Personal History (11 page)

One of the few memories I have of any reference to my being Jewish is of an incident that took place when I was ten or eleven. At school we were casting for reading aloud
The Merchant of Venice
, and one classmate suggested I should be Shylock because I was Jewish. In the same way I had once innocently asked my mother whether we were millionaires—after someone at school accused my father of being one—I asked if I was Jewish
and what that meant. She must have avoided the subject, because I don’t remember the answer. This confusion about religion was not limited to me: my sister Bis recalls that at lunch in our apartment in New York once, with guests present, she blurted out, “Say, who is this guy Jesus everyone is talking about?”

My identity as Jewish did not become an issue until I reached college and a discussion arose with a girl from Chicago who was leaving Vassar. She had been asked if she would see another acquaintance, a Jewish girl, also from Chicago. “Oh, no,” she replied, “you can’t have a Jew in your house in Chicago.” My best friend, Connie Dimock, later told me how horrified she was to have this said in front of me. Only then did I “get it”—and this was 1935, with Hitler already a factor in the world.

About the third thing that was never discussed in our family, sex, I knew nothing for a surprisingly long time. I had no idea what sex was or how babies were conceived. In fact, it was as if our rigorous schedules and exercise and athletic program were constructed to keep us from thinking too much about it. I once asked my mother what really happened during sex, telling her I’d read about the sperm and the ova but wondered how it all worked. She responded, “Haven’t you seen dogs in the street?” Although unfortunately I hadn’t, I naturally said, “Of course,” and that was the end of the conversation. Mother finally brought herself to speak to me about having periods, or “becoming a woman.” “Don’t worry about it, Mother,” I replied, “it happened months ago.”

Because these matters were never discussed, I was almost totally unaware of all of them—money, religion, and sex. It’s peculiar: I realized, of course, that the houses were big and that we had a lot of servants, but I didn’t know we were rich any more than I knew we were Jewish. In some ways it was quite bizarre; in others, quite healthy. Equally odd was how little we were taught about the practical aspects of life. I didn’t know how to manage the simplest tasks. I didn’t know how to dress, sew, cook, shop, and, rather more important, relate to people of any kind, let alone young men. My governess and I did some minor shopping, but as I grew up I mostly inherited party dresses from my sisters, until, when I was eighteen, Mother took me to Bergdorf Goodman for French clothes of staggering beauty and sophistication, which were well beyond my years and whose quality was wasted on young people who dressed appropriately. There was nothing in between for everyday.

I was always well fed and cared for, of course. In fact, my mother was constantly reminding us of how lucky we were, how much we owed our parents, how far-seeing and wonderful my father was to have taken care of us all. And we were indeed lucky. We had vast privileges. We had parents with solid values. Our interests were aroused in art and politics and books. But to all of this I brought my own feelings of inability and inferiority—
not only to my mother, but to my older sisters and brother. I was, I thought, realistic about my own assets and abilities as I grew older. I was not very pretty. I grew tall early, and therefore seemed ungainly to myself. I didn’t think I could excel, and was sure I’d never attract a man whom I would like and who would not be viewed with condescension by my parents and siblings.

In all the turmoil of the family and our strange isolation both from our parents and from the outside world, we children were left to bring ourselves up emotionally and intellectually. We were leading lives fraught with ambivalence. It was hard to have an identity. An early example of this came one day when the telephone rang in the playroom and there was no grown-up present. Bis very fearfully picked up the phone and said hello. A male voice impatiently asked, “Who is this? Who is this?,” to which Bis replied, “This is the little girl that Mademoiselle takes care of.” That was the only way she could think of to describe herself to a strange grown-up.

So the question of who we really were and what our aspirations were, intellectual or social, was always disquieting. The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past.

I
N
J
UNE OF
1933, my father bought
The Washington Post
. None of us could have known then what a transforming event this would be in all our lives. The paper had fallen on hard times, brought on in large part by the aimless ways of its owner, Edward Beale McLean, a dapper playboy whom Alice Longworth later described as a “pathetic man with no chin and no character.” Ned, as he was known, had been a poker and golf companion of President Harding, though their relationship ended badly for Ned when he—along with the paper—was linked to the Teapot Dome scandal.

From the time he inherited the
Post
in 1916 until he lost it a decade and a half later, Ned had paid scant attention to either its news or its business side. He brought his mistress to editorial meetings, or so it was alleged by his wife, Evalyn, in divorce proceedings. In fact, concerning his news sense, Evalyn memorably said, “He would not have recognized a piece of news—not even if the man who bit the dog likewise bit Ned McLean.” Evalyn, for her part, operated on a grand scale. The wealthy daughter of a mining tycoon, she lived in huge houses, gave lavish parties, and owned—and wore—the famous Hope diamond, which was reputed to bring bad luck to its owners, and seems to have done so for her. She had every intention of saving the
Post
for her sons and so had turned down several offers to buy it—or urged her husband to do so—including at least one from my father.

