Personal History (61 page)
Authors: Katharine Graham
Isaiah, who had deliberately arranged for his surgery to be done while Phil was in London with Robin, wrote me:
Phil telephoned to me and visited me twice in my hospital room. On the first occasion not one word was said about any personal matter at all. This was queer, but I did not bring it up, neither did he. He was acutely nervous throughout, and although he talked quite sanely and even interestingly about the Kennedys, etc., I could see that this was not what his mind was on. However, I did nothing to let him off the hook, and lay back in my exhausted condition and smiled wanly from time to time, and in the end the nurses had to ask him to leave. On the next day he returned and there was a certain amount of personal talk, from which I gathered that he does indeed want a divorce and hopes to see you to discuss it with you, etc. He has an iron control of himself at the moment, but within some kind of devils are certainly still at large. On the other hand, it is quite impossible to say that he is in any respect insane. His own account of his incarceration had a wonderful grim humour about it. I had no idea whether what he said was accurate—it certainly didn’t tally with the accounts of others, but I didn’t practice any inquisitorial methods. I merely made clear my devotion to you and left it at that. He claimed to harbour no resentment or bitter feeling towards you of any kind. I did not see the lady. Nor was she mentioned, except very glancingly. It was not suggested that I should see her and I behaved as if she did not exist. I have no idea whether any banquets were held or how much entertainment occurred, since I really was absolutely out of everything.
In advance of this trip, Phil had planned for a meeting of
Newsweek
’s overseas correspondents. They arrived from all over the world to meet with the editors in London, and he made a speech to this group, demonstrating yet again his ability to function at a high level even in the face of his illness. He began his remarks by describing the company, saying, “I have been responsible for its affairs for 17 years—and for the last 15 years, since it became a corporation in 1948, I have been controlling owner of its voting shares.” There was no mention of my father or how this came to be or the existence of me as a minority owner, of course. He ended his remarks
with some philosophical thoughts, including a phrase about journalism’s being the first rough draft of history, which is quoted to this day:
I am insatiably curious about the state of the world. I am constantly intrigued by information of topicality. I revel in the recitation of the daily and weekly grist of journalism.
Much of it, of course, is pure chaff. Much of our discussions of how to do it better consist of tedium and detail. But no one yet has been able to produce wheat without chaff. And not even such garrulous romantics as Fidel Castro or such transcendent spirits as Abraham Lincoln can produce a history which does not in large part rest on a foundation of tedium and detail—and even sheer drudgery.
So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.…
While Phil was in London, I tried to pick up the pace of my life a little. My mother and I together planned a large reception at her house for May 7, to which we invited hundreds of people. Mother called it a “Show the Flag party”—a way to assure people we were still here and still okay, despite Phil’s efforts to take over. It served its purpose.
On May 11, after going to Paris from London and then on to Ravello for five days of rest, Phil and Robin flew back to the States, and after taking care of some things in Washington, he and Robin left again for Puerto Rico.
I went on seeing close friends and going out a little more. One person I saw was David Bruce, to whom I talked about my plans and intentions and my resolve not to give Phil a divorce unless he gave up at least enough of his controlling stock in
The Washington Post
so that I would have the majority interest. I’m not sure how I came to this conclusion, but I do know that my determination was total. I was not going to lose my husband
and
the paper. And if my husband was firm in his decision to leave me, then I would fight to keep the paper.
The chain of events and activities quieted down, and an audible silence was emanating from Puerto Rico. I suspected that my not hearing much from there meant that Phil had become depressed, and indeed he had. Being there hadn’t cured his exhaustion; instead, the calm and inactivity seemed to have given him time to think and added to his depression.
When they returned to New York from Puerto Rico on June 12, Ed
Williams met them at the airport, and it was Ed’s view that Phil was the worst he had ever seen him, “really so depressed it was like he was paralyzed, physically paralyzed, with almost an inability to move.” It’s hard to sort out whether he returned intending to remain with Robin or break up with her, but they did come to Washington and move into a large house on Foxhall Road.
