Personal History (34 page)

I
N THOSE SAME YEARS
, cosmic events were developing abroad, starting with the Truman Doctrine in the spring of 1947, and followed by the
Marshall Plan. The
Post
had just acquired Ferdinand Kuhn to report on foreign affairs but had no one abroad, so it used wire services and occasionally free-lancers. Prior to Russ’s coming on board, Phil even let reporters take trips paid for by the military, all in an effort to beef up reporting of foreign news.

Among the campaigns the
Post
took on was support for the Marshall Plan, which the paper featured regularly on the front page, and to which it devoted a special section in November 1947. This supplement, spearheaded by Phil and written by top
Post
reporters, won the National Headliners’ Club award for outstanding public service and was reprinted widely throughout the country. In fact, the paper was more and more being recognized. The Newspaper Guild, in the course of giving its Heywood Broun awards in early 1948, said of the
Post:
“In these days when playing it safe and treading softly is so general, the record of
The Washington Post
in 1947 is truly extraordinary. It is a vivid demonstration of what an outstanding newspaper is like and what it can do in serving its readers, its community and the country.”

On the downside, negotiations with the printers dragged on for months. Plans were made in case of a strike. “Very complicated business, a newspaper,” Phil noted in a letter to my father late in 1947. It was a hard winter, one in which, as Phil said, “every damn possible thing seemed to go wrong.” Finally, by spring, the effects of Russ’s coming to the paper, along with some other new top people, were beginning to be seen, and when the seemingly endless Newspaper Guild negotiations finally wound up, Phil and I took time out for a much-delayed vacation. We set off for Nassau at the end of March, by which time I was eight months pregnant with our third child. Knowing the pace of life that we would soon return to, I clung to the sun and the sand with renewed intensity, feeling fine and fat and sunburned.

While we were in Nassau, Phil had a call from CBS President Frank Stanton, who supervised the radio stations then owned and run by CBS. For several years, Phil had been worrying over what to do with WINX, a small radio station my father had bought in 1944, hoping to create some profits to ease the effects of the
Post’s
accumulated losses. Dad had actually wanted to get a network station at the time, but when he couldn’t, he bought this tiny independent 250-watt station, which could be heard within a radius of about two blocks—on a windy day. It did make a little money, but my father quickly learned that what it made came from broadcasting the daily “number” for gamblers and racketeers. He had the station management substitute classical music for the race results, and the bottom fell out of the profits.

When Stanton called Phil in Nassau to ask if he’d be interested in purchasing a majority share of CBS Radio in Washington, with the understanding
that they would make an effort to acquire a television license later, Phil replied facetiously, “Not much, but I’ll take the next plane up.” He was ecstatic. We cut short our trip so that he could hurry north to begin negotiations, and for several weeks he shuttled back and forth to New York.

Years later, Frank told me that he had earlier held conversations with Sam Kauffmann at the
Evening Star
about their possible affiliation with CBS. Kauffmann had expressed great interest in the opportunity, and the deal was nearing completion, when, at the end of a lengthy talk in his office, Kauffmann, an eminent leader of Washington’s WASP establishment, said, “By the way, Mr. Stanton, how much of CBS is Jewish-owned?” Frank immediately replied, “All of it, Mr. Kauffmann,” put on his hat, and left the room. His call to Phil came soon after this.

The negotiations between CBS, whose chairman was Bill Paley, and the
Post
were easy and quick, in large part because they were conducted by Frank and Phil themselves. Phil was a very able negotiator; he had the figures in his head and knew how to operate in this kind of situation, no doubt greatly helped not only by his law-school training but by what he told me was the most valuable course he took at the school, accounting.

A month after the whole thing began, the baby was due, and I was resting. Phil woke me and asked me to talk to Frank’s wife, Ruth, on our back porch while he completed the negotiations in the library with Frank. I had never met Ruth Stanton before, but we chatted amicably for a couple of hours. Frank and Phil concluded the deal, which was announced with great fanfare on May 17, 1948. The
Post
and CBS would co-own the fifty-thousand-watt Washington station WTOP, with 55 percent owned by the
Post
and 45 percent owned by CBS. Privately, Phil was delirious with excitement. It was the real moment of the
Post
’s entry into a new business world and into the electronic world.

On the evening of my talk with Ruth Stanton on our back porch, we went to a cocktail party in honor of Margaret Truman. There was the usual amount of standing around, and I began to feel contractions starting and told Phil I thought the baby might be coming. When he asked how I knew, I realized that this was the first time he was really involved with a baby’s birth. It was his third child and he still didn’t know what happened.

I didn’t want to leave for Johns Hopkins and find out I was mistaken, but when the contractions grew stronger, we set out, having reserved a hotel room in Baltimore in case this was false labor. About halfway there, I suggested that the hospital was indicated, Phil sped up, and we made it with only twenty minutes to spare before things got serious. I had asked my doctor about natural childbirth, which had begun to be in vogue, and when he insisted that it wasn’t for me, I took this as a challenge. Even though I hadn’t had any of the training involved, I made a resolve to have
this baby without anesthesia if I could, but not to say anything in case I couldn’t.

