Personal History (25 page)

The year Phil served as Felix’s law clerk can only be described as rollicking—it definitely had a Rover Boys quality to it. Our friend and Hockley co-dweller Edwin McElwain was clerking with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Ed Huddleson was with Justice Frank Murphy, and of course Prich was always around, even though now working for the executive branch of the government.

Felix being Felix, our lives were intertwined. He was all-enveloping. That year there were more or less continual phone calls or visits to our house or his, and constant gossip and jokes about people on the Court or what was going on there.

Our mornings always got off to a slow start. Phil had a lifelong inability either to get up in the morning or to go to bed at night. I am a morning person and a dormouse at night. The phone would often ring in the morning and Felix would say, “Where is Phil?” “On his way, Judge,” I would respond, using the title we always gave him, while simultaneously kicking Phil out of bed and helping him rush out.

Phil had bought a secondhand Oldsmobile, painted a weird shade of green by some previous owner, in which he would pick up the justice at his house in Georgetown and drive him to work and home again. They would talk, argue, and gossip nonstop. Felix often dictated to Phil, who typed while the justice strode up and down composing. When Felix’s prose occasionally turned elaborate, purple, or bromidic, Phil, disapproving, simply stopped typing. If they disagreed about an opinion, arguments would go on and on until Felix was either influenced or simply decided. Felix was so tolerant that at times his original opinion would simply not get written, but when strong emotions were involved, the arguments could go on for months. During one case about which Phil and Felix disagreed strongly, Phil, looking disgruntled, came in after dropping the justice at his house on 30th Street. Apparently they had argued all the way home. As soon as he walked into the house, the phone rang, and the argument continued unabated until—to my surprise—I heard Phil say, “Well, I don’t care what you do, Judge. I just don’t want to see you make yourself look silly!”—with which he banged down the phone. I don’t remember what the case was,
but I do remember that they kept delaying writing the decision while the argument raged on. Finally, they worked all night to finish writing the opinion at the very last possible moment before the Court adjourned, and then returned home in the early morning in a cab, Felix so tired he didn’t focus on the driver’s asking for his address. Phil quoted the taxi driver as looking back at this exhausted man and saying, “What’s the matter? You stupid or something?”

Another day, the justice came into our house with Phil, grabbed my arm very tightly as he often did, sometimes so tightly that it hurt, and asked, “Kay, did Phil tell you what Hughes said on the Court the other day?” “No, he didn’t, Judge,” I replied. “Phil, why didn’t you tell Kay? You should have told her. Holmes told his wife everything.”

Felix had boundless energy and ebullience and a tremendous
joie de vivre
. He was cerebral, of course, but he was also emotional. He loved engaging in verbal dueling over issues. And he loved certain kinds of people—particularly those whose ideas of right and justice jibed with his own. But he also liked people who disagreed with him and stood up to him, if they were very smart and were within his mental spectrum; it wasn’t enough to be intelligent if you bored him or were pedestrian or had a literal mind. Because the Frankfurters were childless, Felix seemed to adopt as his intellectual sons the young Harvard law students who interested and amused him, hence the fullness of the relationship with the law clerks and their families. He loved laughter and gossip, and he encouraged the extreme irreverence of his favorite students and liked to be challenged by them. To an outsider brought up with old-fashioned manners, the boys seemed breathtakingly rude, but Felix didn’t see it that way; the shouted arguments and insults were simply his preferred form of communicating. Prich was particularly irreverent. Someone reported that at a law clerks’ dinner Prich sat slumped over a conference table, drumming his fingers with his eyes half shut, while the arguments raged. Suddenly Felix looked down the table and said, “Prich, what are you doing?” Prich looked up and said, “Counting the digressions in your argument.” Felix roared.

Since Phil was spending long hours at the Court, I went back to work on the
Post
, writing stories for the “Brains” section of the Sunday paper, now called “Outlook.” This was a much more intense writing experience than any I had had, and was sometimes hard for me. Once Phil found me at two in the morning, hunched over my typewriter, pecking desperately away; I was stuck in the middle of a story, unable to go on. He asked me a few questions, wrote out a few paragraphs, unstuck me, and went back to bed.

I wrote on such subjects as the broadcasters’ fight with ASCAP, propaganda
groups and the America First Committee, Mrs. Roosevelt’s beginning her third term, the Harry Bridges trial, the D.C. Juvenile Court, the Cherry Blossom Festival and spring in Washington, Pan American Day, and one piece entitled “Brain Trust Gone, but Professors Are Still Here.” I joined the Women’s National Press Club, recommended by Casey Jones, who wrote a letter in my behalf saying I was a “thoroughly competent reporter.”

The
Post
was still operating from its plant on E Street, several doors away from the National Theater. The entire building was perilous and problematic. Everything in it was old, except some of the people. The small, dark lobby housed a cashier and a counter where back copies of the paper were sold and the public was dealt with. There was a small cagelike elevator run by a man who had to manage the old-fashioned gate, and a dangerous ride in it took you past the city room on the second floor to the editorial offices, women’s department, and the editors’ and publisher’s offices in the front of the building on the third floor.

The local newspaper war was heating up. Cissy Patterson’s merging the
Times
and the
Herald
made the
Post
third in circulation behind her combined circulation and the
Star
. My father often complained that, while the other Washington papers were first in advertising and in circulation, the
Post
was first in operating expenses. The Scripps Howard afternoon tabloid, the
News
, was still much read at lunchtime.

