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. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. The Post publisher took a mistress, Robin Webb, whom he set up in a large house in Washington and a farm outside of the city. Contact Us Years later he told me that he had developed his wit and humor as a way to deal with his younger-boy social and athletic disadvantages. ), Graham had undeniably, historically, made the right decision, and in the years to come she supported the investigative efforts of the Post; but the signs of her ambivalence about her social and political role never ceased. Still, I believed that with enough rest he'd recover and we'd go on. She was flushed, delighted. I simply didnt connect my lack of self-confidence with his behavior to me., The end of this increasingly painful marriage was prolonged and extremely public. 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. My father said, "Done." If one compares the approach of the liberal media (the Post, the Times, etc.) The talent level in the newsroom began to shift, and so did the culture of the place. But what of it? Gear Prudence Mrs. Grahams personal relations with the powerful and the once powerful became, if anything, even more visible after Watergate. Signing On to The Post. . 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. . It was incredibly exciting. At last, we could begin to believe that The Post was here to stay. This time, he saw his departure as final. Email or phone: Password: . He was one month shy of his 31st birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in America. I found him captivating. He refused to be used, particularly by my mother, or to be dominated by her. Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Under Ochs, the Times institutionalized the notion of nonpartisan, objective reporting. He never really meant it when he spent weeks vilifying the Times for bias, he told Katharine Q. Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. Phil went to school in Miami. with that of the increasingly powerful conservative media (the Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, etc. Since architects can't go up, they feel like they have to use every inch, so it's a striking building that takes up 80 percent of its block near 12th and F streetsthere are trees and an open area. 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. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. Events, Football All that has changed now, with the publication of Katharine Grahams own Personal History (Knopf; $30). The legends of correspondents and their varying abilities to cope with a royal visit were countless. He felt he owned it because he had worked for 17 years to make it a success, so from his point of view the paper was his. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. Phil stunned Katharine by proposing marriage to her almost instantly, and he followed up the proposal with an insistence that they set out for Florida and a life without family money. From the earliest days of our relationship, for instance, I thought that we had friends because of him and were invited because of him. Phil Graham's descent into the abyss of manic depression accelerated, and on 24 December 1962 she discovered that he was embroiled in an affair with a Newsweek stringer, Robin Webb. The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. I also said that I admired the legislation he himself had got passed and was for him and wanted to make sure he knew it.. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. The mask was made to match, also at Bergdorfs, by Halston, who was then still making hats.) Graham considered the ball a kind of coming out for a middle-aged debutante. But in Pete Hamills column in the New York Post she was suddenly Marie Antoinette. Robin Lee Graham is seen on his boat "Dove" during his solo trip around the world in the late 1960s. 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}. In 1934, when Phil was 19, his mother died of cancer -- he later confessed that he had cried himself to sleep night after night in college. 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. 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. For example, what I could not have known at the Hermitage is that after the suicide of her husband, on August 3, 1963, and the funeral, Mrs. Graham sent her eldest son, Donald, back to his internship at the Times, sent her two younger sons, Bill and Steve, back to summer camp, and promptly flew off to Europe to meet her eldest childher daughter, Lallyand a group of very O.K. Housing Complex If there was one journalist she admired more than any other, it was her friend James Reston, and it was Reston who, despite his many virtues, had famously said, I will not have the New York Times muckraking the President of the United States. But in the end she made her decision. It was not long before he began looking around town to buy a newspaper. To keep a story out of the paper to achieve a purpose, even a fine one, is neither appropriate nor in the spirit of my father's definition of the duty of a newspaper: "To try to tell the truth. There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. 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. Her story was not easy to figure out. He stormed the podium and berated Philip Pannell Collapsed at a Statehood Rally. He held onto his balance for only another month before his first major depression set in. Robin, who is a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, opened up about their marriage on her husband's podcast, "Phil in the Blanks." "We don't have the perfect marriage," she admitted. 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. The founder, Lucy Madeira Wing, believed that God was a woman and tried to mold the girls into Shavian Fabians, an army wielding its noblesse oblige. In my boyhood as a reporter, I nearly killed the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. (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.) CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. 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. 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. @robin.webb.100. In 1940, he married Katharine, daughter of millionaire Post owner Eugene Meyer, who made Graham publisher in 1946. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. It was a loyal nanny, Powelly, who supplied the hugs, the comforting, the feeling of human contact, even the love that my mother did not.. He counterbalanced my ingrown resistance to new and different ideas, and to people with whom I didn't agree politically. 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. Shortly after this, my father seems to have brought up with both of us the possibility of Phil's working at the paper after the war. So, on June 18, 1946, The Post announced that my father was withdrawing from active direction of the paper. After the honeymoon, we settled into our little house, which we rented for $80 a month in a pleasant neighborhood called Burleith. See Photos. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. See Photos. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. Latest news and commentary on Robin Webb including photos, videos, quotations, and a biography. I have now gone. I got it for her. In the end, Joe and his like-minded friends bought Phil's argument that this bill was better than nothing. Katharine's husband Philip battled alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. friends for the Aegean cruise. Curie. With me in the lead, the three of us walked down a ramp and past what appeared to be a coffin-size box with open slats. 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. . Everything except Phil's personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father. I went because it was my Destiny. It all seems so odd in retrospect. Phil very much wanted to go to Glen Welby for a break from the hospital, and had started to work on the doctors to obtain their permission. I had begun writing so-called light editorials and laying out parts of the editorial page. 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. 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. Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. Also, it was part of my bafflement at what I saw as Phil's increasingly strange behavior. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. For nearly all Post reporters and editors, even those few who ventured to call her Kay, she was the woman who signed our checks, the Queen Mother, a cartoon figure with a lockjaw voice that sounded, to us, like money. The Young Publisher, In many ways, Phil was at his very best as a publisher in these years. 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