Personal History (39 page)

As the campaign heated up and Eisenhower wasn’t speaking out against McCarthy, Herblock drew cartoons that were clearly at odds with the editorial support the
Post
was giving Ike. Phil was incensed by many of these cartoons. One that he refused to print depicted Eisenhower saying “Naughty, naughty” to Nixon and McCarthy, who were drawn as two smear artists with buckets and dripping brushes in their hands. Finally, during the last weeks of the campaign, Phil had the cartoons dropped from the paper altogether—the last time I believe this ever happened. Instead, he used reprints of earlier cartoons. Since the cartoons ran elsewhere in syndication, this ploy was not only ineffective but embarrassing. In late October, the
Washington Daily News
carried an article headlined “Where’s Mr. Block? One of D.C.’s Top Draw-ers Is Missing.” On the other hand, it’s easy to see why Phil felt he had to take action. It’s hard for a publisher trying to espouse a certain cause in the paper to have such powerful cartoons running on the same page and dominating print. Even so, Phil later acknowledged to Herblock that he had been mistaken.

Phil became more and more actively involved in the election itself, so much so that he actually campaigned for Eisenhower a few times. On October 30, he served as master of ceremonies for a “Citizens for Eisenhower Rally.” To keep Phil company, I went with him to at least one Eisenhower rally, including one where Phil spoke but I sat silently. I can’t justify Phil’s actions, but publishers did this kind of thing more often then. For instance, John and Mike Cowles, publishers in Des Moines and Minneapolis, were big contributors to, as well as activists in, Ike’s campaign.

On Election Day, November 4, we watched the returns at the Rauhs’—ironically, probably our most liberal friends. Phil was thrilled by the result. However, he wrote Stevenson a few days after the election:

By now, McCarthy was growing even more sinister and more powerful. Playing on fears stemming from the Cold War, he made outrageous charges, many within the protected confines of Senate or congressional hearings, or just before newspaper and television deadlines so that all that got on the front page or the air was the charge itself. After a while, we in the media learned to carry the other side and to put his charges in perspective, but he was a new phenomenon with which the press had to learn to cope, and it took a while to catch up with his methods.

Much of Phil’s time was taken up with the McCarthy menace. The fear of communism remained pervasive, and attacks on people for being sympathizers or liberals even, much less genuine communists, continued to stir up serious trouble. Editorially, the
Post
was highly critical of McCarthy’s positions and attacked him regularly. Most effective of all probably was Herblock’s series of cartoons depicting McCarthy and his various outrageous activities. It was Herblock who had coined the word “McCarthyism”—on March 29, 1950—using it as a label on a tar barrel. Taken together, the
Post’s
comments against McCarthy represented a very clear—and brave—position, and the paper took a lot of heat for its coverage. In fact, the war between McCarthy and the
Post
was vicious and frightening.

We were helped to a certain extent by Joe Alsop and his brother Stewart, whose column had become important to the
Post
, and whose anticommunist themes helped soften the perception of the
Post
as somehow sympathetic to the communists. Perhaps, too, some of the criticism was blunted because of the paper’s support of Eisenhower. This was offset, however, by criticism from the left that we were not doing enough about McCarthy.

Once Eisenhower was president, he became one of those who Phil felt was not speaking out enough, and he became more and more disenchanted with the president’s lack of response to McCarthy and the climate he was nourishing. Walter Lippmann had been an enthusiastic supporter of Eisenhower, but his wife, Helen—like me—had been a renegade for Stevenson. Sometime soon after the election, the four of us were together, and Walter asked Phil, “What are we going to do?” At the same time he turned to Helen and me saying, “And you, shut up.” We laughed at the two men’s dismay over White House passivity. Phil was constantly badgering Sherman Adams, the president’s chief aide, to try to get Eisenhower to take stronger stands.

Since the
Post
was still fighting for its life economically, Phil felt very pressured by forces he couldn’t control. One of the principal forces over
which he had little control at this time was my mother. Like Barth and Herblock, she was unrelenting in her condemnation of McCarthy and his reckless charges. She despised him vigorously and publicly, calling him variously a “perpetual adolescent who has never matured,” a “warped personality who is now revenging himself upon a society which he feels has never been fair to him,” and a “gangster type.” In worrying that insinuations and accusations by anticommunists were going to get people thrown out of their jobs without hope of reinstatement, she felt that such behavior put America “on the road to something worse than a Gestapo.” Her answer was to look to the
Post
to handle the situation and to pressure Phil to “try to save our democratic freedoms.” She argued, not illogically, “What is the use fighting totalitarianism abroad if we are going to imitate its worst aspects here at home?” But, as usual, her passion was excessive and uncontrolled.

Shortly after the inauguration, my mother delivered her strongest blast yet against McCarthy, this time to seventeen thousand school administrators in Atlantic City, warning that the congressional committee investigating schools and colleges threatened not only academic freedom but American democracy itself. In this speech, she called McCarthy “our modern grand inquisitor,” a dangerous and ruthless demagogue, a political adventurer, and a psychopath, and compared his tactics to those of the bull ring. An article on her speech, along with her photograph, appeared on the front page of
The New York Times
. An Illinois congressman, the conservative Harold Himmel Velde, counterattacked her as having written a warmly pro-Russian letter to
Pravda
. The charge was false—the letter had been written by a Mrs. G. S. Mayer of Canada. The
Post
, of course, defended her, and Velde retracted his claim but not before the
Times-Herald
had picked up and used the accusation.

Not content with taking on McCarthy, Mother often took on the Catholic Church for its stand on education. She viewed this as a just cause and herself as an intrepid warrior for public education, but it was Phil and the
Post
who paid the price, in counterattacks of a serious kind, such as a boycott—a burden which Phil viewed with some outrage as an unnecessary one in the circulation-and-advertising struggle.

Just as he occasionally pulled back editorials and cartoons, so, too, he had to rein in my mother now and then. One notable time came in 1952, when he disowned a speech she made in Detroit condemning attempts by the Catholic hierarchy to support sectarian schools. He felt the speech would be construed as anti-Catholic. Mother had warned Phil that she would be making this speech: “I hope it makes no difficulties for
The Post
. I have written to Wiggins to write the news report on it himself so that he can play down whatever he wishes to.” Among the things she said that raised red flags for Phil:

Phil was so alarmed that he was going to issue a press release stating that my mother’s views were her own and not to be confused with those of the
Post
. Following Russ Wiggins’s advice, however, he softened it to a statement to be read as coming from her, which he hoped would be picked up by the press: “The views expressed in my Detroit speech are my own and do not reflect the opinions of
The Washington Post
.… I do not participate in the formation of editorial policies.” The question then arose as to how to reach her, since she was on a night train returning home. Russ knew the editor of the
Buffalo Evening News
, Alfred H. “Kirk” Kirchhofer, and got him to board the train there at a water stop at two in the morning, wake her, and get her to sign off on the statement.

A long, feisty exchange of letters followed between my mother and Phil, all written out by hand. Typically, she depicted her situation as unbearable, and asked rhetorically what she was to do:

She ended her letter by telling Phil not to bother to reply, but suggesting they “must get together for a good talk.” He sent back a fourteen-page handwritten response. Rightly or wrongly, he didn’t agree with her analysis of the “urgency of the problems you see arising from the American Catholic Church. I doubt if Freud, Jung and Bill Meyer could find out
whether my position results from fear or objectivity, but I at least am unaware of the fear.”

At the same time, he knew that her speech would cause considerable hostility to the
Post
. He believed there had to be a sense of priorities about the number of wars the
Post
was willing to engage in, and saw his obligation as defining the priorities with “an over-all, institutional point of view.” So the question for him was “why
The Post
should carry another burden when it is not one our institutional thinking makes necessary.”

Even though he felt his “most odious bias is toward being Pollyanna,” Phil concluded that “time and tolerance and thoughtful discussion have worked out many a tough problem,” adding:

So the potentially searing episode was gradually put behind all of us. When this kind of drama arose I experienced no emotional complications. I was 100 percent behind Phil and in accord with his views about the family tensions—as indeed, most of the time, was my father.

Many emotions flared up in this period of McCarthy’s heyday. Friends fell out with each other. Rows erupted on every side. One notable argument close to home took place in March 1952 at a lunch at Joe Alsop’s. Although the details are lost to me now, I recall that it was a small luncheon party with friends, including Isaiah Berlin, who was here from England. Whatever the specifics of the argument, at some point Phil exploded with anger, and he and Isaiah fought loud and long. I believe Phil eventually stormed out of Joe’s house. Joe was furious with Phil and wouldn’t speak to him. Isaiah thought Phil had been incredibly rude and called to tell him so. Phil wrote Isaiah that the “boorishness at lunch was inexplicable—and inexcusable. Plain bad manners.” He added, in his own way of apologizing, “I only hope that by now you may believe it had nothing more to it than that I am an occasional sufferer from … a tendency to get one’s mouth in high [gear] before one’s brain turns over.”

Phil and Joe made up as well, but their relationship was not without further arguments and letters flying back and forth. In mid-1953, for example, they got into another terrible fight at Joe’s house, over the issue of taking the Fifth Amendment rather than testifying. That time Joe followed up with a letter of apology and explanation:

Joe’s reference to Phil’s being a successful man and thus forgetting what it was like to be poor obviously touched a more sensitive nerve than any of us understood at the time. It came out later, when he was ill, that Phil resented the way he had been helped to his successful forum. But his abilities were clearly so extraordinary that none of us suspected the insecurities that lay beneath the surface.

O
NE GREAT LOSS
for us and for the
Post
was that Herbert Elliston’s heart disease forced him to resign in 1953 as editor of the editorial page. In a farewell interview in the paper, Herbert said he had no guiding principle to leave, but if he did “it would be a line from Somerset Maugham: ‘If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.’ ” Herbert had been the editor for thirteen very distinguished years.