I simply didnt connect my lack of self-confidence with his behavior to me., The end of this increasingly painful marriage was prolonged and extremely public. 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. He ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndon's contact lenses. Phil wasn't much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy -- so much so that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear. She had not thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children, Graham writes. . 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. As a publisher, Don Graham may never face a pair of crises as critical as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. As enormous cages and nets were being assembled in the circus ring, she declared, I think its time to go.. During his time in D.C., Graham rubbed shoulders with a group of like-minded politicos known as the Georgetown Set, and came to know both Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Phil and my mother also got along well. Loose Lips The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. In later years, he wanted to mold the career of his friend Senator Lyndon Johnson. At last, we could begin to believe that The Post was here to stay. During this time, Robin's father Joseph studied physiotherapy so that he could administer it to his son. For her part, Katharine would go on to helm the Post, becoming its de facto publisher during the famed Watergate era and, in 1979, becoming the first woman to hold the title officially. Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. 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. 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. 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. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? It was incredibly exciting. I told her that this woman, this very important woman, was gravely ill and in need of immediate medical attention. The General Secretary had revealed his plans for a joint United StatesSoviet space mission to Mars, and we led the paper with that world beat. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. ~ Gambling. See Photos. . On the appointed day, I put on my good blue suit, fired up the office Volvo, and proudly drove the hairdresser to Mrs. Grahams suite at the National Hotel. The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. Though Phil knew nothing about the newspaper business -- or any business, for that matter -- his brains and abilities served him well. We don't have one. They met earlier that year. 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. Soccer I see nothing wrong with the fact that people in power often deal with others on more than one level, she writes. Hamill interspersed a faux-sprightly account of the party (And Truman was just marvelous!) with The helicopter landed in a scrubby open field six miles north of Bong Son. It wasnt subtle, but it hit home. I did not go because I did not want to help you. Unlike Phil, I find it hard to express emotion. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. The whole idea of buying Newsweek and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. That decision may have been right for me, she writes, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Donso wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration. As I began to lead the way down the steps, a bus-size babushkathe usherfixed me with a hard look and said, Nelzya. Impossible. My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. So, on June 18, 1946, The Post announced that my father was withdrawing from active direction of the paper. 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. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. As he emerged more on the journalistic and political scenes, I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kiteand the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality. Phil Graham began referring to his wife, who by 1952 had given birth to four children, as Porky; to heighten the joke, he gave her as a present a French butcher-shop head of a pig. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". Instead, it appeared on Page B7. The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was an analyst heavily into existential psychology. Theater He stormed the podium and berated The only thanks you ever seem to receive is a deafening chorus of carping criticism. 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. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. Having Phil back was a tremendous -- and tremendously complicated -- relief. It introduced him to Felix Frankfurter. I was earning about $1,500 a year. Phil was clearly upset, too. . . Robin Webb. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice. Maksym Levin started documenting war to become famous. After seeing conflict up close, his motivations shifted. All the familiar episodes of the Washington, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. I almost rather died!. Felix adopted Phil as one of his "boys" before he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court. 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. I did not go to help you. Then I lied. But then Mrs. Graham was laughing. At about the same time, she was on a cross-country flight and ran into Senator Bob Dole, who was then working as chairman and chief hatchet man for the Republican National Committee. The next step in the battle for civil rights was on. The evening was fine and fun. Events, Football 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}. 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. Health problems and death Best Blood Sugar Supplements 2023: Top Blood Sugar Pills That Work, Best Ebony OnlyFans To Follow For Thick Ebony OnlyFans Videos (2023), Best Dating Sites For Older People: Mature Site To Find Love, Best CBD for Dog Anxiety: High-Quality oils to Calm Your Dog, Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. I insisted. Week after week, the leading figures of the Nixon Administration lambasted Graham and the Post for the Watergate stories. I got it for her. They were both from the South. 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. We danced the twist -- or attempted to. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. After a hurricane struck in 1926, the sugar company gave up and his father developed a dairy business on some of the land. 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. He refused to be used, particularly by my mother, or to be dominated by her. Robin Webb. (According to some accounts, Philip also threatened to divorce Katharine and marry Robin Webb, a Newsweek stringer with whom he'd been having an affair.) He does not travel the globe to interview foreign leaders. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. This is about enough to mention about the family except possibly to reemphasize that they are lousy rich -- for instance, they live in an absurdly huge vulgar castle here, have another in N.Y., have a ranch in Wyoming, etc. I also think that he realized the illness would recur. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. The moment of happiness you gave me is more help than most people are given in a lifetime, Thank you for it. He said he felt trapped, no longer able to go on; that everything was black. Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. . If she has been cool to any Presidents since Watergate, they have been the two Democrats, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, not least because they came to town with the greatest suspicion of old-line WashingtonKatharine Grahams Washington. 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. . In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. 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. This was not entirely to the good. On Christmas Eve in 1962, she discovered he was having an affair with Newsweek freelance journalist Robin Webb. 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. They both loved power and its use for what they thought of as desirable purposes. Her beginnings were at once privileged and starved. and he began an affair with a young Newsweek staffer, Robin Webb. 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. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. By contrast, the Wall Street Journals editorial page ignored Watergate and Iran-Contra as ideologically inconvenient and has pursued Whitewater with the foam visible on its lips. Unfortunately, this incapacity often produced in womenas it did in mea diffuse way of talking, an inability to be concise, a tendency to ramble, to start at the end and work backwards, to overexplain, to go on for too long, to apologize. He committed suicide that day. Katharine soon learned of their affair, when she picked up the phone and heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain.. In some ways, this was the bottom moment for me -- very confusing, very difficult, and very painful. Phil suffered from numerous illnesses, increasingly so as the years went by. Meyer began his financial career by investing six hundred dollars his father had given him for not smoking until he was twenty-one. Terms & Conditions There was, of course, no way to press the point. Phil also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality. 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. 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. While publisher of the Post, he grew so close to L.B.J. 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. Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. The cost of failure was incalculable. 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. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. . He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. Robin . Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. Until now, Katharine Graham, considering her influence, has been almost invisible. His anxiety as a son-in-law was in place before the wedding vows. Mrs. Graham blinked and said, I think its time to go.. The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. 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. Robin, who is a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, opened up about their marriage on her husband's podcast, "Phil in the Blanks." "We don't have the perfect marriage," she admitted. . It similarly (if with less success) pursued Iran-Contra and Bill Clintons ethical droppings. He would help me proofread. . Seelye. Facebook. 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. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. 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. You cant go. I went because it was my Destiny. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. . Phil and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. Finally, Otis and some other men got him to his room. You've probably heard of her father, Eugene Meyer, who is now publisher of the Washington Post, and has been in the past such things as head of the Federal Reserve. Great risk was involved, or so one heard. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. My God! she said, covering her pearls with the tips of her fingers. To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. At one meeting with L.B.J. Join Facebook to connect with Robin Graham and others you may know. 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. The Formative Years. Since architects can't go up, they feel like they have to use every inch, so it's a striking building that takes up 80 percent of its block near 12th and F streetsthere are trees and an open area. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. that he wrote speeches for him and advised him on civil rights and key appointments; he even had power of attorney for Johnson and went out and found him a house to buy. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. He felt he owned it because he had worked for 17 years to make it a success, so from his point of view the paper was his. Few suggested that Katharine the Great was a first-rate book, or even a solid oneit was flatly written and salted with highly suspect, even paranoid, materialbut one had to wonder if Mr. Jovanovich would have done the same for anyone else. I found him captivating. 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. CAPTION: Katharine and Phil Graham in 1962, left, after The Post purchased Artnews; above, from left, Phil's half brother Bob Graham -- now a U.S. senator from Florida -- Felix Frankfurter, Ernest Graham and Phil Graham in 1955; right, Phil Graham with John Kennedy on Cape Cod in 1961. On Oct. 28, in the middle of the night, he broke. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. . 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. In addition, Farber believed that labeling something, giving a name to a disorder, changed how the patient viewed himself and was viewed by those around him. Philip Pannell Collapsed at a Statehood Rally. When they were taken to see JFK, Phil spoke -- "shrewdly and eloquently," according to Joe -- pointing out all the obvious things that Johnson could add to the ticket and noting that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble. Mrs. Graham seemed not to mind the nasty benches or the almost very funny clowns. What made the situation even more complicated was the status of the Post. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. I think this definition of roles deepened as time went on and I became increasingly unsure of myself. Local Dining Guide, City Lights Graham was gambling every sort of inheritance that was important to her: the paper, her fortune, and, perhaps most important, the judgment of the ghosts who crowded around her. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. 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. You are stuck with me as a mascot repeat mascot. She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. 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. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. D.C. 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.. and mass movements aimed at breaking the President. 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