K: And so then time passes and …
B: Well, time passes and the telephone rings and it’s you. That’s the next event in my life.
K: And I say, “Would you like to have lunch?”
B: Yes.
—BCB interview with Kay Graham, October 9, 1989
One day, at the back of one of Ben’s boxes, I encountered an undated document titled “A case-study in prestige institution building.” There was no author listed on the cover page, only the designation “rough draft” and a handwritten note from Ben’s old secretary referring to the author as a “French b-school professor.”
I eventually figured out who wrote the report, and why, but for two years I knew him only as “The Frenchman.” It really is as if de Tocqueville had materialized in the Washington Post newsroom. The Frenchman was an outsider, observing the operation and culture of the Post clinically but with a distinctly French sense of whimsy. “With an elusive smile,” he writes of Ben at one point, “I would say that the Executive Editor is a fundamentalist.” You can almost smell the cigarette smoke.
He fully grasps Ben’s vision for the Post:
In our case, as the French would say, Mr. Bradlee’s coup de genie has been first to visualize the intuitive relevance of a new image for the Post and then to give it an appropriate formulation.… The mid-sixties conceptual breakthrough was (to use an old fashioned military catch-word) to provide The Washington Post with a mission. In brief, it was to move The Washington Post from a parochial and liberal newspaper to a prestigious national one.
He saves some of his most incisive analysis for the relationship between Ben and Kay:
In what respect can the [goal] formulation and the concomitant vision of The Washington Post have been the seeds and means of a committed working psychological contract between Mrs. Graham and Mr. Bradlee? Serious professors would label this operation the formation of a “dominant coalition” between Mrs. K. Graham and Mr. B. Bradlee, I will rather use the more musical French term “duo.” Cheap talks of pop-psychoanalysis speculate a lot about the “duo.” In fact, social scientists are better off—and better novelists—if they stay with the plain facts of human action.…
Pundits are delighted to guess who is in charge at the Post? It’s like making waves in a glass of water. Both can attempt to carry the mission and try to become “number 1” in their respective domains. Mr. Bradlee’s line of conduct was restricted to gaining the support necessary to lead an autonomous news room dedicated to making a prestige institution. Mrs. Graham’s opportunity [lay] in directing the paper as an organization, to control its editorial component and, of course, in the area of “critical decisions” to have the last word. The rationale of the “duo” is that of a positive sum-game: both actors are dependent upon each other, the two of them have stakes but the more they cooperate the greater the chances to win together—and in that case, to win big.
There is a lot of truth packed into those two grafs. The Frenchman couldn’t have known how right he was, even in terms of how Ben and Kay saw themselves. This is an exchange the two of them had in January 1974, during Watergate, when a media report named Kay “Outstanding Newspaper Executive” and Ben runner-up:
When I was at boarding school too long ago, I chased one classmate for five goddam years in the scholarship department. In forty months of grades, he finished first, and I finished second … except for one month when he was recuperating from undulant fever or something.
So I was accustomed early to being runner-up. But it pissed me off!
It is one of the pleasures of working for you to tell you that I don’t mind being runner-up to you one damned bit. In fact, I’m all-out flattered.
Love
Kay wrote back to Ben the next day:
Dear Ben:
That note was a Bradlee gem. It was full of charm; I loved it.…
The reason you and I get along so well, notwithstanding the fact that we are both innately endowed with a primordial urge—not at all competitive, mind you—to be No. 1, is because of this—our routes run parallel and synchronize.
I know I’m No. 1 because you are No. 1. You know that I know that I am No. 1 because you are No. 1 … I don’t mind it and even quite like it. That’s why it doesn’t piss you off and you don’t wish for me undulant fever.
It’s a privilege to work with you, in the words of a great man.
Love
“If you go over the whole of Kay Graham’s life,” Don Graham, Kay’s son, told me one afternoon in his office, “Ben was the biggest right decision she ever made.”
Graham succeeded his mother as publisher of the Post in 1979 and as chairman of the Post Company when she retired in 1991. When I asked him what had stuck with him about Ben over time, he said, “Obviously his relationship with Kay was something you had to see to believe. I don’t know if you’ve read her book …”
“She is not overstating how self-doubting she was.”
“And Ben’s the opposite.”
“He was the best thing she had going,” Don Graham said.
