By the way, Senator, I didnt say I hated Nixon, she told Dole. . But those who worked in the Posts newsroom knew one infinitely reassuring fact about Mrs. Graham: that at the most important moments of her professional life she did the right thing. Beer His anxiety as a son-in-law was in place before the wedding vows. View the profiles of people named Robin Webb. Post vice president James Truitt arranged with Kennedy to send Air Force 2 to retrieve Graham, who checked in for the first of two brief stays at Chestnut Lodge, then a leading psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Md., that has since burned down. 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. Join Facebook to connect with Robin Graham and others you may know. It was all kept very private; our one idea was to conceal what had happened not only from the world but from our friends, my family, and even our children. Updated: August 28, 2015 He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. He was really a. He wept and wept and couldn't stop. See Photos. The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. I went because it was my Destiny. From the earliest days of our relationship, for instance, I thought that we had friends because of him and were invited because of him. The car, at least, was waiting and its driver was sober. I did not go to help you. Baseball After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. He refused to be used, particularly by my mother, or to be dominated by her. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. 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. But what of it? . As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. I had no understanding of the terrible depression he had gone through or the polar-opposite mood that was dominating him at the time. Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me. Page Three She hardly exists in Woodward and Bernsteins books, and she is portrayed in cardboard terms almost everywhere else. 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. The reporters and editors might have got a nervous thrill from the Administrations hysteria, but Mrs. Graham did not. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. Indeed, the paper was still struggling for its life. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivalling only Gone with the Wind in circulation and Portnoys Complaint for indecency, Colson said. Loose Lips Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. I was charmed and dazzled. His friends are, for the most part, not especially famous. He told me that he wanted to preserve our marriage and our family; he said that he loved Robin but would tell her the affair was over, and that he would stay with his family. Why are Vladimir Putins opponents dying? Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper.. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. As for Phil, at the same time that he was building me up, he was tearing me down. Later, she developed an infatuation with the work of Thomas Mann and seems to have made endless demands on the authors time and patience. I almost rather died!. On Christmas Eve in 1962, she discovered he was having an affair with Newsweek freelance journalist Robin Webb. It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. Most of the year following Phil's breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. 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 went to school in Miami. 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. Needless to say, for years I regaled all who would listen with my Katharine Graham story. Ronald Reagan made sure to accept invitations to Mrs. Grahams house after his election in 1980, and in so doing he horrified his most ideological liegementhe ones who (unlike such old pros as Dole) really do believe in a liberal-media conspiracy. That Christmas Eve afternoon, the world I had known and loved ended for me. Weymouth's brother, Stephen Graham,. Gone not to my Far Country but to my Destiny. I was expected to perform all the pulling and hauling; Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the childrens. CAPTION: The Grahams with their children at Glen Welby in 1956; Lally, left, Katherine, Phil (holding Steve), Bill and Don. 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. . As is true of any royal visit, there were many logistical problems to be worked out. 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. We don't have one. It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. In 1963, he and Webb flew to Arizona; he appeared at a . 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. 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.). But that statistic has to be balanced by the conservatism of nearly all publishers. ), 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. Mr. At Harvard, Phil made the Law Review and, at the end of his second year, became its president. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. . Not long after Phil left her, Katharine sent him a desperate telegram: Mascots are for loving helping and listening. Food News When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. As a publisher, Don Graham may never face a pair of crises as critical as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. The legends of correspondents and their varying abilities to cope with a royal visit were countless. Bradlee was incensed, and said so in terms both loud and profane. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next days edition of Pravda. Robin Webb Retweeted Franklin Graham @Franklin_Graham 4 Dec 2017 TOMORROW morning Jack Phillips' case will be coming before the Supreme Court. I have now gone. . She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. The only thanks you ever seem to receive is a deafening chorus of carping criticism. (I had a French dressa Balmain design, copied at Bergdorf Goodman, she writes. Robin Webb (Robin Elaine Riddle) See Photos. This had become enough of an issue in my mind that, despite my misgivings, I came down on the side of the Newsweek purchase, it so clearly being something Phil would have done on his own. 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. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from New York, and naturally we were talking about Phil. 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. He committed suicide that day. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. Mainly, the Grahams were poor and had a difficult struggle. Otis Chandler and his wife, Missy, met Phil and Robin at the airport. So, although he remained fairly liberal on domestic issues, he was not so on foreign policy. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. Katharine saw her parents only sparingly. Robin Webb. 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. But there was also a certain Africa-based correspondent who carved his own career coffin by arranging for a balloon safari over the Masai Mara at dawn; just as the sun was glinting off the savanna and the balloon was rising above a herd of grazing giraffes, Mrs. Graham is said to have turned to the correspondent and announced, with a profane burr, You know, I didnt travel all the way here to be a fucking tourist. It is said that the correspondent ended up as a recipe checker in the food section. Nonetheless, Phil was the fizz in our lives. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. Robin Webb. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. It wasnt until years later that I looked at the downside of all this and realized that, perversely, I had seemed to enjoy the role of doormat wife. The pressures were enormous and her preparations for them slight. As he emerged more on the journalistic and political scenes, I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kiteand the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality. Phil Graham began referring to his wife, who by 1952 had given birth to four children, as Porky; to heighten the joke, he gave her as a present a French butcher-shop head of a pig. Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. I insisted. When she travelled to Paris, she quite naturally took up with Brancusi and Rodin and Stein and Satie; she took fencing lessons with Mme. Mrs. Grahams personal relations with the powerful and the once powerful became, if anything, even more visible after Watergate. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. By June 17th, thanks to his national editor, Ben Bagdikian, he had his own set of papers. 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. And I was incredulous -- this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me! Check out the latest pictures, photos and images of Phil Graham. . 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. And then nothing more. There, in a ballroom full of the nation's top publishers, Phil Graham lost it. At once he became my father's close collaborator. Robin was sent away with too little care or attention. 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