Personal History (28 page)

In January 1943, Phil graduated fifth in his class of five hundred, a radio cadet with a waiver in hand for Officers’ Candidate School. Soon we left for the East, and within days of leaving Sioux Falls, we were both restless and lonely at not being together, nostalgic for the proximity to the camp of Room 611 at the Carpenter Hotel. The consolation of those months in Sioux Falls was that we were together. I wouldn’t have traded being with him and sharing that experience for anything in the world. And despite all its minuses, we had liked Sioux Falls.

On the other hand, I was looking forward to seeing everybody in Washington and getting a taste of home life, as well as a meal I didn’t have to fight for. Since by this time it was definite, I
was
having a baby, and it looked more and more as if I would be able to carry it through to term, I
decided to live at my parents’ in order not to be alone while I was pregnant. Phil, now doing basic training for officers in Wayne, Pennsylvania, was happier in his work than he’d been for months. He liked the town, his hall, the officers, and the men. Then, in the middle of February, Phil left Wayne for further training at Yale, where he was pleasantly ensconced for six weeks in Farnum Hall, happily supplied with the East Coast’s usual array of newspapers and magazines, and with a PX just fifty yards away. Our weekends in New Haven were wonderful, spent in a room at the Taft Hotel, only half a block from his hall. Phil worried about the long trip for pregnant me, but I was glad of the opportunity.

Phil graduated first in his class from the OCS program at Yale and was temporarily assigned, now as a second lieutenant and communications officer, to General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, headquartered in Washington, where we finally had real time together. After ten days of OSS, however, which Phil found political and full of “white-shoe” boys, he decided he was miserable and asked to return to the air corps, which was not accomplished without considerable embarrassment.

Around May 1, his orders came to leave the next day for an air-force assignment center in Salt Lake City. This time I was too pregnant to think of going with him. Though I knew I would have to have the baby without him there, I comforted myself with the assurance that it was better to have had the glorious month of April together while I was still fairly mobile. We again went through a departure at the train station, accompanied once more by the dreadful uncertainty about where he was really headed.

I busied myself in moving to my old single room at my parents’ house. I was almost undone by Phil’s possessions left behind, especially his pennies, which all his life he took out of his pockets and stacked on a dresser or tabletop. One note of comic relief was that he had left my framed photo behind on the mantel.

T
HE
S
ECOND
A
IR
F
ORCE
had an awesome array of places to which Phil could have been sent from Salt Lake City, with Boise, Tucson, Galveston, Sioux City, and El Paso being the choicest. On May 7, I heard that he had left for Ephrata, Washington, from which he wrote that his own worst expectations had been met.

Ephrata, near Yakima, was a combat-crew training school in the middle of nowhere, made from old huts left over from the New Deal days of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The camp was terribly organized for living or for leaving, situated as it was near a town of nine hundred people and offering few, if any, escapes for the men. It was a cold and barren place, and Phil was already a bit depressed by the time he reached it. His
time there was probably the nadir of his military life, marked by constant bad weather, heights of inefficiency, and depths of loneliness.

My letters to Phil and his to me were like long, continuing conversations—mine about whom I’d seen, where I’d been, some national issues, and the frequently discussed baby, always referred to as Petunia; his about the difficulties of life in Ephrata. I felt unapologetic about confiding any low feelings I had, because I knew how I’d feel if Phil didn’t tell me how
he
felt. I didn’t see why there should be added to the strain of a relationship by correspondence the false burden of pseudo-gallantry. In truth, I was worried about the real reason for Phil’s gloom—whether he was unhappy about the long run or the short. Was his mood, like mine, affected by the weather and not being together, or was it the lack of congenial company, or what was it?

