He kept questioning whether this was the reason for his success and his prominence. Even now I cant sort out my feelings about this; its hard to separate what was a function of Phils terrible affliction, which manifested itself only later, and what was more basic. 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 cannot tell you how pained I am by the circumstances which have caused you, quite unnecessarily, distress and concern, Jovanovich wrote in a cowering letter to Mrs. Graham. Simple Pleasures. Then I lied. Sometimes you become friends with people with whom you work because of some common interest or just because you have to work together. That Christmas Eve afternoon, the world I had known and loved ended for me. Also, it was part of my bafflement at what I saw as Phil's increasingly strange behavior. He wanted Estes Kefauver to head an anticrime commission and told him so, repeatedly, until Kefauver did it. For the first time I had found a man who was that right mix of intellectual, physical, and social charm, and warm and funny on top of that. And yet his periods of lucidity and humor, of lively intelligence, were frequent enough to confuse her and delay any sense of reckoning. 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. Graham was born to a Lutheran family in Terry, South Dakota. {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. Robin Webb. Phil and my mother also got along well. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. 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. 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. 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 Harrison Webb. 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.. Phil also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality. 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. She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. Soon Phil began telling his friends that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Robin Webb. As enormous cages and nets were being assembled in the circus ring, she declared, I think its time to go.. She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. The talent level in the newsroom began to shift, and so did the culture of the place. 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. He wept and wept and couldn't stop. 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 he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. See Photos. Local Activists Work With Falls Church City Council To Reinvest In Eden Center. She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. 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. Graham, Katharine (1917-2001) American newspaper publisher who guided the Washington Post through its most turbulent period when it published the "Pentagon Papers" and investigated the Watergate affair. In early 1963, Phil's condition became public. But, if he does, the decisions should not be as hard for him as they were for Katharine Graham. Katharines mother, Agnes Meyer, was descended from Lutheran ministers. He was intent, however, on making his mark in public life as well as on the stock exchange. Robin Webb. The babushka melted. Robin Webb. At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. In fact, Graham played a significant role in convincing JFK to appoint Johnson to the vice presidency instead of Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. . Openings Felix adopted Phil as one of his "boys" before he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court. . Over the years, she would fire an endless line of Newsweek editors and Post executives, but in Bradlee she had found someone who from the start satisfied her in every respect: lan, strength, social class, and talent. She rebuffed Norman O. Browns invitation to join the Communist Party. She once took the time to introduce her friend the architect I. M. Pei to Agnes. I didnt think much about it at the time, but this was the beginning of a pattern that I can see now was quite unhealthy. I felt close to history. Phil was born in 1915 in . Seelye. It all seems so odd in retrospect. 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. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. 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. You cant go. I was earning about $1,500 a year. 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. 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. Page Three 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. For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. Robin Webb. 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. Phil Grahams world had been the world of the powerful, and his widow did not want to offend its leading members. 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. He left no note of any kind. 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. I found him captivating. This article is adapted from the forthcoming book "Personal History" by Katharine Graham, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. There was, of course, no way to press the point. If one compares the approach of the liberal media (the Post, the Times, etc.) 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. 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. As a publisher, Don Graham may never face a pair of crises as critical as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. They both loved power and its use for what they thought of as desirable purposes. He told me that he loved me and said we would be married and go to Florida, if I could live with only two dresses, because I had to understand that he would never take anything from my father and we would live on what he made. At the end of the day, everyone except Phil Graham and me had engagements, so he asked if I wanted to have dinner. For whatever reason, I liked to be dominated and to be the implementer. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. Her gesture in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him, she writes. . While publisher of the Post, he grew so close to L.B.J. To get a sense of how momentous were Katharine Grahams two decisions in the nineteen-seventieson the Pentagon Papers and Watergateit is crucial to understand just how poorly she had been prepared for such decisions by her family, her legendary husband, and the atmosphere in which she had always lived. Facebook gives people the power to. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. It was incredibly exciting. At once he became my father's close collaborator. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from New York, and naturally we were talking about Phil. 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 told him I had the feeling that he thought my point of view was different from Phils, but that in general Phil and I had agreed. Curie. He was really a. 