He needed Joe's help because Joe had a solid relationship with the black leadership in the country, especially Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP. At a meeting of the Religious Roundtable, Howard Phillips, the head of the Conservative Caucus, warned darkly, You cannot always have Kay Graham going to your cocktail parties and smiling at you. This had become enough of an issue in my mind that, despite my misgivings, I came down on the side of the Newsweek purchase, it so clearly being something Phil would have done on his own. For all its glamour and great personages, Personal History is a litany of humiliations, incidents in which the memoirist faults herself for lack of judgment, of independence, or of strength. Two years later, the Grahams took control of the Post Company stock. Under Philip Graham's management, the newspaper, thanks to its collaboration with the CIA, experienced an upswing and its empire expanded, including the purchase of the then-moribund Newsweek magazine [1] and other media properties. He does not travel the globe to interview foreign leaders. I felt close to history. . After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. Mrs. Grahamone always referred to her as Mrs. Graham, even in private and at great distancesdid not travel in the style of the British Raj, but she was not arriving on a Eurailpass, either. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. Much of his activity was related to politics. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. Phil's mother had discussed her desire that he go to law school. Youve never known anything., I cant say I think Mother genuinely loved us, she writes. He told me that he wanted to preserve our marriage and our family; he said that he loved Robin but would tell her the affair was over, and that he would stay with his family. Simple Pleasures. He also vowed to do a number on the Post, and to go after the Graham familys broadcasting licenses. He said he felt trapped, no longer able to go on; that everything was black. That. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. . Baseball See Photos. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. Here was someone who combined for me the two parts of my life that I thought were inescapably separate. We had one small cushion, a $500 wedding present from an aunt, which I thought I would use for extras like theater and travel tickets. Courtesy photo Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the summer 2019 edition of. She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. But what of it? After we had lunched as long as we could, someone suggested driving to the country, and we spent the afternoon there. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. I insisted. Profile. He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world. . On Aug. 3, 1963, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, having struggled with severe bouts of depression for at least five years, went into the bathroom of his family farm near Marshall, Va., and committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. I had no understanding of the terrible depression he had gone through or the polar-opposite mood that was dominating him at the time. Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. It was not long before he began looking around town to buy a newspaper. Loose Lips Phil Graham was forty-eight when he died. Graham was one of four children. "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down . The message was that Col. Robert McCormick {the newspaper baron who had purchased the Times-Herald five years before} wanted $8.5 million for the paper. There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. My father received a confidential letter from his friend Kent Cooper, former general manager of the Associated Press, who was living in retirement in Palm Beach. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from New York, and naturally we were talking about Phil. On an early trip, he requested a secretary, and the bureau chief dispatched Robin Webb, a young Australian trying to make it as a journalist. To a reporter, and especially a reporter in 1996, there doesnt seem to be a need to make any decision at all. It was incredibly exciting. I can see today that his activities had become increasingly frenetic, though still fairly constructively so, the most obvious example of which was his purchase of Newsweek, then a weak, marginally profitable newsmagazine for businessmen, far behind its rival, Time. But those who worked in the Posts newsroom knew one infinitely reassuring fact about Mrs. Graham: that at the most important moments of her professional life she did the right thing. Even considering the style of rich American families in the early part of the century, her parents, Eugene and Agnes Meyer, seem to have exceeded the norm for emotional reticence. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. CAPTION: The Grahams with their children at Glen Welby in 1956; Lally, left, Katherine, Phil (holding Steve), Bill and Don. Because of this, he never put a name to Phil's illness. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. COMSAT was a groundbreaking public/private organization, half government, half telephone company. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. But although I was thoroughly fascinated and charmed by Phil, I was also slightly resentful, when I thought about it, at feeling such complete dependence on another person. (One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the Posts editorial quality. Robin Webb. While publisher of the Post, he grew so close to L.B.J. At one point, he wanted to fire the highly respected editorial writer Alan Barth, who had dared to defend the right of Earl Browder, the former secretary-general of the Communist Party in America, not to name names before a Senate subcommittee. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him. I then talked in terms I had inherited from Phil and in a way I would never have done laterand that embarrasses me now, she writes. Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. Join Facebook to connect with Robin H Webb and others you may know. By the way, Senator, I didnt say I hated Nixon, she told Dole. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. What made the situation even more complicated was the status of the Post. It proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.. My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. In the summer of 1963, Phil seemed to be getting betterhe was undergoing treatment at a psychiatric center in Marylandand there was even hope of resuming a normal life at home. As he was being taken out of George Washington, he loudly proclaimed who he was and that he was a prisoner. At one point, President Kennedy dispatched a Presidential plane to get him from Phoenix to Washington. Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. It was a loyal nanny, Powelly, who supplied the hugs, the comforting, the feeling of human contact, even the love that my mother did not.. He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of The Washington Post. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. We don't have one. And then nothing more. The Formative Years. . . Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose The Post. Then He Tested Positive for COVID. I didnt think much about it at the time, but this was the beginning of a pattern that I can see now was quite unhealthy. He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. At once he became my father's close collaborator. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. From Sioux Falls, Phil and Robin flew to Phoenix, where many of the nation's most prominent publishers were gathered for a meeting of the Associated Press. Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, George Shultz, Paul Nitze, Douglas Dillon, McGeorge Bundy, Jack Valenti, Joe Califano: her list of establishment friends is long and decidedly nonpartisan. . Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. He was acutely aware of the dilemma that arose from the fact that, as he put it, "a newspaper must be a successful commercial enterprise in order to survive. At that meeting he offered him the vice-presidency -- both because he thought he had to and because he thought that Johnson would not accept. Phil wrote a letter in return that Katharine rightly describes as pretty strange: One morning when you were despairing I tried to help you by words. Graham instructed Bradlee to recount what he had seen and heard, and after he had done so the publisher and the three officials worked out a deal: as long as all the city pools were shut down for the time being and would be integrated the following year, the paper would print nothing more of what had happened. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. It was with Felix that Phil entered the world of great minds, ideas and books, stimulating conversation, and above all an interest in current events. They were both from the South. To the surprise of some, she easily warded off the blandishments of Samuel I. Newhouse (once with a somewhat duplicitous Theodore Sorensen as her agent) and the Times-Mirror Company. Ronald Reagan made sure to accept invitations to Mrs. Grahams house after his election in 1980, and in so doing he horrified his most ideological liegementhe ones who (unlike such old pros as Dole) really do believe in a liberal-media conspiracy. Naturally, they voted that he be allowed to go. James Reston, who was then a friend of the Grahams and was the most eminent figure at the Times, repeatedly declined offers to go to the Post. On the eve of the first Moratorium against the war, the Post published a nasty editorial (also not quoted in Personal History) that tried to set the paper apart from the antiwar movement. He even got the patients to take a vote among themselves. He committed suicide that day. In 1934, when Phil was 19, his mother died of cancer -- he later confessed that he had cried himself to sleep night after night in college. At dinner that night, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. My feelings about The Post, however, were very clear. Check out the latest pictures, photos and images of Phil Graham. . He and his girlfriend flew to Phoenix to attend a meeting of The Associated Press. There was, of course, no way to press the point. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Katharine Grahams establishment position on the war did not go unnoticed. The second week in February, he called me at work late one afternoon suggesting that we have dinner at Harvey's, a famous old seafood restaurant next door to the Mayflower, where we could buy the early edition of The Post. He remained seriously depressed but seemed to me to be quite noticeably better, even after only a week or so at Chestnut Lodge. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. In college at the University of Florida, Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub gin. However, on Feb. 4, he traveled to New York and went straight to Idlewild, where he met Robin once more. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. In the midst of the crisis, she wrote to Ehrlichman, saying, What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. His widow was left to confront all the myths and all the insulations that her marriage, her class, and her sex had imposed on her. Meyer began his financial career by investing six hundred dollars his father had given him for not smoking until he was twenty-one. John Ehrlichman, Ronald Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself all charged the Post with disloyalty. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase if its all right with you. If I thought Id done anything to make someone unhappy, Id agonize. It was not what Phil needed at that time, but it was what he wanted -- an irresistible temptation to be engaged in an exciting venture that would, in fact, alter the shape of the world. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. But, always, it was he who decided and I who responded. I panicked. "Very complicated business, a newspaper," Phil noted in a letter to my father late in 1947. Ad Choices. Darren has released eleven albums to date, plus she has been featured on various other albums and compilations. . Nobody knew what to do. Despite Phil s constant self-flagellation about being the son-in-law of a rich and powerful clan, he did not shy from the advantages for long. I passed the box without incident. Sometimes you dont really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I didmoved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life. In doing so, she and her editor, Ben Bradlee, dragged the Post out of the sea of the ordinary and made it great, made it a rival of the New York Times. . From the start, Katharine was dazzled by her husbands intelligence and wit, his ability to light up a room: He began to liberate me from my family and from the myths they had propagated. But she was resentful as well. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. He had all the symptoms of severe depression -- overwhelming doubt about himself and his abilities, a desire to seclude himself from the world, indecision even about what pair of shoes to wear, guilt, and occasional talk of suicide. He loved me, and I loved him. I almost rather died!. And he wanted many things. On Aug. 3, 1963, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, having struggled with severe bouts of depression for at least five years, went into the bathroom of his family farm near Marshall,. And by now helping you I believe and I pray I shall help you. After the honeymoon, we settled into our little house, which we rented for $80 a month in a pleasant neighborhood called Burleith. In effect [Bill and Steve] lost both parents at once. The moment of happiness you gave me is more help than most people are given in a lifetime, Thank you for it. Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. He would help me proofread. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. As enormous cages and nets were being assembled in the circus ring, she declared, I think its time to go.. ", Early Thursday morning, Kennedy called Johnson, waking him up and making an appointment to see him a little later. Robin Webb (Robin Elaine Riddle) See Photos. Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. They had a natural affinity. with that of the increasingly powerful conservative media (the Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, etc. But there was also a certain Africa-based correspondent who carved his own career coffin by arranging for a balloon safari over the Masai Mara at dawn; just as the sun was glinting off the savanna and the balloon was rising above a herd of grazing giraffes, Mrs. Graham is said to have turned to the correspondent and announced, with a profane burr, You know, I didnt travel all the way here to be a fucking tourist. It is said that the correspondent ended up as a recipe checker in the food section. Another habit of his that emerged during those years was that, when we were with friends and I was talking, he would look at me in such a way that I felt I was going on too long and boring people. . Sometimes Katharine glimpsed her parents as they were dressing to go out, or as Agnes was being massaged and manicured in preparation for the evenings entertainment. At Harvard, Phil made the Law Review and, at the end of his second year, became its president. The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was an analyst heavily into existential psychology. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. Then I lied. Nonetheless, Phil was the fizz in our lives. Sometimes you become friends with people with whom you work because of some common interest or just because you have to work together. I gather Dr. Farber initially tried to read him passages from Martin Buber, and when this failed to work, they forcibly tranquilized him and put him on the plane. Katharine, by her own account and in the accounts of others, was a tall and awkward girl with a manly stride, but she was also intelligent, and she absorbed the lessons of her social class well. And I was incredulous -- this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me! By 1968, reporting and editorials on Vietnam by Ward Just and a few others helped change the atmosphere of reverence on the pages of the Post, and that change had its effect on the thinking of the publisherso strong an effect that when the Times, thanks to Neil Sheehan and his source, Daniel Ellsberg, began printing the Pentagon Papers, on June 13, 1971, Bradlee felt wounded, and, with Grahams encouragement, pushed his staff to find its own copy of the documents. Although at the time I didnt realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. Bradlee had been Phils friend, not hers, but he pushed for the job of managing editor, pushed with his customary blend of charm and vulgarity (Id give my left one for the job, he told her at lunch one day), and she melted. In the beginning, even Richard Nixon got the same treatment. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. It is hard to remember now just how far in front the Times was after the Second World War. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. Phil's involvement in the whole matter -- besides pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship -- began in earnest in July, when he invited {civil rights lawyer} Joe Rauh to our farm in Virginia, Glen Welby. He stormed the podium and berated Suddenly, an enormous claw lunged out of the box and toward the innocent calf of the chairman of the Washington Post Company. . He contracted polio at less than one year of age and, due to the lack of metal immediately after the second world war, was placed by doctors in a plaster of Paris cast for two and a half years. To get a sense of how momentous were Katharine Grahams two decisions in the nineteen-seventieson the Pentagon Papers and Watergateit is crucial to understand just how poorly she had been prepared for such decisions by her family, her legendary husband, and the atmosphere in which she had always lived. 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