Personal History (44 page)

D
ESPITE MY PLEASURE
in the life I was leading during these years, I can see now that I was having problems I didn’t acknowledge to myself. I was growing shyer and less confident as I got older. I still didn’t know how to look my best or how to handle myself in social situations. I was afraid of being boring, and went on believing that people related to us entirely because of Phil.

It’s hard to convey how unsure I felt or why, or to explain how I could have been so unaware at the time. At some point during this period, I attended a ladies’ lunch given by Lady Bird Johnson for the wives of members of Congress and a few newspaper wives—Helen Lippmann, Sally Reston, and me. After lunch, Lady Bird asked everyone to stand up and say what she’d done the summer before. Most of the women had campaigned for their husbands and spoke about that. I was paralyzed with fear at the thought of speaking in front of this group and was absolutely unable to utter a word; what’s more, I refused to try. On another occasion, I did make a speech, following a text, to about sixty people, on a study I had headed up for a year having to do with adoption and foster care and with children taken out of their family homes. This must have been my maiden speechmaking effort, and I was terrified. With Phil’s help, I wrote and rewrote it a number of times and managed to get through the ordeal, but the cost to me in anxiety was utterly out of proportion to the event.

Maybe my friends—and I had very good women friends—perceived what I didn’t. Early in 1956, led by Polly Wisner, they gave a party in my honor dubbed “Salute to Katharine Graham.” I was pleased but puzzled as to why they had done it. It was no doubt to bolster me because they thought I needed it, but I honestly had no sense of needing attention.

My insecurity had something to do with both my mother and Phil. My mother seemed to undermine so much of what I did, subtly belittling my choices and my activities in light of her greater, more important ones. My very eccentric relations with her were exemplified in an incident of these years. I would often call on her when she was in bed or resting. We would endlessly discuss her activities and speeches, interspersed with occasional contributions from me about the children. One day I decided very deliberately that I would bring up my project to get children out of Junior Village, a large shelter in the District, and into foster homes. It took some courageous determination, but I started to say she might be interested
in some work I was doing. As I went on, she cut me off decisively, saying, “Oh, darling, I gave up on the District years ago.” So ended my abortive effort to talk with her about something that mattered to me.

As for Phil, at the same time that he was building me up, he was tearing me down. As he emerged more on the journalistic and political scenes, I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite—and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality. He always had a very sharp wit and sometimes a cruel humor—I’d seen it used in many social situations, and occasionally friends of ours were the targets. He would utter some harsh truth in such a humorous way that most of the time he got away with it, with even the target of his wit joining in the laughter. Increasingly, however, the wit he had turned on others he now turned on me. I became the butt of the family jokes. Strangely, I was still so mesmerized by him that I didn’t perceive what was happening, and even played along with it. Because I had gained some weight, though not that much, he started to call me “Porky.” He even gave me a French butcher-shop tole head of a pig, which I put up on the porch at Glen Welby, thinking it was funny.

Another habit of his that emerged during these years was that, when we were with friends and I was talking, he would look at me in such a way that I felt I was going on too long and boring people. Gradually, I ceased talking much at all when we were out together.

I recognized none of this condescension at the time, but one lengthy letter Phil wrote my mother at the end of 1955 reflects it. She had sent him an article about Thomas Mann, and he responded, clearly betraying a superior attitude that he shared with my mother:

Quite an odd remark about someone who had probably read more of Mann than he had, and who had read the two Henry Adams books well before he did and had recommended them to him. Yet, despite all this, I failed to recognize how aggressive his behavior to me had become. I had learned so much from him that I felt like Trilby to his Svengali: I felt as though he had created me and that I was totally dependent on him. Even now I can’t sort out my feelings about this; it’s hard to separate what was a
function of Phil’s terrible affliction, which manifested itself only later, and what was more basic. The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. I simply didn’t connect my lack of self-confidence with his behavior toward me.

Although the pace of Phil’s work life was brutal, he still seemed to thrive on it. There were shadows developing, but they were so slight that I didn’t see them—or didn’t perceive them as shadows. Looking back, I see that his constant physical ailments were a prelude to his mental affliction, to a latent disease of which I—or, indeed, he—was totally unaware. His increasing bouts with viruses meant that he would return to an office piled high, as he told a friend, “with deferred crises and accrued catastrophes.” Nonetheless, when he was well, there was still no one who could better tackle these crises and catastrophes.

Phil was now managing the greatly enlarged
Post and Times-Herald
. John Sweeterman played the chief role under him and took most of the responsibility for business decisions, but Phil was very much the chief strategist always. He was more involved in editorial issues with Russ Wiggins and on the editorial page with Estabrook, but John and Russ enabled him to focus on the larger issues, dipping into the day-to-day activities of the paper only as he chose. In this period, he spent almost as much time on his many outside activities as on the paper itself, but he managed to keep everything not only in hand but progressing.

By the fall of 1954, Phil was “busier than eight bird dogs,” in large part because of negotiations with CBS to purchase its minority interest in the
Post’s
station WTOP. Though the timing of this was a little awkward, given that it was only about six months since the purchase of the
Times-Herald
, we had always been interested in owning all of WTOP television and radio, and this was our chance. The price for CBS’s 45-percent interest was $3.5 million. It was a daring move on Phil’s part to increase our debt, having just undertaken a major expansion, but it was another one that paid off handsomely in the end.

