People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart.

After The Washington Post
Simons left The Post for a position as Curator at The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard university in 1984. When the time came it was managing editor Howard Simons--not Ben Bradlee or other ranking editors--who made the crucial early decisions that led to the Washington Post's extraordinary coverage of the Watergate scandal especially the decision to allow the metropolitan staff which did not normally report on national politics to pursue the story. The Media and the Law and The Media and Business and in 1986 wrote a spy novel with Haynes Johnson called The Landing.

He started at The Post as a science reporter but soon became an editor nurturing talented young reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Howard Simons (June 3 1929 - June 13 1989) was the managing editor of the Washington Post at the time of the Watergate scandal and later curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.