Personal History (64 page)

I felt terrified without Phil. I badly missed his guidance. Even with all the difficulties of the last few years, he had always been there to lean on. Though I had learned a great deal from him, I still felt insecure making my own decisions. What strength I did have derived from the last, grueling
year, when I had had to carry the burden at home, but it had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be there at all.

Ironically, at the same time I was wishing he was there, all that Phil had been made my job more difficult. His having done everything so well—and, as it seemed to the world, so effortlessly—made it even more daunting for me. Not only had I mythologized him, but others shared the same idolatrous view, which added to my confusion. Everyone would come in and weep on my shoulder about him. As time passed, I developed more perspective and realized that my image of him was at some variance with the reality. He hadn’t been as perfect as I thought. He had been brilliant and had achieved an amazing record, but, of course, there were attendant problems. My job was made infinitely harder by comparing myself not with the real Phil Graham but with my exaggerated idea of his ability and accomplishments. Still, I didn’t have as much energy as Phil had had, nor were my interests as broad, my knowledge nearly as deep, or my training as adequate. As I readily admitted, I certainly didn’t feel in any way equal to running the
Post
the way he had run it. I wrote to an old friend that having me at the helm of the
Post
and
Newsweek
“isn’t like having Phil running them, but I feel like the President of the United States who said to Congress, ‘I am the only President you’ve got.’ ” I had to come to realize that I could only do the job in whatever way
I
could do it. I couldn’t try to be someone else, least of all Phil.

What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge. The surprise was that I landed on my feet. I did so largely for two reasons. One was Fritz Beebe and the circle of men who had served Phil so well and who remained in place to help me. The other was luck.

Fritz was a life-saving presence to me and to the company. He himself was relatively new at business and at media, having only been at our company for two and a half years, much of which he had spent simply holding things together and trying to counteract whatever damage Phil did or tried to do during his illness. He also had worked hard to steer a path between Phil and me in the last several months, and then had had to pick up the pieces after Phil’s death and deal with the legal complications he left behind. Fritz was generous to me in every way, making me feel comfortable, wanted, and regarded. We got along easily because of his understanding—and forgiving—nature.

One of the things Fritz and I had done between Phil’s death and my leaving for Europe was to discuss our roles and to decide on titles. He suggested that he should remain chairman and I should succeed Phil as president. The titles themselves didn’t bother me or even interest me, but I did see that this might entail his being boss and my being number two, and I wanted to be clear. I suggested that, whatever the titles, we be partners as
he and Phil had been. Appropriately, Fritz asked how I thought this would work. “I’m not sure,” I replied, “any more than I can tell you at the beginning how a marriage would work, but maybe this will work like a business marriage.” I’m not sure how I dared to suggest equality, considering my lack of credentials. And I’m also not sure why he acceded to my position, which most businessmen of his stature would have viewed as unreasonable, even though I was the owner. Maybe he understood—or I may have explained—that I had lived all those months in fear of losing the
Post
and didn’t want to end up ceding it away. I don’t think our relationship would have worked differently in any case, no matter what our titles.

There was also considerable luck involved in my being able to function at all in this new role. The company was relatively small, and it was private, both of which helped during my first months on the job. The groundwork of stability for the
Post
had been laid with the purchase of the
Times-Herald
nearly a decade before. Revenue at the
Post, Newsweek
, and the television stations was growing fast, as were profits. Management at each business was steady. (This, of course, is all much clearer in retrospect than it was to me at the time.) We were editorially visible through the
Post
and
Newsweek
, both of which mattered to various constituencies, especially the government and the president. We had a solid base on which to build, a firm financial footing. If the company had been bigger or public or less secure, I might not have had the luxury of learning as I did.

Personally I was lucky because I had a demanding and difficult but interesting and absorbing job to try to fulfill. I was economically independent and, despite my loneliness, I was not really alone. We were a family unit, with Bill and Steve still home and Lally and Don at college, and my mother nearby. My brother and two sisters were also helpful, along with a core group of friends.

I will never forget the support I felt from Lally throughout these difficult days and weeks. She sent me the most moving letter, which I received as I got home and just as I went to work:

Besides all of this, I had another important asset in my passionate devotion to the company and to the
Post
. I cared so much about the paper and about keeping it in the family that, despite my lack of knowledge and feelings of insecurity, I felt I
had
to make it work.

And so I got down to the job. I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn what the
Post, Newsweek
, our television stations, and the company itself were about. Throughout the first weeks, I felt I was wandering around in a fog, trying to grasp the rudiments: who did what, when, why, where, and how. It’s hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was. I knew neither the substance of the business and journalistic worlds in which I was moving nor the processes through which these worlds operated. Despite my father’s expertise and experience, I knew next to nothing about business and absolutely nothing about accounting. I couldn’t read or understand a balance sheet. I remember my complete befuddlement and inability in the beginning to follow technical financial discussions. The mere mention of terms like “liquidity” made my eyes glaze over.

I was also uneducated in even the basics of the working world—how to relate to people professionally, how to tell people things that they might not want to hear, how to give praise as well as criticism, how to use time to the best effect. Things that people learned automatically in the workplace or in graduate schools, I didn’t know: that there were organizations of headhunters who could help you find executives if you had to go outside the company; that there were well-defined reward and incentive systems, which everyone but me seemed to know about; that there is a system for dealing with people in a hierarchy—that you don’t bypass executives but, rather, deal with problems through them, or risk undermining their authority. I stumbled around the
Post
building talking to people, not realizing that I shouldn’t always start with the first person I encountered—who often turned out to be the union head—or that people would try to use me for their own purposes. There really wasn’t anyone who could take me by the hand and teach me the things I needed to learn and how to go about learning them. I fell into a somewhat mindless pattern of routines and trying to deal with issues as they arose.

Naturally I looked to others for advice and counsel. Two of those who were helpful with specific suggestions were Clare Booth Luce and Walter Lippmann. Clare gave me interesting and useful guidance on how to handle myself at work. Although some of it was peculiar to her and some of it seems dated now, much of it being about a woman in a man’s world, I took to heart what she said. Among other things, she warned me not to commit
myself to being in the office a set number of hours each week in case it diminished with time—which it didn’t. She also advised me to have a male secretary, which I did, keeping Charlie Paradise, who had served Phil well for so many years. Clare also told me to keep in close touch with my correspondence, and that, when I sent mail to some other executive or staff person to be answered, I should ask to have it back to see how it was handled, so that I would know and learn.

More help came from Walter Lippmann, with whom I had shared my concern about the excessive amount of reading material I had and how to sort it all out. Although he thought this troubled me unduly, he wrote me:

What I knew was that I was way behind most people engaged with current issues on a daily basis—in general familiarity with these issues, as well as in knowledge of specifics. In addition, I am a naturally slow reader, which made for further problems in getting on top of things. Walter’s suggested remedy was a good one, but it would have taken much more self-confidence than I had to ask reporters to brief me—that would have required an assurance on my part that I had a right to impose on them to try to bring me up to speed.

Oveta Hobby, who had also inherited her job as publisher of the Houston Post Company when her husband died, came to see me at
Newsweek
soon after I went to work. She was a personal friend of Phil’s and mine, and of my parents before me. We had a cozy talk about the obligations of a news executive, among which she cited speechmaking. I said that speeches were going to be outside my bailiwick, that I wasn’t going to give any, because I simply wasn’t able to. She responded equally dogmatically, saying that I had no choice: I would have to learn to do things like that.
She herself hadn’t known many things but had learned. I realized, with some dread, that she might be right, and that speechmaking might indeed be in my future.

Feeling that I needed to do some of the things that Phil had done, I created an unnecessarily rigorous schedule, going up to
Newsweek
in New York each week for two days. My intentions were good: the idea being for me to learn, and for the people there to feel I cared about them and their work. Today I’m not sure this was a wise investment of my time and energies, especially since it also left Bill and Steve alone too much.

Newsweek
was especially difficult for me because I truly was an outsider. The people working there viewed themselves as an autonomous unit of the company and were happy to be quite separate from Washington. Except for Fritz, whom the executives liked, they welcomed the backing of The Washington Post Company but not its guidance. Having always felt uncertain about
Newsweek
, I was nervous and jittery there. For me, it was the newest and the strangest part of the whole company, practicing what I later called “its own particular approach to journalism.”
Newsweek
seemed far from my familiar ground in Washington—literally and figuratively. Because I didn’t know most of the people who worked there, nor they me, and because Robin was associated with
Newsweek
, I felt all the more disconnected from it.

On my way to Europe right after Phil’s death, I wrote to two men whom I regarded as unfriendly—Ben Bradlee and Arnaud de Borchgrave. I thought of them as Phil’s people, Phil’s friends, and both of them had stood clearly and decisively with Phil for their own good and separate reasons. Ben felt he owed Phil loyalty for his purchase of
Newsweek
, but I think he, and actually most of the people at
Newsweek
, simply didn’t know The Washington Post Company or feel any loyalty to anyone but Phil himself. When they saw things coming apart, they tried to cut a straight professional line and separated Phil from me, naturally taking his side.

Arnaud was a friend of Robin’s from
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau, which made me all the more wary of him. But he played a large and useful, if ambiguous, role abroad for
Newsweek
. He was a dashing figure, a charmer of sorts who knew many of the monarchs, rulers, and leaders, and a fine reporter. And he was good for the magazine. (He also lived very well off it.)

What I said to both of them was that the past was past and that I hoped we could all go forward together. Ben doesn’t remember receiving such a letter, but I am very clear about having written to both men. I knew enough even then to understand that personal feelings shouldn’t enter into professional situations. My later relationship with Ben, of course, became one of the most cherished professional and personal relationships of my life, and one of the most productive. Arnaud remained more or less
distant from me and seemed to feel that I was “out to get him.” If I was, it took me an inordinately long time, since he was at the magazine for seventeen more years, until he was fired by the editors in 1980 over an editorial disagreement. Even then, when Lester Bernstein,
Newsweek
’s editor at the time, told me that the editors had unanimously decided to part company with Arnaud, I asked if they were certain, stating that Arnaud did have a lot of talent. Lester’s response was, “I came to tell you, not to consult you.”