The babushka melted. Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. This was not entirely to the good. On an early trip, he requested a secretary, and the bureau chief dispatched Robin Webb, a young Australian trying to make it as a journalist. 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. Books So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. Profile. She'd been told that Harvard was the best, so her dying wish was that he go there. He stormed the podium and berated Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. 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. There is still a vital distinction. . She once took the time to introduce her friend the architect I. M. Pei to Agnes. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. See Photos. CAPTION: Katharine and Phil Graham in 1962, left, after The Post purchased Artnews; above, from left, Phil's half brother Bob Graham -- now a U.S. senator from Florida -- Felix Frankfurter, Ernest Graham and Phil Graham in 1955; right, Phil Graham with John Kennedy on Cape Cod in 1961. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. {But a fight was unnecessary. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration. Dr. Phil and Wife Robin Live in a Sprawling Mansion! 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. Her name is Katherine Meyer and I've not a doubt in the world that you'll love her. in 1964, in his bedroom, she sat in an armchair while the President lay down on the bed. . The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. His health, already frail, was affected physically and mentally. The Post pursued Watergate as a news story, not as an ideological crusade. He was really a. I have now gone. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. D.C. 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. 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. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. Phil went to school in Miami. Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. Mixing Politics. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. The cost of failure was incalculable. But that did not mean she was strong in all things. (According to some accounts, Philip also threatened to divorce Katharine and marry Robin Webb, a Newsweek stringer with whom he'd been having an affair.) Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . It introduced him to Felix Frankfurter. The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. Robin Lee Graham is seen on his boat "Dove" during his solo trip around the world in the late 1960s. There was the Latin-American correspondent for the Post, who wandered the continent for weeks in advance, arranging hotel suites, hairdressers, and interviews with heads of state from Caracas to Tierra del Fuego. Liz at Large In my boyhood as a reporter, I nearly killed the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. Great risk was involved, or so one heard. After much talk, consultation, and soul-searching, Phil finally decided to accept. 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.. 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. Robin Webb. But what of it? This is a surprising piece of work on every level. He ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndon's contact lenses. 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. We danced the twist -- or attempted to. The story, of course, revealed nothing of Mrs. Graham. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. Early the next day, Phil and Larry in Paris both wrote letters to Stanton. I would be recalled to the home office. Phils greatest successes were in business: buying and absorbing the Times-Herald in 1954, purchasing Newsweek (for a song) in 1961, and making inroads against the dominant paper in town, the Evening Star (which folded in 1981). I almost rather died!. His remarks quickly degenerated, turning into nonsense interspersed with ugly language. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. Then I lied. 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. My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. I was charmed and dazzled. . . By early March 1961, Phil was involved in his old in-depth way with many activities -- political and Post Co.-related -- and he seemed to me to be enjoying himself. Under Philip Graham's management, the newspaper, thanks to its collaboration with the CIA, experienced an upswing and its empire expanded, including the purchase of the then-moribund Newsweek magazine [1] and other media properties. His friends are, for the most part, not especially famous. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. Name variations: Kay Graham; Mrs. Phil Graham; Katharine Meyer. 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. I never should have gone, she said. So does her imperious carriage. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. We were both up all night, with me trying desperately but to no avail to be of some reassuring help. Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. (I had a French dressa Balmain design, copied at Bergdorf Goodman, she writes. It wasnt 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. Grahamone always referred to her as Mrs. Graham, even in private and at great distancesdid not travel in the style of the British Raj, but she was not arriving on a Eurailpass, either.. I see nothing wrong with the fact that people in power often deal with others on more than one level, she writes. They both loved power and its use for what they thought of as desirable purposes. The car, at least, was waiting and its driver was sober. The only other inhabitants were Seminole Indians. 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. 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. My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. 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. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. 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. 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. Since Eisenhower was not very interested, except in theory, and was concentrating on his vacation golf games, there was a vacuum within the administration. 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. When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, Phil saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. . Finally, Otis and some other men got him to his room. The interview had been heady stuff. 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.). Work Here The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. Terms & Conditions He held onto his balance for only another month before his first major depression set in. 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. He kept questioning whether this was the reason for his success and his prominence. Graham was one of four children. Graham instructed Bradlee to recount what he had seen and heard, and after he had done so the publisher and the three officials worked out a deal: as long as all the city pools were shut down for the time being and would be integrated the following year, the paper would print nothing more of what had happened. 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. That was some circus! 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. 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. In England, she lunched with Harold Laski, but then went off to Salzburg to meet her mother, who treated us to the Hotel Bristol and tickets to the music festival there. While a friend went on to visit the socialist experiment in Moscow, Katharine, on the stern advice of her father, did not. Phil wasn't much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy -- so much so that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear. I had no understanding of the terrible depression he had gone through or the polar-opposite mood that was dominating him at the time. This arrangement was never an issue. Because of this, he never put a name to Phil's illness. ~ Gambling. The whole idea of buying Newsweek and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. He wept and wept and couldn't stop. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. There is plenty of material in Personal History to satisfy the most obvious expectationsall the familiar episodes of the Posts history are replayed, and famous faces bob into sight as if in a capital version of Grand Hotelbut more interesting is the degree to which this memoir is a description of the muggy intimacy of the world of Washington and the way one powerful woman learned to live her life there. . To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. Phil viewed this whole sequence of events, with some reason, as a violation of his rights and civil liberties. I hadnt realized that the Post wasnt perfectly okay.). 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. Phil suffered from numerous illnesses, increasingly so as the years went by. I rang her up and explained the situation. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Attention would have to be paid. But, always, it was he who decided and I who responded. Mumble Sauce, About Us Phil's mother had discussed her desire that he go to law school. On Oct. 28, in the middle of the night, he broke. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. But there are also relationships that start out that way yet cross over to become real friendships that last forever. Philip Leslie "Phil" Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American newspaper publisher. Mr. Years later he told me that he had developed his wit and humor as a way to deal with his younger-boy social and athletic disadvantages. . Phil asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. Olympic Sports, Savage Love . And he wanted many things. Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. In the midst of the crisis, she wrote to Ehrlichman, saying, What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. 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. 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. City Lights: Your weekly guide to artsy goings-on, hitting your inbox Thursdays and Sundays. . Even considering the style of rich American families in the early part of the century, her parents, Eugene and Agnes Meyer, seem to have exceeded the norm for emotional reticence. 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. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. Everything rotated around him, and I willingly participated in keeping him at the center of things. Having Phil back was a tremendous -- and tremendously complicated -- relief. Theater 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. He had left me for good, and it was almost more than I could bear. The pressures were enormous and her preparations for them slight. Why are Vladimir Putins opponents dying? A few days later, I was assigned to show her and her close friend Meg Greenfield, the Posts editorial-page editor, around the city that was then known as Leningrad. Film/TV 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 and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. community.". In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper.. In the summer of 1963, Phil seemed to be getting betterhe was undergoing treatment at a psychiatric center in Marylandand there was even hope of resuming a normal life at home. 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. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). He needed Joe's help because Joe had a solid relationship with the black leadership in the country, especially Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. robin webb phil graham photos Coach Thomas returned to Servite in January of 2018 after coaching at his alma mater, Crespi from 2012-2017. You've probably heard of her father, Eugene Meyer, who is now publisher of the Washington Post, and has been in the past such things as head of the Federal Reserve. . 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