B
Y
1955, the
Star
was finally finding it necessary to do a little work. Within a year of the purchase of the
Times-Herald
, we had equaled or passed the
Star
in many important categories. Having been the leading paper in Washington for a hundred years, the
Star
now found itself with about 125,000 fewer readers than the
Post
, though we continued to lag behind in advertising. The arrival of Frank Gatewood from the old
Times-Herald
to work on advertising made a great difference. Retail stores were wedded to the
Star
, but Gatewood persuaded some of the big accounts to give us a larger portion than before. Frank was so valuable that my father joked that he had paid $9.5 million just to get him on the
Post
. Once it got
rolling, Gatewood recalled, advertising improved very fast, and the
Post
went from having 28 percent of the field to 50 percent in three years.

From 1955 on,
Post
profits exceeded those of the
Star
. Costs were tightly controlled. When we look at the size of the
Post
today and think of the foreign correspondents in bureaus around the world, it’s difficult to recall a time when the “foreign” reporting was done from Washington, or when only news services were used, but it was not so long ago. And when Phil sent Murrey Marder to London as the
Post’s
first foreign correspondent in January 1957, what Murrey wrote was to be shared with WTOP, which was paying some of his expenses. Not until five years later were two other correspondents added, and Phil Foisie was charged with editing foreign news, essentially becoming the first foreign editor. Under Foisie, the foreign service later grew to twenty-three people abroad, with many stringers to supplement the correspondents—not all of them first-rate.

As time went on, Phil got increasingly involved with public and political events, and the
Post
began to take less of his time. Some of the things he did made him more visible in the local, national, and business communities, as well as in political spheres, but all the things he did were done because he believed in them. Many of his outside activities had been going on for several years—the University of Chicago board, ACTION (a committee on housing), the Council on Economic Development, the Ad Council, Southwest redevelopment, and D.C. home rule. Others began in the mid-1950s and grew increasingly political.

Despite the intensity of his involvement in electing Eisenhower in 1952, Phil had quickly become disenchanted with the administration and had been developing a commitment of time and energy to Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m not sure what triggered his relationship with Johnson, but it now seems predictable, even foreordained. Johnson worked actively to cultivate the press, and Phil was always drawn to politics. They both loved power and its use for what they thought of as desirable purposes. They were both from the South. Both were full of humor—with an edge. They had a natural affinity.

As early as 1953, Phil had begun steady exchanges with the senator. In January, Johnson sent Phil a list of Democratic committee assignments for the coming year. He had circled what he viewed as the key new appointments and attached a note reminding Phil of their talks in the past “about the need for assuring a greater representation of your members and of conflicting points of view upon the standing committees of Congress.” In thanking him, Phil referred to an editorial the
Post
had just printed titled “Best Foot Forward,” which praised the committee assignments made by the Democratic Steering Committee—“under Senator Lyndon Johnson’s leadership”—as having “given the liberal Northerners of the party generous opportunities on key committees,” as well as signaling “a degree of
unity never achieved while the party was in power.” “As you can see,” wrote Phil, “we thought you had done a fine job.”

LBJ appreciated the editorial and wrote Phil to thank him. Some months later, Johnson sent Phil one of his speeches and a note about the vote on his resolution against the spread of communism to the Western Hemisphere. Phil actually wrote back thanking Lyndon “for not bawling me out for the skimpy job we did on it the day it came out. I hope we have made some later amends.…”

These exchanges reflect a relationship in which the press is closer to government than journalists ought to be—at least today. However, for those times, for that decade, it was not unusual. The problem was that their relationship grew even closer, and though there were still some constructive ramifications, there were to be certain negative ones for me later on.

I
N THE MIDTERM
campaign of 1954, Vice-President Nixon, with whom Phil had been impressed in 1952, became highly vitriolic. His tactics led Herblock to draw one of his most famous cartoons—Nixon crawling out of a sewer as a band and an official group greeted him, the head man holding a placard reading, “Here he comes now.” Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Democrats retook control of the House and the Senate, making Lyndon Johnson the Senate majority leader. From this point on, Phil and Johnson became even closer.

One keen interest of Phil’s was clean elections and campaign-finance reform. He took up the study of the role of money in politics early in 1955, speaking out and writing about it in the hope of getting something done. As usual, he was ahead of his time on a problem that was to get dramatically worse. People were not even aware of the true cost of campaigns, he argued; there was a huge discrepancy between what was reported as spent by the national committees of the two major political parties and what was actually spent.

As he saw it, most of the money for campaigns came from three sources: the underworld, special-interest groups, and “the hopefuls”— that is, people who contribute in the expectation of receiving high public office. As he stated it in a speech, Phil saw the problem as “how can we raise enough honest, untainted money to permit our politicians to run for office without becoming obligated to corrupt or selfish forces? And in doing this, how can we help to create a higher regard for the importance of politics in the American future?” His solution was to look to the individual good citizen. A Gallup poll had found that one-third of American families were prepared to give politically. Phil thought an advertising campaign could inform people and persuade both that one-third and others
to contribute, in order to end corruption. He argued that if “this thoroughly ‘doable’ thing is indeed done, it should constitute the single most important political reform of our times.”

Full accounts of this speech were carried in the
Post
, and the idea became known as the Graham Plan. The following year, Phil persuaded Lyndon Johnson of the need for legislation. Though the Senate seemed, according to Phil, “scared stiff about the possibility of what might come out if Pandora’s Box is opened,” Johnson was “seriously enough agitated to be most amenable to almost any reform I wanted to propose!” Phil’s work was all behind the scenes, because, as he admitted, “we can be useful only so long as the numerous prima donnas are getting all the credit.” After much discussion with LBJ, focusing on a bipartisan program of reform, a bill was drafted and eighty-five senators signed on as cosponsors—which had never happened before in the Senate’s history, it seems. Only one voted against the bill, which was, as Phil told my father, “not a completely perfect bill, but a good step forward.” But the bill failed to pass the House.