Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. The moment of happiness you gave me is more help than most people are given in a lifetime, Thank you for it. There was, of course, no way to press the point. This time, he saw his departure as final. 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. To help Phil pay back the debt he incurred in borrowing to buy the stock, I volunteered to pay for all our living expenses -- houses, cars, schools, entertainment -- and did so. Phil's early memoranda to his executives are stunning in their detailed outline of problems, potential, and objectives. . So does her imperious carriage. Mrs. Graham seemed not to mind the nasty benches or the almost very funny clowns. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. On Feb. 1, Phil came home briefly. 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. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. Health problems and death 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. A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. Curie. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. He loved me, and I loved him. Indeed, the paper was still struggling for its life. . In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. After we had lunched as long as we could, someone suggested driving to the country, and we spent the afternoon there. Needless to say, for years I regaled all who would listen with my Katharine Graham story. 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. Phil was born in 1915 in . I told you how lonely it had been when I had visited my Far Country and how I could not get near enough to help you in your Far Country. So, although he remained fairly liberal on domestic issues, he was not so on foreign policy. The two most powerful presences in her lifeher mother and her husbandwere both clearly suffering from psychological problems, yet Katharine still felt inferior to them. Seelye. 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. 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. . 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. 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. Phil then cut a deal. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. Phil called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. Probably the greatest debate the paper must face, both in the newsroom and as a story, is the divide between black and white. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. He was quite a success. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. He and his girlfriend flew to Phoenix to attend a meeting of The Associated Press. He left no note of any kind. Mrs. Grahams personal relations with the powerful and the once powerful became, if anything, even more visible after Watergate. My father had said that he himself was too old to let Phil work his way up. Before making speeches, she shook with terror; in the face of unsettling news, she had the unfortunate habit of breaking down in tears. 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. If you have the goods, you say, Screw it, and publish. 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. Although at the time I didnt realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. Then, in June 1946, President Truman called and asked my father to become the first president of the World Bank. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. But then, at intermission, she seemed to tire. As I began to lead the way down the steps, a bus-size babushkathe usherfixed me with a hard look and said, Nelzya. Impossible. . She rebuffed Norman O. Browns invitation to join the Communist Party. 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. One doctor told a friend later, "Phil was determined to get out and really was unbelievably masterful in his ability to manipulate people." . In college at the University of Florida, Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub gin. Except for the $500 present, I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the Army. As he emerged more on the journalistic and political scenes, I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kiteand the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality. Phil Graham began referring to his wife, who by 1952 had given birth to four children, as Porky; to heighten the joke, he gave her as a present a French butcher-shop head of a pig. 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. Grahams father had had trouble coming up with the funds to send him to Harvard Law, but managed to do so. Sometime after the "brainwashing" party, Johnson urged Phil to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. 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. Books Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. I had to face facts -- Phil was really gone. We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. The babushka melted. 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.. Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . This is about enough to mention about the family except possibly to reemphasize that they are lousy rich -- for instance, they live in an absurdly huge vulgar castle here, have another in N.Y., have a ranch in Wyoming, etc. On the appointed day, I put on my good blue suit, fired up the office Volvo, and proudly drove the hairdresser to Mrs. Grahams suite at the National Hotel. Courtesy photo Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the summer 2019 edition of. 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. It was all kept very private; our one idea was to conceal what had happened not only from the world but from our friends, my family, and even our children. 2023 Cond Nast. Performance/Dance . (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.) But even this was hard to understand. 243 replies 897 retweets 2,932 likes Robin Webb Retweeted To the surprise of some, she easily warded off the blandishments of Samuel I. Newhouse (once with a somewhat duplicitous Theodore Sorensen as her agent) and the Times-Mirror Company. He was raised in Miami where his father, Ernest R. ("Cap") Graham, made a career in farming and real estate, and was elected to the State Senate. I heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain. Much of his activity was related to politics. 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. D.C. My feelings about The Post, however, were very clear. Local Activists Work With Falls Church City Council To Reinvest In Eden Center. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. Dr. Phil McGraw and his wife Robin McGraw attend the ceremony honoring Dr. Phil McGraw with a star on The Hollywood Walk Of Fame on February 21, 2020. He stormed the podium and berated After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. 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. Phil would be publisher in title and in fact. 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 happens to be a beautiful Destiny and I shall be there while it is beautiful and while it is not. Otis Chandler and his wife, Missy, met Phil and Robin at the airport. They were both from the South. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. Then He Tested Positive for COVID. 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. Ups and Downs. 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. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. At a meeting of the Religious Roundtable, Howard Phillips, the head of the Conservative Caucus, warned darkly, You cannot always have Kay Graham going to your cocktail parties and smiling at you. Events, Football "So I restated the matter urging him not to count on Johnson's turning it down . . Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. 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. Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. It was incredibly exciting. 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. All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). The End. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. It's hard to describe my devastation after my discovery of the affair. The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. Own personal History ( Knopf ; $ 30 ) the summer 2019 edition of courtesy Editor! The door to a downstairs bathroom, I was unable to make a that. 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