When Johnson had announced he was running for President that year, Phil Graham helped write the speech; he even ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndons contact lenses, which had popped out. This is a posture unbecoming to a publisher of newspapers. . Phil Grahams world had been the world of the powerful, and his widow did not want to offend its leading members. Mann was once asked if Agnes was German. Books in 1964, in his bedroom, she sat in an armchair while the President lay down on the bed. 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. He sparked ideas, praised and persuaded, criticized and cajoled. She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. . Soccer See Photos Inside His Beverly Hills Home. 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. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? 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. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. 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. I gather Dr. Farber initially tried to read him passages from Martin Buber, and when this failed to work, they forcibly tranquilized him and put him on the plane. Bradlee now sees himself as the self-appointed leader of. To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. To a reporter, and especially a reporter in 1996, there doesnt seem to be a need to make any decision at all. 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. 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. CAPTION: The Grahams with their children at Glen Welby in 1956; Lally, left, Katherine, Phil (holding Steve), Bill and Don. Robin Harrison Webb. The book has been republished twice by small presses. Music When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next days edition of Pravda. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. I began keeping a little accounts book, dutifully noting every penny spent, including the cost of gas and oil for the car, stamps, groceries, even our personal allowances, which were $9 each per week. Facebook gives people the power to. Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose The Post. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. Basketball Philip Graham was publisher and later co-owner of The Washington Post. Joe persuaded Phil to accompany him to urge Kennedy to offer the vice-presidency to Johnson. Thats enough, Buster, he said, and he dragged Bradlee into a meeting with two officials from the Department of the Interior and with Clark Clifford, from the Truman White House. He had come into a job for which he was ill-prepared. . 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. . This was a typical example of the way Phil used power to accomplish something good. He also began making public scenesonce launching into an obscene tirade during a speech, and, on another occasion, punching out a detective at an airport. But what of it? Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. community.". That was some circus! 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. Renewed Activity. It was incredibly exciting. The evening was fine and fun. 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.) I went because it was my Destiny. Its hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. Phil often involved The Post in righting wrongs, as he saw them. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs. Graham, and a hundred dollars. ", Early Thursday morning, Kennedy called Johnson, waking him up and making an appointment to see him a little later. Robin Webb was raised in England, UK. Insofar as she was capable of love, I think she loved my father and us, but she was highly complex, and at times deeply unhappy. In her own memoir, Agnes wrote of rebelling against the responsibilities of marriage; she behaved, she said, as if the whole world were in a conspiracy to flatten out my personality and cast me into a universal mold called woman.. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. . For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. 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. He loved me, and I loved him. Katharine soon learned of their affair, when she picked up the phone and heard Phil and Robin talking to each other in words that made the situation plain.. The year leading up to Grahams death was a turbulent one for him and his family. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. This was in 1988, and I had recently been assigned to the Washington Posts bureau in Moscow. Local Dining Guide, City Lights Graham was born to a Lutheran family in Terry, South Dakota. 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.. 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. Because of this, he never put a name to Phil's illness. In 1963, he and Webb flew to Arizona; he appeared at a . Freelancers Guide Robin Webb. Philip L. Graham. Unfortunately, this incapacity often produced in womenas it did in mea diffuse way of talking, an inability to be concise, a tendency to ramble, to start at the end and work backwards, to overexplain, to go on for too long, to apologize. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. 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. {But a fight was unnecessary. We in Moscow had neither the time nor the luxury that would allow us to confirm these legends. Telling his father about the marriage proved difficult. Early in 1940, I was invited by a friend to Sunday lunch with a group at the Ritz Carlton. 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.. Katharine Graham, the general secretary of the Washington Post Company, and a planeload of senior editors would soon arrive in town to conduct it. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. Katharines mother, Agnes Meyer, was descended from Lutheran ministers. . How could a woman reared in such exquisite privilegeone whose circle of friends, among them Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson and Nancy Reagan, rarely widened beyond the most powerful lites of Washington and New Yorktake such risks? Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. 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. 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.). 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. Sometime after the "brainwashing" party, Johnson urged Phil to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. Gear Prudence 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. 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. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male, and since my brother was in medicine and had shown little or no interest in the business, my father naturally thought of Phil. Robin Webb. 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. . Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. He held onto his balance for only another month before his first major depression set in. 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. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. Phil and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. Great risk was involved, or so one heard. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. 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. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. 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. And I was incredulous -- this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me! 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