He was a manic-depressive. See Photos Inside His Beverly Hills Home. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice. And I was incredulous -- this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me! Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. In effect [Bill and Steve] lost both parents at once. Although at the time I didnt realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. Unlike Phil, I find it hard to express emotion. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. 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. Gone not to my Far Country but to my Destiny. 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. @robin.webb.100. 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. "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. This time, he saw his departure as final. This was a typical example of the way Phil used power to accomplish something good. Then I lied. Two years later, the Grahams took control of the Post Company stock. Mixing Politics. 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. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. The Formative Years. The whole idea of buying Newsweek and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. In doing so, she and her editor, Ben Bradlee, dragged the Post out of the sea of the ordinary and made it great, made it a rival of the New York Times. As for Phil, at the same time that he was building me up, he was tearing me down. you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.. Liz at Large 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. Page Three I would be recalled to the home office. . 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. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. 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. If there are any smart literary agents around these days, one of them will copyright the title The Breaking of the President, the piece said, for it is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon B. Johnsons authority in 1968 are out to break Richard M. Nixon in 1969.. He left no note of any kind. Naturally, they voted that he be allowed to go. For whatever reason, I liked to be dominated and to be the implementer. Finally, Otis and some other men got him to his room. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. The General Secretary had revealed his plans for a joint United StatesSoviet space mission to Mars, and we led the paper with that world beat. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. AKA Philip Leslie Graham. 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 story would run on the front page of The Post unless the people with the power to do something about it integrated the pools. . Facebook gives people the power to. It happens to be a beautiful Destiny and I shall be there while it is beautiful and while it is not. I almost rather died!. 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. This was my most important contribution to the interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party. 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. Even when Katharine was the publisher of the Post, David Halberstam writes in The Powers That Be, she felt as if she were in her mothers shadow. The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was an analyst heavily into existential psychology. Work Here He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of The Washington Post. Phil would be publisher in title and in fact. I'm not sure what triggered Phil's relationship with Lyndon Baines Johnson, but it now seems predictable, even foreordained. After lunch, we went upstairs to our bedroom for a nap. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. 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. It was my paying all our living expenses that had allowed Phil to purchase his stock with his income from The Post. Perhaps if the turmoil had ended there he might have been able to rest and get his strength back. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. Events, Football I felt close to history. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. . Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. In fact, Graham played a significant role in convincing JFK to appoint Johnson to the vice presidency instead of Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. One did not want to spend the remainder of ones career taste-testing lima beans. On Nov. 2, I flew up to Idlewild Airport with Phil to see him off to Europe, where he was going to talk to Larry Norstad. 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. The babushka melted. 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. Sure, we can go, I ventured, but the second act has some really great animals. I began to describe Misha the Bear, who wore skates on his hind paws and played ice hockey. Gradually, I became the drudge and, whats more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. See Photos. robin webb phil graham photos Coach Thomas returned to Servite in January of 2018 after coaching at his alma mater, Crespi from 2012-2017. Katharine saw her parents only sparingly. 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. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. She did not have to. 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. Her gesture in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him, she writes. Philip Leslie "Phil" Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American newspaper publisher. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. Nobody knew what to do. That decision may have been right for me, she writes, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Donso wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. (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.) Graham was one of four children. Attention would have to be paid. 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. Housing Complex How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. 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. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. 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. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. We had lunch on two trays on the back porch at Glen Welby, chatting and listening to some classical records. In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. . The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. She attended the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia, one of the few girls schools intent on training young women for a career. By contrast, the Wall Street Journals editorial page ignored Watergate and Iran-Contra as ideologically inconvenient and has pursued Whitewater with the foam visible on its lips. While publisher of the Post, he grew so close to L.B.J. 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. 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. Phil also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality. Before making speeches, she shook with terror; in the face of unsettling news, she had the unfortunate habit of breaking down in tears. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. I went because it was my Destiny. 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. Felix adopted Phil as one of his "boys" before he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court. Her story was not easy to figure out. Updated: August 28, 2015 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. During that Leningrad trip, the only moment that hinted at something mysterious and human came when we were in a map room at the Hermitage Museum. By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. Books 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. 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. This is a surprising piece of work on every level. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. This is a very significant case and has huge repercussions for freedom of expression & religious liberty in our country. 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. She had not thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children, Graham writes. 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. and he began an affair with a young Newsweek staffer, Robin Webb. Someone -- I've never been sure who -- reached President Kennedy, who agreed to the use of a government plane to transport the doctors to get Phil. Gear Prudence 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. Robin Webb. Following the lead of my successful colleague the Latin-American correspondent, I tried to schedule every minute of the two days allotted me. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. Im not sure she was ever really able to. During his time in D.C., Graham rubbed shoulders with a group of like-minded politicos known as the Georgetown Set, and came to know both Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. Grahams father had had trouble coming up with the funds to send him to Harvard Law, but managed to do so. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. Phil began to look for a chairman for COMSAT and turned to our friend Gen. Lauris Norstad, who was soon to retire as supreme allied commander in Europe. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. I got it for her. Much of his activity was related to politics. I believe that Phil came to the sad conclusion that he would never again lead a normal life. . The story, of course, revealed nothing of Mrs. Graham. 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. My father received a confidential letter from his friend Kent Cooper, former general manager of the Associated Press, who was living in retirement in Palm Beach. . He loved me, and I loved him. It similarly (if with less success) pursued Iran-Contra and Bill Clintons ethical droppings. Why are Vladimir Putins opponents dying? 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. 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. "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.". Despite his early apprehensions about my father's wealth, politics, and possible impulse to control, Phil gradually grew very close to him. 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. 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