Personal History (33 page)

The first conflict she had with the management of the
Post
in which Phil became embroiled took place in 1948 and involved an incident in which Herbert Elliston felt she had interfered with his work. He protested to Phil—noting that it was the only occasion he’d had to complain in the eight years he’d been at the paper—that she had corrected a proof of an editorial of his on secularism and sent it directly to the composing room.
Herbert felt, justly, that she had overstepped her bounds, and that she had undermined his responsibility for the editorial page as well as his authority with the editorial staff, not to mention his reputation in the eyes of the men in the composing room.

My mother was apologetic but wounded. She wrote to Herbert at once, saying that she was “horrified by the impression my unfortunate stupidity made upon you.” She had her own version of what had happened, explaining it away as “open to misinterpretation,” but adding:

Her true feelings came out the next day when she wrote Phil, ostensibly about a speech she was giving on the “Modern Curriculum and Released Time” but throwing in these words:

Naturally, Phil had to take the time to assuage her hurt and smooth relations for the future good of the paper and all concerned.

Phil’s diplomatic skills and tact in dealing with this and so many other situations with my mother saved us all. He often ran interference on conflicts I had with her and took the lead in working out the personal relationship he and I developed with her and my father as my parents, as well as with them as the owners of the
Post
and my father as his boss initially.

During this period, Phil continued to want me with him most of the time, but it was he who determined where we went. He hated most formal evenings, especially embassy dinners. Sometimes I begged to go somewhere that sounded glamorous, but he made the decision and I complied. What I hadn’t learned was to be more independent of Phil himself.

Paradoxically, my mother should have been a role model, since she didn’t operate under any constraints, but she had made her own daughters feel inferior to her, preventing us, in some ways, from viewing her as a positive example. Yet even she, with all her independence and ego, articulated
the importance of being—and to some extent lived the life of—a wife whose primary obligation was to her husband and children.

A
FTER
D
ON’S BIRTH
and Phil’s return from overseas, I had not gone back to work. When Phil went to the
Post
, I made a unilateral decision not to, because I thought it would be too confusing for both of us to be there at once. Phil was less sure that this was right and even encouraged me to come back. Early in 1947, his concern for what my life was becoming led him to suggest that I start writing a weekly column that would be a review and digest of what was interesting in the magazines. Its goal, as I described it in a letter to his sister, was “to make me a little less stupid and domestic than I have been of late.” My guess is that he thought up the idea to keep me working for the paper but independent of its organization.

Actually, ever since Phil had started on the
Post
, I had been thinking about taking a part-time job, but feared they didn’t exist. This was a great one, about which I felt semi-apologetic because I thought maybe it was make-work. In fact, Phil had picked up the idea from another paper, and the column still runs in the
Post
. It was called “The Magazine Rack,” and I began writing it for the Sunday paper in April 1947, paid the magnificent sum of $15 per column. It took me only a day to do, but invariably the writing fell on a difficult day, and I was often in a panic about finishing it. To my private surprise, however, I enjoyed the work, and I kept it up for several years, even picking up a subscriber along the way—the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, courtesy of our friend and its editor, Barry Bingham. About a year after the column first appeared, Barry wrote to Phil saying that his paper wanted to add a small amount of feature material. He had been watching the magazine column and thought it was just the kind of thing he would like to have once a week. Phil wrote Barry that his inquiry had made my day and that the
Post
would be delighted for the
Courier
to have the column, right after a few weeks’ maternity leave for the birth of our third child. He added:

Around the same time as I started the column, I increased my involvement in civic affairs. In 1947, I was appointed to the National Capital Sesquicentennial Commission, of which President Truman was the honorary chairman. It was during these immediate postwar years that I
also got involved in welfare work, doing my share of fund drives, especially for the Community Chest and the National Symphony. I then went on the board of the Children’s Convalescent Home. I hadn’t known much about boards or volunteer work until I was approached to join this one, and I was upset when it turned out to be an old-fashioned social board. The very first meeting, held at the exclusive Sulgrave Club, was entirely occupied with where to put a plaque honoring a lady who had given funds for a bathroom. The board had been taken over by the second generation of the quite correct Washington families who later did convert this home into a really useful institution, at which time I participated more happily.

I was also preoccupied with dealing with our small children. In those days and in our situation, there was no sharing of duties between parents. I did absolutely everything domestic—found the schools and supervised the children’s activities, kept the social calendar for all of us (once Phil had decided what he and I would attend), and decorated the houses. I also was the one who had to see to repairs and renovations. In 1947, when Lally was four, I got her into a nursery school which I described as “veddy, veddy modern,” whose application process presaged something of what today’s parents go through. I was asked all sorts of odd questions, such as did I think my home training had been successful. I roared with laughter and said I didn’t know but I supposed not. They also asked me what I wanted her to get out of nursery school, which I couldn’t answer successfully either. I was never sure why they admitted her—certainly not on the basis on my responses—but decided it had to be the result of the “test” they gave her, in which she successfully put blocks together.

