We don't have one. So does her imperious carriage. But, if he does, the decisions should not be as hard for him as they were for Katharine Graham. That was some circus! She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. Her gesture in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him, she writes. If one compares the approach of the liberal media (the Post, the Times, etc.) 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. Robin Webb. 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. It was very much in Felix's nature, and he was dealing with two men -- Phil and Joe -- to whom he was as close as though they were his sons. 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. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. The whole strategy for going for voting rights was inspired -- the idea for which Phil was the architect. . ~ Gambling. Robin Webb. 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. At dinner that night, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. 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. The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. 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. So did Meg Greenfield. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was an analyst heavily into existential psychology. Privacy Policy Eugene served Agnes breakfast in bed every morning; he ate at the bedside table. After we had lunched as long as we could, someone suggested driving to the country, and we spent the afternoon there. Graham heard him. 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. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. 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. I did not go to help you. . Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. At one meeting with L.B.J. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. Page Three 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. Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. 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. It introduced him to Felix Frankfurter. The area was still a wilderness. Nonetheless, Phil was the fizz in our lives. Kennedy went back to his headquarters and, according to Arthur Schlesinger in "Robert Kennedy and His Times," told Bobby, "You just won't believe it. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, Phil saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. Born Katharine Meyer on June 16, 1917, in New York City; died on July 17, 2001, in Idaho; daughter of Eugene Meyer (owner of . I also think that he realized the illness would recur. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. 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. When the plane landed in Washington, he was taken first to George Washington University Hospital and later to Chestnut Lodge, a private mental hospital in a suburb of Washington. in 1964, in his bedroom, she sat in an armchair while the President lay down on the bed. Mixing Politics. Only 15 years later, when things were very bad, did I look at the situation ruefully. Baseball Moreover, Graham was acutely sensitive about the image of the Post as a liberal newspaper and, as a result, had chosen a law firm with close connections to the Republican Party; not surprisingly, Grahams lawyers urged her to delay publishing or not to publish at all. Following the lead of my successful colleague the Latin-American correspondent, I tried to schedule every minute of the two days allotted me. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. The deal took only about three weeks from beginning to end, during which time he slept very little and rode a high crest, working feverishly to get it done. In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. He wants it.". Both were full of humor -- with an edge. His remarks quickly degenerated, turning into nonsense interspersed with ugly language. To a reporter, and especially a reporter in 1996, there doesnt seem to be a need to make any decision at all. I think he felt he'd done such harm the last time around that he just couldn't deal with it, couldn't fix everything. Young & Hungry between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. Katharine knew that her husband and her old way of life were lost to her, but, fearful though she was of confrontation and of Williams, she was determined to fight for the paper. On a second trip in December, Graham described Webb on his official schedule as "Newsweek reporter and temporary personal shopper, tour director, and femme de chambre for our group." Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. . Suddenly, an enormous claw lunged out of the box and toward the innocent calf of the chairman of the Washington Post Company. In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. Join Facebook to connect with Robin Graham and others you may know. {But a fight was unnecessary. Jovanovich caved, then pulped. We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children. Basketball 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. In the midst of the crisis, she wrote to Ehrlichman, saying, What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. @robin.webb.100. Someone -- I've never been sure who -- reached President Kennedy, who agreed to the use of a government plane to transport the doctors to get Phil. Graham also had a hand in the appointments of no less than three more friends to the Kennedy administration, including then-Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. 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. The most imposing woman in journalism delivers an unexpectedly confessional autobiography. You are stuck with me as a mascot repeat mascot. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. 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. So much of his life flowed from the year as president of the Law Review. She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. 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 hadnt realized that the Post wasnt perfectly okay.). Tenants in Rent-Controlled Units Could See as Much as 8.9 Percent Increases, The Cranky Redskins Fans Guide to Dan Snyder. 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 never really meant it when he spent weeks vilifying the Times for bias, he told Katharine Q. This is a surprising piece of work on every level. We grew less able to keep up with what was happening in the world. . It wasn't until years later that I looked at the downside of all this and realized that, perversely, I had seemed to enjoy the role of doormat wife. The next step in the battle for civil rights was on. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Hockey Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. I believe that Phil came to the sad conclusion that he would never again lead a normal life. 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. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? Its hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. 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. Katharine Grahams establishment position on the war did not go unnoticed. For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. All around was the loud mewing of big cats and small children. One did not want to spend the remainder of ones career taste-testing lima beans. She is a Valkyrian type with something elsea mixture of Valkyrie and Juno., Agness ambitions were fuelled by resentment of her station as a wife and mother. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. He remained seriously depressed but seemed to me to be quite noticeably better, even after only a week or so at Chestnut Lodge. See Photos. He ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndon's contact lenses. Sure, we can go, I ventured, but the second act has some really great animals. I began to describe Misha the Bear, who wore skates on his hind paws and played ice hockey. The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. It proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.. He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world. If there are any smart literary agents around these days, one of them will copyright the title The Breaking of the President, the piece said, for it is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon B. Johnsons authority in 1968 are out to break Richard M. Nixon in 1969.. 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. On an August afternoon, Phil and Katharine went together to their farm, Glen Welby: We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. 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 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 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. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next days edition of Pravda. John Ehrlichman, Ronald Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself all charged the Post with disloyalty. 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. Agnes was perennially engaged in writing books-in-progress. 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,. Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. On Nov. 2, I flew up to Idlewild Airport with Phil to see him off to Europe, where he was going to talk to Larry Norstad. At dinner at Joseph Alsops one night early in 1961, Graham continually offered political advice to the new President, John Kennedy. Gradually, I became the drudge and, whats more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} See Photos. D.C. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. Local Activists Work With Falls Church City Council To Reinvest In Eden Center. Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. . 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