So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. By 1906, Meyer had made several million dollars by investing in securities; by 1915, he was worth between forty and sixty million. 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. My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. . According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. 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. Agnes was perennially engaged in writing books-in-progress. He was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk the following year for Felix Frankfurter, his mentor from Harvard Law School. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. . community.". Food News He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. . Insofar as she was capable of love, I think she loved my father and us, but she was highly complex, and at times deeply unhappy. In her own memoir, Agnes wrote of rebelling against the responsibilities of marriage; she behaved, she said, as if the whole world were in a conspiracy to flatten out my personality and cast me into a universal mold called woman.. With me in the lead, the three of us walked down a ramp and past what appeared to be a coffin-size box with open slats. Phil then cut a deal. So does her imperious carriage. Freelancers Guide Tomorrow: Watergate. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. 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. John Ehrlichman, Ronald Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself all charged the Post with disloyalty. He was really a. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. Telling his father about the marriage proved difficult. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. . . I never should have gone, she said. 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. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. 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. 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. Contact Us Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. I said that, much as I admired and loved President Kennedy, Phil personally had got along with him much better than I had. Gone not to my Far Country but to my Destiny. Advertisement. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. Phil went to school in Miami. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. These days, the Post is usually thought of as the second-best paper in the country, after the Timesor, if not the second-best, then at least tied for that honor with the Wall Street Journal and, stretching some, the Los Angeles Times. But, always, it was he who decided and I who responded. They were both from the South. Simple Pleasures. . We now had the morning field in Washington to ourselves. But by the summer of 1958, he was starting to do a little more. If you have the goods, you say, Screw it, and publish. Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. Eugene Meyer had bought the Washington Post at auction for eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in 1933, and in 1946 he made Phil its publisher. But hurry, she said. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. Graham was from a Florida family whose financial prospects, while far from dire, were a matter of occasional drama. AKA Philip Leslie Graham. We danced the twist -- or attempted to. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Thats enough, Buster, he said, and he dragged Bradlee into a meeting with two officials from the Department of the Interior and with Clark Clifford, from the Truman White House. 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. There is still a vital distinction. Philip Pannell Collapsed at a Statehood Rally. Phil called me once or twice, and carried on in his usual irreverent, breezy way. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. Phil began to look for a chairman for COMSAT and turned to our friend Gen. Lauris Norstad, who was soon to retire as supreme allied commander in Europe. On Aug. 3, having apparently made noticeable improvements, he convinced doctors to let him take a retreat to the Virginia farmhouse. 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. I'm not sure what triggered Phil's relationship with Lyndon Baines Johnson, but it now seems predictable, even foreordained. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. Profile. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The story would run on the front page of The Post unless the people with the power to do something about it integrated the pools. Phil was born in 1915 in . But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. Nonetheless, Phil was the fizz in our lives. I believe that Phil came to the sad conclusion that he would never again lead a normal life. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice. 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. At one point, President Kennedy dispatched a Presidential plane to get him from Phoenix to Washington. By mid-1948, The Post was still a rocky, if lively, paper. Son: Stephen Meyer Graham (b. I went because it was my Destiny. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. 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. On the other hand, some of our long talks over the past few years had made it apparent to me that Phil was worried about being a "son-in-law," about having been "given" the paper and the company by my father. We were both up all night, with me trying desperately but to no avail to be of some reassuring help. It was plain white crpe with slate-colored beads around the neck and the sleeves. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. As a publisher, Don Graham may never face a pair of crises as critical as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Phil stunned Katharine by proposing marriage to her almost instantly, and he followed up the proposal with an insistence that they set out for Florida and a life without family money. 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. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. His remarks quickly degenerated, turning into nonsense interspersed with ugly language. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. 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. It was incredibly exciting. 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. Perhaps it was true. . Both Phil and Felix worked on Joe throughout our dinner, suggesting that the most important first step for the 1950s was the right to vote. COMSAT was a groundbreaking public/private organization, half government, half telephone company. 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. Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. 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. . The paper sent out a young reporter named Ben Bradlee to cover what was happening, but Bradlee could barely find his story in the paper: it was buried deep inside, and nearly all mention of race and violence had been excised. I had no understanding of the terrible depression he had gone through or the polar-opposite mood that was dominating him at the time. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. He does not travel the globe to interview foreign leaders. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. ), Graham had undeniably, historically, made the right decision, and in the years to come she supported the investigative efforts of the Post; but the signs of her ambivalence about her social and political role never ceased. His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. Mrs. Graham blinked and said, I think its time to go.. Robin Harrison Webb. Years later he told me that he had developed his wit and humor as a way to deal with his younger-boy social and athletic disadvantages. There was, of course, no way to press the point. With Webb, he traveled to a publishing convention in Phoenix and caused a stir when, taking the microphone in a manic state, he started talking about the alleged affairs of John F. Kennedy, with whom he had been closely associated for some time. One did not want to spend the remainder of ones career taste-testing lima beans. He replied, Oh, yes, very. What made the situation even more complicated was the status of the Post. . 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. D.C. As enormous cages and nets were being assembled in the circus ring, she declared, I think its time to go.. 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. At the beginning of 1954, an event occurred that led up to what I still think of as the defining moment for the company: the unexpected acquisition of the Times-Herald {the other morning paper in Washington}. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. She'd been told that Harvard was the best, so her dying wish was that he go there. If there was one journalist she admired more than any other, it was her friend James Reston, and it was Reston who, despite his many virtues, had famously said, I will not have the New York Times muckraking the President of the United States. But in the end she made her decision. Here was someone who combined for me the two parts of my life that I thought were inescapably separate. See Photos. Though Phil knew nothing about the newspaper business -- or any business, for that matter -- his brains and abilities served him well. He was married to Katharine Graham, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of The Washington Post. You cant go. Phil Graham's descent into the abyss of manic depression accelerated, and on 24 December 1962 she discovered that he was embroiled in an affair with a Newsweek stringer, Robin Webb. In fact, Graham played a significant role in convincing JFK to appoint Johnson to the vice presidency instead of Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. "Very complicated business, a newspaper," Phil noted in a letter to my father late in 1947. He has an example to follow. All right, she told Bradlee on the telephone, in the midst of a reception at her house, with the Posts lawyer counselling caution in her free ear. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. It is hard to remember now just how far in front the Times was after the Second World War. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. Ben, with another reporter, was on the site for 36 straight hours. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. In 1965, Graham helped herself and the paper immeasurably by hiring Ben Bradlee, Newsweeks charismatic bureau chief in Washington and a friend of the Kennedys. It similarly (if with less success) pursued Iran-Contra and Bill Clintons ethical droppings. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. By June 17th, thanks to his national editor, Ben Bagdikian, he had his own set of papers. 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. Everything except Phil's personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father. As I began to lead the way down the steps, a bus-size babushkathe usherfixed me with a hard look and said, Nelzya. Impossible. 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