Personal History (74 page)
Authors: Katharine Graham
For me, the party was just great pleasure, maybe doubly so because it
was unlike my real life. I was flattered, and although it may not have been my style, for one magic night I was transformed.
I
N
1966, Don Graham graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude, despite having spent most of his time editing the
Crimson
. He had decided to volunteer for the army and not wait to be drafted—a decision that surprised me. I had supposed he would go on to graduate school, which you were still allowed to do and stay draft-exempt. Most of Don’s friends were against the war, and Don himself had reservations, but when I asked him about his decision, he quietly replied, “The rich are staying in school and the poor are being drafted. I can’t live with that.” The possibility—or probability—of his going to Vietnam concerned me, but there was no way to argue with that kind of thinking.
On August 22, 1966, I drove Don to Washington’s Union Station early in the morning; we said goodbye and he got on the train, headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was an awful scene, so reminiscent of Phil’s departure for the army twenty-four years earlier. Don’s reaction to the military was like Phil’s, too—depressed by the nearly complete lack of logic in army routine, the mindless brutality he saw everywhere, and the rules designed to promote fear.
While still in college, Don had fallen in love with a fellow
Crimson
editor, Mary Wissler, and they decided to get married. I questioned this decision mildly, on grounds of youth—they were both twenty-one—and the confused emotions brought on by the army, but he was adamant. Our whole family and Don’s and Mary’s friends assembled for the wedding in January 1967 in Chicago, where Mary had grown up.
Only six months later, Don was on his way to Vietnam. The war was just beginning to be the searing, anguishing issue it later became, and now it invaded my personal life. Don’s letters throughout the year he spent in Vietnam, assigned to the First Air Cavalry, gave me my truest and best view of what was going on there. One of his first, written just two weeks after his arrival in the country, reflected skepticism already:
… though I cringe at the thought of what infantrymen do to the people over here … I admire them enormously for sticking it out, for fighting a war they hate in a country they loathe for a cause they neither care about nor believe in.
He wrote to Mary that, whatever the outcome of the war, “the worst will not be for us, but for these poor, poor Vietnamese, who will go on suffering no matter what happens.”
In September, he wrote me:
The only thing I can vaguely see from over here is that many policies which seem bad are being pursued because it is impossible for the Administration to change them without admitting serious previous error. Suppose McNamara now concluded that the bombing all along had been doing no good, that it had produced no substantial results and had to be stopped. Could Johnson turn around and say, “Well, we have lost a few planes and a few hundred pilots and a few million dollars but we have decided that we were
in error?”
In January 1968, he wrote:
I bet this all sounds familiar—probably Daddy wrote home about the same things. I expect there are a lot of things here anyone who saw World War II would find familiar. One thing must be missing though—I’ve never heard anyone express much concern about how the war ends or whether it ends, or, indeed, any expectation that it will end before the expiration of anyone’s tour.
“The one-year hitch,” he added, “which is responsible for our ‘high morale’ and much more, is also responsible for this.”
For a while, the
Post
had only one reporter in Vietnam, Ward Just, who as early as mid-October of 1967 had a piece in “Outlook” about how hard it was to believe anything about Vietnam. Don read it and agreed, writing me, “There really is too damned much self-deception going on among the US military in this country.” From what he could see, civilian casualties in Vietnam were “horrifying,” and he added: “It just seems goddamned awful that we are doing such immense damage to people who are truly innocent bystanders, who never wanted us to fight for them, or the North Vietnamese. And even if the outcome of the war is somehow positive, I think our treatment of these people will ensure that no government considered too friendly to the US will endure in South Vietnam.”
Meanwhile, as television brought the war right into our living rooms, the home front was beginning to boil. Many young people felt it was just as patriotic to protest the war as it was to serve the country by fighting in it. Don, hearing about the demonstrations across the country, worried about their effect:
I recognize people I knew as conservative or politically uninterested going through what I did: recognition of the radicals’ home-truths (war is bad; we are acting cruelly and terribly toward the
Vietnamese) and the thrill that comes from participating in something like the protest. At the same time, over here, I talk to people who have had another totally changing experience—they have seen friends die, and they know they are going to die, and they don’t want to die now. They could care less about what we do to the Vietnamese.
