Personal History (54 page)

With regard to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Chal Roberts ascribes the
Post’s
failure to send reporters to Florida and Guatemala to the fact that Phil, his editors, and Chal himself saw nothing wrong with such a CIA operation and indeed hoped it would succeed. On April 22, a
Post
editorial declared that events in Cuba were “only one chapter in the long history of freedom, which has encompassed many greater disasters and darker days before men have combined their wit and determination to write a brighter sequel.” Only on May 1 did an editorial refer to “the Cuban misadventure”
and the next day to an “appalling mistake of judgment.” Then Phil pulled a critical editorial by Bob Estabrook out of the paper without telling him, a warning that his mood was deteriorating again. Clearly his being absent from the paper much of the time but occasionally plunging in deeply must have been very confusing and disorienting to the staff.

One of the first people Phil turned on at that time was Estabrook, who had been named editorial-page editor when Russ became editor of the
Post
. Phil’s and Bob’s personalities were not in harmony, and they had developed various differences on issues over the years. In this instance, Bob had argued that on some editorial issues the paper had to acknowledge when it was changing its position, and that seemed to be the last straw for Phil—he was so angry that he wanted to fire Bob. Russ Wiggins solved this problem by sending Bob off to London to be a columnist for the paper and taking over the editorial page himself, which had the effect of putting Al Friendly in charge of the news operation.

Another change that Phil brought about at this time was a change in the law firms used by the company. When Bill Rogers left the government, Phil tried to get Covington & Burling to take him in as a partner so that he could work for us. When Covington rejected this idea, Phil switched all the company business except for broadcasting to another firm that Bill had joined, in part with the idea of upgrading it. With this move, Bill became general counsel to The Washington Post Company and a close associate of Fritz’s, Phil’s, and later of mine.

As was typical of Phil during these years, he kept his hand in politics, drafting and editing speeches for Bobby Kennedy as well as for the president and vice-president. He also drafted a foreign-policy speech on unity for LBJ to deliver to the Magazine Publishers Association—which he had gotten the vice-president to agree to deliver in the first place—and accompanied him when LBJ spoke to the group. Immediately afterwards, LBJ and Lady Bird flew to the Far East for an official trip. They had been house-hunting just before leaving and had narrowed their search to two houses. Lyndon left Phil his power of attorney, told him to consult with Abe Fortas and to decide on which one to buy. Abe was worried that the bigger, grander one, owned by Perle Mesta and known as the Elms, would hurt LBJ’s political image—it was a formal, large, French-style house with a lot of lawn and grounds around it—but Phil, who was in charge of making the decision, decided in favor of that one, despite Fortas’s misgivings. Years later, Lady Bird expressed profound pleasure in Phil’s choice, saying she would never have dared set her sights that high. “It was too elegant, too expensive. But that’s the nicest house I ever lived in. I loved that house and I loved every day that I spent there.”

——

B
Y MID
-M
AY
, I was allowed out of my bed five hours a day. I mostly used that time moving around with Phil. And as summer neared, I gradually was up more and more. Lally graduated from Madeira on June 3, and Phil described our daughter at the time in a letter to a childhood friend, evoking the natural love of a proud father: “She miraculously goes to Radcliffe this fall and is as far beyond me in sophistication and general wisdom as you and I once were beyond Uncle George and Ernie.”

Several parties had been planned for Lally’s coming-out year and graduation. My then friend Bunny Mellon, Paul’s wife, had decided to give a dance at their Upperville farm, Oak Spring, for her daughter by her first marriage, Liza Lloyd. Whenever Bunny did something like this, she did it in a major way. She had suggested that I give a dinner for Lally and Barbara Lawrence, Lally’s close friend, earlier on the night of the dance, and then bring all of our guests to Oak Spring. Poor Dr. Felts agreed to the idea of the dinner on June 16—as long as it was a quiet family occasion. I nodded agreement. The quiet family occasion, however, turned out to be 120 for dinner—roughly eighty young people, friends of Lally’s, and forty adults. This was my first real night out, my own coming out after the weeks in bed.

