robin webb phil graham photos

He wanted Estes Kefauver to head an anticrime commission and told him so, repeatedly, until Kefauver did it. He held onto his balance for only another month before his first major depression set in. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. CAPTION: Phil Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, often involved the paper in righting wrongs, as he saw them. As is true of any royal visit, there were many logistical problems to be worked out. Mrs. Graham spotted a map of the Aegean and Black Seas and began to talk about a cruise she had taken in the summer of 1963, not long after her husband died. 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. That Christmas Eve afternoon, the world I had known and loved ended for me. Please reload the page and try again. He had the ideas, the jokes, the games. Phil drove me home, and we talked for a long time. We don't have one. Perhaps it was true. 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. And he wanted many things. So did Meg Greenfield. 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. 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 also brought into my life more laughter, gaiety, irreverence for rules, and originality. 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. 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. . It was incredibly exciting. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Eugene Meyer had bought the Washington Post at auction for eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in 1933, and in 1946 he made Phil its publisher. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. Mrs. Grahams personal relations with the powerful and the once powerful became, if anything, even more visible after Watergate. He and his girlfriend flew to Phoenix to attend a meeting of The Associated Press. 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. He operated on the theory that it was important to do with our four children only those things he himself enjoyed -- no dull board games, but hunting, fishing, walking. 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. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. 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. There is still a vital distinction. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. I then talked in terms I had inherited from Phil and in a way I would never have done laterand that embarrasses me now, she writes. My feeling that something fundamental had been destroyed was a result of my total commitment and my belief that these feelings went both ways. . 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. And by the words you came near enough for help and I touched you and we went for a walk and were again in life. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. And yet his periods of lucidity and humor, of lively intelligence, were frequent enough to confuse her and delay any sense of reckoning. Phil remained loyal to Johnson until he lost the bid for the nomination. In the summer of 1963, Phil seemed to be getting betterhe was undergoing treatment at a psychiatric center in Marylandand there was even hope of resuming a normal life at home. By contrast, the Wall Street Journals editorial page ignored Watergate and Iran-Contra as ideologically inconvenient and has pursued Whitewater with the foam visible on its lips. Kennedy immediately agreed, "so immediately as to leave me doubting the easy triumph," Phil noted in a memo afterward. Film/TV Oh, you know, he said, during a campaign they put these things in your hands and you just read them. (Dole admitted the same to a Times reporter after the 1996 campaign. . Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. By 1906, Meyer had made several million dollars by investing in securities; by 1915, he was worth between forty and sixty million. Mainly, the Grahams were poor and had a difficult struggle. Advertise with Us, Sponsored Posts from our Partners To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. Someone -- I've never been sure who -- reached President Kennedy, who agreed to the use of a government plane to transport the doctors to get Phil. She had to learn to be a publisher and, what was more, to be a far better publisher than her husband had been. We were both up all night, with me trying desperately but to no avail to be of some reassuring help. Phil went to school in Miami. Her beginnings were at once privileged and starved. The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer. Health problems and death 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. (One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the Posts editorial quality. 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. Lets go, lets publish. And by doing that she opened the way to Watergate and to the Posts position as a rival of the Times. On Jan. 1, 1946, he started his postwar work at the age of 30 as associate publisher of The Post. 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. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from New York, and naturally we were talking about Phil. Theater She was a woman of inchoate ambitionan ambition that took the shape mainly of ambitious friendships and painfully comic intellectual pretensions. Curiously I was in complete accord with this idea. As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. That was some circus! In the end he went sadly but willingly, late in the day on June 20. She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. On Aug. 3, 1963, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, having struggled with severe bouts of depression for at least five years, went into the bathroom of his family farm near Marshall, Va., and committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. 2023 Cond Nast. 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. 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. Dr. Phil and Wife Robin Live in a Sprawling Mansion! He was simply not interested in the Times ideal so much as he was in making the Post a player in Washington and, perhaps more, in being a player himself. He has an example to follow. Some companies thought the Post such a potentially profitable property, and Graham such an unlikely figure to run it, that they came to her with offers to buy it. I was earning about $1,500 a year. On an early trip, he requested a secretary, and the bureau chief dispatched Robin Webb, a young Australian trying to make it as a journalist. At some point, however, not quite three weeks after Christmas Eve, the phones started to work again between Phil and Robin. On the appointed day, I put on my good blue suit, fired up the office Volvo, and proudly drove the hairdresser to Mrs. Grahams suite at the National Hotel. Whoops! Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. It wasn't 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. Even now I cant sort out my feelings about this; its hard to separate what was a function of Phils terrible affliction, which manifested itself only later, and what was more basic. They met earlier that year. 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.). . According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. Truitt, an intimate of the Grahams whomBen Bradlee would later force to resign, committed suicide himself in 1981, still despondent over his treatment at the newspaper after Philips death. 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. Under Philip Graham, the Post had no prayer of even pretending to match the standards of the countrys best paper. It was incredibly exciting. Phil's early memoranda to his executives are stunning in their detailed outline of problems, potential, and objectives. As for Phil, at the same time that he was building me up, he was tearing me down. Curiously, I not only concurred but was in complete accord with this idea.. Those first few years of marriage, Phil and I had a very happy time. 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. Much of his activity was related to politics. I never should have gone, she said. This was not entirely to the good. 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. To find it out and tell it." You've probably heard of her father, Eugene Meyer, who is now publisher of the Washington Post, and has been in the past such things as head of the Federal Reserve. When she spoke to her daughter, it was often in the barbed rhythm of insult. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. Loose Lips Gradually, I ceased talking much at all when we were out together. She felt like Trilby to his Svengali; she felt as if he had created her, that she was totally dependent. He was the fun at the dinner table and in our country life. You cant go. In middle age and in a state of grief, she suddenly found herself in charge of a newspaper that had yet to show any signs of greatness, and of a group of men who regarded her with, at best, considerable suspicion. Ben, with another reporter, was on the site for 36 straight hours. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. in 1964, in his bedroom, she sat in an armchair while the President lay down on the bed. 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. Phil Graham, he said, was too hot for me, too involved in politics, felt too deeply about people, even his own people on the paper.. The reporters returned to The Post to write the story, expecting, of course, that it would be on the front page. 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