My father continued to run the
Post
with zest. He enjoyed being the publisher, and his employees enjoyed working for him. They had begun to refer to him affectionately as Butch—at least behind his back—which he loved and considered a term of respect. Although the
Post
ran a deficit in 1940 of three-quarters of a million dollars and even more the next year, he was working hard at winnowing down the loss. In the summer of 1941, he proposed sharing the “progress” of the paper—there were no profits—with his employees, by offering to divide two-thirds of any improvement over the previous year’s results among them. The advertising linage of the
Post
was less than one-half that of the
Star
, but circulation was up to 130,000, compared with the 50,000 in 1933 when my father bought it.

Also in the summer of 1941,
Time
magazine did a piece on the
Post
, calling it “the Capital’s sole big-league newspaper.… It has become a journal of national importance, a reading must on Capitol Hill, an institution of high character and independence, a force for good in its bailiwick.” In a wonderfully hick response that appeared on page one, the
Post
said, “There can be no stretched headbands around the Post; this newspaper has just started to grow.” Whatever the response, this must have been an exciting accolade for a paper so new in its regeneration and still so far behind
the dominant and wealthy
Star
in local prestige. The progress made was a tribute to my father’s tenacity in the face of great difficulties and what at times seemed a hopeless case. He would moan and groan over his breakfast tray, brought to him at my mother’s bedside, exclaiming, “I think I’ll sell the
Post.”
She always succeeded in encouraging him and bucking him up at the low moments.

P
HIL AND
I were both ardent Roosevelt partisans, although, since the District of Columbia had no vote, our support was just talk. My parents, like many other District residents in 1940, were passionately pro-Willkie. Mother, in her usual style, became a friend as well as a supporter of the Willkies. I suspect, with hindsight, that Willkie was a fine candidate, although we related to Harold Ickes’s condescending description of him as “the barefoot boy from Wall Street.”

Our first Christmas together we spent in bed with the flu. First I collapsed; then Phil, on Christmas Eve. We had to turn away our two guests and spent the day on the second floor with a little artificial eight-inch Christmas tree and a few visitors and phone calls—the saddest one being from my brother on his way to Boston to be married to Mary Adelaide Bradley, a research student whom he knew at Johns Hopkins and who had been a year ahead of me at Vassar. The flu kept us from going to the wedding. The little tree remained for years, sentimentally, among our Christmas decorations.

By this time, as the war in Europe went on escalating, English children were pouring into the United States to seek refuge from the falling bombs. The Frankfurters had added great excitement to their house by taking on the three young children of Gilbert Murray, the famous Greek scholar at Oxford, who was a friend of Felix’s. My father took on an entire nursery school of fifteen children and their teachers, rented a large country house near Warrenton, Virginia, furnished it hastily, and lodged them there for the duration of the war. It was called Clover Croft School.

When France fell, my father brought over to America two families of his French relatives, who, being Jewish, were in danger. He supported them, helping the men get jobs and providing money to help educate the children here. Unfortunately, his cousin Léon Zadoc-Kahn and his wife, Suzanne, declined my father’s invitation to help them leave Europe, and eventually died in Auschwitz. Their son Bertrand, a doctor who was head of the American Hospital in Paris, had shot himself when France fell. Under the shock of his loss, they didn’t want to leave. Bertrand’s sister Jacqueline stayed in France also and was hidden in what was originally Free France by a very brave Catholic family. She and her husband, Jacques
Eisenmann, were close to my father and are still close to me. They are now well into their nineties and immensely gallant.

A
S THE
C
OURT’S
term drew to a close in the late spring of 1941, Phil began to think more and more about what to do next. He still thought he would return to Florida to practice law and eventually go into politics, and we had made a trip to Tallahassee during which he had been interviewed and had got a job in the state attorney general’s office. But back in Washington the threat of America’s getting involved in the war seemed too real for us to move to Florida. Phil concluded that we would eventually be fighting and that he would go. In the meantime, he didn’t want to abandon the effort to gear up for war; he wanted to be involved. As talk of war intensified, Phil’s after-hours work turned to politics, and he cast around for the place where he could be most useful.

In late May, he had lunch with Robert Lovett, then assistant secretary of war for air, who told Phil he should stay working in Washington “until our need for soldiers and sailors shaped up a bit more.” Because his own office bureaucracy was too dominated by army colonels, Lovett decided that Phil’s abilities could best be used by Harry Hopkins in the White House, where Hopkins—FDR’s closest adviser, but in failing health—was living. Lovett felt there was a bottleneck in the White House and that a good young fellow could take enough of the work off Hopkins to enable him to prepare really important things for the president.

Frankfurter and Lovett both talked to Hopkins, who saw Phil one June morning in his combined bedroom and office. Phil went in weak-kneed and scared. He later wrote his father an account of the meeting:

The year that began with Phil’s going to Lend-Lease, in June of 1941, and ended with his going into the army the following summer, was one of the most exciting of our lives. Oscar Cox attracted able people to work for him; they in turn related well to each other and to people in jobs with access to higher-ups. In this way, they could constructively pull the levers of power and make government work more effectively than it otherwise would have. Oscar was himself one of those superstars secure enough to want the best around them and to give people a lot of authority and then back them.