One did not want to spend the remainder of ones career taste-testing lima beans. Page Three The mask was made to match, also at Bergdorfs, by Halston, who was then still making hats.) Graham considered the ball a kind of coming out for a middle-aged debutante. But in Pete Hamills column in the New York Post she was suddenly Marie Antoinette. He loved me, and I loved him. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. . She went ahead with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and she backed her reporters and editors during Watergate, when the Post Companys survival was under threat and the paper was all alone in pursuing the story. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. Books Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose The Post. . In his first, brief tenure at The Post, Ben Bradlee was deeply distressed by the side of Phil that used the paper to achieve his political purposes, however worthy. In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male, and since my brother was in medicine and had shown little or no interest in the business, my father naturally thought of Phil. In the midst of the crisis, she wrote to Ehrlichman, saying, What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Gradually, I became the drudge and, whats more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. There is no doubt that the vast majority of reporters at papers like the Post are themselves more liberal than the general population: a recent poll showed that eighty-nine per cent of Washington-based correspondents voted for Clinton in 1992. Only 15 years later, when things were very bad, did I look at the situation ruefully. The End. Beer At once he became my father's close collaborator. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. Almost pathetically, he asked not to go back to Chestnut Lodge. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. 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. Please reload the page and try again. I began keeping a little accounts book, dutifully noting every penny spent, including the cost of gas and oil for the car, stamps, groceries, even our personal allowances, which were $9 each per week. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next days edition of Pravda. Katharine Graham, the general secretary of the Washington Post Company, and a planeload of senior editors would soon arrive in town to conduct it. He would help me proofread. He came to Washington in 1917 as a dollar-a-year man for the Wilson Administration; and, while he was holding a variety of positions on the War Industries Board, the Farm Loan Board, and the Federal Reserve Board, the Meyers became friendly with Bernard Baruch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Evans Hughes. When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, Phil saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs. Graham, and a hundred dollars. Liz at Large The book has been republished twice by small presses. We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. You cant go. He never really meant it when he spent weeks vilifying the Times for bias, he told Katharine Q. 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. Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper.. Facebook gives people the power to share. At that point, Phil got together with {columnist} Joe Alsop to discuss the merits of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy's running mate. Nobody knew what to do. Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. As I began to lead the way down the steps, a bus-size babushkathe usherfixed me with a hard look and said, Nelzya. Impossible. All rights reserved. In one case, there were 200 whites arrayed against an equal number of blacks -- with Park Police on horses in the middle. 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. If you have the goods, you say, Screw it, and publish. At one meeting with L.B.J. Some companies thought the Post such a potentially profitable property, and Graham such an unlikely figure to run it, that they came to her with offers to buy it. He committed suicide that day. Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. The pressures were enormous and her preparations for them slight. 243 replies 897 retweets 2,932 likes Robin Webb Retweeted For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. In the end, Joe and his like-minded friends bought Phil's argument that this bill was better than nothing. The Grahams ran their rather expensive household out of Katharines trust fund; meanwhile, Meyer gave Phil nearly three times as many shares of Post stock as he gave his daughter. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. 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. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. 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. Probably the greatest debate the paper must face, both in the newsroom and as a story, is the divide between black and white. Phil and my mother also got along well. 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. Phil suffered from numerous illnesses, increasingly so as the years went by. 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.. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. But hurry, she said. Here was someone who combined for me the two parts of my life that I thought were inescapably separate. Born: 18-Jul-1915 Birthplace: Terry, SD Died: 3-Aug-1963 Location of death: Marshall, VA Cause of death: Suicide . Indeed, the paper was still struggling for its life. Everything except Phil's personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father. Post vice president James Truitt arranged with Kennedy to send Air Force 2 to retrieve Graham, who checked in for the first of two brief stays at Chestnut Lodge, then a leading psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Md., that has since burned down. Having Phil back was a tremendous -- and tremendously complicated -- relief. Renewed Activity. 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. It is hard to remember now just how far in front the Times was after the Second World War. Latest news and commentary on Robin Webb including photos, videos, quotations, and a biography. You are stuck with me as a mascot repeat mascot. Grahams father had had trouble coming up with the funds to send him to Harvard Law, but managed to do so. See Photos. 1952) Mistress: Robin Webb (Newsweek journalist, 1962) High School: Miami High School, Miami, FL After Robert Opel dashed naked across the stage in 1974, he ran for President and settled into the gay leather scene, in the orbit of Robert Mapplethorpe and Harvey Milk. 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. ), 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. 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. It was incredibly exciting. 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. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. See Photos. She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. On the first great story of her era as publisherthe war in Vietnamthe Posts performance was nearly an embarrassment. . Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. It proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.. 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 would be lucky to cover high-school softball in Prince William County. . He replied, Oh, yes, very. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. We now had the morning field in Washington to ourselves. Telling his father about the marriage proved difficult. Bradlee was incensed, and said so in terms both loud and profane. Facebook. The only other inhabitants were Seminole Indians. Soon Phil began telling his friends that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Robin Webb. 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. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. 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. His anxiety as a son-in-law was in place before the wedding vows. Katharine Graham is now seventy-nine, and the Post is in the hands of her son Donald, who is fifty-one. She did not have to. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.. . I would be recalled to the home office. My God! she said, covering her pearls with the tips of her fingers. 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. Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. So, on June 18, 1946, The Post announced that my father was withdrawing from active direction of the paper. Film/TV I went because it was my Destiny. He wants it.". Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. 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. 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, Va., and committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. But he always insisted that we lead our own lives. This was in 1988, and I had recently been assigned to the Washington Posts bureau in Moscow. Her name is Katherine Meyer and I've not a doubt in the world that you'll love her. . In 1966, Truman Capote, her neighbor at the U.N. Plaza, where she kept a New York apartment, threw his famous Black-and-White costume ball for her. 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. Advertisement. 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}. 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. 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. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. Agnes was perennially engaged in writing books-in-progress. He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. . So, although he remained fairly liberal on domestic issues, he was not so on foreign policy. Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. 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. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). He was simply not interested in the Times ideal so much as he was in making the Post a player in Washington and, perhaps more, in being a player himself. Katharine, born in New York in 1917, was baptized when she was ten to satisfy the Lutheran side of the family; to satisfy the demands of class, the Meyers had their own pew at St. Johns Episcopal Church, on Lafayette Squarethe presidents church (Katharine did not seem to realize she was part Jewish until she was at Vassar.) His most passionate political interests are local. That was some circus! I didn't hear the term "manic-depression" until some years later. Money, my fathers being Jewish, and sex were taboo subjects at home. 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. He counterbalanced my ingrown resistance to new and different ideas, and to people with whom I didn't agree politically. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. Philip Graham was publisher and later co-owner of The Washington Post. See Photos. My father had said that he himself was too old to let Phil work his way up. So did Meg Greenfield. She had not thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children, Graham writes. Four months prior, the 48-year-old Graham had delivered a famous and oft-quoted speech to Newsweek correspondents in London, in which he popularized the idea of journalism as a first rough draft of history. (Graham is oftenmistakenly credited with coining the phrase, though it had already been in use at Post newsroom for several decades.). 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