Personal History (47 page)

Farber was not a strong individual. Phil, by force of his personality, seemed to have taken charge the minute he walked into Farber’s office, when he told Farber he wasn’t charging enough and that he, Phil, would pay more. Farber let him do so. From then on, even in his most depressed moments, Phil seemed the dominant figure in that relationship. Every rule of psychiatry was broken. Farber became a personal friend of Phil’s, writing him letters, coming to visit us at R Street and Glen Welby, giving Phil some of his research and writings to edit and comment on, even at one time suggesting we visit him in Italy, where we could all drink together—not something I wanted to encourage in Phil.

After each of his sessions with Farber, Phil would come home and essentially repeat all that had been said, seeming to hold nothing back, although I suppose he must have been more selective than I realized. These recappings had the effect for me of indirect participation in his therapy.

At the same time, I was trying to keep the children’s lives as normal as possible, and the outside world unsuspecting. As a result of all this, I came close to the breaking point myself. Toward the end of January 1958, three months after the onset of Phil’s depression, I found the weight on me more than I could bear, until one morning I felt almost physically paralyzed. But, like many people, I was unable to admit I needed help and thought there might be something weak or wrong about someone not
in extremis
looking to psychiatry for help.

Phil discussed all this with Dr. Farber, and between them they arrived at the bizarre solution that I, too, should begin seeing him. They suggested this as a way of keeping things secure and cohesive, but it was certainly unusual for both Phil and me to be seeing the same doctor. Never did Farber suggest that this might not be a good idea. Incredibly, there was one point in the next few years when I was going to him often and Phil was not seeing him at all. I once asked Farber if I had to keep constantly at Phil’s side, if I could take a break from a weekend at Glen Welby, to which he responded that I absolutely must keep it up. I needed and was grateful
for a guiding hand at that time, and Farber undoubtedly helped to some extent, but this three-way conversation was very complicating, and I didn’t know enough to suggest a different program or to seek one out.

For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all—occasionally for a meeting or two, or for lunch. He canceled almost all meetings and public events and never made a speech, although toward the end of that first year he participated in a panel of fathers and sons for Donald’s class at St. Albans. He played golf with different partners at Burning Tree several times a week. He spent every weekend and sometimes weekdays at Glen Welby. If he traveled, it was mostly by train, since airplanes disturbed him in his depressed moods. We went out to dinner only selectively—mostly with one or two people, sometimes but rarely to larger, more social dinners. Going out at all was risky, for he often drank too much and used unacceptable language.

Phil’s position at the paper and in the company was such that people could understand his leading this kind of life. Many
Post
people knew that he was stretched thin and taking a rest, but no one knew exactly what had happened—partly because of his ability to cover up and partly because of my help in explaining away his absences and concealing his excesses. Phil himself was unsure of what he was dealing with. Months after the breakdown, in his correspondence explaining his lack of activity, he said, “I have been taking a sort of sabbatical after several doses of flu and an accumulation of exhaustion …” and that he had had a “winter of boringly bad health.” In one letter he said he had “pledged to my wife to limit my engagements in the near future so that I may maintain that state of rosy health which is now mine.” His secretary wrote to someone that Phil was “out of circulation for several months, resting under doctor’s orders.”

Luckily, these years of his illness coincided with a period when major achievements at the paper already had been consolidated. Luckily, too, there was a strong national boom in both general business and advertising that year, which helped the paper and the business along—the paper turned a record profit of $2 million in 1957. In 1958, the
Post
was the only Washington paper to show a gain in advertising linage. The
Star’s
lead in total advertising was whittled down to three million lines, from eighteen million just five years before.

B
AD AS IT WAS
, Phil’s depression in 1957 was not as extreme as those that hit later. He was obviously ill, and he had several sieges of normal sicknesses as well—bouts of flu, rounds of viruses—but at this point he could still function a little if he had to. While leading this restricted life, Phil still accomplished quite a lot by means of correspondence, memos, or
the telephone. He also went on working with Lyndon Johnson, occasionally meeting with him, writing him letters of advice, or drafting a speech. Johnson wrote to Phil saying how much he missed his “favorite counselor,” adding, “I certainly want your advice and your suggestions because this job is so big that I need all the help I can get from the best and most enthusiastic source.”

Phil also turned to writing—perhaps indicating his longing for another kind of life—writing plays, some light verse, and extensive bulletins for the Lake Philip Yacht Club, extremely convoluted in their humor. He also did some writing of a more serious kind. In the summer of 1958, he wrote a highly appreciative essay/book review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s
The Affluent Society
, which appeared in the
Post
under the headline “The Folly of America’s Faith in Chain Belt Living.”

He became enamored of a book by a French writer, Germaine Tillion,
Algeria
, and recommended it to everyone, sending it around to several of his friends, including Lyndon Johnson and Jack Kennedy. He wrote to Kennedy:

I know of almost no one in the First World who was then thinking about the Third World and the importance of development.

D
URING THIS PERIOD
, we were seeing much less of my parents, but we still gave the
Post’s
twenty-fifth purchase-anniversary party at Glen Welby in the summer of 1958. Mainly we spent a lot of time with the Restons, and Phil met with Scotty separately for long talks, during which he again made a pitch to Scotty to come to the
Post
and again got rejected. Despite being as close a friend as Phil had, Scotty disapproved of Phil’s active involvement in issues on which the paper reported and his use of the paper to further his own political goals.

It was during this period that Phil got to know Edward Bennett Williams, the famous criminal trial lawyer. He and Williams had met in the early summer of 1957, while Williams was defending Jimmy Hoffa, the powerhouse of the Teamsters, who was accused of bribing one of Senator
John McClellan’s staff. Phil was riveted by the Hoffa case, which he thought was hopeless and unwinnable. Ed later recalled that first meeting vividly:

Phil told me in great detail all about his meetings with Ed, but he didn’t bring him home. I remember meeting Ed and his first wife, Dorothy, but a joint friendship didn’t develop then; the relationship was between
the two men. Ed and I became warm friends only much later. Phil told me about his first meeting with Dorothy, who had been born with a deformed arm. Upon meeting her, Phil did one of those breathtaking things which came to him so naturally. He said, “Hi, kid, what’s the matter with your wing?” She apparently loved the honest, benign curiosity, compared with the way many people ignored her arm or looked the other way.

So, despite his continuing lethargy, Phil engaged in various minor activities, making his usual impact. He arranged for a car to be given to Walter Lippmann for his seventieth birthday, which Lippmann immediately traded for one he preferred. He conferred with Lyndon Johnson, convincing him to push the D.C. home-rule bill—for which we had both worked for so long. He spoke to
Post
meetings of stockholders and employees. These little incursions into the world were definite steps forward, and it’s hard to reconcile them with the way he was still feeling.

Except for Farber, I spoke to no one about Phil or what was wrong, and this was eating me up. Phil liked me to be there when he came home from seeing Farber, so I always arranged to be at home for him at those times. What I did otherwise, perhaps as part of our cover-up of the real situation, was to step up my involvement in welfare work. I kept meeting with all the organizations with which I was involved—the children’s schools, the boards, and so on—and entered a more interesting phase of my work with the Department of Public Welfare, involving an in-depth study of how to get children out of the District’s Dickensian dumping-ground, Junior Village.

Although I was trying hard, I certainly didn’t understand Phil or respond to his needs well enough during this time. I don’t know now, and certainly didn’t then, how much pressure he felt because of his son-in-law status at the
Post
. It’s possible that he really wanted out of our marriage but felt he couldn’t get out because of the paper. But by the time I might have acknowledged that, his illness was so evident that it was impossible to sort out what was driven by the illness and what were his underlying feelings.

Throughout these first years of his illness, Phil remained the dominant figure by far in the family. Yet I had some say. I was the foundation, the stability. I can’t remember exactly when he suggested just picking up, taking the children out of school, and living abroad for a while, but it must have been around the beginning of 1958. I thought this idea was much too out of the ordinary. To leave his job, uproot the children, put everyone in French schools—it all seemed unthinkable. Was he right? I’m not sure, but I know I wasn’t able to face the idea at the time. Actually, it may have been a good idea, and was certainly typical of his inventive zest for life. He was undoubtedly feeling pressures from which he wanted to escape, and we might all have profited from it.

In the summer of 1958, after months of going slow, Phil wrote to his father, “I am beginning to feel quite a bit better, but it has been a slow process. I still get tired more than I like and I guess I will have to continue at reduced speed for a few more months. If it were not for that I would grab a plane and fly down for a visit.…” Actually, at this point Phil was even less connected to his own family than he was to mine, but he was still explaining his absence as a need to lie low for a while and get his strength back.

By the summer and fall of 1958, Phil was starting to do a little more, but only a little. Yet his business instincts continued to function at a high level. He was in negotiations that continued over a long period to buy the Greensboro
News and Record
in North Carolina—the town’s only newspaper and the owner of Greensboro’s only TV station, WFMY, a CBS affiliate—at a cost of $7 million. The deal finally fell through because of the reluctance of a member of the family who owned the paper, but Phil had nursed it along for months. He then devoted the same energy to planning new buildings at already existing properties: one for WJXT in Jacksonville and the other a $5-million addition to the
Post
building to be completed in 1960.

M
EANWHILE
, my own life evolved to accommodate Phil’s changed one and the changing needs of my four children and my aging parents. Mother called us a great deal and had her ways of letting us know if we hadn’t been attentive enough. She would hint about how much she’d seen of her other children—e.g., “Ruthie is so wonderful, she calls every day”—or make not-so-subtle statements about how thoughtful Bis had been. My visits to her remained mostly one-sided. Actually, after 1957 this was helpful to me: it was easy to keep from her Phil’s illness or how I felt about it, since she rarely asked about me and didn’t take time to listen when she did ask. Like Phil, she had frequent bouts of colds, flu, or even pneumonia. She stayed in bed most of one winter—I suspect there was some depression along with whatever ailed her—and drank pretty continually, too.