Soon after I had joined the Washington Bureau of Newsweek in 1957, stories had begun appearing that the magazine was for sale—first in the trade press, and then increasingly in the general press. I dreaded these stories, not so much because I admired the management (I did not), but because I felt the bastards I knew were bound to be better than the bastards I didn’t know. In fact, Malcolm Muir, Sr., ran Newsweek as an adjunct of the Chamber of Commerce for his business friends, and Malcolm Jr., who had the title of Executive Editor, presided preppily over the editorial product without energy or idealism.
But the magazine was owned by the legendary Vincent Astor, the tall, leonine, multi-millionaire head of the famous Astor family, then in his late sixties, ailing and childless. When he died in February 1959, leaving the magazine to the Vincent Astor Foundation (for “the relief of human misery”), the flow of “for sale” stories, especially in Time magazine, it seemed to some of us, reached flood stage. We wasted endless hours worrying about, and researching, this or that potential buyer, none of whom we knew. Norton Simon, for instance, the chairman and CEO of Hunt Foods, and future husband of the actress Jennifer Jones, threw us into a particular panic. Without knowing anything about him, we started referring to him as the “goddamn ketchup merchant.” The stories ruined morale, at least in the Washington Bureau. A few of us felt like pawns, helpless and without weapons in the boardrooms where decisions to sell or buy Newsweek would be taken.
In fact, we did have some weapons. One, two, and three layers down, below all the people with the fancy titles, there was a lot of talent, energy, and flair. Like Osborn Elliott. He had been the magazine’s business editor, and in that capacity knew his way around a boardroom. He was now the magazine’s number three, as managing editor, and he was still in his thirties. I knew three publishers (a little) who ran newspapers of conscience and quality. Phil Graham of The Washington Post, for whom I had once worked; Joe Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (we had gone to the same prep school); and Marshall Field of the Chicago Sun-Times (Tony Bradlee was a friend of his sister). Oz Elliott and I kicked their names around longingly, and in the greatest secrecy.
One night, after a bad day of brooding, and a few shooters, I called Elliott in New York and told him I was damn well going to pick up the phone—it was almost 11:00 P.M.—and call Phil Graham right then.
It was the best telephone call I ever made—the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding, totally rewarding.
He answered the phone himself. I blurted out that I wanted to talk to him soonest about the Post buying Newsweek. He said simply, “Why don’t you come on over? Now.”
I was sitting in his living room ten minutes later. I stayed there talking, and trying to answer his questions—mostly about people, who was good and who was bad and why—until just before 5:00 A.M. I was back at 9:00 A.M., as ordered, with fifty pages of thoughts, “just stream-of-consciousness stuff . . . no one’s going to read it but me,” Graham told me.
I scarcely knew Phil Graham. I had worked for him, at a time when the Post was small enough that everyone knew everyone. We had dealt with each other a couple of times. Once I asked him to support my application for a Nieman Fellowship, and he had replied, “Fuck you. You’ve already been to Harvard.” Once when he used me to integrate Washington’s swimming pools. And once when I asked him for a leave of absence to take the Paris Embassy job and he said, “You bastards are all alike. You get a few bylines, and you’re ruined.” But he then gave me fantastic letters of introduction to Jean Monnet, General Eisenhower, General Norstad, and others. I did not know that Phil suffered from severe bouts of manic depression, and that my late night telephone call had come during an up phase.
Essentially my pitch to him was that Newsweek could be made into something really important by the right owner, if only the right people were freed to practice the kind of journalism Graham knew all about; that Newsweek was about to be sold to someone (whomever) who wouldn’t understand or appreciate its potential; that it wouldn’t require a lot more money . . . maybe a few thousand bucks worth of severance pay, and maybe Newsweek was just the right property for The Washington Post to make a move toward national and international stature. He got my message long before I was through delivering it, and all he wanted to talk about was the cast of characters. Who was who—in the Washington Bureau and in New York, on the news side and on the business side. God knows what I said, I was so turned on by his interest and enthusiasm. Luckily, there is no written record of this conversation, and the fifty-page memo I gave him at nine that morning has mercifully disappeared. I’m sure I was indiscreet; he encouraged indiscretion with indiscretion, and before I left he was using “we” and saying “could.”
I reported to Elliott that day, and let my boss, Ken Crawford, into the loop. Two days later Graham, Crawford, and I were on the train to New York, with Phil’s secretary, Charley Paradise, to meet with Oz, Gib McCabe, the business manager, and the great Fritz Beebe, who would quit the Cravath law firm, where he had watched over the Meyer and Graham family interests, to run The Washington Post Company with Phil Graham. Just north of Baltimore, Phil asked me and Paradise to leave the stateroom while he talked to Crawford. Charley and I were pals from ten years earlier. He had been a secretary at the Cravath law firm, when it was Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine & Wood, and he had known old Grandpa deGersdorff.
Beebe met the train at Penn Station, and I got my first glimpse of this man who would play such an important role in my life. If it weren’t for the twinkle in his eyes and the cigar in his face, I would have said FBI agent. He was wearing a brown fedora and heavy blue overcoat, trying to be inconspicuous against the dirty tile wall. At a later meeting, Beebe looked me over with a quizzical eye, as Graham sized up Elliott. We both wanted to be loved so much our judgment turned to mush, but we felt we both had passed muster, so far.
It was Beebe who so quietly and so efficiently refined Graham’s enthusiasm into a series of inquiries and a list of answers that were needed before anything could be translated into a plan of action. Was it really for sale? Fritz figured it was . . . a weekly news magazine is not the kind of investment favored by foundations charged with maximizing income for the relief of human misery.
Would the conservative Vincent Astor Foundation sell anything to the liberal Washington Post? The legendary conservative Colonel Robert McCormick had sold the Washington Times-Herald to Phil Graham seven years earlier, and Vincent Astor had started out a Roosevelt Democrat (and FDR neighbor on the Hudson River), even if he had turned conservative. Beebe figured it would.
I had had dinner with Vincent and Brooke Astor, arranged by Newsweek’s former editor Harry Kern, who was so enamored of the Astors that he moved into their apartment building. When Beebe heard that story—and the fact that both Oz and Phil knew her—his eyes really twinkled.
Could the Post afford to buy Newsweek? Beebe said he would find out from “Uncle Harvey,” which turned out to be a code word for the Prudential Insurance Company’s chief loan officer, named for Beebe’s real live uncle, a builder in upstate New York. At what price? Nobody knew.
Who else was trying to buy us? Oz had heard on Wall Street that the Muirs were going to make an offer, using Newsweek’s cash on hand as a down payment. Beebe smiled again. Norton Simon, the ketchup merchant, was in fact interested. And so was Doubleday, the book publishers, a new entry in the bidding war.
