This is a very significant case and has huge repercussions for freedom of expression & religious liberty in our country. She attended the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia, one of the few girls schools intent on training young women for a career. Check out the latest pictures, photos and images of Phil Graham. I told him I had the feeling that he thought my point of view was different from Phils, but that in general Phil and I had agreed. Katharine's husband Philip battled alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. 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. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. Openings Up to that time I had been a fairly present mother, attending school functions, driving teams to sports events, trying to be back in the afternoons when the kids got back from school. But he always insisted that we lead our own lives. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. There he was diagnosed with manic depression, a condition today known as bipolar disorder. Nobody knew what to do. Katharine, by her own account and in the accounts of others, was a tall and awkward girl with a manly stride, but she was also intelligent, and she absorbed the lessons of her social class well. For years, Katharine witnessed her husbands violent mood swingshis periods of heavy drinking, his bizarre behavior, his prolonged depressions. 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.. The whole idea of buying Newsweek and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. Phil called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. . It similarly (if with less success) pursued Iran-Contra and Bill Clintons ethical droppings. Liz at Large The evening was fine and fun. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly. Facebook. When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, Phil saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself. . . 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. His anxiety as a son-in-law was in place before the wedding vows. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration. It was incredibly exciting. Mrs. Graham, for her part, wrote back to him, I was full of admiration anyway for what you did and the way you did it. In the end, Davis sued her publisher for libel and breach of contract in 1982 and received a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose The Post. This was not entirely to the good. Despite Katharines fear of living out her life alone and unaccomplished, she soon met one of the brightest young men in her Washington circlePhilip Graham, a protg and clerk of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. 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. At that meeting he offered him the vice-presidency -- both because he thought he had to and because he thought that Johnson would not accept. Under Phil Graham, the Post had a well-respected editorial page and mediocrity nearly everywhere else; it was not even the best paper in the city. Phil was born in 1915 in . . 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. 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. 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. But in the spring of 1971 the Supreme Court had not yet declared its strong support of press freedoms to the degree that it would in the Pentagon Papers case; moreover, the Post itself did not yet have the financial standing or the self-identity to go forward simply and with confidence. 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. In 1966, Truman Capote, her neighbor at the U.N. Plaza, where she kept a New York apartment, threw his famous Black-and-White costume ball for her. Felix adopted Phil as one of his "boys" before he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court. He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of The Washington Post. With Grahams support, Bradlee was soon firing the lazy and the mediocre, the racist and the dull, and he then set about raiding topflight papers around the country for their best talent. But what of it? Her obeisance was institutional and political, not merely personal. He wept and wept and couldn't stop. We grew less able to keep up with what was happening in the world. Her story was not easy to figure out. This is, for me, the most painful thing to look back on. I cannot tell you how pained I am by the circumstances which have caused you, quite unnecessarily, distress and concern, Jovanovich wrote in a cowering letter to Mrs. Graham. He also vowed to do a number on the Post, and to go after the Graham familys broadcasting licenses. 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. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. . I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. 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. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. Two years later, the Grahams took control of the Post Company stock. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. The cost of failure was incalculable. This arrangement was never an issue. I think he felt he'd done such harm the last time around that he just couldn't deal with it, couldn't fix everything. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. The Post Company had gone public just two days before getting the papers, and publication could easily have affected its stock prices for the worse. We had one small cushion, a $500 wedding present from an aunt, which I thought I would use for extras like theater and travel tickets. Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . As she grew older and more self-confident, she could be imperious, even frightening to her editors and executives, but her desire to please, or at least to get along with, those in power, never entirely faded. Phil firmly stated his intention to divorce me and marry Robin. She did not have to. Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. 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. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. It all seems so odd in retrospect. Phil was clearly upset, too. Robin Webb Retweeted Franklin Graham @Franklin_Graham 4 Dec 2017 TOMORROW morning Jack Phillips' case will be coming before the Supreme Court. Graham was from a Florida family whose financial prospects, while far from dire, were a matter of occasional drama. 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. So does her imperious carriage. Hockey Philip Leslie "Phil" Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American newspaper publisher. Much of his activity was related to politics. Museums/Galleries The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. Eugene Meyer was a Jew who might have preferred not to be. He sparked ideas, praised and persuaded, criticized and cajoled. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. There is no doubt that the vast majority of reporters at papers like the Post are themselves more liberal than the general population: a recent poll showed that eighty-nine per cent of Washington-based correspondents voted for Clinton in 1992. To this day, I cannot say what the beast wasa leopard, a cougar, a jaguarbut I can still see its talons not an inch from the hose and flesh of my proprietor. Mrs. Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. 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. friends for the Aegean cruise. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 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. But that did not mean she was strong in all things. Robin Webb was raised in England, UK. After the war, Phil Graham was even more national security conscious than before. . Early in 1940, I was invited by a friend to Sunday lunch with a group at the Ritz Carlton. 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 Harvard, Phil made the Law Review and, at the end of his second year, became its president. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. 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. We were both up all night, with me trying desperately but to no avail to be of some reassuring help. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. Money, my fathers being Jewish, and sex were taboo subjects at home. She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. On Christmas Eve in 1962, she discovered he was having an affair with Newsweek freelance journalist Robin Webb. Tomorrow: Watergate. He loved me, and I loved him. Indeed, the paper was still struggling for its life. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. On Feb. 1, Phil came home briefly. She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. So Phil returned to Washington and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. I had visions of that fellow in the balloon, high above the plain, floating into journalistic obscurity, so I did what one cannot ordinarily do with a babushka. When a young woman named Deborah Davis published a biography in 1979 called Katharine the Great, Mrs. Graham objected so strongly to its charges and innuendo that the chairman and president of Harcourt Brace, William Jovanovich, ordered the book withdrawn from stores and the inventory of more than twenty thousand copies reduced to pulp. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. As is true of any royal visit, there were many logistical problems to be worked out. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. All the familiar episodes of the Washington, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. 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. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. My father said, "Done." 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. Facebook gives people the power to share. The paper sent out a young reporter named Ben Bradlee to cover what was happening, but Bradlee could barely find his story in the paper: it was buried deep inside, and nearly all mention of race and violence had been excised. Graham, Katharine (1917-2001) American newspaper publisher who guided the Washington Post through its most turbulent period when it published the "Pentagon Papers" and investigated the Watergate affair. She pursued hard the company of the well known. Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. 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. Philip Leslie "Phil" Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American newspaper publisher. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. The Post pursued Watergate as a news story, not as an ideological crusade. 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. His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. I would not insist that Moscow was short on luxury in those days except to note that I did not so much find a hairdresser as create one. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. 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. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. 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