A few days later, on Monday, June 17, Phil consulted both Dr. Farber and Ed and in effect told them that it was all over. He wanted to end the affair with Robin. Farber, typically, was again questioning and indecisive; he asked Phil if he was sure. Ed stepped in and asked Phil three questions: Did he want Robin to leave? Did he want Ed to ask her to leave? Did he want to come home if I would have him? To all three questions, Phil—in an agony of despair and depression—answered yes. Poor Robin took the shuttle to New York, and Al Friendly went to spend the night with Phil in the house on Foxhall Road. The next day, Phil’s brother, Bill, again came up from Florida and stayed with him, as did Fritz Beebe.
On that same Monday I got a call from Al saying that Phil wanted to come back if I would agree—which I did immediately. On the afternoon of June 19, Phil returned to R Street and spent the night.
Having Phil back was a tremendous—and tremendously complicated—relief. For me, one of the immediate questions was whether I could go through another black depression with him. I knew all too well what it was like—not being able to leave the house except when he was at his doctor’s; hours and hours of intense talk; hearing things I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear or know about. All of those years we had labored through together to get him out of the depressions had resulted in his leaving me. None of my efforts had led to a happy ending, and I felt I just couldn’t assume once again the heavy burden and responsibility of being his sole support system.
Clearly we needed intensive outside help. Phil, almost pathetically, asked to be allowed to stay at home, not to go back to Chestnut Lodge, which I viewed as the only option. I don’t believe any of us thought there might be an alternative to Chestnut Lodge at the time, and in terms of Phil’s treatment, I assumed that the psychiatrists knew what they were doing and didn’t question whether the Lodge was the right or appropriate place, or whether Farber was the right doctor.
This decision-making about whether to go to Chestnut Lodge or stay at home was horribly painful—made a little less so by Ed Williams and Bill Graham, who both felt Phil should go, and by Phil himself, who in the end went sadly but willingly. Our loyal driver, Tony, drove him to the Lodge late in the day on June 20.
At some point that evening, when several of us were at the Lodge with
Phil, I saw Ed for the first time since Phil’s last illness had begun. There was a roomful of people, but on instinct I went up to him and very quietly thanked him for everything he’d done, saying, “I can see you did the best for him.” When I later met with him to go over what had happened and how he viewed it all, he told me that his one idea had been to hold on to Phil.
What Ed had done was right. With his ability to appraise people and situations, he had been very aware of Phil’s mental state at almost every turn and very clear about his instability. At the same time, he was determined to do the best he could for him under the circumstances. Ed’s devotion to Phil was not unlike mine, unswerving and uncompromising, and his behavior at this time created a lasting bond between us.
The day after Phil went back to Chestnut Lodge, Al Friendly wrote him:
At the rock bottom of despair, and against the hardest opposition conceivable, you made the toughest decisions possible. When every thought was an agony to frame, your mind remained the best and most exciting one I know.
With those resources, how can even you doubt that you will succeed in what you have to do?
There will also be the help from the love of more friends than you know.
I’ll see you soon, whenever you’d like me to.
Lally, who was working in the
Newsweek
Washington bureau that summer, wrote about the mid-June events to my mother, whom she was going to be joining in Greece for another yacht trip:
Last night he went in the hospital, and Donny and I were both so glum about the future. But, this morning, I really feel certain that he will indeed come through it. Mummy seems greatly cheered by the last two days during which he’s been at home. I am greatly cheered that despite the fact that he feels there is so little to live for at the moment, he has been so incredibly courageous, strong, and kind. Not only did he get rid of the girl but he also managed to dismiss Farber which I think in ways was even harder; for Farber was really his only ray of hope in the past few days, since he told Daddy that he knew he could pull through his depressions and do it without a hospital and also that although the words “manic depressive” might be a very adequate description of his past behavior, they did
not
necessitate a future cycle. Obviously, giving up Farber meant giving up the hope of going through the
depression without a hospital and also accepting the label of manic depressive. I wince at the thought of the agony he must be experiencing. It must be so frightening to realize that your whole life is governed by cycles in which you are either irrationally happy or just as irrationally depressed. Enough … I just hope so much that somehow all this can be cured or at least helped.
Lally’s letter suggests Phil’s still-positive feelings about Farber, although he himself had dismissed him as his doctor. Indeed, he was attached to him—partly, I think, because Farber espoused ideas Phil agreed with and played down any idea of real mental illness. Perhaps his dismissal of Farber at this point was an indication of just how low Phil was—that he no longer believed Farber and knew the sickness would recur. The letter also reflects that, at last, a name had been given to this illness.
To me, Phil seemed, as usual, to be truly courageous, positive, and hopeful in the face of terrible anguish. In a letter to my mother, he said:
What seemed for some moments an end, I must now turn into a beginning. With Kay’s singular love, with that of the children, with yours, with that of my brother and that of friends—I know I can do it. A beginning scaled to decent human values. At least I do so pray.
There was a short interlude after Phil went to the Lodge before I started to visit; then I went pretty much every day for several hours. I often took picnics, and we’d sit outside to eat. Occasionally, we’d play tennis or bridge. Gradually, a few friends started to visit him, but mostly they were from the family or the company. Billy and Steve had gone off to camp. Lally went abroad to visit the Berrys in England before joining my mother’s yacht party in Athens. Don and I were alone at R Street, he working all day for Scotty Reston. (Scotty wrote Phil saying that he had had two guys doing this job at the
Times
for him, but that “Don Graham, in his sophomore year at Harvard, is better than either of them. He has come in here very quietly and composed sometimes as many as 60 letters a day and written them simply and quickly and done a lot of other things on the side. Everybody likes him.…”)
Bob McNamara was very good about visiting Phil at Chestnut Lodge. One Saturday morning I was playing tennis with Bob’s wife, Margy, and she told me that Bob had said to tell Phil he was coming to see him later that afternoon. I said I’d ask Phil to see if he was up to it, but Margy replied that Bob, who thought it would be good for Phil, had insisted on just announcing that he was coming. It was so typical of Bob, who was working at the Defense Department at a feverish pitch, to conclude that
that was the best approach and to take time on a Saturday afternoon to drive an hour to Chestnut Lodge. Phil demurred but eventually agreed to see him. Phil and I sat together on a bench under a tree waiting for the long black official limousine, which eventually swung into the driveway. I left the two men alone to talk. Bob’s recollection of what he said to Phil was, “Goddamn you, get out of here, come down and help us. We need you.” And Phil said he couldn’t, in effect saying that nobody would accept him. Bob assured him that he knew more about the Defense Department than almost anyone, and repeated that he should get down there and help out. Bob later told me that he said all this partially because he thought that’s what Phil needed to hear, but more because it was basically true. He felt strongly that Phil had an extraordinary insight into the nation and how to deal with its problems. One thing Bob recalled was that, when he asked Phil what he should be doing to help, Phil replied, “Well, the first thing I’ll tell you is not to waste your time coming out here.”
Although of course it was hard, I was ecstatic about Phil being back, even if in the hospital. Naturally, I dropped nearly all of my activities, including a planned trip to Europe, to concentrate on him. He remained seriously depressed but seemed to me to be already quite noticeably better, even after only a week or so at Chestnut Lodge. I felt he finally had doctors who were treating a real and known illness, and because of that I was able to hope that we could, as I wrote a friend, “surmount the difficulties of the last few years.” Although I still naïvely believed that Phil could and would get better, on some level I think even I was beginning to recognize that this was wishful thinking.
I wasn’t on sure footing when it came to what to talk about with him, but advised one friend who wanted to write that “he loves love at this point and also any sort of news or political gossip that you can think of.” Phil was full of remorse and guilt and sadness. He, who hated to hurt people, had to begin to deal with all the hurt his actions had wrought—for me, for the children, for Robin, for himself. It’s hard to imagine his frame of mind—knowing he had left his home and children, had sent for Robin more than once, and then in the end had told her it was over and had come back home to us. Worry about his actions and what he had done to himself, his life, and to all of us was the main thing on his mind—that, plus the thought that not only had it happened but it might happen again.