They didn’t know each other very well when they got together for their fateful lunch, at the private F Street Club in downtown Washington, in December of 1964.1 If anything, they had actually gotten off on the wrong foot. The main obstacle between them had also been their main point of contact: Phil.
In the last year or so of his life, as his bipolarity worsened, Phil had taken up with a young woman named Robin Webb, a stringer who worked in Newsweek’s bureau in Paris. In addition to all of the marital hurts inherent in such a betrayal—Kay found out by mistakenly picking up a second telephone in their home on Christmas Eve of 1962—it turned out that Phil had retained Ben’s friend Edward Bennett Williams to draw up a new will excluding Kay and leaving his controlling interest in the paper and in the Post Company with Robin.
It’s hard to convey what an affront this was to Kay, and to her family. Her father, Eugene Meyer, had bought the paper in 1933, right before Kay turned sixteen, and the Post had been central to her life since then. Meyer was a successful financier who had mapped out and then executed his life in thirds: the first for education, the second for asset accumulation, and the third for public service. He viewed the ownership of a respectable newspaper as a kind of public trust, and the Post was his baby. He had nurtured it back to life from near-financial ruin with sound management and adherence (generally speaking) to the seven principles of running an effective newspaper that he set out when he bought the Post, principles that even in this digital age still sit in hard copy in the Post’s lobby.2
“He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell,” Phil Graham wrote of Eugene Meyer, with typical directness, to his own father after deciding to marry Kay in 1940. According to Kay’s memoir, Meyer was worth somewhere between forty and sixty million—in actual dollars at that time, not adjusted for inflation—when he left Wall Street shortly before the First World War to begin the public service portion of his life in Washington. In accordance with principle number six, he would pump more than $20 million of his own funds into the struggling Post before it became consistently profitable.
Kay and Ben shared an elite pedigree, which was one of the reasons Kay felt so comfortable around Ben, but her upbringing was much posher than his. There was an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a vacation home on seven hundred acres in Mount Kisco, New York—indoor swimming pool, bowling alley, tennis court—and a large mansion on Crescent Place, off 16th Street, in downtown Washington. Kay attended private schools, took French lessons, made her debut, and generally lived the life of one of the richest young women in Washington.
For all of the privilege, there was also a heavy dose of loneliness and distance. Kay’s mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, was an intelligent, imperious woman who cultivated intense friendships with writers like Thomas Mann and didn’t have a great deal of interest in mothering her children. Shortly after Kay was born, in New York, Agnes departed for Washington to be with Eugene, leaving her children in the care of paid staff in the Fifth Avenue apartment for more than three years. “I can’t say I think Mother genuinely loved us,” Kay would later write in her memoir, one of that book’s sadder sentences.
Kay worked as a copygirl at the Post between high school and college (two years at Vassar, two years at the University of Chicago). She claimed to have read the paper every day while she was away at school, sometimes offering her father welcome suggestions about how to improve it. He added a famous, prophetic postscript to one of his letters to her while she was at the University of Chicago:
P.S. If you don’t soon get down here on the Post there won’t be anything left to do but the routine jobs of trying to hold our position. You ought to be in on the job of putting it to the top. It is much better sport fighting to get there than trying to stay there after you have gotten there. When we get there I will go out looking for some trouble somewhere, and let you, Mother, [and two editors] keep the machine running.
After graduation, she spent a year working as a reporter for the San Francisco News, but she knew that she was only postponing the inevitable. In early 1939, she came home to work for her father as an editorial writer at the Post, and later that year she met Phil.
The Meyers embraced Phil Graham, and he them. He and Kay started a family (the only time that Kay stopped working for the Post), and when Phil got back from service in the Army during World War II Eugene Meyer brought him in as an associate publisher. From then on, but officially beginning in 1948, Phil ran the paper with Eugene Meyer’s blessing, and Kay generally supported Phil. He was voluble and hated to be alone. When he took a bath, he wanted her to sit in the bathroom with him. When he worked late down at the paper she would often join him and hang out on the couch in his office.
Eventually, supporting Phil became harder and harder, publicly and privately. His drinking accelerated, and his unpredictability wreaked havoc on their lives. She knew he was on a manic upsurge when he decided to buy Newsweek in 1961, and she was so worried about his health (and the success of the deal) that she didn’t even tell him, when she arrived in New York, that she had been preliminarily diagnosed with tuberculosis. She began to understand that the gutting depressions that followed the up phases were symptomatic of a true sickness.