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. It was with Felix that Phil entered the world of great minds, ideas and books, stimulating conversation, and above all an interest in current events. Robin Webb. 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. 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. Phil and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. 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. 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. City Desk He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). It introduced him to Felix Frankfurter. This is a surprising piece of work on every level. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. It was plain white crpe with slate-colored beads around the neck and the sleeves. The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. 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. Perhaps if the turmoil had ended there he might have been able to rest and get his strength back. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. . Olympic Sports, Savage Love 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.) 318 Robin Webb Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE Collections Project #ShowUs Creative Insights EDITORIAL VIDEO BBC Motion Gallery NBC News Archives MUSIC BLOG BROWSE PRICING ENTERPRISE VisualGPS INSIGHTS BOARDS CART SIGN IN Images Images Creative Editorial Video Creative Editorial FILTERS CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. Profile. By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. D.C. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. Nobody knew what to do. Whoops! My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. After the war, Phil Graham was even more national security conscious than before. His health, already frail, was affected physically and mentally. Privacy Policy In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. 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. After a hurricane struck in 1926, the sugar company gave up and his father developed a dairy business on some of the land. 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. and mass movements aimed at breaking the President. Eventually, the debate over the war led to a shift in the editorial pagethe conservative Russell Wiggins was replaced by the more liberal Philip Geyelinbut the Post never completely distinguished itself on Vietnam. . District Line Daily: Our news, politics, arts, food, and sports coverage in one email every weekday. Tomorrow: Watergate. Truitt, an intimate of the Grahams whomBen Bradlee would later force to resign, committed suicide himself in 1981, still despondent over his treatment at the newspaper after Philips death. Oh, you know, he said, during a campaign they put these things in your hands and you just read them. (Dole admitted the same to a Times reporter after the 1996 campaign. On the first great story of her era as publisherthe war in Vietnamthe Posts performance was nearly an embarrassment. 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. Phil remained loyal to Johnson until he lost the bid for the nomination. Facebook gives people the power to share. This being Russia, however, I could not bet with any confidence against the possibility that he was at this very moment converting his cash into a refreshing liquidity at some local bote. Katharine Graham, the general secretary of the Washington Post Company, and a planeload of senior editors would soon arrive in town to conduct it. 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. . When a young woman named Deborah Davis published a biography in 1979 called Katharine the Great, Mrs. Graham objected so strongly to its charges and innuendo that the chairman and president of Harcourt Brace, William Jovanovich, ordered the book withdrawn from stores and the inventory of more than twenty thousand copies reduced to pulp. Like many members of his class and generation, his postwar view was shaped by his work in wartime intelligence; a classic Cold War liberal, he was uncomfortable with McCarthy, but quite friendly with the personnel and policies of the CIA. . 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 was already committed to Kennedy. Mrs. Graham, for her part, wrote back to him, I was full of admiration anyway for what you did and the way you did it. In the end, Davis sued her publisher for libel and breach of contract in 1982 and received a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . I was charmed and dazzled. I felt he finally had doctors who were treating a real and known illness. 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. 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. Coronavirus, Carry-out Critic 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. At last, we could begin to believe that The Post was here to stay. Gradually, I ceased talking much at all when we were out together. She felt like Trilby to his Svengali; she felt as if he had created her, that she was totally dependent. All around was the loud mewing of big cats and small children. If you think that it's important to have high quality local reporting we hope you'll support our work with a monthly contribution. Grahams father had had trouble coming up with the funds to send him to Harvard Law, but managed to do so. Eugene served Agnes breakfast in bed every morning; he ate at the bedside table. . 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. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? Probably the greatest debate the paper must face, both in the newsroom and as a story, is the divide between black and white. Join Facebook to connect with Robin H Webb and others you may know. (I had a French dressa Balmain design, copied at Bergdorf Goodman, she writes. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Philip L. Graham. Basketball After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. But, always, it was he who decided and I who responded. We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. 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. 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. Perhaps it was true. Katharine, by her own account and in the accounts of others, was a tall and awkward girl with a manly stride, but she was also intelligent, and she absorbed the lessons of her social class well. "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. Then, in June 1946, President Truman called and asked my father to become the first president of the World Bank. I also think that he realized the illness would recur. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. Having Phil back was a tremendous -- and tremendously complicated -- relief. I did not go because I did not want to help you. Facebook. . In college at the University of Florida, Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub gin. Tenants in Rent-Controlled Units Could See as Much as 8.9 Percent Increases, The Cranky Redskins Fans Guide to Dan Snyder. 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