In fact, my father had several times before expressed interest in the
Post
and other papers. As early as 1925, when he realized that Hearst had two papers in Washington, both losers, he thought Hearst might be willing to sell one, and tried to acquire the morning
Washington Herald
.

Four years later, in 1929, he tried to buy the
Post
for $5 million, certain that this price was so high that the American Security Trust Company, which controlled the paper then, couldn’t possibly afford to turn him down. But it did. Other offers for the
Post
, including two in 1931,
each for $3 million, were also rejected. This was because Evalyn McLean held on—despite divorce proceedings and court fights. So the profitable paper Ned had inherited from his father continued its downhill slide. Poorly managed, with at least a half-million dollars in debts, it was forced into receivership in March 1932, unable even to pay its newsprint bills, and was to be sold at public auction.

Meanwhile, in September 1930, my father had been appointed by Hoover to be governor of the Federal Reserve Board. What he undertook in this job was nothing less than an attempt to turn around the Depression. He guided the banking and monetary policies of the United States domestically and abroad. He conceptualized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, writing the legislation to set it up, shepherding the bill through the Congress, and serving as chairman of the new credit agency—his name was specifically written into the legislation as chairman so that the bill would be sure to pass—as well as keeping his responsibilities as governor of the Federal Reserve. But the strain of running one institution in the morning and another in the afternoon—and both during the worst of the Depression—was too great, and he nearly broke under the pressure. My mother went to see President Hoover to say that these intolerable professional burdens could not continue and that the president would have to relieve my father of some of his duties before he had a complete breakdown. In her diary she gave a graphic description of her visit to the president:

In the end, what helped relieve the pressure a little was congressional passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932, which separated the two jobs of the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and allowed my father to give up the latter.

The election of Franklin Roosevelt in the fall of 1932, of course, created a different problem for my father, a Hoover appointee. He felt that what he had attempted was for the public good, so he saw no point in re-signing—even though Hoover wanted him to. My mother’s interpretation of Hoover’s repeatedly urging my father to resign before Roosevelt’s inauguration was typically to the point:

My father may have felt similarly, but he had no intention of making his job as governor of the Federal Reserve look like a political position, which he felt it was not meant to be nor should be. On the other hand, he didn’t see any sense in remaining in the government, since he felt he was tilting at windmills. When Roosevelt asked him to stay as head of the Federal Reserve, he agreed to do so, but in late March, he sent FDR his letter of resignation. In his eyes, Roosevelt’s sins were many, but a few stood out: his experimentation with the dollar, his disregard for the gold standard, and his general lack of sophistication about economic and financial policies—a lack shared, I must say, by every other president.

So the bankruptcy of the
Post
came at a propitious time for my father—just as he was leaving the government. He and my mother had clearly discussed the possibility of buying the paper, since she wrote in her diary on May 7, nearly a month before the purchase and the day before my father’s resignation from the Federal Reserve Board was accepted by FDR:

Yet, sometime after this diary entry, my father had still not decided to make the purchase. Instead, the first thing he did was retire to Mount Kisco. The story goes that, after his second week of retirement, he came down the stairs trailing his finger on the banister and claiming to find dust. He murmured something about the house’s not being properly run, to which my mother responded, “Eugene, it’s time you bought the
Post.”
He himself explained what happened to a group from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1934:

Ironically, he was prompted to reconsider the
Post
by a visit to Mount Kisco from Cissy Patterson—Eleanor Medill Patterson—who had been a longtime friend of both my parents. Cissy was the sister of Joe Patterson, founder of the
New York Daily News
—at that time the great tabloid—and the cousin of Colonel Robert McCormick, owner and publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
.

The McCormick women were strong and intelligent, and Cissy was all of that. She was what the French call a
“jolie laide”
—a woman who is feature for feature ugly but succeeds in being beautiful. She lived in a mansion on Dupont Circle, now the Washington Club, became the editor of Hearst’s morning
Herald
, and later was also editor and publisher of the afternoon
Washington Times
, leasing the papers from Hearst until she finally bought them and combined them into one all-day paper. At this point, in 1933, she knew one important thing: that her future depended on who owned
The Washington Post
.

Aware of my father’s previous attempts to buy Washington newspapers, she came to ask if he meant to buy the
Post
now, and her question actually re-aroused his interest. This time it held, and he came down to Washington to pursue the paper. Since it was known that he had at one time been willing to pay $5 million for it, he didn’t want to escalate the bidding at the auction by revealing his identity. Consequently, he had a lawyer, George E. Hamilton, Jr., do the bidding for him, and instructed Hamilton to raise anybody’s bid by $50,000 or even $100,000 immediately, as though he were going to go on forever, then to jump in increments of $25,000 once the bidding reached $800,000. He also gave Hamilton an outside parameter of $1.5 to $1.7 million, and sent him off to the auction on his behalf. He himself remained out of sight at Crescent Place, which was essentially closed up for the summer, hiding with his friend and lifelong assistant, Floyd Harrison.