He said he felt trapped, no longer able to go on; that everything was black. CAPTION: The Grahams with their children at Glen Welby in 1956; Lally, left, Katherine, Phil (holding Steve), Bill and Don. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. Phil was clearly upset, too. 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. Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. In one case, there were 200 whites arrayed against an equal number of blacks -- with Park Police on horses in the middle. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. With Grahams support, Bradlee was soon firing the lazy and the mediocre, the racist and the dull, and he then set about raiding topflight papers around the country for their best talent. Katharine saw her parents only sparingly. 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. Up to that time I had been a fairly present mother, attending school functions, driving teams to sports events, trying to be back in the afternoons when the kids got back from school. And by the words you came near enough for help and I touched you and we went for a walk and were again in life. He counterbalanced my ingrown resistance to new and different ideas, and to people with whom I didn't agree politically. I found it impossibly difficult to learn and never really did, although my children tried having me learn by stamping out cigarettes and drying myself with bath towels. At the beginning of August 1957, Johnson, who was then Senate majority leader, asked Phil to help him win passage of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Advertise with Us, Sponsored Posts from our Partners There is plenty of material in Personal History to satisfy the most obvious expectationsall the familiar episodes of the Posts history are replayed, and famous faces bob into sight as if in a capital version of Grand Hotelbut more interesting is the degree to which this memoir is a description of the muggy intimacy of the world of Washington and the way one powerful woman learned to live her life there. journalism. During that Leningrad trip, the only moment that hinted at something mysterious and human came when we were in a map room at the Hermitage Museum. 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. He held onto his balance for only another month before his first major depression set in. His anxiety as a son-in-law was in place before the wedding vows. 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,. Ad Choices. He committed suicide that day. and U.P.I., were infuriating the White House with reporting that showed the contrast between the official statements of the generals and the dire situation in the field, the Post could not keep pace. I would be lucky to cover high-school softball in Prince William County. Basketball Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. Perhaps it was true. Week after week, the leading figures of the Nixon Administration lambasted Graham and the Post for the Watergate stories. After we had lunched as long as we could, someone suggested driving to the country, and we spent the afternoon there. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. There, in a ballroom full of the nation's top publishers, Phil Graham lost it. Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . . I told him I had the feeling that he thought my point of view was different from Phils, but that in general Phil and I had agreed. 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. Phil then cut a deal. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. Seelye. I was earning about $1,500 a year. 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. Like many members of his class and generation, his postwar view was shaped by his work in wartime intelligence; a classic Cold War liberal, he was uncomfortable with McCarthy, but quite friendly with the personnel and policies of the CIA. you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.. He was married to Katharine Graham, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of The Washington Post. By 1906, Meyer had made several million dollars by investing in securities; by 1915, he was worth between forty and sixty million. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. Grahams father had had trouble coming up with the funds to send him to Harvard Law, but managed to do so. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. At Harvard, Phil made the Law Review and, at the end of his second year, became its president. The car, at least, was waiting and its driver was sober. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. Graham was from a Florida family whose financial prospects, while far from dire, were a matter of occasional drama. 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. All around was the loud mewing of big cats and small children. . Phil Graham, he said, was too hot for me, too involved in politics, felt too deeply about people, even his own people on the paper.. Email or phone: Password: . The Post pursued Watergate as a news story, not as an ideological crusade. 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. You cant go. When Johnson had announced he was running for President that year, Phil Graham helped write the speech; he even ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndons contact lenses, which had popped out. This is a posture unbecoming to a publisher of newspapers. Latest news and commentary on Robin Webb including photos, videos, quotations, and a biography. Her allegiance to democratic capitalism is no less firm than that of William F. Buckley, Jr., and her inherent faith that the establishment lites will do the right thing is nearly absolute. Money, my fathers being Jewish, and sex were taboo subjects at home. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. It was he who instilled in Phil a distrust, fear, and horror of any drugs, not to mention shock therapy, claiming that these treatments reduced people to something less than human -- something tranquilized and fishlike. 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. Though Phil knew nothing about the newspaper business -- or any business, for that matter -- his brains and abilities served him well. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. By early March 1961, Phil was involved in his old in-depth way with many activities -- political and Post Co.-related -- and he seemed to me to be enjoying himself. So does her imperious carriage. He had left me for good, and it was almost more than I could bear. As she grew older and more self-confident, she could be imperious, even frightening to her editors and executives, but her desire to please, or at least to get along with, those in power, never entirely faded. He was raised in Miami where his father, Ernest R. ("Cap") Graham, made a career in farming and real estate, and was elected to the State Senate. My father had said that he himself was too old to let Phil work his way up. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. Women traditionally also have sufferedand many still dofrom an exaggerated desire to please, a syndrome so instilled in women of my generation that it inhibited my behavior for many years, and in ways still does. Updated: August 28, 2015 Only 15 years later, when things were very bad, did I look at the situation ruefully. City Lights: Your weekly guide to artsy goings-on, hitting your inbox Thursdays and Sundays. . . . At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. He replied, Oh, yes, very. In later years, he wanted to mold the career of his friend Senator Lyndon Johnson. To keep a story out of the paper to achieve a purpose, even a fine one, is neither appropriate nor in the spirit of my father's definition of the duty of a newspaper: "To try to tell the truth. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. 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. In 1949, riots were taking place, as members of the Progressive Party led black children to swim in Washington's previously all-white public swimming pools. In middle age and in a state of grief, she suddenly found herself in charge of a newspaper that had yet to show any signs of greatness, and of a group of men who regarded her with, at best, considerable suspicion. Robin Webb. (One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the Posts editorial quality. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. He left no note of any kind. At dinner at Joseph Alsops one night early in 1961, Graham continually offered political advice to the new President, John Kennedy. . Performance/Dance Sometime after the "brainwashing" party, Johnson urged Phil to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. I told you how lonely it had been when I had visited my Far Country and how I could not get near enough to help you in your Far Country. This was a typical example of the way Phil used power to accomplish something good. It all seems so odd in retrospect. It was a fleeting, mystifying moment, but a very real one. His friends are, for the most part, not especially famous. He was really a. Phil was born in 1915 in . It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. Signing On to The Post. The book has been republished twice by small presses. Phil felt such urgency about co-opting Stanton that he decided to send a personal messenger to ensure that the letters reached Frank in New York. Phil and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. See Photos . A few days later, I was assigned to show her and her close friend Meg Greenfield, the Posts editorial-page editor, around the city that was then known as Leningrad. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. The phone rang and I picked it up, not realizing that Phil, too, had picked it up, in his dressing room, with the door shut. In early 1963, Phil's condition became public. 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. The only thanks you ever seem to receive is a deafening chorus of carping criticism. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. District Line Daily: Our news, politics, arts, food, and sports coverage in one email every weekday. For example, what I could not have known at the Hermitage is that after the suicide of her husband, on August 3, 1963, and the funeral, Mrs. Graham sent her eldest son, Donald, back to his internship at the Times, sent her two younger sons, Bill and Steve, back to summer camp, and promptly flew off to Europe to meet her eldest childher daughter, Lallyand a group of very O.K. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer. We don't have one. . {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} He welcomed her with a carload of flowers, and together they flew to Sioux Falls, S.D., where he was to talk to the publisher of the local paper about buying it. In college at the University of Florida, Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub gin. His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. Facebook gives people the power to. All rights reserved. Oh, you know, he said, during a campaign they put these things in your hands and you just read them. (Dole admitted the same to a Times reporter after the 1996 campaign. To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. My feelings about The Post, however, were very clear. . 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. Phil's mother had discussed her desire that he go to law school. It similarly (if with less success) pursued Iran-Contra and Bill Clintons ethical droppings. Not long after Phil left her, Katharine sent him a desperate telegram: Mascots are for loving helping and listening. It was all kept very private; our one idea was to conceal what had happened not only from the world but from our friends, my family, and even our children. Much of his activity was related to politics. An exception is David Halberstams 1979 book, The Powers That Be, which provides a vivid group portrait of the men and women behind the Post, CBS, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. In the early days of Watergate, she tried, in rather submissive terms, to build a personal bridge to the one man who exceeded even Nixon in his public hatred of the PostSpiro Agnew. . I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him. This is a surprising piece of work on every level. Baseball Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. Now I can see how extraordinary -- and out of order -- it was for a Supreme Court justice to be stepping over the boundaries to this extent, but I didn't then. 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. I was charmed and dazzled. The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivalling only Gone with the Wind in circulation and Portnoys Complaint for indecency, Colson said. During the 1988 visit to Moscow, I remember, Mrs. Graham said that perhaps she ought to telephone Nancy and tell her about the lengths that the Kremlin was going to in preparing for an imminent summit. The cost of failure was incalculable. He also vowed to do a number on the Post, and to go after the Graham familys broadcasting licenses. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. It was incredibly exciting. Surrounded by her male editors and executives, Graham could recognize in herself the same reflexes of deference she had learned as a daughter and as a wife. Later, she developed an infatuation with the work of Thomas Mann and seems to have made endless demands on the authors time and patience. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. I got it for her. To this day, I cannot say what the beast wasa leopard, a cougar, a jaguarbut I can still see its talons not an inch from the hose and flesh of my proprietor. Naturally, they voted that he be allowed to go. In an otherwise blissful spring of journalistic overload, a time when the merest cough in the Kremlin merited front-page attention, it came about that the Post and its sister publication, Newsweek, were being awarded a plum: an interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party. They were both from the South. See Photos. Privacy Policy He also began making public scenesonce launching into an obscene tirade during a speech, and, on another occasion, punching out a detective at an airport. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. Katharine's husband Philip battled alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose The Post. Mumble Sauce, About Us But that did not mean she was strong in all things. During this time, Robin's father Joseph studied physiotherapy so that he could administer it to his son. Mrs. Graham, for her part, wrote back to him, I was full of admiration anyway for what you did and the way you did it. In the end, Davis sued her publisher for libel and breach of contract in 1982 and received a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. Phil went to school in Miami. The appearance of this messenger, a Newsweek stringer whose name was Robin Webb, was the beginning of the tragic end. A downstairs bathroom, I found him really a. Phil was born in 1915 in the nation & # ;... Right-Wing image of Graham as the junior man in the end of second... 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