Personal History (60 page)

On March 1, Phil finally left for two weeks in Puerto Rico with Robin, during which time he again began buying things, arranging to rent with an option to acquire two apartments. Though these were ostensibly for the company, he and Robin intended to use them; he even wrote someone that they might make Puerto Rico their home base rather than the Pearson farm.

A few weeks earlier, Phil had had an argument with Russ Wiggins over an editorial about de Gaulle that Phil wrote and wanted to run in the paper—he had a kind of fixation on de Gaulle, seeing him as a great man standing alone. Phil wanted to fire Russ at some point during one such argument, but Al Friendly said, “If he goes, I go.” Faced with the loss of both top editors, Phil had backed down.

Now he sent Russ an editorial he himself had written about the newspaper strike which he wanted printed in the
Post
. He also sent along seven pages he had typed himself that were highly critical of the editorial the
Post
had run on the strike, saying he should have been consulted and even suggesting an apology in print for the earlier editorial at the same time that the paper ran his. Russ not only refused to run Phil’s editorial but said he would quit if the piece appeared. Phil backed down again, but it escalated his feud with Russ—to the point where Phil told Al Friendly to take over the editor’s post. But Al again refused.

Phil also wrote several articles, including one on Cuba that appeared in the “Outlook” section and generated many positive letters, one of which was from the president, who added a note to his letter saying, “I hope you will come by some day soon.” But as Chal Roberts reported later, “[W]hen Graham took to berating Kennedy over the phone, asking ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ the President replied, ‘I know I’m not talking to the Phil Graham I have so much admiration for.’ ”

The difficulties, indeed, were constant—for me, for Phil, and for the company and those trying to hold it together. The whole affair, as David Bruce noted in one of his diary entries, was “inexpressibly sad.”

I
SEEMED TO
be living on another planet. The most painful moments—the ones that disturbed me the most profoundly—were those in which people reported to me that they had seen Phil and that he appeared to be rational and calm, indeed quite well. Even Fritz Beebe at one point told me he seemed fine. I had begun seeing Dr. Cameron by this time, and he assured me that people in these states could appear very normal for defined periods of time when they wanted to, but that fundamentally Phil was not rational, that he was ill. Even so, despite his assurances, the apparently normal encounters Phil was having with others shook me—about him, and about us. Was this the real Phil? And was this what he really wanted? If so, what did that say about our relationship, about our twenty-two years together? What he seemed to be saying was that whatever was the matter with him was my fault, and here was the girl of his dreams, and all he needed was to be rid of me and to be with her and with the
Post
.

Among my staunchest allies were the Restons. Scotty had seen Phil at two or three critical moments. According to him, “Phil thought my religious faith could help him”:

One day during this period when Phil was away, I myself went to see Scotty and Sally in a terrible state of despondency. Scotty remembers thinking that I was giving up, that I didn’t seem to have the strength to go on. He said to me, “Kay, you’ve got to fight for this paper. It does not belong to Phil Graham. Your father created this paper. There is not room in Washington for two Graham families. You and I can’t do anything about Phil, but we can start training Donny, and I would like to take him as my clerk this summer”—which he did.

The other person who stiffened my back was Luvie Pearson, who was the closest, most helpful, most ever-present friend throughout all those months. She somehow transmitted to me some of her own extraordinary strength and originality. The most important moment, one I will always remember, took place when the two of us were walking in Montrose Park, across the street from my house. I was talking about hanging on to the paper until the children, especially the boys—since in those days that’s how I thought—were old enough to run it. I recall Luvie firmly and distinctly saying, “Don’t be silly, dear. You can do it.”

“Me?” I exclaimed. “That’s impossible. I couldn’t possibly do it. You don’t know how hard and complicated it is. There’s no way I could do it.”

“Of course you can do it,” she maintained. “Cissy Patterson did it. So can you.” And to counter my disclaimers of impossibility, Luvie added, “You’ve got all those genes. It’s ridiculous to think you can’t do it. You’ve just been pushed down so far you don’t recognize what you can do.”

That was the first time that anyone had mentioned the idea of my running the company, or that I had even contemplated it in passing. The whole notion struck me as stunning and ridiculous, wrongheaded but sweet, coming as it did from my good, loyal friend who was trying valiantly to buck me up but who obviously didn’t understand what running the business was all about and what it would take.

Though I didn’t think much more about going to work myself, I did think a lot about what Luvie, and Lorraine before her, had said about Phil’s attitude toward me, and I began to realize how he had been treating me, especially in the past few years. Jean Friendly later recalled certain times at Glen Welby when Phil was being very peculiar: “He was charming to the children and nasty to you. He was so mean at that point to you, I couldn’t get over it.” She correctly understood that I always viewed it as a joke and thus didn’t see the comments and behavior as put-downs.

After Phil’s return to Washington from Puerto Rico, I got a call saying he wanted to meet me at the R Street house to discuss the divorce and to pick up some of his things. I called Luvie and told her what had been proposed. “Listen, dear,” Luvie said, “you don’t need this. I’ll come and pick you up right away and we’ll drive out to my farm.” I was frightened
at the idea of seeing Phil face to face and uncertain how to handle it, so I readily agreed to Luvie’s plan. We drove away in haste, spent the day at her farm, and returned to find that he had packed up most of his clothes and possessions and had apparently been angry at my absence.