W
HAT TO DO
in the summers was something I struggled with during these years. Usually I took the children to Mount Kisco to visit my parents, but my feelings were invariably mixed about going to Seven Springs Farm. I knew the children would love it, as, indeed, they always did, and as I had as a child, but I didn’t like the idea of leaving Phil in Washington, to commute there for weekends. And since he worked all week with my father, I thought he might need a break from my family on weekends. I was also concerned about my mother’s relations with my children, and how she viewed their upbringing. She acted as though they had never eaten so well in their lives as when they were at her house. And there was also an unending comparison between our children and my brother’s children, who were often there, too, in those years. This set up a tense competition between the families. But worst of all, my mother developed favorites among the grandchildren at different times in their lives—a favoritism she displayed with an astounding lack of sensitivity. Once, she came into the dining room, where the children were having an early dinner, and said, “Lally, I brought you a
flower.” I will never forget Donald, two years younger, saying quietly, to no one in particular, “I guess Grandma couldn’t find a flower for me.”

Although the children were the center of my life at this time, the main focus of Phil’s attention—and at the center of our life together—was the
Post
, where he was working on all fronts at once. His early memoranda to his executives are stunning in their detailed outline of problems, potential, and objectives in business and editorial areas. He looked at and analyzed everything, from making better use of editorial space to obtaining more newsprint; doing a more thorough job of research in order to improve the editorial content; preventing a street-sales drop in summers; decreasing payroll costs; keeping expenses down; minimizing typos, misprints, and mechanical-department problems; promoting the paper; and beefing up suburban coverage for Maryland and Virginia (part of a constant drive by all publishers of the
Post
to maintain a deep penetration of our local market). After only a year on the paper, Phil was thoroughly knowledgeable and totally in charge. As his secretary, Charlie Paradise, wrote a friend, “[S]ince Phil joined the organization … he is doing his best to make things hectic around here … which meets with my thorough approbation.”

Phil became one of the
Post’s
best ad salesmen, often writing letters to company executives around the country giving forceful evidence for why the
Post
was a logical, cost-effective choice for their advertising dollars. He was so totally immersed in the paper and was spread so thin, having only a very fragile, if developing, organization under him, that he was undertaking his own labor negotiations—a poor idea even for someone more experienced. He faced labor problems from the start, especially with the printers. After a particularly grueling period, he wrote Isaiah Berlin in January 1948 that he had just made “an unsuccessful attempt to throttle the poor printers with the Taft Hartley law.” He also engaged in serious negotiations with the
Post
’s circulation people, an area where costs had, as Phil put it, “simply been killing us.”

He pushed for using the paper for educational purposes in schools throughout the area. He restored the comics to their prewar size. He even undertook some extensive redecorating of the newsroom, which he described to a vacationing Casey Jones as not unlike childbirth, “in that you get great results but only at the cost of significant pain.”

Phil focused a lot of his attention on the people who worked for the paper and those he wanted to work for it. He knew everyone in the building, always taking on the problems of people who worked for him—worrying over someone’s sick child, unmet mortgage payment, health crisis. He began actively recruiting young people with potential, as well as more established reporters and editors with proven abilities. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it.

One of the biggest changes for the paper took place in early April 1947, when Russ Wiggins came as managing editor. Phil and my father had gone back to Russ a year after their first offer, and this time he accepted, preferring to return to the writing-and-editing end of newspapers. Just before he agreed to come, my father asked him if he wanted to see a financial statement for the company, to which Russ replied, quite typically, “No, Mr. Meyer, you are enough of a financial statement for me.” In what no doubt was a move upstairs, Casey Jones was given the title of “assistant to the publisher” and stayed on for another three years before leaving to become executive editor of the
Syracuse Herald Journal
.

Russ’s relationship with the
Post
was a happy and constructive one for the next twenty-one years. He immediately instituted several changes, which had a significant effect on the quality and integrity of the city room. He announced a new set of rules, one of which ended the practice of routine racial identification in the paper. No longer would the
Post
write such lines as one identified by Chal Roberts in his history of the paper: “Sam Jones, 24, Negro, was arrested for larceny yesterday.” Overnight, he eliminated “freebies”—trips paid for by the government and free tickets for anything. Also, after just a few weeks on the job, he called in the police reporter, Al Lewis, to ask if he was having parking and other tickets fixed for people in the building. Al’s prompt response was, “Yes, sir.” Russ then asked, “For whom?”—to which, much to Russ’s consternation, Al replied, “For everybody.” “What do you mean, everybody?” demanded Russ disbelievingly. “Well, people in the composing room, the advertising room, the newsroom, circulation. I just take them to the station and give them to the chief.” Russ put an instant stop to this practice by saying, “Starting today, this minute, there is to be no more ticket fixing at police headquarters. We might have to be in a position to write some critical stories about the police department, and I don’t want you or the
Post
to be beholden to the chief of police or anybody else.”

This new policy proved important right away, because one of the first editorial ventures undertaken by Russ and Phil was a crusade against crime—local and national. The local story led to a bitter fight with the Washington police, and in particular with Police Chief Robert J. Barrett, a veritable guerrilla war that began the year Russ arrived and went on for at least four more, until finally, in 1951, the
Post
supplied to a congressional committee convincing evidence of corruption, and Barrett “retired” amid charges that remained unresolved because he had invoked the Fifth Amendment.