There are certain experiences—childbirth is one; moving is another—that nature and time definitely draw a curtain on, so you forget in between times how painful they are. In this case, after four hours I was about ready to give up when the doctor said, “If you can stand one more contraction, you can have the baby.” Although I was convinced I was exploding, I did, and our second son was born. It was indeed traumatic, and I kept reliving the sensations for some weeks after, but I was pleased at having done it this way. I was even more pleased with the reality of William Graham, whom we gave the middle name “Welsh” after Phil’s grandmother, who regarded Phil—or at least so he claimed—as her favorite grandchild.

The baby and I returned home six days later to a haven on our third floor, where we were quarantined against chicken pox, which Lally had caught. Phil surprised me by having installed our first television set. People were just starting to buy them, and there was a good deal of intellectual snobbery in Georgetown about having one at all. Our first evening home, the Restons came over and we all watched a baseball game until I wilted into bed next door with the baby.

B
Y MID
-1948, the
Post
was still a rocky, if lively, paper, whose eight hundred employees were a proud, generally hardworking lot. In the fifteen years since my father’s purchase, circulation had risen from 50,000 to 180,000 daily, while advertising had gone from four million lines to twenty-three million. The
Post
had been awarded numerous prizes, including five major awards for reporting, three for editorials, one for cartooning, and three for public service.

Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me. At the same time, he wanted to ensure that the
Post
would forever serve the public interest. In effect, what he and Phil did was to set up a kind of trust based on an English model that protected some of the newspapers there. According to a page-one article in the
Post
, to ensure its continued independence and a responsible ownership in the event the paper ever had to be sold, my father appointed “a self-perpetuating committee of five persons who will hold full power of approval or veto over the disposition of voting shares in the
Post
subsequent to the control now exercised by Mr. and Mrs. Philip L. Graham.…” The committee—originally made up of James Conant, president of Harvard University; Millicent MacIntosh, dean of Barnard College; Judge Bolitha J. Laws, chief justice of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; Colgate Darden, president of the University of Virginia; and Chester Barnard, president of the Rockefeller Foundation—had absolutely no authority over or responsibility
for the policies or operation of the paper, but had “absolute discretion” to approve or disapprove potential owners subsequent to ownership by Phil and me.

The press release that announced these moves went through a number of drafts that were edited by both my parents. It still moves me in its honest expression of my father’s beliefs about what he had tried to do with the
Post
over the previous fifteen difficult years:

On his birthday that year, just before this announcement, Phil received $75,000 as a gift from my parents. Though my mother sent it with a note saying she was giving it to him as a birthday and wedding-anniversary present “with all my affection,” it was really to help him buy his share of the stock in the
Post
. Phil and I each already had 175 shares of Class A common stock of the company, which had been given to us by my mother in November 1947. We bought the other shares from my father, at $48 per share. In effect, 3,325 shares were transferred to Phil, and 1,325 shares were transferred to me, giving us a total of 5,000 voting shares. Phil
received the larger share of the stock because, as Dad explained to me, no man should be in the position of working for his wife. Curiously I not only concurred but was in complete accord with this idea.

Two years later, the transition to us was completed with the gift of the rest of the shares to the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation, which had been set up in 1944. The foundation had been a very small one, made politically and economically much larger by the acquisition of the B shares. It was set up very carefully to be independent in its administration, and not a tool for the family’s use. This was carried out perhaps overly zealously, to the extent that my father could not get the foundation to do anything even remotely connected to his interests. By now there is no connection at all between the family and the foundation, but it has been an effective force in the Washington area.

In order to make things equitable for my siblings, who would not be gaining ownership of the paper, my parents gave an equal amount of money to them at this time. There were a few tense moments when my father told them about the arrangement, but nothing like the difficulties that were to develop in other newspaper families. My brother had some second thoughts, but decided to stick with his decision to pursue his medical career. Bill was asked to invest when we bought the
Times-Herald
and at other times, and though his advisers at Morgan Guaranty constantly warned him not to buy any more stock when we went public, he obstinately kept adding to his position. When he died of a combined stroke and lung cancer in 1982, with the stock still in the $30s, he left some very wealthy children and a large foundation.

Flo, who was already estranged from the family, was, with some difficulty, reassured by my father that she and her children were being fairly dealt with. Bis and Ruth, who had every right to feel unevenly treated, have remained generous, loyal, loving, and supportive in every way. They were left secure but not affluent compared with my brother and myself. They were never given the opportunity to buy
Post
stock, largely because it was worth very little in the beginning and was regarded as risky. Later, Morgan kept them out, even after one sister wanted to buy stock as a sign of support of the paper during Watergate. With true conservator instincts, the bank wouldn’t sell appreciated and, they thought, valuable standard stock, such as IBM—this was even after Warren Buffett had taken a big position in the Post Company. (They were still denigrating our stock—and me—to my brother’s heirs after he died.)

On my part, in order to help Phil pay back the debt he incurred in borrowing to buy the stock, even with my mother’s gift, I volunteered to pay for all our living expenses—houses, cars, schools, entertainment—and did so. Everything except Phil’s personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father the
day we were born. This arrangement was never an issue; it didn’t bother either one of us. I never thought about it, and we never talked about it. Only fifteen years later, when things were very bad, did I look at the situation ruefully. I recall my brother-in-law Bill Graham gently telling me it had been wrong from the start.