Personal History (56 page)

S
IMULTANEOUS WITH
Phil’s appointment to head COMSAT, there was an ominous development abroad. Signs of a crisis emerged at a dinner party Joe and Susan Mary gave on the night of October 16, a sendoff party for the Bohlens, who were about to leave for Paris. Joe had wanted President Kennedy to attend the dinner to show the French that this ambassador was important to the president. Besides the Alsops and Bohlens, there were only a few guests—the president and Jackie; the French ambassador, Hervé Alphand, and his wife; Isaiah Berlin, who had come down from Harvard, where he was teaching on an exchange program; and Phil and me.

The president had just that morning received the first pictures of Soviet missiles being erected in Cuba, but he had decided to keep his normal schedule and attend the dinner. When he arrived, he barely greeted anyone before he led Chip out to the end of Joe’s garden for a long talk. It appeared to some of us who glanced out that they were arguing. Joe began to think they’d never come in and started pacing, but just when Susan Mary was convinced the meal would be ruined if it was held up any longer, they returned and we all sat down to dinner.

The president was sitting on Susan Mary’s right. “I felt extraordinary tension,” she later recalled. “I’ve never felt anything like it. It was a physical sensation. I felt I was sitting by a very high-powered motor, which was revved up to its fullest powers.” The other thing that struck her was that the president, who so rarely repeated himself, so rarely monopolized dinner conversation, asked the same question twice, first of Bohlen, then of Berlin: “What have the Soviets done historically when their backs are to the wall? How do they behave?”

Joe remembered the president as being “in a brown study the whole evening.” When the men separated from the women, as they regularly did after dinner, he recalled Kennedy saying, “Of course, if you think simply about the chances in history, you have to quote the odds as somewhere near even that we shall see an H-bomb war within the next ten years.” When the men rejoined the women, the president again took Chip into the garden, where they stood talking. Finally, they came back and the president left, apologizing that he had an early and hard next day, and still arguing with Chip as he went down Joe’s front steps.

This was at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chip was a member of the team Kennedy had assigned to advise him, and the president, it turned out, had been urging him to stay home and remain part of this Executive Committee. But, knowing that a change of his plans might tip off the Soviets, Chip advised the president that he and Avis should sail the next day as arranged. Joe reflected later that this showed what a real pro Chip was—sacrificing his own participation in the crucial event of the decade for what he thought was the greater good.

The president, still keeping up the appearance of normalcy, left for a scheduled weekend of political campaigning. He was in constant touch with the Executive Committee, then pleaded a cold and returned from his trip to preside over the ExComm in its final debate. The course was decided—a blockade rather than a military strike, which had also been considered. By the weekend, the story, kept so tightly secret all week, started to leak.
The New York Times
noted troop movements and other activities and prepared a story by Scotty Reston. When Scotty checked it with the White House, a plea by the president to
Times
Publisher Orvil
Dryfoos got the story killed, on the understandable grounds that, according to Arthur Schlesinger, “publication might confront him with a Moscow ultimatum before he had the chance to put his own plans into effect.”

By October 20, the
Post
began to get wind that something was going on. Al Friendly was giving a dinner at his home when Walter Lippmann phoned to say that something serious was up. Friendly called Murrey Marder at home and then went to the office, from where he called Arthur Schlesinger at the White House. Schlesinger said only that everything was “tense and tight.” This, plus the fact that the president had returned from Chicago with his alleged cold, was all we had.

Marder then did a brilliant piece of reporting. At that time there was a check-in book at the State Department, which no longer exists because of this very story. Marder observed that two people from the CIA had just checked in. He thought this was odd on a Saturday night. Certain that a crisis was at hand but not knowing where, he raced around the department and found that the only lights on were in the Latin American Bureau and the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which included the United Nations, and of which Harlan Cleveland was assistant secretary. Running into Cleveland, Marder had to think quickly of a question that might elicit a useful answer, which an open-ended one like “What’s going on?” clearly would not. So he asked, “How bad does it look to you, Harlan?” to which Cleveland replied, “Well, pretty bad.”

By that time, Marder had eliminated the idea of Berlin or the Middle East and guessed Cuba. Hoping to get Cleveland to confirm his guess without asking him directly, Murrey asked, “Is it going to be like last time”—referring to the Bay of Pigs—“where you’re going to be in on the crash landing but not the takeoff? Are you people in the loop this time on this Cuban thing?” Cleveland said, “I think we are.”

So, on Sunday, October 21, the
Post
published a story about a crisis that appeared to be centered in Cuba. President Kennedy blew his stack; he had fended off the
Times
, which actually had about half or three-quarters of the story, and here, out of the blue, came the
Post
, to which nobody was paying much attention.

Apparently, Kennedy called Phil that day and asked him to move the paper away from targeting Cuba. Unaware of this, Chal Roberts and Murrey were racing around town trying to put together whatever they could. Phil, in Al Friendly’s office, called Marder in and asked him if he was sure he knew what he was doing. When Marder told him what had happened the night before, Phil said, “Oh, my God, is that all it’s based on?” Murrey went back to his typing, and Al said we weren’t sold on the Cuba angle, so we were going to take it out of the lead. To this day, Murrey says he
doesn’t know what President Kennedy said to Phil or what Phil agreed to, but clearly Phil wanted the
Post
to stop focusing on Cuba.

The next day’s story ran under an eight-column banner, “Major U.S. Decision Is Awaited.” Marder, without a byline, began:

That day, Monday, October 22, President Kennedy briefed congressional leaders and spoke to the nation in the evening, revealing Cuba as the locus of the crisis. Bill Walton and a friend, Helen Chavchavadze, who were to dine with the Kennedys, watched the speech at Bill’s house in Georgetown and then tore down to the White House to be there by the time the president got upstairs from the basement broadcast facility. Bill recalled telling Kennedy that he had given a very impressive peace speech, to which Kennedy replied, “But right now, we are just listening and praying. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” At that moment a White House aide drew them aside and said, “If there is trouble, you and Miss Chavchavadze will be whisked off with them. And you’ll just have to go,” which meant going to a protected facility in the countryside built especially for the president. Helen burst into tears, sobbing that she couldn’t go because she had left her two small children at home with a nanny. “I can’t go; I won’t go,” she said. The aide quieted her by saying, “In fact, we think it will be all right.”

Phil behaved perfectly well throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, except perhaps for carrying out Kennedy’s wishes too literally. But it was a hard call to make in view of what was at stake. My own reaction was one of concern for the world, but I didn’t really believe it would come to all-out war and cannot remember feeling any personal fear. The prospect of nuclear war seemed more unreal to all of us than it actually was.

A
T ABOUT THIS TIME
, Phil made two more significant purchases, accelerating the buying trend so typical of this phase of the illness that no one had yet named; only later did I learn that buying things is a well-known
symptom of manic-depression. In the first case, he saw a classified ad in the
Post
for a farm about five miles from Glen Welby, in Hume, Virginia—a farm that consisted of 365 acres and a house, all for $52,000. Phil sent for an aerial photo and, without even visiting, asked his lawyer to take care of everything so that he would only have to sign the final contract. He accomplished the whole purchase in just two weeks, with a $26,500 down payment, $20,000 of which was provided—ironically, as it later turned out—by me. I’m sure I had no logical reason for acceding to the idea of acquiring a second farm. No doubt I agreed to it because I agreed to almost everything. I certainly understood that we didn’t need a second farm, but I believed that Phil had to be mollified. I also was fully aware that he’d often bought things about which I’d had doubts that turned out to be good acquisitions in the end. As usual, I thought, “Who am I to question this?”

Phil also decided to purchase a big, expensive plane, a Gulfstream 1. Normally, people ordered this kind of plane months ahead of delivery, but Phil wanted it so immediately that he took the model the Grumman company used for demonstration purposes. It was my mother who suggested we think about the consequences of having a plane at our disposal. She wrote Phil:

Mother was still totally unaware of Phil’s problems, but was staunchly brave and supportive later, when, alas, she necessarily learned of his illness.

T
O WARD THE END
of October, the COMSAT incorporators held their first meeting. The need for haste in dealing with the beginnings of COMSAT contributed to the frantic pace of Phil’s life and to his anger with anyone and anything that got in his way. He began to look for a chairman for COMSAT and turned to our friend General Lauris Norstad, who was soon to retire as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Phil pushed hard to get him to agree to take the COMSAT job, even involving the president and Secretary of Defense McNamara in trying to convince him. Phil also
wanted Frank Stanton, his fellow RAND trustee but still CBS president, to become COMSAT’s president and operating head.

On November 2, I flew up to Idlewild with Phil to see him off to Europe, where he was going to talk to Larry Norstad about COMSAT. Early the next day, Phil and Larry in Paris both wrote letters to Stanton. Phil felt such urgency about co-opting Stanton that he decided to send a personal messenger to ensure that the letters reached Frank in New York. Late on the afternoon of November 3, Frank’s secretary buzzed him to say that there was somebody waiting with a message for him. He said, “Just take the message and I’ll get it later,” but the secretary insisted, “No,
she
wants to see you.” According to Frank, a young woman then came in, sat down, and said, “Here’s something Mr. Graham wanted me to give you.” Frank thanked her and put the letters on his desk, intending to read them later. She said, “Aren’t you going to read these? I came all the way across the ocean with this message. You ought to look at it.”

The appearance in New York of this young woman, whose name was Robin Webb, was the beginning of the tragic end. I have only been able in later years to piece together some of what had happened up to that point and what happened in the ensuing months. Larry Collins, then head of
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau and later a well-known author, had received a call from Phil asking to have a secretary on a standby basis for that November weekend. Larry sensed that this was important and that it had to be someone he trusted—that he couldn’t just call a secretarial service in Paris. The office secretary’s English wasn’t good enough for dictation, and he knew that Robin, who was a
Newsweek
stringer, could do the job, so he called and asked her to fill in.

Robin was actually quite an able journalist, Larry recalled. “She was Australian. She was very much one of the boys, a little bit ‘matey.’ She was fun and very nice. Drank a fair amount in the good Australian tradition. A nice kid is what you would say. Worked very hard and did very well for us.” When Larry called her, her first response was, “I’m not a secretary. I’m a journalist,” to which Larry said, “Come on—don’t be stupid. This is going to give you a chance to know the boss.” She agreed reluctantly, but insisted that Larry never ask her to take dictation again.

Phil later told Collins he had “borrowed your secretary for 48 hours” to deliver the letters to New York. He also mentioned he had told Robin that once she got there she could use his suite at the Carlyle and relax and enjoy New York for a couple of days before returning to Europe.

The connection between Phil and Robin had been just that quick. On November 5, Phil himself flew back to New York, where I met him. We came home to Washington, and then he flew back to New York the following day, went to
Newsweek
for an editorial conference, saw Frank (who had never really been interested in the job), and, most important, picked
up Robin and flew to Glen Welby with her. And so it began. I don’t know how long she stayed in the United States, but when she returned to
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau, she was discreet about the relationship with Phil, though it was clear, according to Larry Collins, that she was on cloud nine.