Phil's activities in regard to Little Rock were the first sign for me that something was wrong with him, that his powerful talents could be used in such an idealistic but confusing and irrational way. There, in a ballroom full of the nation's top publishers, Phil Graham lost it. "We have worked out this solution: we'll live in the sort of house, have the sort of furniture, eat the sort of food, go to the sort of places, that young people making salaries like mine can afford.". 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. Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. In fact, Graham played a significant role in convincing JFK to appoint Johnson to the vice presidency instead of Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". Sometime after the "brainwashing" party, Johnson urged Phil to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. Katharine Grahams establishment position on the war did not go unnoticed. During the McCarthy era, the Post acquitted itself well, especially in the reports of Murrey Marder, but when everyone from the Chicago Tribune to a two-bit conservative publication entitled Plain Talk attacked the Post as Washingtons Pravda, Graham showed dangerous signs of capitulation. In 1940, he married Katharine, daughter of millionaire Post owner Eugene Meyer, who made Graham publisher in 1946. I also said that I admired the legislation he himself had got passed and was for him and wanted to make sure he knew it.. Ups and Downs. But in the spring of 1971 the Supreme Court had not yet declared its strong support of press freedoms to the degree that it would in the Pentagon Papers case; moreover, the Post itself did not yet have the financial standing or the self-identity to go forward simply and with confidence. In 1967, Katharine wrote a letter to Johnson (not quoted in the book) expressing enormous empathy: These times are so difficult that my heart bleeds for you. 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. He even got the patients to take a vote among themselves. He acknowledged that he used humor as a weapon with which to keep people at a distance. He was intent, however, on making his mark in public life as well as on the stock exchange. My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. I rang her up and explained the situation. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. Sometimes you become friends with people with whom you work because of some common interest or just because you have to work together. See Photos. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Having Phil back was a tremendous -- and tremendously complicated -- relief. It's hard to describe my devastation after my discovery of the affair. Phil was clearly upset, too. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. Great risk was involved, or so one heard. Books In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. Lets go, lets publish. And by doing that she opened the way to Watergate and to the Posts position as a rival of the Times. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. 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. This time, he saw his departure as final. 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. Phil viewed this whole sequence of events, with some reason, as a violation of his rights and civil liberties. Ad Choices. . Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. (The Meyers had five children, of whom Katharine was the fourth.) Graham supported Eisenhower in 1952 and, in the service of that support, censored the work of his greatest star, the cartoonist Herblock, in the last two weeks of the campaign. Charles Colson, for one, tried to dismiss the conspiracy as fictiona charge that, if true, would probably have ruined the paper forever. If by June the Washington establishment is happy with Ronald Reagan, then you should be unhappy with Ronald Reagan. In the coming years, Mrs. Graham formed an especially close friendship with Nancy Reagan. The two most powerful presences in her lifeher mother and her husbandwere both clearly suffering from psychological problems, yet Katharine still felt inferior to them. Hockey City Lights: Your weekly guide to artsy goings-on, hitting your inbox Thursdays and Sundays. Phil's mother had discussed her desire that he go to law school. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. Liz at Large Katharines mother, Agnes Meyer, was descended from Lutheran ministers. Then, in June 1946, President Truman called and asked my father to become the first president of the World Bank. Robin Webb (Songbird) See Photos. The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. 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. It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. And yet his periods of lucidity and humor, of lively intelligence, were frequent enough to confuse her and delay any sense of reckoning. But hurry, she said. The whole strategy for going for voting rights was inspired -- the idea for which Phil was the architect. Her obeisance was institutional and political, not merely personal. I hadnt realized that the Post wasnt perfectly okay.). But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. Born Katharine Meyer on June 16, 1917, in New York City; died on July 17, 2001, in Idaho; daughter of Eugene Meyer (owner of . . Robin Webb. . 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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. Gradually, I became the drudge and, whats more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. Facebook gives people the power to. See Photos. "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down . Housing Complex 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. 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. 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. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. The book has been republished twice by small presses. Then I lied. 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. If one compares the approach of the liberal media (the Post, the Times, etc.) Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him. Phil very much wanted to go to Glen Welby for a break from the hospital, and had started to work on the doctors to obtain their permission. 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. Robin Webb Retweeted Franklin Graham @Franklin_Graham 4 Dec 2017 TOMORROW morning Jack Phillips' case will be coming before the Supreme Court. AKA Philip Leslie Graham. Week after week, the leading figures of the Nixon Administration lambasted Graham and the Post for the Watergate stories. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. 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. Beer And by now helping you I believe and I pray I shall help you. He committed suicide that day. The evening was fine and fun. The only other inhabitants were Seminole Indians. Film/TV Believing that he knew enough of the key players that he could solve the problem with behind-the-scenes maneuvering, he kept several phones going day and night. That was some circus! She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. 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. His remarks quickly degenerated, turning into nonsense interspersed with ugly language. Freelancers Guide To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. Philip L. Graham. By mid-1948, The Post was still a rocky, if lively, paper. Facebook gives people the power to share. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. 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. I never should have gone, she said. Theater So did Meg Greenfield. 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. In the process of blowing his stack, as only he could do, Ben felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Phil, who said, "Okay, buster, come with me," and led the way to his office. Phil remained loyal to Johnson until he lost the bid for the nomination. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). with that of the increasingly powerful conservative media (the Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, etc. 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. Perhaps it was true. They had a natural affinity. 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.. Gear Prudence So much of his life flowed from the year as president of the Law Review. . How could a woman reared in such exquisite privilegeone whose circle of friends, among them Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson and Nancy Reagan, rarely widened beyond the most powerful lites of Washington and New Yorktake such risks? In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. He knew everyone in the building, always taking on the problems of people who worked for him -- worrying over someone's sick child, unmet mortgage payment, health crisis. 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. I went because it was my Destiny. I panicked. Early the next day, Phil and Larry in Paris both wrote letters to Stanton. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. Naturally, they voted that he be allowed to go. Eugene served Agnes breakfast in bed every morning; he ate at the bedside table. He loved me, and I loved him. 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. 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. To help Phil pay back the debt he incurred in borrowing to buy the stock, I volunteered to pay for all our living expenses -- houses, cars, schools, entertainment -- and did so. The Post Company had gone public just two days before getting the papers, and publication could easily have affected its stock prices for the worse. 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. As a publisher, Don Graham may never face a pair of crises as critical as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. This is a very significant case and has huge repercussions for freedom of expression & religious liberty in our country. After the war, Phil Graham was even more national security conscious than before. ", "Washington City Paper has made me feel like I am part of the D.C. He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. Jovanovich caved, then pulped. @robin.webb.100. You cant go. By June 17th, thanks to his national editor, Ben Bagdikian, he had his own set of papers. 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. As is true of any royal visit, there were many logistical problems to be worked out. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. For years, Katharine witnessed her husbands violent mood swingshis periods of heavy drinking, his bizarre behavior, his prolonged depressions. She attended the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia, one of the few girls schools intent on training young women for a career. 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 begun writing so-called light editorials and laying out parts of the editorial page. She was a woman of inchoate ambitionan ambition that took the shape mainly of ambitious friendships and painfully comic intellectual pretensions. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. The interview had been heady stuff. Youve never known anything., I cant say I think Mother genuinely loved us, she writes. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. 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