On the way back to Washington, Crawford revealed what Graham had said to him: Ernest Lindley was out of there (“We’ll find him another job”). Crawford would take over the Washington column (“You want it?”), and Bradlee takes over the bureau (“Can he do it?”). That stunned me. He wasn’t fucking around, as the saying goes.
For the next few days, under the tightest security, most of the action was in New York, as Beebe checked with Uncle Harvey, Oz worked on persuading Brooke Astor that Phil Graham was as good as he looked, that he and her young friend “Benny” wanted this deal to go through more than life itself. In Washington, Phil was hard to find for a while and I started worrying that his enthusiasm was flagging. (In fact, for a while it was, as a depression moved in.) But Fritz assured us the pursuit was still active, and our chances were still alive.
And then all of a sudden, it was D-Day, March 9, 1961, the day the Astor Foundation was going to decide on the new owner of Newsweek. The Post delegation consisted of Phil; his wife Katharine, who was then raising children, running an active household; John Sweeterman, the smart and steely head of the business side, who had done so much to put the Post in the black; and Russ Wiggins. They had checked into the Carlyle Hotel in New York the day before, and I had been asked to join them for dinner that night. The grandfather of all snowstorms closed the airports, and I got on the overnight train only to wake up the next morning at 8:00 A.M. stalled in a huge drift just outside Baltimore. I was desperate—scared that I would miss all the drama—but I got to the Carlyle just after one o’clock and found them all huddled uncomfortably around the phone, still waiting for the call that would put them out of their misery from Allan Betts, who ran the Astor Foundation.
In the bosom of the Post family, only Phil Graham really wanted to buy Newsweek. Katharine was worried about Phil’s health, and her own. She was hospitalized with TB a few days later. Sweeterman was worried about the impact of buying Newsweek on the Post’s bottom line. To his core Russ believed that if there was enough money to buy Newsweek, it should first be spent on improving the editorial quality of The Washington Post.
A couple of Bloody Marys later, Graham couldn’t stand it any more and went to take a shower. And of course the phone rang. Phil leapt out of the shower, barely wrapped in a towel to take the call. All we heard was a series of widely spaced “Yups.” Then he hung up and said, “We got it,” and I literally shivered in excitement. Without any real idea of how, I knew my life had changed—again.
I was delegated to call Elliott, and then the plan was for Graham to meet Allan Betts in the waiting room by the elevators on the newsroom floor. Betts would take Graham to a staff meeting, introduce him to everyone, and Phil would deliver himself of an impromptu, emotional and uplifting speech. I was tagging along, and we were waiting for Betts in Newsweek’s reception room, when Mac Muir walked through, spotted Phil, and, totally surprised, asked him what he was doing there. He didn’t have a clue, nor had his father until about three minutes earlier. But when the old man spotted me sneaking into the staff meeting, he snarled, “Up for the kill, eh, Ben?” and our acquaintance was mercifully terminated. I couldn’t help thinking of the poor bastard who got fired for hiring a limousine too big to get through the gates guarding the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s “moulin.”
Phil’s speech promised only the commitment we wanted so much, and assured us all we would have a good time. A slight understatement.
It turned out to be an incredible deal for all of us at Newsweek, especially me, but it was also a once-in-a-lifetime deal for The Washington Post. The price was $50 a share, for a total of $15 million. But Newsweek had $3 million cash in the bank, plus a half-interest in a San Diego TV station, later sold for another $3 million. So the real price was only $9 million, and Beebe’s Uncle Harvey, the Prudential, came up with most of that. Fritz once told me that the actual out-of-pocket expenses of purchasing Newsweek were “about $75,000,” a figure I do not understand. Newsweek’s profits have averaged $15 million a year for the last thirty years, a figure I do understand. My reward was Washington Post stock, as a finder’s fee, and an extraordinarily generous expression of appreciation. It changed my life, as much as the Post’s purchase of Newsweek changed theirs.
Just as my life had undergone a sea change through friendship with the Kennedys and through the acquisition of Newsweek by The Washington Post, the Kennedys were changing the face and the character of Washington. Nothing symbolized this change more than the parties, for the Kennedys were party people. He loved the gaiety and spirit and ceremony of a collection of friends, especially beautiful women in beautiful dresses. They liked to mix jet setters with politicians, reporters with the people they reported on, intellectuals with entertainers, friends with acquaintances. Jackie was the producer of these parties. Jack was the consumer. They gave five or six dances during their time in the White House, and that’s where it all came together.
The crowd was always young. The women were always stylish. And you had to pinch yourself to realize that you were in the Green Room of the White House, and that that chap who just stumbled on the dance floor was no stag-line bum, but the Vice President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Sometimes, the very best friends were asked not to come until after dinner—or that’s how we sometimes explained our absence to ourselves. “They” had to have some of their out-of-town friends to the White House for dinner. The guest lists rarely included members of the Irish Mafia, the Irish Catholic political friends and associates, generally from Boston, who were in many ways closer to Kennedy personally and professionally than the Beautiful People, or the intellectuals. There was a fundamental dichotomy in Kennedy’s character: half the “mick” politician, tough, earthy, bawdy, sentimental, and half the urbane, graceful, intellectual “Playboy of the Western World.” Only a few people crossed that dividing line.
In spite of the pageantry, I always had the feeling that the news of the day was never too far from the dance floor.
At one dance in February 1962, a half hour before midnight, the president came across the dance floor to say he had a helluva story for me, and to ask me if it was too late in the week to change the Newsweek cover. It was too late, but I trusted his news judgment enough to know that if he was talking about changing covers, he was talking about a story. As he walked away he told me to meet him in the Green Room, under the spectacular Peale portrait of Benjamin Franklin, at 12:30 A.M. I was there promptly, talking to Katharine Graham, when he took me aside and gave me the word: Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane, which had been shot down by the Russians nine months before, had been swapped for Rudolph Abel, a colonel in the Soviet intelligence agency, and the highest-ranking Communist spy ever caught by the United States. Abel had been fingered by a defector and convicted of conspiring to collect military secrets.
The story would be announced in a couple of hours, the president told me, and asked again if it was too late for Newsweek to change its cover.
If it was too late for Newsweek, maybe it wasn’t too late for what we loved to call, condescendingly, “our sister publication,” The Washington Post. I went looking for Phil Graham to ask him if the Post’s next edition could handle a new lead story. It could, he said, and pulled me over to a telephone sitting on the sill of a large window facing Lafayette Park in the main entrance hall of the White House. He got the Post’s night managing editor on the line, and after a few minutes of conversation, he handed me the telephone, saying, “Okay, Buster, start dictating.”
A moment from another world! Imagine a reporter dictating an exclusive story, a lead story, sourced from the President of the United States, from a telephone just off a White House dance floor to the strains of Lester Lanin’s dance band. It was the kind of moment that made Kennedy nervous about me, and me nervous about my relationship with him. It now seems also a risky thing for the president to have done. But I was not nervous enough to sacrifice the professional challenge and thrill.
The Post would catch 165,000 copies of the home-delivered edition with my story leading the paper, without a byline. The Post would have a world beat on the story for a couple of hours, much to the discomfort of Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press officer, who had planned to deliver this exclusive to the other reporters present—Tom Ross of the Chicago Sun-Times, Bill Lawrence of ABC and the New York Times, and Rowland Evans, the syndicated columnist. When Graham and I rejoined the party after the phone call, the other reporters looked at us edgily. They had seen the president disappear at least three times, and now Graham and I were obviously up to something. At 2:00 A.M., the president disappeared once more, this time (as he told me later) to an open line to Berlin, and assurance that the prisoner exchange had actually been consummated. When he had that assurance, he flashed Salinger the signal to tell Ross and the others, and rejoined the party.
My one short conversation with the president about this incident, which pissed off a lot of reporters, especially the wire services, came four days later when the Kennedys and Tony and I were having cocktails before dinner.
“By the way, who do you work for anyway?” Kennedy asked, out of the blue.
“Are you making any charges?” I asked, not wanting to admit anything I didn’t have to admit.
“No.” He smiled. “Do you have any statement you want to make?”
“Not at this time,” I said, not knowing how sore he was, or if in fact he was sore at all. He said he was about to order an investigation of the leak, but he thought it over for twenty-four hours and concluded that he didn’t have to. He had not considered the possibility that I might write something about Powers for the Post. I felt he was somewhat in awe that I must have dictated the story during the dance from a phone in the White House. But not mad.
And we moved on to rehash the party. Rehashing the Beautiful People parties was almost as much fun as attending them, especially for those of us who had trouble thinking of ourselves as Beautiful People. We changed diapers, worked on Harry Homeowner projects, and scrambled for baby-sitters. Tony was too private a person to be interested in the Beautiful People, and I was too much of a journalist to be trusted by them. .
But the parties and the people were a once-in-a-lifetime chance to look at this part of the Kennedy lifestyle. It seems of less moment today than it did then. But these were heady times. Something always seemed to happen at these parties, but just outside the boundaries of normal social behavior. Once it was Godfrey McHugh’s girlfriend (he was Kennedy’s Air Force aide), who had reportedly been seen taking a dip in the White House pool and jumping on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. (“Get after McHugh,” the president said to Jackie.) Once it was a dust-up involving Gore Vidal—who was Jackie’s stepfather’s stepson in addition to his more impressive accomplishments—Lem Billings, Kennedy’s friend from way back, and Bobby Kennedy. Fisticuffs were suggested but averted. Once it involved the seating at dinner. Naturally, the prized seats were on either side of the president, and one of the night’s toughest decisions was who would get the nod. At dinner before one dance, the president was flanked by the Pinchot sisters, Tony Bradlee on one side, Mary Meyer on the other. And the Beautiful People from New York seethed with disbelief.
We were invited to a birthday party cruise down the Potomac on the Sequoia in May 1963. Invitations had read, “Come in yachting clothes,” which meant white jeans to me. Guests included Bobby and Ethel; Teddy and a “Last Hurrah” type from Boston named Clem Norton who had been a friend and coat holder for Honey Fitz (Kennedy’s maternal grandfather); Sargent and Eunice Shriver; the Bartletts; Bill Walton and Mary Meyer; George Smathers and his wife; Anita and Red Fay, Under Secretary of the Navy; Jim Reed, Assistant Secretary for Law Enforcement at the Treasury Department; Fifi Fell; and actor David Niven and his wife Hjordis.
After cocktails on the fantail, with thunder and lightning as omens of the storm to come, dinner was served below. There were many toasts, including Red Fay’s interminable rendition of “Hooray for Hollywood,” which panics the male Kennedys and no one else. The boor of the evening was Clem Norton, with his endless imitations of Honey Fitz and his harelip that meant very little to anyone not involved in Boston Irish politics. Norton got drunker and drunker, until at midnight he was literally stumbling over the presents piled in front of the president. There was a moment of stunned silence as Norton lurched forward and put his shoe right through a beautiful and rare old engraving of Washington that was Jackie’s birthday present to her husband. It had cost more than $1,000, and Jackie had scoured galleries to find it, but she greeted its destruction with that familiar veiled expression. When everyone commiserated with her, she said simply, “Oh, that’s all right. I can get it fixed.”
At one point during the toasts, George Smathers rose and delivered a particularly laudatory eulogy of the president that embarrassed most of the guests. First, because earlier toasts had been either gently or not so gently teasing, and second because the senator from Florida had been spending much of his time recently working against various New Frontier proposals on the Hill.
It took Bobby to pipe up and say what everyone else was thinking. “Where were you when we needed you, George? You weren’t with us in 1962, that’s for sure.” Kennedy led the roar of laughter that followed.
Kennedy had not learned that the Twist was passé, and kept calling for more Chubby Checker every time the three-piece combo played anything else for long. He had ordered the skipper of the Sequoia to bring the ship back to the dock at 10:30 P.M.—in case he wasn’t having a good time. But he ordered her back to sea (four or five miles down the Potomac)—toward Mount Vernon—a total of four times.
The next morning we gathered on the South Lawn of the White House about noon, a touch hung over, for a helicopter flight to Camp David—our first trip to the presidential resort that Eisenhower had named for his grandson. The Kennedys, the Nivens, Caroline and John and Miss Shaw, their nurse, Captain Taz Shepard, the president’s naval aide, ourselves, and the Secret Service. It was the beginning of another extraordinary day. The Nivens, who had known none of us before, were charming, and it felt like a gathering of old friends.
When we arrived, each of us went to small individual cabins. Ours was “Maple,” with a living room, one very small bedroom, one large bedroom, and two baths. We rallied ten minutes later in front of the main lodge, and Kennedy drove us all to a skeetshooting range near the heliport. Kennedy shot first, and he was as lousy as we all turned out to be, hitting about four out of the first twenty. Niven made us all laugh as he explained his theory that the secret of skeet shooting lay in the voice one used to order up the clay pigeons. Whereupon he would whisper, “High tower, pull,” and miss, then shout, “Low tower, pull,” and miss again.
We then went for a swim in the heated pool, with the president in his skivvies, after giving Niven his own trunks. He wore his back brace even for the short walk from the dressing room to the pool. His back had been, giving him real trouble, he admitted, but was almost “miraculously better” last night and today. Jackie told us that she had asked Dr. Janet Travell, the back wizard, to give Kennedy a shot that would take away the pain, if only for the birthday party. The doctor had said there was such a shot, but it would remove all feeling below the waist. “We can’t have that, can we, Jacqueline?” the president had decided.
