Curie. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. The talent level in the newsroom began to shift, and so did the culture of the place. Gear Prudence Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. And yet his periods of lucidity and humor, of lively intelligence, were frequent enough to confuse her and delay any sense of reckoning. and he began an affair with a young Newsweek staffer, Robin Webb. . 2023 Cond Nast. From Sioux Falls, Phil and Robin flew to Phoenix, where many of the nation's most prominent publishers were gathered for a meeting of the Associated Press. ", Early Thursday morning, Kennedy called Johnson, waking him up and making an appointment to see him a little later. See Photos. 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. Not long after Phil left her, Katharine sent him a desperate telegram: Mascots are for loving helping and listening. My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones, she writes. But I want you to know I am among the many people in this country who believe in you and are behind you with trust and devotion.. Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration. ), 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. During the 1988 visit to Moscow, I remember, Mrs. Graham said that perhaps she ought to telephone Nancy and tell her about the lengths that the Kremlin was going to in preparing for an imminent summit. He loved me, and I loved him. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. She'd been told that Harvard was the best, so her dying wish was that he go there. Joe persuaded Phil to accompany him to urge Kennedy to offer the vice-presidency to Johnson. Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down . Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. Suddenly, an enormous claw lunged out of the box and toward the innocent calf of the chairman of the Washington Post Company. Olympic Sports, Savage Love So, although he remained fairly liberal on domestic issues, he was not so on foreign policy. 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. At dinner at Joseph Alsops one night early in 1961, Graham continually offered political advice to the new President, John Kennedy. 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. He and his girlfriend flew to Phoenix to attend a meeting of The Associated Press. Agnes was perennially engaged in writing books-in-progress. But then Mrs. Graham was laughing. Loose Lips He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. They were both from the South. 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. He was married to Katharine Graham, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of The Washington Post. I had visions of that fellow in the balloon, high above the plain, floating into journalistic obscurity, so I did what one cannot ordinarily do with a babushka. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. Robin Webb. For nearly all Post reporters and editors, even those few who ventured to call her Kay, she was the woman who signed our checks, the Queen Mother, a cartoon figure with a lockjaw voice that sounded, to us, like money. View the profiles of people named Robin Webb. If we should ever meet again, I would like to tell you some of my thoughts on what I have come to recognize as a kind of editorial blackmail, in which persons say that if you reject a work. Facebook. Her obeisance was institutional and political, not merely personal. (The Meyers had five children, of whom Katharine was the fourth.) Mumble Sauce, About Us Katharine Grahams establishment position on the war did not go unnoticed. There was, of course, no way to press the point. 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. 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. Katharine saw her parents only sparingly. 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. . He even got the patients to take a vote among themselves. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". 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. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. Advertise with Us, Sponsored Posts from our Partners One doctor told a friend later, "Phil was determined to get out and really was unbelievably masterful in his ability to manipulate people." Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. But then, at intermission, she seemed to tire. Courtesy photo Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the summer 2019 edition of. Beer Local Dining Guide, City Lights The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. 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. After the war, Phil Graham was even more national security conscious than before. 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. Phil called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. 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. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. . Without Graham working as a go-between at the 1960 Democratic Convention, Kennedy might never have picked Johnson as his running mate. District Line Daily: Our news, politics, arts, food, and sports coverage in one email every weekday. In an otherwise blissful spring of journalistic overload, a time when the merest cough in the Kremlin merited front-page attention, it came about that the Post and its sister publication, Newsweek, were being awarded a plum: an interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party. I would be lucky to cover high-school softball in Prince William County. His most passionate political interests are local. See Photos . Soccer With time, Katharine was becoming more and more troubled, less and less secure. Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. Baseball The Post pursued Watergate as a news story, not as an ideological crusade. 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. Around the table in Phil's office sat Secretary of the Interior Julius "Cap" Krug, Undersecretary Oscar Chapman, President Truman's special adviser Clark Clifford, and two or three others. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. I never should have gone, she said. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. On Oct. 28, in the middle of the night, he broke. My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. In meeting after meeting, in Washington and New York, she was the only woman in the room, and not a self-confident one at that. 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. As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. Robin Lee Graham is seen on his boat "Dove" during his solo trip around the world in the late 1960s. Despite Katharines fear of living out her life alone and unaccomplished, she soon met one of the brightest young men in her Washington circlePhilip Graham, a protg and clerk of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. The Formative Years. Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me. 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. . Not only did Phil own the majority of the stock but he also believed that his efforts as publisher entitled him to ownership. 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. After much talk, consultation, and soul-searching, Phil finally decided to accept. 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. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice. So does her imperious carriage. The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. The appearance of this messenger, a Newsweek stringer whose name was Robin Webb, was the beginning of the tragic end. That was some circus! Everything except Phil's personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father. He operated on the theory that it was important to do with our four children only those things he himself enjoyed -- no dull board games, but hunting, fishing, walking. ~ Gambling. Perhaps if the turmoil had ended there he might have been able to rest and get his strength back. In effect [Bill and Steve] lost both parents at once. Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. 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.. At Vassar and at the University of Chicago, Katherine took an interest in left-wing politics, which were very much in the air, but always her sense and her sense of breeding prevented her from taking what seemed like extreme steps. Weymouth's brother, Stephen Graham,. But that did not mean she was strong in all things. The car, at least, was waiting and its driver was sober. Latest news and commentary on Robin Webb including photos, videos, quotations, and a biography. All around was the loud mewing of big cats and small children. (One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the Posts editorial quality. It's hard to describe my devastation after my discovery of the affair. . Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. friends for the Aegean cruise. 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. Phil viewed this whole sequence of events, with some reason, as a violation of his rights and civil liberties. The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures. I told her that this woman, this very important woman, was gravely ill and in need of immediate medical attention. Nobody knew what to do. But hurry, she said. We grew less able to keep up with what was happening in the world. 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. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? 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. . 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. 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. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. Im not sure she was ever really able to. 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. All rights reserved. By 1968, reporting and editorials on Vietnam by Ward Just and a few others helped change the atmosphere of reverence on the pages of the Post, and that change had its effect on the thinking of the publisherso strong an effect that when the Times, thanks to Neil Sheehan and his source, Daniel Ellsberg, began printing the Pentagon Papers, on June 13, 1971, Bradlee felt wounded, and, with Grahams encouragement, pushed his staff to find its own copy of the documents. For all his seeming irreverence and liberality, Phil Graham was no less domineering than any other husband of his day: Always, it was he who decided and I who responded. He was quite a success. I would not insist that Moscow was short on luxury in those days except to note that I did not so much find a hairdresser as create one. 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. Please reload the page and try again. Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. . Advertisement. 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. I remember his commenting on how well Phil wrote and how much he'd like to have him work for The Washington Post. And by the same token, I would add that my continuing and genuine pride in the papers performance over the past few monthsthe period that seems to be at issuedoes not proceed from some sense that it has gratified my personal whim. He told me that he wanted to preserve our marriage and our family; he said that he loved Robin but would tell her the affair was over, and that he would stay with his family. 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. 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. On July 5, Johnson held a press conference at which he announced his candidacy. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. I have now gone. Here was someone who combined for me the two parts of my life that I thought were inescapably separate. And, under Bradlees urging, she began spending the money necessary to create, among other things, a first-rate foreign staff. She once took the time to introduce her friend the architect I. M. Pei to Agnes. City Lights: Your weekly guide to artsy goings-on, hitting your inbox Thursdays and Sundays. The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. Unlike Phil, I find it hard to express emotion. Facebook gives people the power to. I went because it was my Destiny. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. Health problems and death It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. Money, my fathers being Jewish, and sex were taboo subjects at home. . Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. 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. During this time, Robin's father Joseph studied physiotherapy so that he could administer it to his son. . In 1934, when Phil was 19, his mother died of cancer -- he later confessed that he had cried himself to sleep night after night in college. 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. Profile. Pretty soon this kind of thinkingindeed, this kind of lifetook its toll: most of us became somehow inferior. By 1906, Meyer had made several million dollars by investing in securities; by 1915, he was worth between forty and sixty million. I insisted. Liz at Large 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.
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