In September 1942, my mother had made a tour of Britain’s war centers to report on how the citizenry there was focused on production. She and a friend, Ruth Taylor, journeyed for a month visiting hospitals, children’s nurseries, schools, factories, workers’ canteens, social centers, and occupational clubs. Her conclusion was that the United States had yet to learn what she considered her major impression of that trip—that this was “a people’s war,” and that the maximum war effort in Great Britain had “set a social revolution in motion.” Her observations of life on the home front in England propelled her to set out early in 1943 on a four-month trip around the United States, visiting factories, shipyards, tenements, schools, day-care centers, reporting on America’s home front and the social effects of the war.

In Mother’s absence, I enjoyed the relative calm. I kept my father company and helped him at the “smokers,” or off-the-record stag dinners and seminars he often gave to bring together administration officials and foreign dignitaries with the
Post
’s editors and writers, so that they could exchange views on how the war was going and what needed to be done by businesses to help the effort. But the dinners I remember most were the quiet ones when just he and I were together. We rarely talked intimately—neither of us had a great capacity, at that time, for intimacy—but without acknowledging it, we had grown very close and very dependent on each other.

During this time, he was as pleased as a little boy because the
Post
was going to break even for the first time. By the middle of the war, the paper actually moved into the black, though not making in 1942 as much as it had lost in 1941. The
Post’s
reputation had grown immeasurably. It had gained substantial prestige and was showing the positive effects of all the efforts and money spent in the ten years since my father bought it. Although he was wary of being too optimistic, nothing could conceal his intense excitement. He and I spent a great deal of time talking about the
Post
specifically and newspapers in general. At one point during the war, he gave me a part-time job reading and comparing newspapers for news play and ideas. I was very enthusiastic and added
PM
and
The New York Times
to the list of papers he wanted me to look at, rejecting payment of any kind so that I could retain the right to leave the job if and when I could join Phil.

In 1943, Herbert Elliston and my father hired Alan Barth from a small Texas newspaper. Barth, more liberal than either of them, was a fighting voice for civil rights and civil liberties and became both a great distinction and, at times, a political problem for my father—and, later, Phil. But he was an ornament to the editorial page, whose contents had markedly improved.

The business side had improved, too, though less spectacularly and more unevenly than the editorial. The circulation department was still in its predevelopment stage and had no adequate managers or professional expertise. Early in 1944, the home-delivery price was increased and the street-sale price went from three cents to a nickel. We were running fifteen million lines of advertising, or two and a half times the original 1933 linage.

On the minus side, the
Post
lacked coherence and consistency and had inadequate local coverage. At the time, Washingtonians still had no vote and the city was governed by a triumvirate of commissioners appointed by the president. The city was also segregated; black citizens and black crime were not considered news. John Riseling, the night city editor, had a map of the District in his head, and when something happened in a black area, no one was sent to cover it.

Patterns were set that influenced the paper for years to come. The editorial page was independent of the news section. It was also independent of my father’s views, yet enough in sync with them that he was pleased and proud of it. Campaigns of all kinds were waged by Casey Jones, the managing editor, and others—against congressmen abusing parking privileges, on child-welfare issues, against the sale of babies for adoption, on a subversive propaganda group in league with the office of right-wing Congressman Hamilton Fish. The
Post
also raised a lonely warning voice opposing discrimination against Americans of Japanese descent in the name of national security. Occasionally, Casey Jones would get wrought up enough to write a front-page editorial, causing great consternation for everyone, but especially for those on the editorial page.

A very important role was played by women on the
Post
during the war years. Elsie Carper, just out of college, joined the paper and was able to move up quickly; many women were taking over the jobs of men who had gone off to war. Marie Sauer, always a stalwart on the women’s pages, was one of the key reporters and editors. I remember worrying about my father’s reaction when Marie joined the Waves—I knew how much he was
relying on these women. Unfortunately, like all publications, the
Post
sank back into its old ways after the men returned. A nucleus remained, however, although largely on the women’s pages and in what were regarded as women’s issues: welfare and education.