As we swam, Kennedy, Niven, and myself, the president ranged over a variety of topics: political giving, the Olympics, and yachting among them. He remarked that only the Jews really gave during political campaigns. And that observation reminded him that Hugh Auchincloss, his wife’s stepfather, had been approached for a political donation in 1960. His “gift,” Kennedy said, had been a promise not to contribute to the Republicans that year, as he did normally. “Eventually, the old boy came up with a magnificent five hundred bucks,” he added. Dick Dilworth (Richardson K. Dilworth, mayor of Philadelphia) had once asked his friend Harold K. Vanderbilt for a contribution when he ran for governor of Pennsylvania, Kennedy told us, and he, too, had come away with a whopping $500.
Vanderbilt’s name led Kennedy to a discussion of yachting, particularly how impressed he had been by how the Soviets won the Star-class races in the last Olympics, even though they had raced them for only a few years. And this reminded him of a story about how the New York Yacht Club had forced the resignation of some British lord who had falsely charged the Americans with illegally ballasting their candidate in the America’s Cup races.
After the swim, while waiting for the others to arrive, the three of us got onto the subject of a guest at the birthday party the night before, who had told Tony and Jackie that he had not slept with his wife for sixteen years. Then we casually adjourned for Bloody Marys on the terrace which overlooks a sloping lawn and a valley that extends forever to the south. All the presents rescued from the rain and ruin of the night before had been piled around the president’s chair for him to open. The lovely old engraving, punctured by Clem Norton’s clodhoppers, had in fact been ruined. The president just put it aside, saying only, “That’s too bad, isn’t it, Jackie?” She was almost as unemotional.
The president’s presents varied from expensive, beautifully bound books to the junkiest gifts sent to the White House by strangers. The present he seemed to like the most was a scrapbook from Ethel, which parodied the White House tours, with their own Hickory Hill madhouse substituted for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
After lunch Kennedy retired for his ritual nap, and Niven and I played golf on the front lawn. There is one green, with four or five tees tucked into different parts of the surrounding woods. The Nivens had to leave at 4:00 P.M., and we all went for another swim before cocktails and dinner. Instead of spending the night as we had planned, Kennedy announced he had to return, and we all flew back to Washington.
Days like that were rare, but magical.
Kennedy and the press were made for each other, using each other comfortably, enjoying each other’s company, squabbling from time to time the way real friends squabble, understanding the role each played in the other’s life.
Kennedy liked reporters because they shared a craving to know what was going on, and to know what people were like. Like reporters, he was always hungry for gossip, giving and getting the hints of what others were thinking and doing. Kennedy liked to talk shop with reporters—promotions, firings, office politics generally. They shared a sense of excitement over current events.
Reporters liked Kennedy for being instinctively graceful and natural, physically unable to be programmed or to be corny. He couldn’t have delivered Nixon’s “Checkers” speech if he had lived to be a hundred. As far as I can find out, he called his wife “Jackie” only once in a public forum. I never heard him tell an off-color joke.
Female reporters liked him, but they were older, and few and far between. Some reporters, especially the older males, were slow in succumbing to Kennedy’s charms, and Kennedy was slow to succumb to the qualities of a few reporters, especially older males. Like Dick Wilson, for instance, the bureau chief of the Cowles newspapers, a “Meet the Press” regular, and Gridiron Club big shot. Once we were talking about which reporter, in Kennedy’s term, was “the biggest SOB” in Washington. Wilson, said Kennedy, after only a few seconds of thought. But a few months later he changed his mind after Wilson wrote a column about the Kennedy family, and particularly how JFK was a fine family man. “Good man, that Wilson,” Kennedy then said with an ironic grin. “Great columnist. Sincere.”
Other candidates to get a call as “biggest SOB” included Roscoe Drummond, once bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, and later New York Herald Tribune columnist, and Arthur Krock, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington correspondent of the New York Times. Once a firm Kennedy family friend, Krock had written the introduction to Kennedy’s Harvard thesis, and was influential in getting it published as the book Why England Slept. Kennedy told me that Krock had never forgiven him for the Newsweek story on the Washington press corps, in which I had quoted him as saying he never read Krock any more. “Old Arthur, he can’t take it any more,” Kennedy said, “and when you go after him, he folds.”
Kennedy occasionally got mad at reporters, although after a short time he usually couldn’t remember why. Once he got sore at the whole New York Herald Tribune and canceled the twenty-four Tribune subscriptions then being delivered to the White House. The straw that broke his back, the president said, came the day after Senator Stuart Symington’s investigation of stock-piling policies had revealed the multi-million-dollar windfall profit arranged by Messrs. George M. Humphrey, Arthur S. Fleming, and Robert B. Anderson, all members of President Eisenhower’s cabinet. Symington’s investigation had revealed that the United States had lost nearly a billion dollars, and that some producers had made profits of 700 to 1,000 percent. “And those bastards didn’t have a line on it,” Kennedy growled, referring to the Tribune. “Not a goddamn line.” “Old Jock,” the president said, referring to John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the Trib’s owner, and former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, “is just trying to keep it alive to help Rockefeller in 1964.”
Kennedy got mad at me in August of 1962 when Look magazine published an article by Fletcher Knebel, entitled “Kennedy vs. the Press,” and subtitled, “Never have so few bawled out so many so often for so little, as the Kennedys battle reporters.” Something of an exaggeration, since everyone agreed Kennedy enjoyed better relations with the press than any president ever.
The objects of his displeasure were two paragraphs in the text of the story, plus some fancy graphics by Look’s art director, entitled “They’ve Dueled with Kennedy.” The graphics consisted of an old woodcut showing a bearded man in a three-quarter-length frock coat, left hand behind his back, right hand raised high with pistol at the ready.
The offensive paragraphs read as follows:
Even a good friend of the president, Benjamin C. Bradlee, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, felt the presidential fire. Kennedy phoned him to take him to task for a Newsweek story about an old Massachusetts aide of Kennedy’s being considered for a federal judgeship.
This was Francis Xavier Morrissey, a Municipal Court judge in Boston, whose legal skills were taxed by parking ticket cases, and whom Kennedy was in fact trying to slip unnoticed onto the federal bench. The presidential “fire” consisted of this one-way conversation: “Jesus Christ. You guys are something else. When I was elected, you all said that my old man would run the country in consultation with the pope. Now, here’s the only thing he’s ever asked me to do for him, and you guys piss all over me.”
The article went on:
Also ticked off later by Attorney General Kennedy for another story, Bradlee takes the rebukes philosophically and not too seriously.
There were two boxes containing names of journalists “Jumped on by Jack” and “Bawled out by Bobby.” My name was the only one to make both lists.
“It’s almost impossible,” [Bradlee] says, “to write a story they like. Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with.”