At one point that spring, Polly Wisner and another friend, Oatsie Leiter, urged me to go to New York with them to see the ballet. I had mostly been staying at home, where I felt comfortable—being in my own house with the children gave me some sense of routine, as if everything hadn’t fallen apart. I had particularly stayed away from New York, because that was part of Phil’s and Robin’s turf. I hated thinking of them in our apartment at the Carlyle and at
Newsweek
and at other spots Phil and I had frequented. Both Polly and Oatsie, however, thought this New York foray would be a nice diversion. On the contrary, it turned into one of those star-crossed occasions when a good idea goes sour by happenstance. Before the ballet, we were having dinner at “21” when Leonard Lyons, the gossip columnist, came up to us and said he’d heard Phil and I were getting a divorce and he was off with another woman, and was that true. I found my food hard to swallow after that interruption. Then we went on to the theater and discovered that our tickets were for the next night. So we bought whatever last seats were left in order to save the evening from being a complete bust.

No one conspired against this expedition—the whole fiasco was accidental. Nevertheless, it gave me a feeling of complete rejection and exclusion. I felt that no one cared, that I didn’t count anymore, and that life was passing me by; all the good things were going to Phil. I was certainly vulnerable, ready to be wounded, so that even a petty misfortune like the tickets seemed to be a straw breaking more than the proverbial camel’s back. The trip to cheer me up brought me down lower than ever.

M
ANY OF OUR
friends were caught in a bind. Quite often, they were pushed by Phil to receive Robin. For the most part they didn’t, but said they would when things between Phil and me got sorted out. The Friendlys were particularly strong about stressing their love of him and loyalty to him but their disinclination to accept the new arrangement until it was legal. There was one sharp exchange by letter between Phil and David Bruce over David’s refusal to have lunch with Phil and Robin, which David had said would be “untimely.” Phil testily and angrily responded that there could be only one act that he felt David would really consider untimely, and “that would be the act of being rude to a lady and disloyal to a friend.” Several days later, Phil wrote David again, saying he had been hurt and baffled and telling him, “I am
always
your friend. I apologize for
stupidly thinking you could ever act toward me out of any motive but the highest kind.”

There were very few happy times for me in those months. One was when Pamela Berry came to visit me over a weekend. Pamela was the wife of Michael Berry, later Lord Hartwell, owner of the
London Daily Telegraph
. She was an intelligent, strong, articulate woman, with a great wit—a leading London hostess and quite a political force in England. Though we were all friends, she was known to prefer men, so I naturally thought she was more Phil’s friend than mine, but she connected almost entirely with me during this time. It was very reassuring to have her come stay with me and express such solidarity.

During this period, my mother was also very supportive, although she had to be restrained from occasional impulses to write Phil or get in touch with him on the theory that she had a special relationship with him, which in a way was true but in a more important way was not. At one point, she signed a will in which my brother, Fritz Beebe, and I and a bank representative signed an agreement about property going to descendants, from which, I suppose, we omitted Phil. Each one of these moves was its own trauma, reminding me of the painful reality with which I now had to deal. Most of the time, I lived in a dream that we would get past this nightmare and that normal life would somehow return.

New York seemed to be Phil’s home base when he and Robin weren’t in Puerto Rico or at the farm, but he made several trips to Washington. Once he had dinner with Bob McNamara, and the next day went to the White House to call on the president. Phil had earlier written Kennedy asking if he could stop by, saying, “If there is any chance of seeing you late that afternoon I promise to be on my best behavior.”

This is one of the few times he acknowledged that there might be a problem with his behavior; more often than not, he was adamant in his denial that anything was wrong. Whenever anyone wrote him suggesting that he’d been ill, he at once responded testily, writing to one man, “I am not, nor have I been, seriously ill.” In response to Hugh Kindersley, an English friend of ours who had written Phil that he’d heard he was ill, Phil wrote: “If the Daily Telegraph said I was ‘taken ill’ in Phoenix it was partly right—because I was certainly ‘taken.’ ” In a letter to David Astor in England, he spelled out his intentions: “You have kindly written me a note worrying about my being ‘ill.’ I am not, and have not been ‘ill,’ but I have managed to start getting a divorce in a rather turbulent manner. When the divorce is through I plan to marry a proper Commonwealth lady—Miss Robin Webb from Sydney, Australia.” Phil spread the word far and wide, even apologizing in some of his routine correspondence for being late in responding because “I … have also been somewhat occupied in the earlier
stages of the unfortunate business of getting a divorce.” He wrote to all of our friends in London and Paris, telling them he was planning a month-long trip to Europe and would be coming with Robin, whom he was going to marry.

Evangeline Bruce wrote me from London that our friends were dreading the visit, fearing that, since they had basically decided not to receive Robin, Phil might “try to trap us into lunching with him at a restaurant ‘alone’ ” and then they’d find her with him and there would be some awful scene. She also noted that Isaiah Berlin was “planning to stretch out his hernia operation and recuperative period” to cover the entire time Phil would be in London. Evangeline added that Phil’s insistence on taking Robin everywhere led them all to speculate on whether he would find a way to “smuggle the little woman into his interview with the PM.” Pam Berry wrote that they were all “dreading the arrival of Phil” and added:

Before going to Europe, Phil, taking Robin with him, flew to California for RAND meetings, where apparently there was vast discomfort over her presence at the business-related dinners. Then, on April 19, they left for London. Evangeline wrote me a detailed report of what she knew and had seen: