Len Downie to publish Post memoir

WASHINGTON — Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. is writing a memoir about his nearly half-century at the newspaper. The tome will be published by PublicAffairs Books in 2020 and promises a peek at the backstory of how The Post covered the biggest stories of the day, from the 1968 Washington riots to President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky to the Iraq War.

Downie, who got his start as an intern in 1964 and eventually rose to the paper’s top editorial job, promises to recount many of the stories the government hoped to quash — and if that sounds like a certain Oscar-nominated movie, it’s no coincidence.

Downie was a consultant for the 2017 film “The Post,” which starred Meryl Streep as Post publisher Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks as Downie’s predecessor as executive editor, Ben Bradlee. Director Steven Spielberg told Downie that he wanted to make the movie at a time when the idea of the media standing against a hostile administration would resonate.

Other sources of inspiration included Post reporter Bob Woodward. “He ordered me to do it, and I always do what he tells me to,” Downie says with a laugh, “though he never did what I told him to do.” And a third factor that prompted Downie to go for it? Cardboard boxes.

The Post moved in 2015 from its longtime D.C. headquarters on 15th St. NW to a building a few blocks away. Downie had kept an office at the old building long after he had officially left his day-today role at the paper, but he knew there wouldn’t be space in the streamlined new digs. As anyone who has ever packed up for a move can attest, discoveries can be made — and Downie says he unearthed a trove: “I realized there was a depth of material there, and a lot of it is applicable today.”