list of other talents who have walked away from the place—or been laid off—over the last few months. It’s a kind of institutional vandalism. 

I have written before that the Post’s editorial page was among the primary influences on the creation of Lawfare. When Fred Hiatt died three years ago, I wrote on Lawfare that his:

influence [on this site] was not substantive in the sense of Fred having done important writing in [Lawfare’s subject matter] space—which was an area on which he was more apt to listen to than to write. It was attitudinal and spiritual and largely unperceived by me at the time Lawfare was coming together.

The Washington Post Editorial Page is the most philosophically diverse editorial page in the country—by a country mile. I was there from 1997 through 2006, and during some of that time, I sat daily in a room with Ruth Marcus and Anne Applebaum, between whose politics spanned most of the range of what I then understood to be the responsible American political spectrum.

…

We tried to build a site that was genuinely ideologically diverse. We tried to build a site where ideas could be debated, including ideas that are deeply contentious. We tried to build a site that was genuinely non-partisan, but in which non-partisanship did not necessarily mean evenhandedness.

This is what the Post used to be and it was a model for me—at times conscious, at times subconscious—as we built Lawfare. It was a deeply honorable thing they had going there. And it is precisely this honorable thing that Bezos has quite self-consciously decided to give up. And when you give it up, you give up the Ruth Marcuses of the world. It’s just as simple as that.

It is fashionable these days to cancel one’s subscription to the Post in protest at this sort of vandalism. All the cool kids are doing it. And the Post has lost a ton of subscribers as a result of its recent spate of self-inflicted editorial wounds.

I have not done it and do not intend to. I still have an emotional attachment to the place. There are still a lot of good journalists there doing good work. I still read them and value them. I still hope the institution will survive in a form worth supporting.

But it’s not a good sign when Ruth Marcus walks out the door. And it’s not a good sign when the paper cannot even muster its own story about her departure but, instead, runs Associated Press copy on the subject. It’s not a good sign that there is precious little evidence that the paper’s leadership structure has any idea that they are, in fact, vandals and have even less appreciation of the value of what they are vandalizing. Most of all, it’s not a good sign that—and of this you can be sure—Ruth’s departure will not be the last. Others are imminent. The Atlantic alone is building a powerhouse newsroom by feeding off the Post’s carcass.

And for those who are wondering, the answer is no: Ruth doesn’t know I am writing this column. It’s the kind of column I usually don’t write about people still moving among the atmospheric side of the ground. She may even be mad at me when she discovers it.

It won’t be the first time. 

The Situation continues tomorrow.