Personal History (82 page)

By that time, late in the afternoon, LBJ had become more serious and philosophical. He recounted with pride his domestic achievements and spoke of the three men who had been most influential in his life: his daddy; Franklin Roosevelt, “who was like a daddy to me”; and Phil Graham—omitting Sam Rayburn, who certainly should have been on that list. “Phil used to abuse me and rail at me and tell me what was wrong with me,” Lyndon recalled, “and just when I was ready to hit him, he’d laugh in that way of his to let me know he loved me. And he made me a better man.”

When, at last, he did get up to leave and we were all standing, he told a final story, filled with friendly feeling. The story was about Sam Rayburn, at the beginning of his political career and still an unknown young man, looking for a place to stay in a small Texas town. Everyone turned him down—all the important people, including the bankers, the newspaper editor, the judge. Only an old blacksmith agreed to take him in for the night. Much later, now famous and powerful, Rayburn returned to the town, this time with everyone wanting him. He told them all no and asked for the old blacksmith. The two of them stayed up very late talking, and when Rayburn finally said he had to get to sleep, the blacksmith said, “Mr.
Sam, I’d just like to talk to you all night.” That, LBJ concluded, was “the way he felt about his friends at the
Post.”
Everyone in the room—not all of them Johnson fans by any means—burst spontaneously into applause, something I had never seen before and have not witnessed since. It was a highly emotional farewell.

W
HILE MY PUBLIC
life grew busier and busier, my private life grew even more so. Nevertheless, there were many small and large pleasures in these years, quiet times that I remember still. To some extent, family problems increased. As my mother aged throughout the mid-1960s, she went rapidly downhill physically. Too many years of too much food and drink, combined with too little exercise, had made her overweight as well as arthritic. When a psychiatrist finally succeeded in getting her to reduce her drinking, it was too late for her to retrieve her mobility but not too late to recover her control of her interests and pursuits. She was back again, exercising her authority, criticizing, and arguing. It was quite a comeback, and she was in very good form for the last few years of her life, which she lived to the fullest, with all her mental faculties intact right to the end.

I had gone to Mount Kisco to visit her for the Labor Day weekend in 1970, and was awakened on September 1 by her maid, who told me she was worried because my mother had not rung for her breakfast. I sensed that she knew something was wrong, so I jumped up and ran in to find Mother in her bed, weirdly inert and already cold. Though I had been expecting her death for some time, it was still a profoundly moving shock when it became a reality. My mother was no longer there to love, to resent, to emulate, to rebel against.

It has always mystified me that I am a weeper on other occasions but not at deaths. It seems almost inhuman to cry at superficial books and movies or when upset or angry but not when I’m deeply shaken, as I certainly was not only at my mother’s death but at Phil’s and my father’s, as well as my sister’s, and later at my brother’s, and since then at too many close friends’. I think that part of my reaction to my mother’s death was that I couldn’t believe she was gone. She had led a long and extraordinary life and left her distinctive mark in many areas—certainly on her children and grandchildren, and even on the two oldest great-grandchildren. I admire and am impressed by her increasingly with the passage of time.

My brother, having finally broken up his long-term marriage, was another worry for me in these years. He seemed always to be ill and had innumerable back and neck operations, and had started taking pain-killing drugs as well as drinking more heavily. His loneliness was terrible. Later he, too, recovered and led a good life for many years.

My son Steve was still another concern. He was lonely at home, since Bill, four years his senior, had left for college. Steve was a classic member of his generation—his class at St. Albans was the first really to confront drugs in school—and few of us parents knew how to cope with the social revolution that we saw reflected in our own homes. Unfortunately, since our house was the biggest and the least supervised, it became the place where Steve and his friends gathered, and his room became the local pot parlor. I would return home to find the windows all open in an attempt to get the fumes out and cover up the telltale signs of smoking. I begged him to stop, threatening that, if caught, he and his friends would find themselves right on the front page of the
Post
. It had little effect.

My social life was escalating. Some of it had to do with new friends I was making within the industry, some with maintaining a life in two cities—Washington and New York. Much of it was work-related, but part I did from sheer enjoyment. There remained an element within me of disbelief that I would be included by people I thought remote and glamorous. I wasn’t pursuing either famous or wealthy people, but my son Bill later told me that he remembered thinking on occasion that there were too many famous people around the house. I suppose that I fell somewhere between the way I had grown up and the way my children now live.

High fashion was certainly new to me. Betsey Whitney and Babe Paley had suggested that I try Halston as a dressmaker—he had set up his own designing establishment after leaving the hat department at Bergdorf Goodman. I did try him, and our relationship was a great success: for fourteen years, until he went out of business, he made my clothes. I felt I looked better than I ever had.

Rudi Serkin was one of my good friends at this time. For a weekend each summer, I went to Marlboro, the music festival and school that my parents had helped him start. I remember watching Casals conduct a Schumann symphony, the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. And we attended rehearsals, much the best part of visiting Marlboro. More important to me, even in our short time together each summer Rudi and I developed a real friendship, which grew over the years. I loved his stories of his youth, his teachers, growing up in the Adolph Busch household and falling in love with Adolph’s daughter Irena when he was only fifteen—and she was four! My one weekend every summer at Marlboro was never enough for Rudi. He always lamented the lack of music in my life, shaking his head sadly about the few concerts I attended or records I played, and saying, “How can you live a life without music?” I felt I made up in part for this deficiency by soaking it up so intensely while I was there.