We will come out of the war so fragmented. I wonder what will happen.
I was seeing and experiencing some of that fragmentation in my own family. My second son, Bill, chose the opposite route of demonstrating and protesting against the war. Both Bill and Steve were of the generation that transformed this country. They let their hair grow, experimented with drugs, and led a new and different kind of life.
That fall of 1967, Bill was arrested for demonstrating in front of the Oakland Induction Center during “Stop the Draft” week. He appeared in a photograph with a raised hand, confronting a policeman, which the police maintained was a threat but which Bill said was an act of self-defense, since he clearly wasn’t about to try to hit an armed officer. The judge threatened to send all the protesters to jail. Our company lawyer, Bill Rogers, undertook to defend Bill, working through one of his law partners in San Francisco. I didn’t want Bill to have a jail record, and in the end, Bill Rogers saved him from jail. But he got arrested again during his senior year, for a sit-in at Stanford’s Scientific Research Institute, which did some defense work. That time, the protesters hired a lawyer to represent them as a group, and I wasn’t allowed to interfere.
For me, it was strange—and strained—to have one son in the war in Vietnam and one at home demonstrating against it. To a certain extent, this was a product of their personalities, but even more it was the three-year age difference between them. This difference of opinion didn’t affect their relationship with each other or mine with either of them. But their two reactions certainly added to my own doubts about the war and eventually to my feelings about how the
Post
should position itself.
Russ Wiggins, as editor of the
Post
, was overseeing the whole editorial-and-news operation, focusing on the editorial page for the most part, particularly after Ben came to manage the news side. Even though I was still basically following Russ’s support of the administration, I was beginning to be concerned about our position on the war and had a lot of questions. Great heat had been focused on me, mostly by my friends Bill Fulbright and Walter Lippmann, and to some extent by Bobby Kennedy, whom I knew less well but saw occasionally. Fulbright had accused the
Post
of “obsequiously” following administration policy, and he invited me to lunch with him on Capitol Hill, to try to get me to turn our editorial policy
around. I listened, but I’m not sure with how much of an open mind. I was pretty convinced still that Russ was right about the war.
I was also getting complaints from readers. In March 1966, before I had begun to be more questioning, I wrote one
Post
reader saying defensively, “We do in general agree with the White House position on Vietnam. While there is obviously a great deal of room for differences of opinion on this subject, we are in no way in touch with the White House nor do we talk to anybody in it about our editorials.”
I wrote another woman in June 1967:
We approach our position on Vietnam with the same degree of concern and worry that everyone shares on this difficult and frustrating war. I am sure Russ Wiggins, the Editor, keeps reviewing our policy on the bombing with an open mind. However, as long as we have half a million troops in the South, I suppose they need any support we can give them.
Even so, I was becoming increasingly uneasy about the paper’s position. I also saw that the news side and the editorial page were diverging more and more about the war. A 1966 editorial stated clearly, “We are in South Vietnam to preserve the right of a small people to govern themselves and make their own choices.” Ward Just, a month later, wrote in a dispatch, “We are here defending freedom as we understand it for people who don’t.” Thinking about the war in Vietnam consumed much of our time and energy at the paper during the late 1960s and early 1970s—nowhere more so than in editorial-page conferences. Russ himself wrote most of the Vietnam editorials, at least through the end of 1966.
Ben and I both knew that Russ had every intention of retiring at the age of sixty-five, which he would reach at the end of 1968, so we were looking for someone to lead the page after that. Somehow, Phil Geyelin, a respected diplomatic reporter for
The Wall Street Journal
, had got a message to Ben that he was interested in the job. In 1962, Phil Graham had tried to get Geyelin to the
Post
, but he had decided to stay with the
Journal
. In the meantime, he’d grown restless there, and now that his friend Ben had come to the
Post
, he was much more positive about it.
When Ben proposed the idea of Geyelin, I welcomed it. In August of 1966, Phil and his wife, Sherry, came to visit me on Martha’s Vineyard, where I was vacationing. He and I took long walks discussing everything about the paper, particularly the role of an editorial page in the nation’s capital, his lack of knowledge of local issues, and what our relationship might be. I also suggested to Phil that he talk to Walter Lippmann, who—Phil later told me—gave him simple but great advice for an editorial page: “Beware of predictability.”
We spoke at some length about what I called the “no surprise rule.” I told him something that I have said to every editor I’ve ever worked with—that I didn’t want to read anything in the paper of great importance or that represented an abrupt change which we hadn’t discussed; that I wanted to be in on the takeoffs as well as the landings. As editor, he would have real autonomy; I didn’t expect to agree with every specific, but I expected to have a “constant conversation” in which we would each know what the other was thinking. I warned him that I didn’t want to wake up more often than not to editorials with which I didn’t agree. I recall telling him that, if that turned out to be the case, something would have to give, to which he jokingly said he assumed that wouldn’t be the owner.
Most of all, we talked about Vietnam. Phil had made two trips to Vietnam for the
Journal
, as a result of which he had grown opposed to the war, concluding that it was unwinnable. But, to my great relief, he was moderate in his views, and I felt comfortable with his thinking. We agreed that the
Post
ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but that we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been. He used the image that changing our policy was like turning a great vessel around—you first had to slow down before you could start to turn.
When Phil came aboard in January 1967 as an editorial writer, but clearly slated to succeed Russ, the tension within the editorial-page staff increased, and the arguments about Vietnam at editorial meetings grew more vociferous. By this time, almost everyone on the page except Russ had begun to change his views on Vietnam. Herblock, who in 1965 and 1966 had kept his pen relatively benign on the war, began to draw cartoons that were much more critical of the administration’s policies and decisions. Ward Just’s reporting from Vietnam, which I viewed as perceptive, detached, and accurate, became tougher as he grew more disenchanted with the war.
Russ, however, remained uncharacteristically locked into his position. Fortunately, he was always good-tempered and forgiving and never personal in his passions, which made discussion possible, despite the violent emotions Vietnam aroused. The back-and-forth between Russ and Phil resulted in a sort of two-steps-forward-one-step-back movement, but in the end the
Post
did begin to turn around its editorial position on the war. An amusing sidelight is that, when Phil brought Meg Greenfield to the
Post
as an editorial writer in July 1968, Russ—in the throes of our debates over Vietnam—said to Phil, “My boy, you’re making the mistake of your life. She’s on my side.”
There
were
“sides” on Vietnam. What President Johnson seemed to feel as time went on was that he was on one side and I and the
Post
, except for his friend Russ—of whom he once said that one of his editorials was
worth as much to him as a division in Vietnam—appeared to be on the other. The war definitely got in the way of my friendly relationship with Lyndon Johnson, but even before the war heated up, I seem to have been on his bad side. He had stopped calling me himself, and by 1966 our relations were definitely somewhat distant. I was no longer asked to anything intimate or friendly, and though I was invited to state occasions from time to time, his greeting in the receiving line was frigid or almost nonexistent. Because I saw Lady Bird regularly in connection with the Beautification Committee, and because I was so busy to begin with, I wasn’t fully aware of how the president was distancing himself from me.
The distance, however, was real. I was visited confidentially first by Bill Moyers and later by Bob Kintner, who served a brief stint in the White House. Both Bill and Bob, wanting to be helpful, carried the same strange story: that the president had heard I had “called in my editors” and told them that he was trying to influence me by inviting me to the White House and that they were not to pay any attention to this. The very idea that I would do such a thing was inconceivable to me. I was incredulous, but so impressed at having heard the same story twice that I decided to write the president to straighten things out. On May 16, 1966, I wrote him what I genuinely felt: