He even got the patients to take a vote among themselves. Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. Mann was once asked if Agnes was German. 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. 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. 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. In 1967, Katharine wrote a letter to Johnson (not quoted in the book) expressing enormous empathy: These times are so difficult that my heart bleeds for you. She pursued hard the company of the well known. AKA Philip Leslie Graham. We danced the twist -- or attempted to. Otis Chandler and his wife, Missy, met Phil and Robin at the airport. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. With time, Katharine was becoming more and more troubled, less and less secure. 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.) 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. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. The violence grew steadily. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. At one point, President Kennedy dispatched a Presidential plane to get him from Phoenix to Washington. 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. (The Meyers had five children, of whom Katharine was the fourth.) Phil remained loyal to Johnson until he lost the bid for the nomination. 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. . 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. Then I lied. Graham was one of four children. 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. The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer. She'd been told that Harvard was the best, so her dying wish was that he go there. The cost of failure was incalculable. . Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. Almost pathetically, he asked not to go back to Chestnut Lodge. ", Early Thursday morning, Kennedy called Johnson, waking him up and making an appointment to see him a little later. City Desk After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. His most passionate political interests are local. Mixing Politics. The year leading up to Grahams death was a turbulent one for him and his family. Theater But that did not mean she was strong in all things. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. 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. As is true of any royal visit, there were many logistical problems to be worked out. Graham was gambling every sort of inheritance that was important to her: the paper, her fortune, and, perhaps most important, the judgment of the ghosts who crowded around her. 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. you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. He knew everyone in the building, always taking on the problems of people who worked for him -- worrying over someone's sick child, unmet mortgage payment, health crisis. At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. I remember his commenting on how well Phil wrote and how much he'd like to have him work for The Washington Post. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. Her obeisance was institutional and political, not merely personal. I went because it was my Destiny. That. {But a fight was unnecessary. Mrs. 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. . Baseball Phil would be publisher in title and in fact. 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. Phil was clearly upset, too. In one case, there were 200 whites arrayed against an equal number of blacks -- with Park Police on horses in the middle. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. 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. He would help me proofread. By the way, Senator, I didnt say I hated Nixon, she told Dole. He wept and wept and couldn't stop. I had begun writing so-called light editorials and laying out parts of the editorial page. . 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. D.C. 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. There he was diagnosed with manic depression, a condition today known as bipolar disorder. . For her part, Katharine would go on to helm the Post, becoming its de facto publisher during the famed Watergate era and, in 1979, becoming the first woman to hold the title officially. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. It was not long before he began looking around town to buy a newspaper. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. Museums/Galleries Then He Tested Positive for COVID. The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. 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. In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. The only other inhabitants were Seminole Indians. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. I almost rather died!. Robin Webb. Graham was born to a Lutheran family in Terry, South Dakota. Gear Prudence And yet his periods of lucidity and humor, of lively intelligence, were frequent enough to confuse her and delay any sense of reckoning. We now had the morning field in Washington to ourselves. 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. 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. Robin . To a reporter, and especially a reporter in 1996, there doesnt seem to be a need to make any decision at all. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from New York, and naturally we were talking about Phil. See Photos . She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. On the first great story of her era as publisherthe war in Vietnamthe Posts performance was nearly an embarrassment. She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. He wanted Estes Kefauver to head an anticrime commission and told him so, repeatedly, until Kefauver did it. 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,. Her story was not easy to figure out. . I also think that he realized the illness would recur. Telling his father about the marriage proved difficult. 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. Phil's mother had discussed her desire that he go to law school. So does her imperious carriage. . As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. Phil was born in 1915 in Terry, S.D., and moved as a boy to the Everglades, where his father, Ernest Graham, was manager of a sugar cane plantation. "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down . Name variations: Kay Graham; Mrs. Phil Graham; Katharine Meyer. All rights reserved. With Webb, he traveled to a publishing convention in Phoenix and caused a stir when, taking the microphone in a manic state, he started talking about the alleged affairs of John F. Kennedy, with whom he had been closely associated for some time. His health, already frail, was affected physically and mentally. Simple Pleasures. . She was in a good mood. Despite Phil s constant self-flagellation about being the son-in-law of a rich and powerful clan, he did not shy from the advantages for long. This time, he saw his departure as final. And by now helping you I believe and I pray I shall help you. 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