Personal History (52 page)

By this time, Carl and Dorothy McCardle were stopped in their station wagon next to us. Dorothy was the much-beloved society reporter for the
Post
, and Carl worked for the Eisenhower administration. Phil pulled the cork from a champagne bottle and tossed it through the Mc-Cardles’ window, muttering, “Here, you Nixon-loving son of a bitch.”

At the ball, the Kennedys looked very handsome—and regal. Because
Joe had asked Afdera Fonda, the beautiful Italian wife of Henry Fonda, and Flo Smith, an old Kennedy friend from Palm Beach, to come by his house for a drink, he decided to go home early, and tried to get Phil and me to leave with him, but by then Phil was having much too good a time. So Joe found Peter Duchin, who was also leaving, got a ride with him through the still-snowy streets, and arrived in time to welcome his guests. They lit a fire and sat down to enjoy it and quietly reflect on the momentous day. Flo and Afdera, however, had spread word of the after-ball party, and their friends started to arrive.

Eventually, we drove home from the dance with the Bohlens and the Bradens, and as our car passed Dumbarton Avenue, we looked down toward Joe’s and noticed that the street was lit up, blocked off, and full of police. Avis said, “Either Joe’s house is on fire or the president’s there.” Indeed he was.

We felt sad not to have left with Joe and shared in the exciting moment when he heard a quiet knock, opened the door, and found the new young president of the United States, snowflakes in his hair and a smile on his handsome face, waiting to come in.

E
VEN NOW
it’s hard to appraise how good a president Jack Kennedy was in the relatively short time allowed him in office, but it’s not hard to recall the excitement and hope generated by a president who was vibrant, young, eloquent, and committed to solving old problems in new ways. Especially in the beginning, we were electrified by the prospects of this administration. Phil and I had been much closer to Johnson than to Kennedy, but Phil, especially, grew close to Kennedy as time went on. Theirs was an easy relationship. At dinner one night at Joe Alsop’s, Phil, typically, was offering political advice when Kennedy teased, “Phil, when you get elected dogcatcher I will listen to you on politics.”

Many of Kennedy’s appointees were or became and remained our friends—among them, Douglas Dillon and Arthur Schlesinger, who served the president as special assistant and adviser on Latin American and cultural affairs and as his resident “court philosopher.” Our old friend Ken Galbraith was ambassador to India, but because he was closer to Kennedy on economic matters than were many others, he commuted frequently from India to Washington for consultations with the president. Kennedy once said to him, “I don’t want to hear about agriculture from anybody but you, Ken, and I don’t want to hear about it from you either.”

Robert McNamara, whom we hadn’t known, came into the administration as secretary of defense. He had been a classmate of my cousin Walter Haas at the University of California, and Wally wanted me to meet him right away. Though ours was not an immediately positive relationship, a strong friendship developed between Bob and Margy and Phil and me, a friendship that Bob and I continue to this day.

Bill Walton was made head of the Fine Arts Commission in Washington, which Kennedy thought was a salaried position, but which, to the president’s embarrassment, turned out not to be. Bill had a marvelous time, though, despite his forced volunteering, influencing the design of
the city, including LaFayette Square, and helping Jackie on matters of renovation and art for the White House.

Part of what contributed to the excitement of the Kennedy presidency for us was that these men surrounding the president, and indeed the president himself, were our friends and, for the most part, our contemporaries. We no longer were the younger acquaintances of the older generation constituting the government. With Phil having become publisher of the
Post
just before his thirty-first birthday, we seemed always to have been the youngest people in the room. Now our generation was running the country. As Phil put it at the beginning of a speech he gave at the National War College, “I have been feeling especially venerable and ancient ever since the moment on January 20 when I first learned that it was possible to be older than the President of the United States.”

B
Y EARLY
M
ARCH
, 1961, Phil was involved in his old in-depth way with many activities—political and Post Company–related—and he seemed to me to be enjoying himself. I can see today that his activities had become increasingly frenetic, though still fairly constructively so, the most obvious example of which was his purchase of
Newsweek
, then a weak, marginally profitable newsmagazine for businessmen, far behind its rival,
Time
.

The magazine,
News-Week
, had first appeared in February 1933, and in 1937 was renamed
Newsweek
, having been bought by Vincent Astor, with Averell Harriman and a few others as investors. At Vincent’s death, the Astor Foundation—controlled by Vincent’s widow, Brooke—in effect owned the magazine, and the trustees decided that it should be sold.

As early as January 1961, one of the men on the
Post’s
business staff had told Phil about the magazine’s being for sale and Phil had said he wasn’t interested. He was then approached by a management group led by Malcolm Muir,
Newsweek
’s chairman, but Phil again dismissed the idea. Then Ken Crawford, a friend of Phil’s and Washington bureau chief for
Newsweek
, and Ben Bradlee, Crawford’s assistant, began egging him on. The idea must have begun to take hold, because when Ben called Phil one night at home (a call Ben later referred to as “the best telephone call I ever made—the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding”), Phil told him to come right over. Ben, reminiscing later, said: “I used to stew about it at night, and it seemed incredible to me that mature people couldn’t have some control over their own future.” That’s what prompted his call. Phil talked at length with Ben at our house and asked him to go home and write an extensive memo on why Phil should buy the magazine, encouraging Ben not to worry about what he said, because Phil would be
the only one reading it. Ben went home at 3:00 a.m. and spent the rest of the night drafting a long stream-of-consciousness memo (unfortunately lost), which seems to have been persuasive to Phil.

A few days later, in late February, this time in the evening at our house, Phil met again with Ben, who brought along Oz Elliott,
Newsweek
’s thirty-six-year-old managing editor. Ben remembered the instantaneous rapport between Phil and Oz: “Phil had this way of leaping ahead of himself. He would start out a sentence, switch, and then expect others to know what he meant and where he was going. Elliott was on the same wavelength, and so they hit it off very well.” The next day, Phil flew to New York, where he met with the company’s lawyers and financial advisers, bringing into the situation Fritz Beebe, who had helped with the purchase of the
Times-Herald
. After Fritz looked favorably at the figures, Phil decided to try to buy the magazine and dove right in.

As active negotiations over
Newsweek
increased to breakneck speed, Phil got terribly frantic and wound up. The deal took only about three weeks from beginning to end, during which time he slept very little and rode a high crest, working feverishly to get it done. The whole idea of buying
Newsweek
and adding yet another huge responsibility to his already too-full plate made me nervous. I wasn’t a regular reader of
Newsweek
, nor was Phil at that time, and it had no real emotional appeal for me. I knew the magazine was national press and therefore had an impact, but I wasn’t thinking about the business effect so much as the potential personal—and negative—effect on Phil. Having been through so much with Phil’s depression, I worried that this would become just another problem for him to deal with, at a time when he was already overextended. On the other hand, some of our long talks over the past few years had made it apparent to me that Phil was worried about being a “son-in-law,” about having been “given” the paper and the company by my father. He kept questioning whether this was the reason for his success and his prominence. Could he have achieved what he had on his own? He seemed to be brooding over this question more and more, and by then this had become enough of an issue in my mind that, despite my misgivings, I came down on the side of the
Newsweek
purchase, it so clearly being something Phil would have done on his own.

Once he had decided to go for the magazine, Phil touched every base he knew to influence the people who would make the decision on which bidder would be the victor, the other finalist being the wealthy publishing house Doubleday. He met with Allan Betts, the vice-president and treasurer of the Astor Foundation, giving him an outline of The Washington Post Company’s proposal for the purchase. While other potential purchasers had simply announced that they wanted to buy the magazine, Phil
took the trouble to write down his ideas for its future. It happened that a few of his ideas coincided with plans that Vincent had made and shared with Brooke, so she was especially keen on Phil’s being the victorious bidder. For her, this decision would be based on more than money. She said at the time, “I want Phil Graham to have it because he’s the only person who has written down exactly what Vincent was thinking about.” Brooke Astor was an important voice in the sale, and she wanted to be sure
Newsweek
would end up in responsible hands. Phil also went to considerable trouble to acquire Averell Harriman’s support—without which, Betts later acknowledged, the foundation would have refused to let Phil enter the race for the magazine at the last minute.

Finally, after a weekend at Glen Welby, Phil left for New York with Al Friendly, John Sweeterman, and John Hayes to meet Fritz. I was supposed to go with them but had some things to take care of, so I suggested I come up the following day. After the flurry of departure, I received a telephone call from my doctor, who asked to see me that afternoon. This was unusual, but I was unsuspecting. I had been to see him the previous week for a chronic cough and fatigue, and as a matter of course I had had a chest X-ray, since the doctors were always looking at several healed scars on my lungs, a not uncommon thing. But this time Dr. Felts said to me that he suspected I might have tuberculosis. If I did have it, it was in the very early stages and therefore could be dealt with, but he wanted me to go to the hospital for a week of tests.

I explained to him that Phil was in the middle of extremely tense negotiations in New York and that I was supposed to join him the following day; there was no way I could call him with this piece of news—I couldn’t possibly divert or upset him with my own problems at such a moment. Believing that I had to be there for him and support him in this effort, I asked Dr. Felts if we could postpone the hospital visit until I got back from New York. I realized that Phil was fragile and that I could help bolster him. Dr. Felts knew Phil well and understood my predicament and said that it was probably safe to go, as long as I didn’t stay up late or spend time in smoke-filled rooms—neither of which I could avoid, of course. His admonitions went the expectable way—none of us slept much, and everyone around me was smoking nonstop.

I felt somewhat like a soap-opera heroine, but not telling Phil at the time was the only thing to do—things were dramatic and tense enough as it was. So I sat in the Carlyle suite with Fritz and Phil and followed the negotiations as a close spectator, watching as they worked together in a perfectly complementary way, enthralled by what was going on and caught up in the excitement. At one point, Betts called to say that although the offers from the final contenders were more or less equal, we had to come up with
more cash if we wanted to be competitive—cash we didn’t have. At first Phil and Fritz were overcome with despondency. Again, my mother got into the picture, calling me to tell Phil to feel free to spend her money, too, if needed. But instead Phil got on the phone and sold the old
Times-Herald
building to the developer William Zeckendorf. After that, he went into one of the bedrooms alone with a yellow pad and a pencil for about an hour, playing with numbers to make the purchase work out. When he emerged, he said to Fritz, “There are three ways we might do this.” Fritz glanced at his pad and quickly responded, “The first two won’t work, but the third one will.”

The whole thing was very courageous of Phil and Fritz. We were still a small private company without much cash, especially after borrowing for all the previous deals and for the
Post
and Jacksonville buildings, which we were in the process of either enlarging or rebuilding, and particularly when contrasted with Doubleday, which was cash-rich.

We were all on pins and needles on the day of decision, March 9. Ensconced in the Carlyle, Phil had nearly worn a path on the room’s carpet, pacing back and forth with worry and excitement. He decided to take a shower to relieve his agitation, and naturally he was in the shower when the phone rang. Allan Betts was calling. Dripping wet and barely covered by a towel, Phil ran out to take the call, turned to us, and said, “We got it.”
Newsweek
was ours.

Once we realized we had the magazine, Phil had to come up with the $2 million down payment. He had no company checks with him but did have a crumpled blank personal check that he had been carrying around in his wallet for a year or longer in case of need. He crossed out his name, wrote in “The Washington Post Company,” and made out the check for $2 million, letting the
Post
’s treasurer in Washington know, so that he could scramble to cover that amount. The check was later framed and hung in Phil’s office, and still hangs in mine. The deposit was a down payment on a total of $8,985,000 to the Astor Foundation at a rate of $50 a share. In the end, Phil had triumphed over about a half-dozen other bidders. Sam Newhouse made a higher bid after the deal was closed, but the Astor Foundation honorably stuck by its word.