Personal History (20 page)

My progress at work was uneven, a series of ups and downs. Every once in a while I thought I was catching on to the art of writing a news story, yet, even when I felt I might be getting the hang of it in terms of speed and efficiency, the top still seemed so terribly far away. Efficiency was my special bugaboo. Every time I did something stupid, I could hear my French governess’s voice resounding through the years, saying
“Etourdie, veux-tu mettre les accents?”
—“Scatterbrain, will you put on the accents?” Here I was, years later, still forgetting to put the accents on.

I feared getting scooped, but so far it hadn’t happened. I went on worrying that I might be “hanging on,” that I mightn’t have been kept on if it hadn’t been for my name, but then, thinking back to my first day, I remembered the hour it had taken me to write a three-line item and felt encouraged by having in just one day written two half-column stories, covered a wool growers’ convention and a fire, and written the weekly church column that always got foisted on some poor sucker. The
News
, chronically short of staff, was particularly so while I was there, and I was always tired by evening, when I rode home on the cable car.

My final story for the paper was the opening of the Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, celebrating the new Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge. I covered the Exposition all day and went out at night with an architect friend, Bill Wurster, who had designed the Arts Building for it.

In the spring of 1939, my father came out to visit and reminded me that I had said I was going to come back to work on the
Post
. In fact, his visit came at a propitious moment. The
News
was going through yet another of its economy drives, and it seemed clear that someone would be let go, in which case I, the junior person, was the likely candidate. Besides, I was worried about taking someone’s job who needed it. So I agreed with my father that I would return to Washington, not exactly reluctantly but not without mixed feelings and a certain sense of loss. I loved those months I spent in San Francisco as I have loved few times in my life.

On April 24, 1939, my photo appeared in
Time
magazine on the personalities page, with the brief story, “To Washington, D.C., went comely, 21-year-old Katherine [sic] Meyer, daughter of publisher Eugene Meyer, to handle for $25 a week the ‘Letters to the Editor’ department of her father’s Post. Said Father Meyer: ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll get rid of her.’ ” Some of my San Francisco friends, with Kagel in the lead, sent me the clip with a note: “There are no ifs in California. Come back to us.”

C
OMING BACK TO
Washington after nearly five years away—at college and in San Francisco—I found a new city. I had no idea how much Washington had changed since I’d left for Vassar. There was an intellectually exciting atmosphere, a sea-change from the Washington I had left behind in 1934. I was happily surprised—indeed, thrilled—by this new city, alive with energetic, dynamic young people. From the stodgy town I’d known, where a small group of older people were the “establishment” and saw each other constantly at very formal dinners and the young people were set in a different but equally boring routine, there had sprung a young person’s ideal place.

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years. In the time I’d been mostly gone, large numbers of these able, idealistic young men and women had come to town ready to help institute reforms, to get the economy working again, to guarantee certain benefits to those without jobs, or Social Security to those in retirement, or minimum wages to those with low-paying jobs. It was a moment when youth could accomplish a lot, when ideas percolated up and were listened to by those in authority.

Against this backdrop, in April of 1939 I went to work on the
Post
. I felt it unwise to try to be a reporter back in Washington, since it would be awkward being the publisher’s daughter, so it was agreed that I would become an editorial-page employee—work that was very different from what I had been doing in San Francisco. I now worked for the editorial-page editor, Felix Morley. The editorial team, with me quite the junior member, met every morning to discuss the issues of the day. Assignments were made based on an individual’s particular expertise, Morley saving the biggest domestic and international issues for himself.

By 1939, the president’s energies were concentrated on uniting the
country on events abroad. This meant abandoning most of the New Deal programs except for those already in place, so the
Post’s
editorials and news began to be more in sync with the administration. The paper fiercely backed preparedness in this country. As early as April 1939, when Roosevelt casually said as he was leaving Warm Springs, Georgia, “I’ll be back in the fall if we don’t have a war,” the
Post’s
editorial page led with: “In using the collective ‘we,’ the President told Hitler and Mussolini … that the tremendous force of the United States must be a factor in their current thinking.” Roosevelt told reporters that this so represented his thinking, “he had almost fallen out of bed” when he read it.

On September 1, 1939, the day the German Army invaded Poland, Barnet (Barney) Nover—one of my editorial colleagues—and I went together to President Roosevelt’s press conference in the Oval Office. The fact that he
could
take me, an unaccredited journalist, to the White House now seems amazing. At that time, the president’s press conferences generally consisted of a small group of (mostly) men standing around the president’s desk listening to him talk, bantering, and asking a few questions.

On this day, it was a larger and more solemn group. Barney and I were there early and so were fairly close to the president’s desk. In his diary, Barney noted the tone of the meeting:

By this time the strain between Morley’s view that we must stay out of the war, and my father’s opposite view that we had to help the Allies and, if necessary, get in, reached a climax. Morley resigned the following spring, and it was announced in August that he would become president of Haverford College. My friends and I were all exultant that the rift had finally caused Morley to depart—so committed were we all to helping the Allies. Being young, we couldn’t understand why it had taken my father so long to see the light.

The transition, however, was fairly smooth. My father first tried to hire Elmer Davis, a popular news-radio broadcaster, but in the end he settled for a recommendation of Morley’s—Herbert Elliston, financial editor for
The Christian Science Monitor
. As Morley had done, Elliston carried the page to greater and greater strength.