So, after our dinner at Glen Welby, we all drove over to Upperville, to the Mellons’. Bunny had had a dance floor built and had decorated the dance area to look like the center of a small French village square with a fair going on around it and lights twinkling on the outskirts. A tent city, where scores of young men had been put up, was in a distant field, but looked very pretty, complete with flags flying. Two orchestras played throughout the night, Count Basie’s alternating with another of the prominent dance bands of the time. The dancing carried on until the early hours of the morning. Someone said an entire vintage year of Dom Pérignon was consumed that night.

It was the last extravaganza on this lavish scale that my children attended, but it was fun, and I was pleased to have had such a memorable evening for my first party night out.

L
ALLY’S GRADUATION WEEKEND
coincided with President Kennedy’s summit meeting in Vienna with Khrushchev. Shortly after the president’s return, Joe Alsop—who had recently married Susan Mary Patten, the widow of his close friend Bill Patten and the perfect wife for him—asked us to drive him out to see the president in a house the Kennedys had rented in Middleburg, Virginia. We sat together as the president soberly discussed the drama of the Vienna meeting and Khrushchev’s toughness with him. As we sat in his living room, President Kennedy, in an old-fashioned
rocking chair that he used for his bad back, sent for the transcript of the meeting between the two leaders and read the exchange that had taken place at the end of it, concluding with his own words in response to one of Khrushchev’s threats: “It’s going to be a cold winter.”

Jackie told me of sitting next to President de Gaulle while in Paris, where she had been so overwhelmingly received and where the French adored her.
“Prenez garde,”
she quoted de Gaulle as telling her,
“elle est la plus maligne”
(“Watch out, she’s the wilier one”), referring to Mrs. Khrushchev. When she met Mrs. Khrushchev in Vienna, Jackie decided de Gaulle had been right. The two women went out onto a balcony to respond to the crowds in Vienna, and Jackie said that Mrs. Khrushchev, “with her little pig’s eyes, … grabbed my hand and held it aloft before I could stop her.”

Kennedy had been deeply shaken by his exchange with Khrushchev, confiding to Scotty Reston right after the meeting that it was the “roughest thing in my life.” Some people believe that Kennedy was driven to his first steps in Vietnam because Khrushchev frightened him so in Vienna over Berlin and other issues. Murrey Marder told me later that on the plane back from Vienna the president was talking to Marie Ridder, who was along on the flight with her husband, Walter, and who was pregnant, and told her gravely, “You have no right to bring a child into this kind of world.” Marie was astonished and pointed out that Jackie was pregnant, too—to which he reportedly responded, “That goes for her also.”

The effect on Phil of our visit was immediate and long-lasting. Shortly after this trip, he responded to Kennedy’s concerns about the grim situation, especially in Berlin, by calling in his editors and reporters—from both the
Post
and
Newsweek
—and impressing on them how Kennedy felt. Phil also met at length with Ben Bradlee one afternoon, joined by Dick Hottelet of CBS and Larry Collins of
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau. And for hours, late into the night, he talked with Tommy Thompson and Chip Bohlen, both Soviet experts and diplomats, at Chip’s home. Phil even suggested some pieces about the threat to Berlin and the possibility of millions of lives being lost in a nuclear war. “We knew he’d been over and got it all from Kennedy,” said Chal Roberts, who had covered the Vienna trip. “We knew he was actually asking us to write something to promote Kennedy’s policies, which was a legitimate news story, but it made us uncomfortable.… I never had a falling out with Phil in any formal sense, but I did think he got too much into politics and the Kennedys.”

N
OT KNOWING WHAT
to do with the summer, to give Phil a rest and me a change of scenery, I was influenced by a friend to return to Cape
Cod. We rented two houses in a family enclave, known as the Bailey Apollonic House, in Cotuit, which had a pier across a small road and a ladder down a cliff to the beach.

The summer was a difficult one. By the time we left for Cotuit, Phil clearly had become depressed again and was also suffering from a very bad back. For the most part, because of the way he was feeling, we led a relatively quiet life while on the Cape. He retreated from involvement with work and from most social events, though he did spend a certain amount of time with the children, teasing Lally about her young boyfriend, whose family was in the arms business and whom Phil christened “Pistols.”