And then came Robin Webb.
In those days Washington “society” still existed, and the Phil-Kay-Robin situation caused a stir. The idea that Phil would both leave Kay and then take the paper away from her and the Meyer family didn’t sit well with the prim matrons who called the social shots. Much of high Washington society rejected Phil and wouldn’t allow him to come to dinner without Kay. People took sides.
This is where Ben comes back in. As he says, “I worked for Phil Graham.” He didn’t know Kay all that well and felt no particular allegiance to her. It was Phil who had bought Newsweek and promoted him. And so when Phil called once from New York and asked if he and Robin could come to dinner that night at Ben and Tony’s house, Ben checked with Tony and then said okay. News of that kind of thing got around. Worse, Kay had heard rumors that Ben had been making jokes about the situation in public, saying that the only thing Phil Graham needed was a divorce.
Kay never confronted Ben directly about any of this until decades later. During their interviews for her memoir, she remembered an interaction they’d had sometime just before Phil’s death. “I said something about Phil being sick,” Kay told Ben. “You said that there was nothing wrong with him except that he needed a divorce and that I should give it to him.”
“I said that to you?” Ben said. “Absolutely made up. I would never do that, Katharine.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think you did, Ben.”
Whether Ben said it or not matters less than that Kay thought he did. “She says, ‘There are only two people I thought I would never forgive, and one was Ben Bradlee,’ ” David Halberstam noted after one of his interviews with Kay in the late seventies. “Ben going around saying that [Phil’s] unhappy and all he needs is a divorce.”
When Phil died, the tension between Ben and Kay deepened when Ben didn’t attend a small gathering that Kay held at her house, on R Street, after the funeral. Ben had flown home for the service on an emergency basis, interrupting a vacation in France with Tony, and he wanted to get back to Europe as quickly as he could. He also felt Kay hadn’t explicitly invited him to her home. Word eventually trickled down to him that she resented him for not showing up.
“[Fritz] Beebe said that you were furious at me because I hadn’t gone to [your] home,” Ben said to Kay when they finally talked about it all for the record, years later.
“See, I don’t remember that,” Kay said. “I wouldn’t know that.”
“I said I didn’t go because I wasn’t invited,” Ben said.
“I wouldn’t have thought I would have noticed,” Kay said.
It seems likely that she had noticed, and that in the interview she was playing it cool for posterity. Either way, it’s striking that there were still such uncertainties and unresolved feelings on both sides regarding a funeral that had happened more than twenty-five years before. If it was that way in 1989, after all that they’d been through together, it’s hard to imagine what simmered between them in 1963.
Kay had been ready to fight Phil for the Post, but his effort to take the paper away from her died when he did. When he drew up Phil’s revised will, Edward Bennett Williams had also written a memorandum saying that he didn’t think Phil was in his right mind when he made the changes that left the company to Robin. After some minor hiccups, the paper was Kay’s. Largely because she was a woman, people expected her to sell it, and the vultures circled. “Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward,” she once wrote of this time in her life—sounding, incidentally, a lot like Ben. “And that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”
On September 20, 1963, Kay assumed the presidency of the Post Company and set about conquering her own fears about being a female boss and running a newspaper. There were a number of sideways steps at the start. (“She spits out executives like tobacco juice,” Edward Bennett Williams once said, of Kay’s capriciousness as an early manager.) As she got deeper into the job, she began to hear from her friends around town that the paper had been coasting for a while, that it had been losing steam even while Phil was still alive. Scotty Reston, the famed New York Times D.C. bureau chief, once asked her, “Don’t you want to leave a better paper for the next generation than the one you inherited?” She had been so busy getting her legs under her that she hadn’t had time yet to think about it that way.
By December of 1964, she had started actively to think about what she might do to put some spark back into the Post. Even though she didn’t particularly like Ben, she was curious about him. She knew he ran a good bureau, that the people who worked under him were happy. Newsweek had twice tried to promote him to positions of higher editorial authority in New York, and he had refused each time. She worried that he would leave the Post Company, maybe for a job in television, and she felt that she should try to keep him. “In some ways it still rankled her years later,” a close associate of Ben and Kay’s would say privately, “the idea that that son of a bitch was dining out all over town, going the wrong way on her and making fun of her. And yet she’s very tough and she knew she needed him. A lesser person might have held it against him.”
October 9, 1989
K: I just wanted to have lunch with you and talk to you. And it was such an awkward thing for me to ask someone to lunch that I took you to the F Street Club because there would be no bill.
B: There would be no bill? … Oh, because you could charge it.
K: Yes, that’s why we went to the F Street Club.
B: Oh, no. Really?
K: Yes.
B: Isn’t that wonderful? I’d have paid, Katharine.
K: And I asked you the question. I mean we chatted and then I said I’ve just noticed that you have twice turned down New York. And what is it that you kind of want to do?
B: When you grow up, yeah.
K: Yes, and you instantly said, well, now that you ask me …
B: No, no, no. That’s not true. I’ll tell you exactly what I said. I said that Phil had always said that there should be continuity in the bureaus, that changing the bureau chiefs of these weeklies every [two] minutes prevented … giving the person who had the job enough time in the job to assume a leadership position of some kind.… I was really quite happy where I was. And thought it was honorable work. But then you, then something happened in which I bit.
K: Well I must have said what do you want to do in the long run? Next question. And that’s when you said, “Well, now that you’ve asked me, I’d give my left one to be managing editor of the Post.”
B: “If it ever came open,” I must have said that.
K: Yes.
B: That’s a little rough even for me.
K: I’m not sure what you said, Ben, but we’ll amend that for history.
B: Whatever you say I said, I said. I’ll have my innings later.
Kay’s openness to the possibility of a return to the Post lit a fire under Ben. Whatever lessons he had learned from the sale of Newsweek—about seizing your own destiny and making your own history—he had clearly made part of his permanent practice. And whatever reservations Kay harbored about him at the start, she admired how ferociously he pursued her for the job. This is from a private interview that Kay did in the seventies:
[Ben was] pushing like hell. And it made me like him. From then on every time I saw him—when are we going to do this? … And he was pushing in a very decent way. I mean, Ben’s pushing is somehow attractive.… It was almost sort of like you know the old Perils of Pauline, and Pearl White, and the villain you know has the woman strapped in bed, and you’re about to do some awful thing and then it’s continued for the next week … and he’s always pushing, and he was relentless.…
I sensed that he was right, that there was a drive and ruthlessness about him and I felt I needed someone to push.
In November of 2010, stuck after two days of trying and failing to write about the beginning of Ben’s real working relationship with Kay, I decided to go down to the paper and talk to Ben about it. The last few times I’d been in to see him he had seemed tired and a little uninterested in my questions, so I wasn’t sure how much more I was going to get.
“Hey there, young man!” he said when I walked into his office.
“Got a sec?” I said. We chatted for a few minutes and then I made my usual segue. “If I can scratch your historical memory again a little bit …”
“Of course.”
I had caught him at a good moment. We started with how little he had known about Kay before he went to work for her, and then we moved on to the famous lunch, a story that’s been told so many times it was hard for Ben to recall anything new.
“Do you remember when it started to become a relationship that you enjoyed, and felt connected to her?” I asked.
“She originally, as I remember it—and even this maybe is a little cloudy—but it was in terms of a year,” Ben said. “Would I come over for a year, just to see whether there was a fit. I was on the ladder to go up to New York”—to move up in the chain of command at Newsweek—“and she knew that. So I think that made her wonder whether there was something for me at the Post here. And what that might be. And could that be explored by my going over there for a year and just nosing around. I think she admired what she called my ‘energy.’ She thought the Post was kind of sleepy.”
“When you would have come over, were you already thinking, ‘I want to run this place’?”
He hemmed a little bit, not wanting to seem immodest. “As I was there and got involved, I got more and more interested in the fact that I had skills that fit. I saw the Post needed an injection of—it was a sleepy paper. There was no energy kicking around the place.” He thought about it a little more, and then said, “Energy is the word. There was just none of it.”
We circled back to Kay. “I guess what I’m interested in is that you really don’t know her and then you get to know her,” I said. “And how important that is for the newspaper. The relationship between the two of you—her knowing she could trust you and you knowing you could trust her, that that’s what made all of this stuff possible.”
“If you really want what …” he said, and then he trailed off. He seemed to sense what I was driving at. “I mean, the mystery is how …” Again, a pause. I waited.
“We had to decide to become close,” he finally said.
“Right.”
“And to keep that out of the physical is amazing.”
It was the question I had wanted to ask but hadn’t quite known how to ask directly.
“Because it’s unlike me,” he continued, and we laughed. “I don’t know whether it was unlike her or not, but it never—there was never a question, you know. I mean, I would tell you if there was a glance or something.”
“Of course.”
“Nothing,” he said. “And that’s hard. And I bet it was hard for her.”
The “Perils of Pauline” image that Kay used to describe how she felt when Ben was pursuing her for the job had always stuck in my mind, along with the act of ravishment it implied. You don’t have to dig very far to find people close to Ben and Kay who will tell you that she was always in love with him.
I brought up another of their better-known exchanges on the subject. When Ben retired in 1991, Vanity Fair ran an extended profile of him in which a former city editor at the paper claimed that he watched Ben roll up his sleeves right before a meeting with Kay, just so she could see his muscular forearms. “He came into the room and the sexual energy of him and her titillation was about as obvious as my stomach,” the editor claimed. “She was very much, and I don’t mean this in a carnal way, she was very much in love with Ben. But then again, so was I.”
At Ben’s seventieth birthday party, a month or so after the Vanity Fair piece ran, Kay gave a toast. “I’d like to use this opportunity to knock down many of the rumors about Ben and me. One is that I was in love with Ben. This is nonsense,” she said. “Another bummer was that I was impressed with Bradlee’s muscles and when he rolled up his sleeves, I keeled over. What I really did is say to myself, ‘This man wears cheap shirts.’ ”
She got off another good line toward the end. “Someday when I reach my seventieth”—she was four years older than Ben—“I hope I’ll be as sexy as you are. It’s difficult when you’re seventy years old to be described in the press as a sex symbol. It’s even harder to prove it.”
“It was clear that you guys felt comfortable joking around about it,” I said to Ben.
“Very comfortable. But that was the magic of the relationship, is that it was comfortable. I hadn’t had all that many bosses. And certainly none of the opposite sex. But it was she who made it comfortable. And she didn’t make it comfortable by flirting with me. There was none of that.”
A little later I asked him if he had ever thought consciously about trying to preserve some boundaries as they began to get closer to each other.
“Oh, I was worried about it,” he said. “I was scared of it. You know, because I could see that we were getting to be friends. And I think I worried …” He paused. “I never thought of fucking her.”
He looked right at me as he said it, as if to say, “There’s the answer to your real question,” and I laughed, hard.
“Put it that way,” he said. “And I didn’t get any sense that she thought of fucking me. I thought that she wanted to be friends. And I started to call her Mums. And that, you know, that describes the relationship. You wouldn’t call a girlfriend ‘Mums.’ And yet, I didn’t feel maternal—I mean, you know.”
I could easily envision how much charm Ben had poured on, first to convince Kay Graham to hire him despite her initial skepticism, and then later to keep her happy when they hit rocky spots at the Post. He gave her a lot of his energy, and a lot of Ben’s energy is a very seductive thing. He would have needed to preserve the space between them somehow.
As we continued to talk about Kay, I made reference to having been surprised by the almost comical stiffness of her upper lip in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, right before Nixon resigned.
“Can you say to me truthfully, Mrs. Graham, that you never said to Ben Bradlee, ‘Ben, come on, we’re having—it’s beginning to cost us’?” Wallace asks.
“Heavens no,” Kay replies, in the most aristocratic way you can possibly imagine. “I wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think it would move him a bit if I did.” Total lockjaw. It’s like a parody of somebody trying to sound like a rich person, and yet she’s saying exactly the right thing. The paradox of Kay Graham.
“She’s got this upper lip that just—it doesn’t move,” I said to Ben, trying to convey this point as our interview drew to a close. I wasn’t criticizing her, but I realized that he thought I was. He pointed toward a framed picture hanging on his office wall, of him and Kay laughing together in a Post meeting room someplace. He’s grinning widely and her head is thrown back in a full gleaming belly laugh, as it is in so many of the pictures of the two of them together.
“It moves in that picture,” he said.
1 As with the date of Ben’s first meeting with Kennedy, this lunch date is a little uncertain, too. Ben wrote in his memoir that it happened in March of 1965, but Kay wrote in her memoir (published two years after Ben’s) that it had occurred in December of 1964. She knew what Ben had written and clearly chose the different date for a reason, in the manner of setting the record straight. Having seen a few of her archival files and all of Ben’s, I feel pretty good about sticking with hers.
2 1. The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained.
2. The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
3. As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
4. What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old.
5. The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
6. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good.
7. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.