I
N MY FIRST
year or so at the
Post
, I began to write with some frequency on the least important issues—so-called light editorials. The titles
themselves are revealing of just how light: “On Being a Horse,” “Brains and Beauty,” “Mixed Drinks,” “Lou Gehrig,” and “Spotted Fever.” I wrote about folk songs inspiring American soldiers; about women mobilizing for defense work; and defended Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, from accusations of being a “fellow traveler.” I wrote a book review of a book by Klaus and Erika Mann,
Escape to Life
, and was unmercifully teased by my friends for the bromidic opening phrase “It is no easy task Klaus and Erika Mann have set themselves.…”

I also edited the “Letters to the Editor,” made up parts of the page, which involved numerous trips to the composing room on the floor below our offices, where printers put the hot-lead rows of type into page forms on dollies as I watched. One of us proofread the page each night, as well as the opinion page, which contained syndicated columns along with some contributed by
Post
reporters and editors. I took my turn at this. Around the time of the changeover from Morley to Elliston, I moved over to the “Brains” section—today’s “Outlook”—and worked for a year there.

I soon began to meet many of the
Post
’s reporters and to deepen my friendship with others. We occasionally left our dingy, run-down, but picturesque building to lunch at Childs or other little neighborhood restaurants on E Street. I quickly fell in with two young reporters whom I hadn’t previously known, John Oakes, nephew of Arthur Sulzberger, then the publisher of
The New York Times
, and Hedley Donovan, a young, bright Minnesotan, handsome, soft-spoken, and very funny. He had been a Rhodes Scholar, then returned from England and got a job with the
Post
. John, also a Rhodes Scholar, later became editorial-page editor of
The New York Times
, and Hedley became editor-in-chief of Time Inc.

Because of my friendship with
Post
reporters like John and Hedley, my work world spilled over into a social life that grew lively and rich in very short order. There were legions of young men in Washington who grouped together to live in houses, which proved to be cheap, attractive, and advantageous to all those rooming cooperatively. Most of these men were on modest government salaries, but by pooling their resources they lived like kings. Hedley lived at one of these bachelor houses, located on S Street near Connecticut Avenue, where I went to a party one night in the fall of 1939. We all went to a nearby restaurant for dinner, and a few of us got back to S Street before our fellow diners. I was looking out the window, calling to the others, when the screen fell out, right onto the heads of those returning, one of whom was Philip Graham, whom I met for the first time that night when he looked up to see me staring down with my mouth agape.

Later that same evening, I went to a bathroom upstairs and there ran into a girl named Phyllis Asher, who said she was going to law school, which at that time was very unusual for a woman. I exclaimed with admiration,
saying that I couldn’t possibly do it and asking how she managed the difficult work. “Well,” she replied, “it’s made easier because I’m engaged to Phil Graham.” She said Phil would come by for her at night and, over a milkshake, they would discuss anything that was on her mind, and this helped. “Oh, how wonderful,” I replied, thinking only that he was the one I had just nearly maimed by dropping a screen on his head.

When the S Street house became too crowded, a second house was found into which some of the S Street residents moved, together with some others. This second house was in Arlington, five minutes away from the Virginia end of Key Bridge. It was essentially those with automobiles who moved to this house.

Hockley, as the house was called, belonged to Admiral and Mrs. Theodore Wilkinson, whose daughters were friends of the boys. When Admiral Wilkinson left Washington for the duration of the war, the Wilkinsons bravely rented the house for very little money to twelve young men. John Oakes and Deering Danielson, a wealthy young man who worked in the State Department and whose family owned
The Atlantic Monthly
, were the only nonlawyers among the Hockley boys. The lawyers included Graham Claytor, who had been Louis Brandeis’s law clerk; Adrian Fisher, known as Butch, a Tennessean who had clerked for both Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter; gentle, sweet Bill Sheldon, who was the most beloved by us all; Quinn Shaughnessy, who became a friend of mine that fall; Edwin McElwain, one of Chief Justice Hughes’s two law clerks; the star, Edward Prichard, known to all as Prich, Felix Frankfurter’s law clerk that year, a brilliant, talented, funny, fat, witty storyteller and mimic, as well as a marvelous conversationalist; and Prich’s great friend Phil Graham, then clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk for Frankfurter the following year. Two of these boys—Graham Claytor and Phil Graham—together with Ed Huddleson, who had stayed behind at the S Street house, had successively been editors of the
Harvard Law Review
, then the most prestigious collegiate job in the country, closely rivaled only by the editorships of the
Yale
and
Columbia Law Reviews
.

Hockley itself had probably been built at the turn of the century. It was made of red brick and had four white pillars on a veranda overlooking a lawn that rolled down toward the nearby Potomac River. The house commanded a magnificent view of the river and the city just across it. It was like a secondhand Tara from
Gone With the Wind
. There was a huge living room, and a dining room that could seat about twenty people that was almost always full. There was also a library on the ground floor, and there were at least six bedrooms upstairs.

Because they pooled their resources and the rent was low to begin with, the boys almost certainly would never again live so well for so little. They had a gardener and a full-time cook and a maid and, most important,
they had Johnson, the all-American equivalent of a major-domo. Johnson and his wife had worked for Dean and Alice Acheson for at least twenty-five years, until the day Alice discovered they had never actually gotten married and sent them packing, much to Dean’s dismay. This happened just when Hockley was being rented, and the boys were able to snag Johnson, who ran this new chaotic household with aplomb.

Life for me fell into a glorious pattern, largely centered on Hockley. An extraordinary assembly of guests gathered there, including Dean Acheson, Archibald MacLeish, Felix Frankfurter, Ben Cohen, Francis Biddle, and various other New Dealers, Harvard professors, and judges and justices, sometimes even for breakfast.

Four of us spent so much time there we became known as Hockley’s “house” girls: Alice Barry, Anne Wilkinson, Jane Acheson, and myself. There were many others, but we became natural adjuncts of the house. Sometimes we would all meet at Hockley and move on to my parents’ country house, farther out in Virginia, or we’d go en masse to the Edward Burlings’ log cabin for Sunday brunches.