I also saw something of Jean Monnet in these years. He had remained a friend from the time Phil and I had first met him in the early 1940s. The thrill for me of being with him never disappeared as long as he lived. He
was energetic and interesting, and I can testify to his virility. I especially loved the way he used the English language and his insightful comments on the American political scene. I recall his once telling me, after he had lunched with Bobby Kennedy, that he had been very impressed, saying, “The president had authority—Bobby has strength.”

I also developed a friendship with Clay Felker. We fell into instant conversational rapport. I had never met anyone like him, and I appreciated his ideas, his obsession with editing, and even his preoccupation with New York City and with
New York
magazine, which he had successfully launched. I never got used to Clay’s odd estrangement from the human race, but I grew to be and remain very fond of him. He changed my New York life from one of solemn dinner parties to one of great fun, taking me to ethnic restaurants or to the theater. He often came to Washington, and we went to Glen Welby for occasional weekends. On one of these I brought him together with Rupert Murdoch, feeling sure that they would become friends, which they did. But it turned out to be an unfortunate friendship for Clay, since he talked to Rupert freely over that weekend, even about his having badly alienated his own directors on the magazine. Rupert ended up taking over Clay’s company.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1971, Fritz Beebe came to me with a critical decision to be made. He thought our situation was such that we had to take the company public, as some other, bigger companies—Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder, for instance—had already done. If we didn’t, he felt we had to sell one of our assets—something big, like our television station in Jacksonville. According to Fritz, we were strapped for cash. Phil had handed out stock options fairly freely, and since we were a private company we were required to buy the stocks back at a valuation determined by Price Waterhouse. By this time, the price of the stock had risen far more than had been foreseen, and we were having to spend cash for these options as people left or retired.

I wish I had understood the whole thing better than I did. My learning paths were more in editorial and management, and I still knew little about business and simply took Fritz’s word for the problem and assumed we had only two choices: either go public or sell WJXT. I wasn’t sure what being a public company entailed, but I knew there would be obligations and disciplines that were not imposed on private companies. I also knew that we would have to be open with information to shareholders. Yet, thinking that it might be good for us to have to run our businesses in a more disciplined and profitable way, I decided that we ought to go public. All my instincts said we should go forward, not back.

What I didn’t understand—since the day of the takeover had not yet
dawned—was that there was a risk we might be taken over by any of these larger companies that had sent out feelers and had remained in a friendly, courting kind of stance. Thank heaven, Fritz and his Cravath partner George Gillespie did understand this. They created a situation in which we went public with two classes of shares—the A shares, about one million, which were all owned by the immediate Graham family, and the B shares, of which there were ten million, owned by the public, by my brother, and by the profit-sharing fund started for employees. I controlled the majority of A shares, and my four children owned the rest. People bought the B shares knowing the company was family-controlled.

Warren Buffett, whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought about 10 percent of the company’s B shares in 1973, later told me he didn’t think we really had to go public but was glad we had. In fact, I was glad we had, too, although I still dislike some of the responsibilities being public entails. The advent of Warren was only one of the positive things that resulted from our going public. It gave us some proper discipline about profit margins, although I worry about the overemphasis at times on the price of the stock. It also gave my children who were not working for the paper a certain amount of flexibility in their own financial management.

The date of the stock offering was set for June 15. In a ceremony on the floor of the American Stock Exchange, I bought the first share for $24.75, and we went public at $26 a share. This important step in the life of The Washington Post Company coincided with some heightened tension with the Nixon administration. As it happened, the June date turned into one of the most dramatic times of my life, but not because we went public.

In May of 1971, the
Post
had had another of those dust-ups with the White House which got quite shrill over nothing. Tricia Nixon was going to be married to Edward Cox at the White House in June. We had assigned Judith Martin to cover the wedding and the activities preceding it, but almost a month before the wedding, the White House barred Judith, claiming that while covering Julie Nixon’s wedding a few years earlier she had crashed a closed reception at the Plaza Hotel. A spokesman from the White House said, “The First Family, quite frankly, does not feel comfortable with Judith Martin.”

Despite my success in maintaining some kind of relationship with a few people in the White House, I had never tried with H. R. Haldeman. He made my blood run cold, and I felt sure the feeling was reciprocated. The only time we ever met on an informal basis was one night at a dinner at Joe Alsop’s when I sat next to him. I had suggested that he call me if he ever had problems he wanted to talk about, and the one time he did call had to do with Tricia’s wedding. Amazingly, someone had prepared a
“talking paper” for him on the points he should go over, which came to light only a few years ago:

Haldeman phoned me on May 13. Little seems to have escaped the taping system in the White House, since our extended conversation was taped and a transcript made, which turned up in the Nixon Library. It ends: