{But a fight was unnecessary. Porter High. Charles Colson, for one, tried to dismiss the conspiracy as fictiona charge that, if true, would probably have ruined the paper forever. Page Three 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. "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.". It is hard to remember now just how far in front the Times was after the Second World War. He loved me, and I loved him. 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. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. He does not live in Georgetown. 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. Im not sure she was ever really able to. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. Events, Football What made the situation even more complicated was the status of the Post. 12 Phil Graham pictures. He was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk the following year for Felix Frankfurter, his mentor from Harvard Law School. 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. @robin.webb.100. Phil, Kennedy said, when you get elected dogcatcher I will listen to you on politics. But in fact Kennedy had listened to him. Finally, Otis and some other men got him to his room. At dinner at Joseph Alsops one night early in 1961, Graham continually offered political advice to the new President, John Kennedy. Few suggested that Katharine the Great was a first-rate book, or even a solid oneit was flatly written and salted with highly suspect, even paranoid, materialbut one had to wonder if Mr. Jovanovich would have done the same for anyone else. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. He counterbalanced my ingrown resistance to new and different ideas, and to people with whom I didn't agree politically. View the profiles of people named Robin Graham. Later, she developed an infatuation with the work of Thomas Mann and seems to have made endless demands on the authors time and patience. . 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. 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. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. Almost pathetically, he asked not to go back to Chestnut Lodge. I did not go because I did not want to help you. 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. Hockey 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 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. Phil wrote him on March 17, 1940, in his nervousness misspelling my name: "I am going to get married. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. 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. 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. Katharine's husband Philip battled alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. Robin Webb (Songbird) See Photos. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. Loose Lips Olympic Sports, Savage Love For years, Katharine witnessed her husbands violent mood swingshis periods of heavy drinking, his bizarre behavior, his prolonged depressions. 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. She pursued hard the company of the well known. He never really meant it when he spent weeks vilifying the Times for bias, he told Katharine Q. 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. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. 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. There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. Since Eisenhower was not very interested, except in theory, and was concentrating on his vacation golf games, there was a vacuum within the administration. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. . 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. The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. 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 does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. 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. (One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the Posts editorial quality. At dinner that night, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. He also vowed to do a number on the Post, and to go after the Graham familys broadcasting licenses. 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. See Photos. 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. After a hurricane struck in 1926, the sugar company gave up and his father developed a dairy business on some of the land. Robin Webb. The cost of failure was incalculable. 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. The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for The Post in the family. 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. Facebook gives people the power to. Everything rotated around him, and I willingly participated in keeping him at the center of things. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. 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. 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. 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. 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. He acknowledged that he used humor as a weapon with which to keep people at a distance. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper.. As a way to solidify this code, Ochs developed the idea of a paper of record.. Robin Webb. As he was being taken out of George Washington, he loudly proclaimed who he was and that he was a prisoner. 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. Phil's involvement in the whole matter -- besides pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship -- began in earnest in July, when he invited {civil rights lawyer} Joe Rauh to our farm in Virginia, Glen Welby. 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. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. Gradually, I became the drudge and, whats more, accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. At Vassar and at the University of Chicago, Katherine took an interest in left-wing politics, which were very much in the air, but always her sense and her sense of breeding prevented her from taking what seemed like extreme steps. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. 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. There was, of course, no way to press the point. Weymouth's brother, Stephen Graham,. . View the profiles of people named Robin Webb. See Photos. I have now gone. 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. He was really a. Phil's activities in regard to Little Rock were the first sign for me that something was wrong with him, that his powerful talents could be used in such an idealistic but confusing and irrational way. It was plain white crpe with slate-colored beads around the neck and the sleeves. Phil was clearly upset, too. Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. Privacy Policy He said he felt trapped, no longer able to go on; that everything was black. On July 5, Johnson held a press conference at which he announced his candidacy. He wants it.". 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. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. But, always, it was he who decided and I who responded. While the Times and the two wire services, A.P. 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. As far as I know, Katharine Graham had not written much since her early days on the Post, when she wrote a magazine column and was the anonymous author of such editorials as On Being a Horse, Mixed Drinks, and Spotted Fever. And yet I dont know of a more complex autobiography by an American business figure, certainly not one that allows itself such moments of weakness, embarrassment, and pain. Phil called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. The whole idea of buying Newsweek and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. 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