He left no note of any kind. 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. But even this was hard to understand. He loved me, and I loved him. 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. Robin Webb. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. and he began an affair with a young Newsweek staffer, Robin Webb. We danced the twist -- or attempted to. 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. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. The book has been republished twice by small presses. 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. In later years, he wanted to mold the career of his friend Senator Lyndon Johnson. 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. Though Phil knew nothing about the newspaper business -- or any business, for that matter -- his brains and abilities served him well. On Aug. 3, having apparently made noticeable improvements, he convinced doctors to let him take a retreat to the Virginia farmhouse. Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. journalism. 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. But that did not mean she was strong in all things. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. At about the same time, she was on a cross-country flight and ran into Senator Bob Dole, who was then working as chairman and chief hatchet man for the Republican National Committee. He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world. Phil suffered from numerous illnesses, increasingly so as the years went by. But hurry, she said. Robin Webb. The second week in February, he called me at work late one afternoon suggesting that we have dinner at Harvey's, a famous old seafood restaurant next door to the Mayflower, where we could buy the early edition of The Post. . After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. My father had said that he himself was too old to let Phil work his way up. The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivalling only Gone with the Wind in circulation and Portnoys Complaint for indecency, Colson said. 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. Another habit of his that emerged during those years was that, when we were with friends and I was talking, he would look at me in such a way that I felt I was going on too long and boring people. Before making speeches, she shook with terror; in the face of unsettling news, she had the unfortunate habit of breaking down in tears. Phil received the larger share of the stock because, as Dad explained to me, no man should be in the position of working for his wife. robin webb phil graham photos Coach Thomas returned to Servite in January of 2018 after coaching at his alma mater, Crespi from 2012-2017. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. So does her imperious carriage. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. All right, she told Bradlee on the telephone, in the midst of a reception at her house, with the Posts lawyer counselling caution in her free ear. In October 1962, Phil accepted an invitation from President Kennedy to serve as an incorporator of the Communications Satellite Corp., known as COMSAT, with the understanding that he would be elected to head it. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Philip Leslie "Phil" Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American newspaper publisher. She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. All around was the loud mewing of big cats and small children. Graham supported Eisenhower in 1952 and, in the service of that support, censored the work of his greatest star, the cartoonist Herblock, in the last two weeks of the campaign. After the honeymoon, we settled into our little house, which we rented for $80 a month in a pleasant neighborhood called Burleith. In the beginning, even Richard Nixon got the same treatment. It was a fleeting, mystifying moment, but a very real one. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? My limousine driver had been given strict instructionsand a sizable bribeto wait outside in case of emergency. On Oct. 28, in the middle of the night, he broke. And, under Bradlees urging, she began spending the money necessary to create, among other things, a first-rate foreign staff. 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. At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. Finally, Otis and some other men got him to his room. Her story was not easy to figure out. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. With time, Katharine was becoming more and more troubled, less and less secure. 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. Phil Graham maintained Meyer's intimacy with power. Katharine Grahams establishment position on the war did not go unnoticed. Then He Tested Positive for COVID. You cant go. Robin Webb. Katharine Graham revealed in her 1997 autobiography Personal History (which her biographer Deborah Davis reviewed for Washington City Paper) that she felt her husband received inadequate treatment at Chestnut Lodge, going so far as to say that his condition required electroshock therapy. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. I did not go to help you. In addition, Farber believed that labeling something, giving a name to a disorder, changed how the patient viewed himself and was viewed by those around him. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. 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. As I began to lead the way down the steps, a bus-size babushkathe usherfixed me with a hard look and said, Nelzya. Impossible. 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. I felt he finally had doctors who were treating a real and known illness. 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. She attended the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia, one of the few girls schools intent on training young women for a career. Kennedy went back to his headquarters and, according to Arthur Schlesinger in "Robert Kennedy and His Times," told Bobby, "You just won't believe it. . He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. Hockey But although I was thoroughly fascinated and charmed by Phil, I was also slightly resentful, when I thought about it, at feeling such complete dependence on another person. The Young Publisher, In many ways, Phil was at his very best as a publisher in these years. Week after week, the leading figures of the Nixon Administration lambasted Graham and the Post for the Watergate stories. Phil's involvement in the whole matter -- besides pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship -- began in earnest in July, when he invited {civil rights lawyer} Joe Rauh to our farm in Virginia, Glen Welby. Not only did Phil own the majority of the stock but he also believed that his efforts as publisher entitled him to ownership. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. I was charmed and dazzled. Young & Hungry 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. 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. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. His friends are, for the most part, not especially famous. Performance/Dance the tiny fringe of arrogant litists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world. The fact is, though, that two days after making that statement Colson talked to Howard Hunt about the need to supply more financial help to the defendants in the Watergate trial. Curiously, I not only concurred but was in complete accord with this idea.. 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. Under Ochs, the Times institutionalized the notion of nonpartisan, objective reporting. After a hurricane struck in 1926, the sugar company gave up and his father developed a dairy business on some of the land. Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. Two years later, the Grahams took control of the Post Company stock. 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. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. At one point, he wanted to fire the highly respected editorial writer Alan Barth, who had dared to defend the right of Earl Browder, the former secretary-general of the Communist Party in America, not to name names before a Senate subcommittee. It proceeds from my belief that the editors and reporters have fulfilled the highest standards of professional duty and responsibility.. Telling his father about the marriage proved difficult. Its hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. He even got the patients to take a vote among themselves. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. Facebook gives people the power to share. . Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. View the profiles of people named Robin Graham. 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.). Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. 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. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. The next step in the battle for civil rights was on. It's hard to describe my devastation after my discovery of the affair. 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. This was not entirely to the good. After the war, Phil Graham was even more national security conscious than before. The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. Phil also wanted Frank Stanton, still CBS president, to become COMSAT's president and operating head. Pretty soon this kind of thinkingindeed, this kind of lifetook its toll: most of us became somehow inferior. It was incredibly exciting. He said he felt trapped, no longer able to go on; that everything was black. He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of The Washington Post. He was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk the following year for Felix Frankfurter, his mentor from Harvard Law School. Then I lied. 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 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}. There were moments of strain between us, mostly when he drank too much, after which -- almost inevitably -- a rather violent quarrel would ensue, followed by abject apologies and diminished drinking, or even a temporary period of no drinking at all. He was a manic-depressive. 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). Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. 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. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. Facebook. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. 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. Then Mrs. Graham started past it. 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. At one meeting with L.B.J. One doctor told a friend later, "Phil was determined to get out and really was unbelievably masterful in his ability to manipulate people." Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. Phil firmly stated his intention to divorce me and marry Robin. Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. Dr. Phil and Wife Robin Live in a Sprawling Mansion! 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. As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. When she suggested to the Newsweek editors that it might be a good idea to hire Aline Saarinen, of the Times, to edit the back of the book, they brushed the suggestion off, saying that the closings were too late, that the physical demands of the job would be too much. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. Phil also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality. The moment of happiness you gave me is more help than most people are given in a lifetime, Thank you for it. Indeed, the paper was still struggling for its life. All that was mostly over now, though I tried to be with them as much as possible. This is not the sort of moment one could hope to find in the self-examination of Andrew Carnegie or Colonel McCormick, much less of Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch. Circumstances seemed to conspire in challenging Graham. Phil, Kennedy said, when you get elected dogcatcher I will listen to you on politics. But in fact Kennedy had listened to him. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. She was in a good mood. . To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. But he always insisted that we lead our own lives. Following the lead of my successful colleague the Latin-American correspondent, I tried to schedule every minute of the two days allotted me. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". . "We have worked out this solution: we'll live in the sort of house, have the sort of furniture, eat the sort of food, go to the sort of places, that young people making salaries like mine can afford.". Page Three They met earlier that year. Moreover, Graham was acutely sensitive about the image of the Post as a liberal newspaper and, as a result, had chosen a law firm with close connections to the Republican Party; not surprisingly, Grahams lawyers urged her to delay publishing or not to publish at all. He loved me, and I loved him. 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. I hadnt realized that the Post wasnt perfectly okay.). She had not thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children, Graham writes. In the late nineteen-fifties, Phil Grahams health and behavior also presented increasingly difficult problemsproblems that might have been solved with medication, if he had not refused it. 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. 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. 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.. The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. Eugene Meyer had bought the Washington Post at auction for eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in 1933, and in 1946 he made Phil its publisher. Local Dining Guide, City Lights 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. 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. 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. Phil Graham was forty-eight when he died. Tomorrow: Watergate. Renewed Activity. It happens to be a beautiful Destiny and I shall be there while it is beautiful and while it is not. He remained seriously depressed but seemed to me to be quite noticeably better, even after only a week or so at Chestnut Lodge. 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