Apparently, the interview went well. Phil was born in 1915 in Terry, S.D., and moved as a boy to the Everglades, where his father, Ernest Graham, was manager of a sugar cane plantation. The editors around her grumbled almost inaudibly, but just enough, it seemed to me, to nudge her out of such a call. Robin . At dinner that night, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. 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. His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. He does not travel the globe to interview foreign leaders. Graham heard him. Dr. Phil McGraw has worked extremely hard over the years . Phils greatest successes were in business: buying and absorbing the Times-Herald in 1954, purchasing Newsweek (for a song) in 1961, and making inroads against the dominant paper in town, the Evening Star (which folded in 1981). 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.. To read Personal History is to understand how ridiculous is the right-wing image of Graham as the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. He wants it.". I remember his commenting on how well Phil wrote and how much he'd like to have him work for The Washington Post. The subject of the cruise seemed to cause her, so many years later, intense painpain beyond the loss of her husband. All the familiar episodes of the Washington, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. He refused to be used, particularly by my mother, or to be dominated by her. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. Ad Choices. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. 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. Phil and my mother also got along well. . So, on June 18, 1946, The Post announced that my father was withdrawing from active direction of the paper. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Money, my fathers being Jewish, and sex were taboo subjects at home. Maksym Levin started documenting war to become famous. After seeing conflict up close, his motivations shifted. 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. Phil received the larger share of the stock because, as Dad explained to me, no man should be in the position of working for his wife. There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Local Activists Work With Falls Church City Council To Reinvest In Eden Center. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. In college at the University of Florida, Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub gin. Naturally, they voted that he be allowed to go. She is a Valkyrian type with something elsea mixture of Valkyrie and Juno., Agness ambitions were fuelled by resentment of her station as a wife and mother. If you think that it's important to have high quality local reporting we hope you'll support our work with a monthly contribution. In speeches, Dole had accused her paper of waging an ideological vendetta against the President. In October 1962, Phil accepted an invitation from President Kennedy to serve as an incorporator of the Communications Satellite Corp., known as COMSAT, with the understanding that he would be elected to head it. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. (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.) Robin Webb (Robin Elaine Riddle) See Photos. He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of The Washington Post. I was already committed to Kennedy. Dr. Phil and Wife Robin Live in a Sprawling Mansion! 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. Even before Adolph Ochs bought the paper, in 1896, the Times had earned its record for rigor when it went after Boss Tweed. 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 never should have gone, she said. I was charmed and dazzled. See Photos. Another habit of his that emerged during those years was that, when we were with friends and I was talking, he would look at me in such a way that I felt I was going on too long and boring people. In the summer of 1949, there were race riots in Washington over the integration of a city swimming pool. Charles Colson, for one, tried to dismiss the conspiracy as fictiona charge that, if true, would probably have ruined the paper forever. We went to a restaurant, had a long dinner, talked and laughed a lot, and drank until quite late. 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. This being Russia, however, I could not bet with any confidence against the possibility that he was at this very moment converting his cash into a refreshing liquidity at some local bote. I told her that this woman, this very important woman, was gravely ill and in need of immediate medical attention. By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. So did Meg Greenfield. The Formative Years. . He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world. At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. During the McCarthy era, the Post acquitted itself well, especially in the reports of Murrey Marder, but when everyone from the Chicago Tribune to a two-bit conservative publication entitled Plain Talk attacked the Post as Washingtons Pravda, Graham showed dangerous signs of capitulation. In meeting after meeting, in Washington and New York, she was the only woman in the room, and not a self-confident one at that. At one point, President Kennedy dispatched a Presidential plane to get him from Phoenix to Washington. Coronavirus, Carry-out Critic D.C. Join Facebook to connect with Robin Graham and others you may know. Mumble Sauce, About Us Phil also wanted Frank Stanton, still CBS president, to become COMSAT's president and operating head. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. Mainly, the Grahams were poor and had a difficult struggle. 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.) Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. This article is adapted from the forthcoming book "Personal History" by Katharine Graham, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. These days, the Post is usually thought of as the second-best paper in the country, after the Timesor, if not the second-best, then at least tied for that honor with the Wall Street Journal and, stretching some, the Los Angeles Times. Baseball As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. Although at the time I didnt realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. I had begun writing so-called light editorials and laying out parts of the editorial page. I would be recalled to the home office. 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. 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. . Its hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. To help Phil pay back the debt he incurred in borrowing to buy the stock, I volunteered to pay for all our living expenses -- houses, cars, schools, entertainment -- and did so. 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. Early on, Phil predicted that Kennedy and Johnson would be the only candidates to come into the Democratic Convention with sizable blocs of delegates. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. 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. Phil's invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. . 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. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. 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. He ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndon's contact lenses. Youve never known anything., I cant say I think Mother genuinely loved us, she writes. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight. Despite his early apprehensions about my father's wealth, politics, and possible impulse to control, Phil gradually grew very close to him. Jovanovich caved, then pulped. See Photos. But that is the way Phil Graham wanted it. Profile. Advertisement. He loved me, and I loved him. 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. . Weymouth's brother, Stephen Graham,. On Feb. 1, Phil came home briefly. 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. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase if its all right with you. If I thought Id done anything to make someone unhappy, Id agonize. Since Eisenhower was not very interested, except in theory, and was concentrating on his vacation golf games, there was a vacuum within the administration. When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, Phil saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself. 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