The cost of failure was incalculable. She supported Roosevelt, but her political values were essentially conservative and well within the boundaries of the American upper classes. He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. At one point, Mrs. Graham asked for ice cream. In the early days of Watergate, she tried, in rather submissive terms, to build a personal bridge to the one man who exceeded even Nixon in his public hatred of the PostSpiro Agnew. Five months later, Phil Graham, once again in a trough of depression, ended the affair and came home.}. Some companies thought the Post such a potentially profitable property, and Graham such an unlikely figure to run it, that they came to her with offers to buy it. Apparently, the interview went well. I grew up considerably, mostly thanks to him. While publisher of the Post, he grew so close to L.B.J. between the constitutionally protected expression of dissent. Also, it was part of my bafflement at what I saw as Phil's increasingly strange behavior. Insofar as she was capable of love, I think she loved my father and us, but she was highly complex, and at times deeply unhappy. In her own memoir, Agnes wrote of rebelling against the responsibilities of marriage; she behaved, she said, as if the whole world were in a conspiracy to flatten out my personality and cast me into a universal mold called woman.. Robin Webb (Songbird) See Photos. It worked, but at the same time it hurt the paper. As she grew older and more self-confident, she could be imperious, even frightening to her editors and executives, but her desire to please, or at least to get along with, those in power, never entirely faded. Latest news and commentary on Robin Webb including photos, videos, quotations, and a biography. In meeting after meeting, in Washington and New York, she was the only woman in the room, and not a self-confident one at that. and U.P.I., were infuriating the White House with reporting that showed the contrast between the official statements of the generals and the dire situation in the field, the Post could not keep pace. Much of his activity was related to politics. He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. Phil, Kennedy said, when you get elected dogcatcher I will listen to you on politics. But in fact Kennedy had listened to him. When a young woman named Deborah Davis published a biography in 1979 called Katharine the Great, Mrs. Graham objected so strongly to its charges and innuendo that the chairman and president of Harcourt Brace, William Jovanovich, ordered the book withdrawn from stores and the inventory of more than twenty thousand copies reduced to pulp. Liz at Large When she suggested to the Newsweek editors that it might be a good idea to hire Aline Saarinen, of the Times, to edit the back of the book, they brushed the suggestion off, saying that the closings were too late, that the physical demands of the job would be too much. But those who worked in the Posts newsroom knew one infinitely reassuring fact about Mrs. Graham: that at the most important moments of her professional life she did the right thing. Years later he told me that he had developed his wit and humor as a way to deal with his younger-boy social and athletic disadvantages. After Robert Opel dashed naked across the stage in 1974, he ran for President and settled into the gay leather scene, in the orbit of Robert Mapplethorpe and Harvey Milk. It was incredibly exciting. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. I cant write in the eloquent words he used. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. It was a loyal nanny, Powelly, who supplied the hugs, the comforting, the feeling of human contact, even the love that my mother did not.. He was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk the following year for Felix Frankfurter, his mentor from Harvard Law School. Advertisement. Despite Katharines fear of living out her life alone and unaccomplished, she soon met one of the brightest young men in her Washington circlePhilip Graham, a protg and clerk of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. In middle age and in a state of grief, she suddenly found herself in charge of a newspaper that had yet to show any signs of greatness, and of a group of men who regarded her with, at best, considerable suspicion. Beer At dinner that night, Phil stood up and went straight to the lectern, where he began to speak. Truitt, an intimate of the Grahams whomBen Bradlee would later force to resign, committed suicide himself in 1981, still despondent over his treatment at the newspaper after Philips death. From Sioux Falls, Phil and Robin flew to Phoenix, where many of the nation's most prominent publishers were gathered for a meeting of the Associated Press. How could a woman reared in such exquisite privilegeone whose circle of friends, among them Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson and Nancy Reagan, rarely widened beyond the most powerful lites of Washington and New Yorktake such risks? Phil's involvement in the whole matter -- besides pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship -- began in earnest in July, when he invited {civil rights lawyer} Joe Rauh to our farm in Virginia, Glen Welby. Grahams insecurity as a woman, as a publisher, and as a parent has clear and painful origins. Graham was one of four children. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Gov. This is a surprising piece of work on every level. Mrs. Graham, for her part, wrote back to him, I was full of admiration anyway for what you did and the way you did it. In the end, Davis sued her publisher for libel and breach of contract in 1982 and received a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. One doctor told a friend later, "Phil was determined to get out and really was unbelievably masterful in his ability to manipulate people." {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} Later, she developed an infatuation with the work of Thomas Mann and seems to have made endless demands on the authors time and patience. Phil wasn't much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy -- so much so that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear. See Photos. The whole political year of 1960 was very exciting. Mumble Sauce, About Us . It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. Her name is Katherine Meyer and I've not a doubt in the world that you'll love her. robin webb phil graham photos Coach Thomas returned to Servite in January of 2018 after coaching at his alma mater, Crespi from 2012-2017. He committed suicide that day. I think this definition of roles deepened as time went on and I became increasingly unsure of myself. He told me that he wanted to preserve our marriage and our family; he said that he loved Robin but would tell her the affair was over, and that he would stay with his family. In the beginning, even Richard Nixon got the same treatment. I was earning about $1,500 a year. After a hurricane struck in 1926, the sugar company gave up and his father developed a dairy business on some of the land. His temperament, his interests, and his style are quite different from his mothers. See Photos. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. Phil and I flew to California five days before the Democratic Convention was to open. Katharine's husband Philip battled alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper.. Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. If she has been cool to any Presidents since Watergate, they have been the two Democrats, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, not least because they came to town with the greatest suspicion of old-line WashingtonKatharine Grahams Washington. It wasn't until years later that I looked at the downside of all this and realized that, perversely, I had seemed to enjoy the role of doormat wife. At Vassar and at the University of Chicago, Katherine took an interest in left-wing politics, which were very much in the air, but always her sense and her sense of breeding prevented her from taking what seemed like extreme steps. Phil Graham's descent into the abyss of manic depression accelerated, and on 24 December 1962 she discovered that he was embroiled in an affair with a Newsweek stringer, Robin Webb. Up to that time I had been a fairly present mother, attending school functions, driving teams to sports events, trying to be back in the afternoons when the kids got back from school. Despite Phil s constant self-flagellation about being the son-in-law of a rich and powerful clan, he did not shy from the advantages for long. Film/TV Since Eisenhower was not very interested, except in theory, and was concentrating on his vacation golf games, there was a vacuum within the administration. Under Phil Graham, the Post had a well-respected editorial page and mediocrity nearly everywhere else; it was not even the best paper in the city. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. John Ehrlichman, Ronald Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself all charged the Post with disloyalty. Email or phone: Password: . She had not yet developed the steely mask that would later trouble the sleep of her adjutants. Philip planned to divorce Katharine for Webb and started the process of dividing up the couple's assets. To win the paper, Phil employed the most feared lawyer in Washington, Edward Bennett Williams. you are repressing free expression and limiting the truth.. Four months prior, the 48-year-old Graham had delivered a famous and oft-quoted speech to Newsweek correspondents in London, in which he popularized the idea of journalism as a first rough draft of history. (Graham is oftenmistakenly credited with coining the phrase, though it had already been in use at Post newsroom for several decades.). I passed the box without incident. But then, at intermission, she seemed to tire. 318 Robin Webb Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE Collections Project #ShowUs Creative Insights EDITORIAL VIDEO BBC Motion Gallery NBC News Archives MUSIC BLOG BROWSE PRICING ENTERPRISE VisualGPS INSIGHTS BOARDS CART SIGN IN Images Images Creative Editorial Video Creative Editorial FILTERS CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. Graham had every reason to refuse or defer publication of the Pentagon Papers. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. In the process of blowing his stack, as only he could do, Ben felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Phil, who said, "Okay, buster, come with me," and led the way to his office. Surrounded by her male editors and executives, Graham could recognize in herself the same reflexes of deference she had learned as a daughter and as a wife. "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. Robin Webb (Robin Elaine Riddle) See Photos. The Post Company had gone public just two days before getting the papers, and publication could easily have affected its stock prices for the worse. Phil went to school in Miami. Her allegiance to democratic capitalism is no less firm than that of William F. Buckley, Jr., and her inherent faith that the establishment lites will do the right thing is nearly absolute. In 1965, Graham helped herself and the paper immeasurably by hiring Ben Bradlee, Newsweeks charismatic bureau chief in Washington and a friend of the Kennedys. . . (According to some accounts, Philip also threatened to divorce Katharine and marry Robin Webb, a Newsweek stringer with whom he'd been having an affair.) He acknowledged that he used humor as a weapon with which to keep people at a distance. This was not entirely to the good. Under Ochs, the Times institutionalized the notion of nonpartisan, objective reporting. He was acutely aware of the dilemma that arose from the fact that, as he put it, "a newspaper must be a successful commercial enterprise in order to survive. Best Blood Sugar Supplements 2023: Top Blood Sugar Pills That Work, Best Ebony OnlyFans To Follow For Thick Ebony OnlyFans Videos (2023), Best Dating Sites For Older People: Mature Site To Find Love, Best CBD for Dog Anxiety: High-Quality oils to Calm Your Dog, Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. The Formative Years. Eugene served Agnes breakfast in bed every morning; he ate at the bedside table. To a reporter, and especially a reporter in 1996, there doesnt seem to be a need to make any decision at all. After a short while, Phil got up, saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom he sometimes used. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next days edition of Pravda. From the start, she was intent on keeping the paper within the family and eventually passing it on to her children. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. He had come into a job for which he was ill-prepared. When Johnson had announced he was running for President that year, Phil Graham helped write the speech; he even ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndons contact lenses, which had popped out. This is a posture unbecoming to a publisher of newspapers. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. It was all kept very private; our one idea was to conceal what had happened not only from the world but from our friends, my family, and even our children. How Dangerous Is Getting Shot in the Shoulder? According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. 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