Bunny Mellon, who had a house nearby on the Cape, called me one day and said, “You know, the Kennedys go around in this boat and they have the most awful thick sandwiches and canned clam chowder for lunch. I think it would be nice to have them to a picnic, and I’d like you and Phil to be there.” I’m sure she didn’t need us, but I was excited. I pleaded with Phil to go, and he hesitantly accepted. We were all waiting on the Mellons’ beach in Osterville when we saw the president’s boat approach with the press boat following. Jack and Jackie jumped off and came in to the beach and took shelter from the press boat, which disappeared after the president had gone out of sight.

Bunny had substituted steamed clams and champagne for the meager lunch she thought the Kennedys usually had on their boat. The president chatted with Phil and me about members of the press corps, giving pretty frank appraisals but being flattering about the
Post’s
two reporters who covered the White House, Eddie Folliard and Carroll Kilpatrick.

At lunch, we all sat around at small tables. The president and Bunny were alone at one, and it was then that he asked her, whose skill at landscape gardening was legendary, if she would redesign the garden outside his office window, complaining that people called the place a rose garden but there wasn’t a rose to be seen—that, in fact, there was nothing but crabgrass. Sometime later, when nothing had happened with the garden and Bunny was going through a receiving line at the White House, the president asked, “Where are the plans for my garden?” “Oh, Mr. President, I’ve been busy and I’ve been traveling. They are in my head but I haven’t had time to get them down on paper.” “That’s the trouble with the whole New Frontier,” the president wryly commented. Bunny eventually got the garden done, and its beauty remains.

One thing Phil did that summer, despite his condition, was to join the board of the RAND Corporation, an independent research organization founded after World War II to advise the air force on public-policy issues, particularly those involving national security. Being on the board put Phil in the position of having yet another connection with an organization
closely related to the government. I think it was still marginally acceptable for him to participate, because the criteria for what publishers could and should do were looser in those days. Some years later RAND invited me to become a member, but by then I felt I couldn’t do it: the connection with the government created too much of a conflict for me.

Most of that fall, Phil was still feeling low and liked to have me with him; as always when he was depressed, he didn’t want to be left alone. Often during this period he would go to the office for only a few hours and then come home. Having fully recovered from TB by then, I started to go along with him to New York most weeks, where we rented a beautiful apartment in the Carlyle Hotel. Occasionally I ventured out—to lunch, with Babe Paley, for example, and sometimes with one or both of her sisters. I was very flattered to be included in their, to me, glamorous New Yorky circle. Despite my own background and actually having been born there, I always felt like a country girl in New York.

Babe became one of my good friends. One day she asked me if I knew Truman Capote. My sister Flo knew him, but I had never met him. Babe said that he was a very close friend of hers and that she wanted to bring us together, so she arranged a lunch for us with Truman and Harper Lee, the author of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. It’s hard to describe Truman as I first saw him. He had that strange falsetto voice for which he was so well known. He was very short, perfectly dressed, groomed, and coiffed. And he was a magic conversationalist—his sentences were like stories. We quickly became friends. Harper Lee was different. She later became a recluse, and I saw her only one other time, also with Truman.

A
S THE ADMINISTRATION
got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. These parties included exquisite women from New York and Europe, but old friends of ours, too, the Johnsons among them. We danced the twist—or attempted to. I found it impossibly difficult to learn and never really did, although my children tried having me learn by stamping out cigarettes and drying myself with bath towels. Phil wasn’t much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy—so much so that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear.

Early in 1962, Drew Pearson reported on the twist parties in his column, headlined “They Twisted at the White House.” Pearson said that “the big story social Washington has been buzzing about has not been U-2 pilot Powers, or the astronaut Colonel Glenn … but rather who leaked the news about the big White House twist party when even the Secretary of Defense, to the amazement of his generals, twisted and when
the President himself danced until 4:30 a.m.” The twist was thought to be rather daring, and some people were shocked that it was being danced in the White House.