The next morning the Tribune interviewed all the occupants of both dog houses. Hugh Sidey had the good sense to say that the Kennedys may whine a little but they are the best news sources in history. I felt I was probably in enough hot water, and was quoted by bureau chief Bob Donovan as declining to comment.
And that did it. From regular contact with the Kennedys—dinner at the White House once and sometimes twice a week, and telephone calls as needed in either direction—to no contact.
Then, in Newport, in September 1962, I received some FBI documents (from Salinger) dealing with how certain professional hate types were behind reports that Kennedy had been married once before his marriage to Jackie. The story, dubbed “John’s Other Wife” by the reporters who knew of it, was pretty widely discredited. It was based on an entry in a privately printed genealogy of the Blauvelt family. The entry said that a twice-divorced Blauvelt descendant named Durie Malcolm had married JFK. Other Blauvelts said the genealogist had made a “colossal mistake.” The FBI documents proved how various hate groups were fanning the flames with malice. To get the documents, I had to agree to show the finished story to Kennedy before it could run. I had never made that deal before. I never did it again. When I showed him the finished story, he said, “Oh, how are you?”, read it, and ended the conversation a few minutes later with “That’s fine,” and I was out of there.
After my “exile” ended, Kennedy remarked to Tony, “I sure was mad at him, but I forget why, now.” He remembered all right the only time he ever brought it up to me. “Jesus,” he started. “There you are really plugged in, better than any other reporter except Charlie [Bartlett], getting one exclusive after another out of this place, and what do you do but dump all over us.”
But Kennedy had a good eye for reportorial talent. Jim Cannon, former national editor of Newsweek,, who had joined me in the Washington Bureau, had quit to join Rockefeller’s staff (he later became President Ford’s domestic policy adviser). I told Kennedy that I was in the market for a couple of good young reporters.
“How much do you suppose Tom Wicker makes?” the president asked like a shot, referring to the New York Times’s rising star, “and how much could you pay? It would be a hell of a coup for you to stick it to the Times by getting him. He wrote a damn good story about my background briefing before Christmas . . . straight, simple, just the way I said it.”
What about Tom Ross, then the number-two man at the Chicago Sun-Times, later an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and the man I really wanted? “He can be a bit of a prick, but he’s good,” the president answered. “I like him and I’d hire him.” Translation: Kennedy admired Ross, and he had probably just written a story the Kennedys didn’t like but knew was true.
It was common knowledge how much the Kennedy men depended on each other, especially how much the president depended on Bobby; but their private behavior reminded me of some rambunctious game, almost like roughhousing . . . full of wit, sarcasm, and love. The times I saw them together, they were relaxing, teasing each other, bantering, making each other laugh.
At a party given by Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith, Kennedy rose to toast his Attorney General, and started by talking about a conversation he had had earlier that day with Jim Patton, president of Republic Steel, part of a running feud he was having with the steel industry, which wanted to raise prices.
“I was telling Patton what a son of a bitch he was,” he said with a smile, referring obliquely to his already famous remark that his father had told him all businessmen were sons of bitches. He paused with the true comedian’s sense of timing, and went on, “. . . and he was proving it.
“Patton asked me, ‘Why is it that all the telephone calls of all the steel executives in all the country are being tapped?’ And I told him that I thought he was being totally unfair to the Attorney General, and that I was sure that it wasn’t true.
“And he asked me, ‘Why is it that all the income tax returns of all the steel executives in all the country are being scrutinized?’ And I told him that, too, was totally unfair, that the Attorney General wouldn’t do such a thing. And then I called the Attorney General and asked him why he was tapping the telephones of all the steel executives and examining the tax returns of all the steel executives. . . and the Attorney General told me that was wholly untrue and unfair.” And then, after another pause, he said, “And, of course, Patton was right.” .
Bobby interrupted from his seat to explain in mock seriousness, “They were mean to my brother,” referring to Big Steel’s price increase. “They can’t do that to my brother.”
Time magazine had described Teddy Kennedy a few weeks earlier as having smiled “sardonically.” After the toast to Bobby, the three brothers were talking about Teddy’s smile when I joined the conversation. “Bobby and I smile sardonically,” the president explained to me. “Teddy will learn how to smile sardonically in a couple of years, but he doesn’t know how, yet.”
Kennedy could be extremely defensive, if a relative came under criticism, especially his youngest brother. In March 1962, it came out that some ten years earlier, Teddy had persuaded an undisclosed friend to take a Spanish exam for him at Harvard. The dean had learned about it and kicked them both out, but with an option to reapply after a certain time. After two years in the Army, Teddy was readmitted and graduated in 1956. Kennedy talked about it philosophically, at first. “It was good to get the story out,” he said. “He’s got six months [before the primary vote in Massachusetts, where Teddy Kennedy had just announced for the Senate] to fight his way out of it. It’s just like my Addison’s disease. It’s out, and now he’s got to fight it. It won’t go over with the WASPs. They take a very dim view of looking over your shoulder at someone else’s exam paper. They go in more for stealing from stockholders and banks.”
I went to Springfield, Massachusetts, to watch Teddy make his political debut at the Massachusetts Democratic Convention—an experience in ethnic excess that I will never forget. Two scenes remain particularly vivid in my mind. The first is of gubernatorial candidate Endicott “Chub” Peabody, who was on crutches from a leg injury. (When the legendary James Michael Curley was told he would be facing Endicott Saltonstall Peabody in some Democratic primary, he is said to have replied, “Jesus Christ, not all three of them.”) Now, Peabody, a former All-American guard at Harvard who was elected governor that November, was swinging his crutches at the supporters of such stalwart Boston pols as Peter “Leather Lungs” Clougherty and Patrick J. “Sonny” McDonough. They were supporting Teddy’s primary opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General Edward J. “One of America’s Great Legal Minds” McCormack, Jr., nephew of John McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington.
The second thing I remember best is a young political page who searched me out on the convention floor with an urgent message to call Operator 18 in Washington. The urgent message was not a child in the emergency room or a house on fire. It was just the President of the U.S. of A., looking for “a fill” on how Teddy was doing, and offering his observations on everyone whose name came up. “Clougherty,” he said, “he’s a real bastard. . . . Took me for two or three thousand dollars once. Cashed some checks of mine during one campaign.” Kennedy asked me if I had talked to Sonny McDonough yet. When I told him I hadn’t, he said, “Their day is gone, and they don’t know it.”
I was whispering to the president on the telephone despite the convention floor noise, because I was worried about how my colleagues in the press section might react if they knew who was on the other end of my phone. And if they knew I had called him collect, at his invitation. It was one thing to have a well-placed source. It was another thing to flaunt it.
Kennedy wanted to know what the lead of my story was going to be, adding, “It almost has to be something about Teddy’s First Hurrah, doesn’t it?” That really bugged me because I had already written my lead in the plane on the way up to Boston, and it did include the play on The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor’s great novel about Boston politics: “For fledgling politician Edward Moore Kennedy, 30, the First Hurrah rose from a steaming, smoking auditorium in Springfield, Mass., at 12:25 a.m., June 9, 1962.”
In the end it was always the Kennedys against the world, united by a love and loyalty that was thicker than blood. But I remember the president reacting to Teddy with a condescension he never showed to Bobby. Even after Teddy was a senator, he seemed still the very much younger brother. Once at a dinner dance given by Douglas and Phyllis Dillon, I saw the president and Teddy standing together, with Teddy doing all the talking while the president roared with laughter. “Some pipeline I have into the White House,” Teddy, whose campaign slogan had been “He can do more for Massachusetts,” grumbled as I joined them. “I tell him a thousand men are out of work in Fall River; four hundred men out of work in Fitchburg. And when the Army gets that new rifle, there’s another six hundred men out of work in Springfield. And you know what he says to me? ‘Tough shit.’ ”
For a Newsweek cover story on Bobby Kennedy in the winter of 1962-63, I asked the president why he thought his brother was so great . . . “and never mind the brother bit.” This was his answer:
“First, his high moral standards, strict personal ethics. He’s a puritan, absolutely incorruptible. Then he has terrific executive energy. We’ve got more guys around here with ideas. The problem is to get things done. Bobby’s the best organizer I’ve ever seen. Even in touch football, four or five guys on a team, it was always Bobby’s team that won, because he had it organized the best, the best plays. Those Cuban prisoners [from the Bay of Pigs episode] weighed on his mind for 18 months. And it’s got nothing to do with publicity or politics. In Palm Beach now, I bet there isn’t one of the [Cuban exile] leaders who hasn’t been invited to his house and to be with his family. His loyalty comes next. It wasn’t the easiest thing for him to go to [Joe] McCarthy’s funeral. [Robert Kennedy had been the Democratic counsel to the McCarthy Committee, and liberals felt he had not been critical enough of McCarthy.] And then when Jean McCarthy’s new husband needed a job, Bobby got him appointed to something.”*
Kennedy also told me two stories about Bobby and the Teamsters that I had never heard before. The first involved an official of the Teamsters Union, allegedly a friend of Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa, who had been indicted by Attorney General Kennedy for some crime, convicted, sentenced, then suddenly started to “sing.” He was apparently beginning to tell all when he was suddenly taken ill and rushed to the hospital, where it was found he was suffering from acute arsenic poisoning. Kennedy said the Teamsters had apparently heard the man was squealing, and had quite simply tried to poison him into silence.
The second anecdote concerned the recent discovery by the Justice Department of some hoodlum who reported that he had been hired by the Teamsters, given a gun fitted with a silencer, and sent to Washington with what the president said were orders to kill the U.S. Attorney General.
When we went to check these stories out, Bobby begged us not to print the first story, for fear that it would so terrify all potential anti-Hoffa witnesses that the anti-Hoffa cause would collapse. He refused to comment on the second story. Newsweek ran neither one.
Jack Kennedy admired above all his brother’s toughness. He told me once with relish about a collision between Bobby and Chester Bowles, former governor of Connecticut, and a Stevensonian liberal who was then Under Secretary of State. It seems Bobby had heard Bowles was saying that he wasn’t sure he was with the administration in their handling of the early days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When they next met, Bobby apparently went over to Bowles, literally grabbed him by the coat collar, and told him, “I want you to know something: you’re with us all the way in this, right?”
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, my access to Kennedy disappeared, reminding me (and others) that my memories of this president are primarily composed of days and hours in his company. During those thirteen days from October 16 to October 28, 1962, I was scrambling for information like everyone else. The closer the country comes to war, the less its leaders find time to relax with friends. After Khrushchev blinked, in Secretary of State Rusk’s great phrase, and the Soviet missile-bearing ship turned back, Kennedy talked about the difficulty of deciding who would join him in the emergency government headquarters hollowed out of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, thirty miles from Washington. “I’m afraid neither of you made it,” he told Tony and me.
Once at dinner Jackie told us a story about how Bobby had gotten so mad about something that he called the Kremlin to complain. This story had been kicking around Washington for some time without corroboration, but the president made no effort to silence his wife’s corroboration. RFK had apparently called Georgi N. Bolshakov, the favorite Soviet diplomat of the Washington press corps and the New Frontier types. It was accepted by us all that Bolshakov was really a KGB operator, but he was a gregarious spy who could drink up a storm, tell funny stories, and beat everyone at arm wrestling. The White House operators, Jackie reported, had been told that there was no answer the night the U.S. Attorney General tried to reach Bolshakov in the Kremlin.
I saw President Kennedy with both his brothers and his father only once, in the spring of 1963, after “the Ambassador,” as his sons called their father, had suffered a crippling stroke. It was at a small dinner party with the Kennedys, Bobby, Teddy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, ourselves, and Ann Gargan, a Kennedy cousin who had made taking care of the Ambassador her life’s work. The old man was bent all out of shape, his right side paralyzed from head to toe, unable to say anything but a few meaningless sounds, plus “No, no, no” over and over again.
The evening was most moving—sad and joyous at the same time, as the old man’s children tried to involve him, while he could react only with the sparkle of his eyes and a crooked smile. They talked constantly to their father, asking him, “Don’t you think so, Dad?” and, “Isn’t that right, Dad?” And before old Joe had a chance to embarrass anyone with his stream of “no’s,” they were off to their next subject. Bobby and Teddy sang a little two-part harp harmony, after Bobby suggested, “Let’s sing a little song for Dad, Teddy.” The Ambassador leaned forward in his chair, tilted his head back to see them more clearly, obviously delighting in their performance. For an encore, Teddy did his imitation of “Honey Fitz,” bearing down on the distinctive lisp, to much applause.
The ceremony making Winston Churchill an honorary American citizen had taken place that afternoon in the Rose Garden, and Joseph Kennedy had apparently caught a glimpse of it from a second-floor window. The president teased his father about how “all your old friends showed up, didn’t they, Dad?” It was obvious the president was referring to people high on the Ambassador’s enemies’ list. “Bernard Baruch,” the president started listing them off. “Dean Acheson . . . he’s on both the offense and the defense, isn’t he, Dad?” Caroline and John were careening around during the cocktail hour, oblivious to Grandpa’s condition, and obviously delighting him. At one point, John bumped into the small table holding Joe Kennedy’s drink, spilling it smack into his lap. Ann Gargan had it cleaned up in a second.
Going into dinner was a struggle. Jackie supported her father-in-law on one side with Ann Gargan slightly to the rear on the other side, so that she could gently kick the Ambassador’s right leg forward between steps. When he ate, she fed him, and wiped his mouth quickly and easily. Stone crabs were served at dinner, and the president asked Teddy to crack his for him. Apparently his back was that painful. “There’s one thing about Dad,” the president said with his mouth full of crabs. “When you go with him, you go first class.” There was a gaggle of agreement, and the Ambassador said, “No, no, no,” jabbing the air with his left hand, much as the president jabbed the air with his right hand to make a point. Everyone knew what he meant.
Jackie had gone to great pains to introduce me as “Beebo” Bradlee’s son, and she reminded old Joe that he had coached the Harvard freshman baseball team, on which my father had played. “You remember your friend Beebo,” Jackie had said to him. “You said how much better looking he was than Ben.” More “No, no, no’s.”
After dinner the Ambassador sank back into his wheelchair and stayed in the circle of conversation for another half hour. Then Ann Gargan announced that “Grandpa is going to bed,” and for the first time the “No, no, no” sounded right. The evening made an indelible impression on me. My parents were still in good shape, and here was this powerhouse of a father reduced to a shell. The Kennedys were at their very best, it seems to me now, when the males were alone together, and united.
Except for his love of the sea, John Kennedy was about the most urban—and urbane—man I have ever met. A well-manicured golf course, perhaps, or an immaculate lawn doing double duty as a touch football field, but that was as far as he could comfortably remove himself from the urban amenities without wondering what the hell he was doing, and worrying about making a fool of himself. He was not an outdoorsman. He didn’t like to fish, as Eisenhower had, and he didn’t like to wear costumes. There is one picture of him in a feathered headdress, posing with some Indians on a reservation, but only one. He didn’t like shooting and was appalled once when he visited the LBJ Ranch and was taken in a limousine to a carpeted blind to shoot deer that had been driven toward him. He was a product of big-city life, and of the comforts and conveniences that his family had provided for him in the big cities.
And so his trip in the fall of 1963 across the northern tier of the United States to honor the cause of conservation was the cause of much conversation from the start. His friends in the press had christened him “Paul Bunyan” for the occasion, and an unlikelier Paul Bunyan would be hard to imagine, in his well-tailored suits and his handmade shoes, walking through the fields and mountains of this land, dedicating dams and parklands.
Tony and I had been particularly involved in this trip, since his first stop was going to be at “Grey Towers,” the family seat of the Pinchots, in Milford, Pennsylvania, where Tony had spent her summers as a child and where her mother, Ruth Pinchot, now summered. I was going the distance for Newsweek, and Tony and her sister, Mary Meyer, were going along to Milford as guests of the president. The occasion of the presidential visit was to accept, on behalf of the United States, the gift of the former Governor’s Mansion and some land, from Gifford Pinchot, Jr., Tony’s first cousin. He was the son of the late Gifford Pinchot, a former Bull Mooser, who had been the first U.S. Forester, and twice governor of Pennsylvania. * That in itself was hardly enough to command the presence of the president. But a chance to see where his friends the Pinchot sisters had grown up, plus a chance to chat up their superconservative mother, was apparently irresistible.
Ruth Pinchot and the president had met, even liked each other guardedly. But to say that they were from opposite sides of the political spectrum is putting it mildly. Ruth Pinchot came down from upstate to New York City as a liberal teenager from the Elmira Free Academy, but during the last years of the Roosevelt administration she and her husband had turned toward the hard right. Her affection for her daughters led her to be more than civil to their friend, the president, but it was assumed by all that every time she saw him, she assuaged her guilt by doubling her normal contributions to Senator Barry Goldwater, and to her Bible, William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine.
Tony and Mary had flown to an air base near Milford in Newburgh, New York, with the president and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, and to Grey Towers itself in the president’s helicopter. I had arrived earlier on the regular press plane. The ceremony and the president’s acceptance remarks were brief and unnotable. Afterward, instead of touring the former Governor’s Mansion, Grey Towers, Kennedy insisted on visiting Ruth Pinchot’s house, the younger brother’s much more modest house a few hundred yards down the road. I couldn’t jostle my way through to the porch, where we normally, and faithfully, celebrated so many sacred cocktail hours, but could only stare while photographers snapped one of history’s stiffest sets of smiles.
After Milford, the trek of Paul Bunyan through the Northwest had little personal interest (except for a magical predawn walk-cumlecture around the lake outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, conducted by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall). The president would call my hotel room every few days to hang out on the phone, and once—in Jackson Hole—he called to ask me to “a little party we’re having” after a day’s festivities. But later that same afternoon, Kenny O’Donnell called to uninvite me—without explanation.
In sober second thought, as my old Greek teacher liked to say, that second call has interested me more than the first one did. Obviously, someone had raised the question as to whether my presence was a good idea, and someone had decided it was not. I wondered why, but without the obvious thought that occurs to me now. I didn’t think of investigating to see who might have been a special guest of the president. I figured someone had pointed out to him that he might risk alienating some reporter, if only one reporter was present. Is that so naive?
While the Kennedy magic was growing on the country, Phil Graham worked his magic on Newsweek quickly. In New York he wiped out both the Muirs, Senior and Junior, by giving them titles but not jobs. Oz Elliott was made editor, at just the right time for Newsweek and for Elliott, and with him came a new sense of hope and excitement. In Washington, out of nowhere, Ernest K. Lindley had been offered a job on the Policy Planning Council of the State Department. (I always suspected Phil enlisted Chip Bohlen’s help to pull that off.) Ken Crawford took Lindley’s column, and I became bureau chief, but it was the change in New York that started Newsweek on the road to commitment and achievement. All of a sudden the magazine shed its Chamber of Commerce, pro-business, pro-Republican establishment cast, and staked out new ground for itself. Younger, more creative, less cynically biased than Time. Fairer, less preachy, and more fun.
Perhaps Phil’s greatest coup had been to persuade Fritz Beebe to leave a partnership in the prestigious Cravath law firm to run The Washington Post Company, and now he had him keep a special eye on Newsweek.
I hadn’t known what to expect under Post ownership in Washington, which was Phil Graham’s town more than mine. The Washington Post and the Grahams were beginning to dominate—culturally, institutionally—what Phil called the sleepy southern town that became the capital of the free world. They were in the process of replacing The Washington Star (and the Noyes and Kauffmann families) as the community’s dominant force. And the Washington Bureau of Newsweek benefited from that dominance, and from the insider position that accompanied it. I remember feeling vaguely uneasy about what might happen when we were reporting stories where Phil’s expertise was better than ours, and remembered vividly when Phil had kept news of the race riots over integrated swimming pools out of the Post. What might happen when the Newsweek Bureau tried to find out the truth about some organization close to Phil’s heart?
Like the CIA, for instance. No one other than its chief, Allen Dulles, knew all that much about the CIA, and few believed what little information was made available. But Phil Graham knew all of the old boy network that ran the agency—Desmond FitzGerald, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, et al.—and almost immediately after we had been bought by the Post, the Washington Bureau of Newsweek was working on a CIA cover story. Phil said he wanted to see the story before it ran, and that sounded like a reasonable idea to me. Our sources were all at the agency’s lower levels, and they had to take lie detector tests every so often about their contacts with journalists. Even touch football contacts. Graham’s sources were running the joint. Came the Saturday deadline for the cover story, and Phil was in my office, fine-tooth combing the copy, suggesting additions, but not demanding that anything be excised.
Phil dropped off our screen soon after the purchase of Newsweek, and we were so involved with ourselves and with Beebe, who was representing Phil, that we didn’t worry about his absence. And we certainly didn’t know the reason. We didn’t know that Phil had suffered from severe depression since 1957, alternating between lows of withdrawal and dependency, and manic highs of erratic behavior and booze. It was his illness that had convinced many of his close friends that buying Newsweek would be ill-advised. Katharine herself had felt that way at first, then came to believe that the purchase would help assuage Phil’s feeling that he was too much an overseer of her father Eugene Meyer’s achievements, and not enough an architect of his own.
Phil had reemerged with a bang in 1962 when he showed up in New York, Paris, and Washington with Robin Webb, not Katharine Graham, on his arm. Webb was an Australian secretary/assistant in the Paris Bureau of Newsweek. She and Phil had Stumbled from a fling to an affair when no one was noticing. But toward the end of 1962, Phil moved out of R Street and set up shop with Robin, and everyone was noticing. All of Phil’s old friends remained resolutely loyal to Katharine. They would barely talk to Phil; they would not see him with Robin. His friends/colleagues at the Post went into a classic defensive crouch, attempting the virtually impossible task of running an organization for a man who was sick and whose sickness made him unpredictable and erratic. On his worst days, he would fire half of them, or hire others for whom there were no jobs. Phil was starved for friendship, and turned to his new Newsweek colleagues for relief. Including Tony and me.
One afternoon, near quitting time, Phil called from New York to ask if he could bring Robin to dinner at our house. I said sure, almost without thinking, because I felt sorry for him and because he had saved my life professionally. I knew Kay Graham and liked her, even was a little intimidated by her, but I didn’t know her at all well and seldom saw her. I worked for Phil Graham. Phil urged me to check with Tony first, saying that he had been blackballed by most Washington houses. Tony okayed my invitation, and soon enough this strange evening was under way. Robin had showed up at the bureau office for a ride home, not unhappy with the consternation her visit caused. When Phil arrived he was very subdued, and quickly settled on the floor in front of a burning fire for a conversation with Dino, then aged four. This was not your standard where-do-you-go-to-school-young-man chat with a friend’s son. This was a full-burn, adult conversation the likes of which I had not seen before. Forty minutes. No booze, no break. Everyone except Phil and Dino growing more and more uncomfortable. He told us he and Robin were going to buy a big house on Foxhall Road, and I remember thinking gloomy thoughts about where all this would end.
In fact we saw little of Phil in Washington after that, but met up with him from time to time at various Newsweek functions in New York, or in some restaurant’s private dining room with a collection of news types, mostly with Robin Webb. I remember one evening in one of those private dining rooms, whose walls were the restaurant’s wine cellar. A long table, with a dozen or more people. Phil sat at one end, with Tony on his right, and the gentle curmudgeon, Jack Knight, the editorial head of Knight Newspapers, at the other end. I couldn’t hear what Phil was saying, but I could hear his voice rise, and I could see that Tony was uncomfortable. Suddenly, Jack Knight silenced the table with a firm, “Phil. Just shut up, will you?” And he did, but the hush that followed was deadly. It seems he had been teasing Tony about being quiet and shy, and the teasing was about to go a step too far.
I never felt I knew Phil Graham, the way a man ought to know a friend. His mind was so fast; his wit so keen; his charm was subtle, yet tangible; he was the friend we all dreamed of having. And yet before the discovery of drugs that could have controlled his violent mood swings, he was doomed.
That summer—1963—Tony and I were off on our first vacation without children. It was August, and we had rented a small farmhouse in Provence. We had driven south from Paris into the Rhone Valley, and finally through the goddamndest thunderstorm I have ever seen, man and boy. For miles, the road wound around the sides of hills, with vineyards stretching away from us and below us. The vintners, scared of the hail that might fall from the thundering clouds and ruin the grapes (still six weeks before they were ready to be picked), were firing shells into the clouds just above us to seed them with silver iodide, forcing them to disgorge their rain. The roar of the thunder, punctuated by the explosion of the guns, in the yellowing darkness of day’s end made for an unforgettable drive.
The thunder was still rolling through the valley when the telephone rang at three o’clock in the morning. The telephone ringing at that time in that place could mean only disaster. But when I picked up the receiver, I could hear only endless static, overpowering an unintelligible male voice. We had to hang up, and wonder which child was how sick as we waited for it to ring again. And it rang every ten or fifteen minutes until six in the morning, when we finally had a voice on the phone we could understand. It was Larry Collins, Newsweek’s brand new Paris Bureau chief, calling from Paris, announcing what he described as “the most terrible news”—my heart sank—“Phil Graham has killed himself.” And instinctively, because our children were safe, I turned to Tony and said, “It’s okay. Phil Graham is dead.”
Phil had returned to his family earlier in the summer, and entered Chestnut Lodge sanitarium in Maryland. Robin had returned to Australia, quietly, and a new beginning had started, when Phil talked the Chestnut Lodge doctors into a weekend pass and shot himself to death at the family farm.
And of course, it was the opposite of okay. It was so deeply sad to lose this bright light before he had lit up the world the way he was on earth to do. He was only forty-eight, with so much time left to do so much.
We flew that day to Marseille, and then to Paris, where Tony stayed with a friend and I went on to Washington for the funeral. The cathedral was jammed with friends and dignitaries, including the president, whose infant son had died only days earlier, as Phil’s death brought everyone together. I went back to Paris right after the funeral service, and Tony and I completed this cursed vacation.
When I returned to Washington, Beebe was reassuring about the future of Newsweek, but he told me I had some fence-mending to do with Katharine: she was hurt that I had not paid my respects after the funeral, at a gathering on R Street. I had known of that gathering, but since I had not been asked to attend, I thought I should not barge in uninvited. Kay and I talked about it later, as I explained and apologized. She seemed mollified, but the fuss reminded me that if I had not known Phil Graham as well as I wanted to, I did not know Katharine well at all. I certainly was in no position to understand the conflict between her doubts about her own abilities as a businesswoman, and as a publisher, and her inclination to carry on the work of her father and her husband. She reached her decision with friends and colleagues in the newspaper business, most of whom secretly wanted her to sell them the Post.
She didn’t really return to work to take over the reins until that fall, and it was months before she got the confidence to insist that she wasn’t interested in being a figurehead.