Personal History (18 page)
Authors: Katharine Graham
The visit Bis and I had in Chicago was extraordinary. We spoke at length about the complexity of being a member of this overwhelming Meyer family, of what it meant positively and negatively, and of what we both wanted to do with our lives. On the train, even as it was pulling out of the station, Bis began a long letter to me, so full of her essence and so full of insight into the family that I’ve kept it always. She wrote on November 20, 1937:
I wish I had had time to talk about your own problems which in the light of my experiences seem very difficult and complicated. One of the hardest problems for all of us is the one which I believe is at the root of Flo’s doings, and which I see little or no hope of her even realizing, let alone solving. That is the difficulty arising from the fact that from earliest childhood, we have all, through what is said and what is unsaid in the family circle, had the feeling that we were born to do big things! It was just a question of choosing the line best suited to us—hardly even the line we were best suited to! There was no question but that whatever it was we had to be best at it. Mother even used to say that, remember? “I don’t care what any of you kids do—even if one of you should want to be an actress—just so you’re the hell of a good actress!”
We have all felt a compulsion to be terrific! And that is a dangerous thing.
It is awfully hard for us really to give our best to something low, small, unimportant. We have lived so long at the top in every respect that it is hard to make ourselves really at home, with roots, at the bottom of the mountain. And that is the only way we will ever grow, if any of us do, to be able to climb under our own power.
It took me almost a month to reply, but when I did, it was a summation of what I was thinking about work, the family, the
Post
, and in particular my father. Bis kept my letter and returned it to me decades later:
On the subject of Meyerdom, I have plenty to say, even though I don’t pretend to understand it completely, either its causes or its effects. It can be compared, obviously enough, with an octopus whose tentacles stretch far and wide, and what is worst of all,
deep. In other words if you try to run from it you are apt to find it within. More concretely, this is the way it is working itself out for me at this point.
To begin somewhere in a circular situation, I think I want to go into the newspaper business. This is because I have certain political views which may or may not change combined with the fact that I like to write.…
Putting aside an unanswerable question at this time, my ability to be a good reporter, which is a gift given by God to a very few, I mean GOOD reporter, the fact remains that what I am most interested in doing is labor reporting, possibly working up to political reporting later.
As you can see, that is no help to Dad. He wants and needs someone who is willing to go through the whole mill, from reporting, to circulation management and problems, to editorial writing, and eventually to be his assistant. This presents the payoff in problems. One, I detest beyond description advertising and circulation and that is what a newspaper executive spends most of his time worrying about. Two, there is a question of point of view which would or might complicate things if I were to work under Dad. And three I doubt my ability to carry a load like the Washington Post, and four I know Dad needs a different kind of person, much more of an automaton under him, and five I damn well think it would be a first class dog’s life.…
Discarding, finally, for a moment, the idea of ever having anything to do with the W. Post, there are more theoretical results to be questioned and tested. As I said long long ago at the beginning of this letter, Meyer tentacles clutch deep. From Dad’s point of view, I think it would mean something; I may be flattering myself, but I think it would mean several things, such as companionship, a living connection with the next generation, and the knowledge that all that he was slaving to build was not going to stop with him.
From my point of view, it would be giving up a position that it is fair to say thousands would fight for, that is an influential position, in an influential paper in the capital of the world’s most important country. Right now anyway. Besides that it would mean losing valuable help, company, and advice, which has already influenced me a great deal and which I respect highly.…
If I find for some reason that I am not fitted to do newspaper work, and this may happen as among other things, I function a little on the slow side, which is not good, I shall get out and consider it no disgrace. I don’t think this is part of the success
idea, because by fitted, I mean simply a competent, not scintillating job. Though that is made difficult by our heritage, I should think it could be worked out practically, though I can’t tell from my present ivory tower window.
And someday I think I shall marry A MAN. That is because by nature I do not like to live alone. I like to live with somebody and if you live with someone it is nice to be married. So maybe I shall devote myself, as Flo always used to prophesy with hoots of mirth, to having sixteen small ones and bringing them up to be unsuccessful and rather animal in their desires, with as little as possible of that specialized human quality called the Rational.…
This letter seems to me to summarize who I was and what I was thinking after four years of college better than I can do it nearly sixty years later. I am puzzled that I had such reservations about working for my father, in view of the continuing conversations he and I were having about my education and career in journalism and the progress of the
Post
. I suppose the answer has to be that I was ambivalent, and maybe so was he, since he and I later both enthusiastically endorsed my husband’s going on the
Post
and my going off to lead the life of wife, mother, and good works.
M
Y STAY
at the University of Chicago—this “noble institution,” as I referred to it to my parents—ended in early June of 1938. My marks throughout my tenure at Chicago were not as good—or as bad, in some cases—as they might have been. I didn’t think it mattered, particularly since I felt I had learned a lot during my two years there. There seems to have been no discussion about my parents’ coming to whatever graduation formalities there were. I don’t believe I thought of graduation as a momentous event, but the fact that my parents didn’t come has been built into a trauma in various accounts, in one of which I am portrayed as weeping. I can’t, in fact, remember why they didn’t come, and to tell the truth, I can’t remember attending the graduations of my own children. Perhaps I inherited delinquency in this respect, or perhaps the sixties generation turned their backs on this kind of event.
We graduated in the beautiful Rockefeller-built chapel, the ceremony presided over by President Hutchins. And then, after partying with my friends, and with my formal education behind me, I left Chicago for Mount Kisco and a fairly uncertain future.
W
HILE
I
WAS
home after graduating, my father suggested that I accompany him to California, land of his youth. I scarcely knew the California branch of my family, but I quickly fell in love with them, and with San Francisco as well—its beauty and its people, the civic feeling, the friendliness, the informality. Very soon I came to think that it would be wonderful to work in such a congenial atmosphere and beautiful environment, so I resolved to try to stay. I told my father that if he would help me find a job there, I would swallow my pride and give up a job I had earlier got for myself in Chicago.
There were four newspapers in San Francisco at that time. In the morning, the
Chronicle
was the predominant and most respected voice. The competition was Hearst’s
Examiner
, the best and strongest Hearst paper of a then still-vibrant empire. The two afternoon papers exemplified typical old-fashioned razzle-dazzle street-sales journalism, bursting with huge headlines, late-breaking stories, and much more sex and crime than the morning papers. My father called his friend George “Deke” Parker of Scripps Howard, and it was on their paper, the
San Francisco News
, that he found me a two-month job. Our competitor in the afternoon was another Hearst paper, the
Call-Bulletin
.
I am surprised that my father didn’t turn to his friends on the
Chronicle
, the better-known and more traditional paper, but the
News
turned out to be a great blessing for me, because it was a typically informal, understaffed, rowdy, scrappy, amusing afternoon tabloid—ideal for a beginner breaking in, since it afforded me opportunities I couldn’t have had in a more structured, orderly atmosphere. But things didn’t start out all that happily. I went to the city room knowing no one, and—worse—not knowing the elements of the job. I hadn’t done much typing and certainly not much reporting. I didn’t know the city or how to get around in it. Everything seemed so suddenly overwhelming. I sat down at my desk and was gripped by fear of failure, lost and defeated before I’d begun.
My father had stayed over a few days, and I went to his room one night and in tears told him that I was afraid I’d bitten off more than I could chew, that I felt unable to do the job and would be of little use to the paper, certainly not worth the $21 a week I was being paid, and that I wanted to go home with him. Dad said simply that everyone had to learn, that maybe I should take some more time before deciding to give up the job, and that if I wasn’t worth the whole $21 a week now I’d be worth much more than that later, since I would gradually learn the things I was so discouraged about now. What persuaded me I’m not sure, but I agreed to stay, knowing I could always give up later.
Just one short month after my tearful desire to run away, my new life had become lots of fun. By mid-August, I was beginning to feel that there were more ups than downs. A touch of ambition was taking hold, and I could see further ahead than the next paragraph. I realized that not just the
News
but San Francisco itself was a good place for me to be starting work, since no one knew I was connected with newspaper big shots, and if some people did, they didn’t care. Most people, in fact, had never heard of
The Washington Post
, and some, I suspected, hadn’t heard of Washington.
On the job I was learning to write, or rewrite, from phoned-in news. It was still taking me too long to write, but my stories were appearing with fewer alterations by the editors on the callous city desk. I was also doing elementary jobs, like tracking down people for pictures. I even covered a bartenders’ union convention. My first serious assignment was cooked up by some editor. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was meeting in town, and he suggested I lure some of the delegates to a bar with the simple proposition that they view the scene of the crimes they were railing against, and do a story on the visit. I duly got the deed done and written up.
After I had been on the job only a short time, my neighbor in the city room, Bob Elliott, the
News’s
experienced, professional labor reporter, leaned over and said that he had heard labor reporting interested me and asked if I would like to be his “legman,” as it was then called, on two big issues he was covering—the growing confrontation on the waterfront involving a possible lockout of the Warehousemen’s Union and a threatened retail-store clerks’ strike against the city’s department stores. I responded with a vigorous and enthusiastic assent, and thus began a long story that absorbed me for many weeks in the San Francisco waterfront and with many of the major figures involved in it.
At the time I began working on the lockout, the longshoremen and warehousemen—those who loaded and unloaded the ships and those who stored the goods from the port in the warehouses and removed them later—were organized into one big union, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). The distributors from all the industries, tired of being knocked over one by one and whipsawed against
each other by this increasingly powerful union, got together and decided to exert their united front by locking out the ILWU so they could negotiate a master contract for the whole waterfront.
When a strike occurred at the Woolworth warehouse, the Distributors Association brought in a boxcar loaded by nonunion people and ordered it unloaded. The “hot car,” as it came to be dubbed—meaning a railroad freight car loaded by strikebreakers—was sent up and down the waterfront, stopping at each warehouse, where the employees were asked to unload it. When the union members refused, they would either go out on strike or be “locked out” of work as a result.
One of my jobs as a reporter on this story was to follow the hot car on its journey along the waterfront, observe each warehouse on which it called and the ensuing work stoppage, and report back to Elliott. So my beat became the waterfront, and my ports of call were the ILWU, the Distributors Association, and the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau, another strong force in the picture. The bureau was a group of radical economists and professional negotiators for the unions, headed by Henry Melnikow. One of its ablest and toughest but most charming members was Sam Kagel, a highly successful negotiator for the ILWU, who had no love for newspaper people. Luckily for me, however, of all the papers covering the waterfront he disliked the
News
least, thinking it was the fairest of all the overtly antiunion press.
The ILWU was headed by Harry Bridges, the radical Australian immigrant who had led the violent longshoremen’s strike in 1934. The warehousemen were headed by another very strong leader, Eugene Patton, one of a huge and authentic waterfront family, all of whom had grown up there and earned their living on the ships or around the harbor. Patton, or Pat, as he was known everywhere, was a wonderfully romantic figure. Smart, funny, and intuitive, though uneducated in any formal sense, he was a brave leader, and a charismatic one.
Each of these players said that I could make myself at home in his office and that if there were developments he would inform me. They all got together at the end of the day to trade information and unwind, usually at a bar at the foot of Sacramento Street, and I began going along. With Kagel, Patton, and occasionally Harry Bridges, I spent many hours up and down the waterfront in one of the twenty or more small, dark bars within a three-block area. We used to get boilermakers—a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey—at twenty-five cents each. If you bought two, you got the third one free—pretty heady stuff for a twenty-one-year-old.