Despite all the evident improvement in the paper, however, it was in no way certain that the
Post
would survive. The Washington newspaper scene was very chaotic, particularly for a town its size. No other city of half a million had so many papers, none of which was a fly-by-night. The struggle for survival was omnipresent and at times a discouraging burden to my father, who was nearing seventy. Seeing him as I did each day, I was constantly worried about how tired he seemed and how hard he was working. These past ten years had taken a tremendous toll.

Given his concerns, my father turned his attention more and more to thinking about the future of the
Post
. The first inkling I had that he might have begun to look at Phil as a white knight came just two years after our marriage. In the fall of 1942, Dad and I were on a train coming back from Mount Kisco, and naturally we were talking about Phil. I remember his commenting on how well Phil wrote and how much he’d love to have him on the paper. I told Phil in a letter, “You better watch out if you don’t want it is all I can say. You may find it in your stocking Christmas morning.”

Shortly after this, my father seems to have brought up with both of us the possibility of Phil’s working at the paper after the war. Certainly he saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for the
Post
in the family. In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male, and since my brother was in medicine and had shown little or no interest in the business, my father naturally thought of Phil. Far from troubling me personally that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper.

Although the impending war had prevented us from moving to Florida after Phil had finished his year as law clerk with Frankfurter, he still had plans to follow Brandeis’s admonition to young Harvard Law School graduates to go back where they came from and become part of grassroots America. Given his love of politics and natural affinity for it, this was Phil’s plan and his desire. He wanted to do public service and to deal with societal problems, as did many of the best and the brightest of our generation—or at least most of those we knew. And despite their mutually respectful, affectionate relationship, Phil had always said he would never work for my father.

But now he was faced with the actual possibility of working on the
Post
. It was an exciting idea, though with a lot of risk involved. It would be a tough struggle in an area in which he had only a passing, indirect knowledge through talking to my father. Phil had to weigh the offer against not
only his ambition to go into law and politics in Florida but his own father’s wish that he come to Florida to be part of the dairy business there.

Phil was in Officers’ Candidate School in New Haven when most of the talks between him and my father took place—and between the two of us. Phil and I sat on the beds in my room at the Taft Hotel for many hours discussing my father’s offer. I loved the idea but didn’t try to persuade Phil. When he asked me what I thought, I ducked, saying I loved Washington, it was my home, but I knew I could be happy other places as well. I also knew I loved the
Post
, but he was the one who would be working, and it really had to be his decision; this was his life, and he had to decide what he wanted to do with it.

After much talk, consultation, and soul-searching, he finally decided to accept. Agreeing with my father’s philosophy, he saw that he could be involved in public issues through the paper as well as through politics. He concluded that the
Post
was a great opportunity, albeit a risky one.

B
EFORE HE LEFT
for overseas, my brother had suggested that I check in with a new obstetrician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, whom he and my sister-in-law wanted me to go to for the baby. I was so traumatized by what had happened before that I wanted to return to my old doctor, probably as a way of reassuring myself that the loss of the first baby was an inevitable accident. I went on denying that anything wrong had been done, attributing the tragedy to fate. Bill pointed out that a teaching hospital like Johns Hopkins would keep good staff longer. His advice led me to go there for the birth of all four of my children.

As Phil whiled away his time in Ephrata, this baby’s due date neared, and all appeared to be well. I had been warned by my doctor that, in order to circumvent the problem of getting to Baltimore in gas-restricted wartime, I should move there on June 5, just to be safe for the June 15 due date. In a fit of well-meant caring, Bis and Pare Lorentz, whom she was just about to marry, persuaded me to go even earlier, so on June 1 I took up residence in Baltimore. Needing someone for company in this strange town, I turned to my sister-in-law, Mary Meyer, who agreed to come with me, leaving her six-month-old son, a deeply generous act (at least to me). We lived together in the Belvedere Hotel in the June heat. Spending any extended time in a hotel, even if it was the best hotel in Baltimore, is difficult; but this was a hotel in wartime in a strange city in which I had no real friends, waiting for a baby to come who didn’t seem very anxious to get here. I quickly became nervous, edgy, and vulnerable.