I’m Alan Fern, the director of the National
Portrait Gallery [inaudible] …Two weeks ago, the National Portrait Gallery acquired
the portrait of Mrs. Anne Green by Charles Wilson Peale [inaudible] Now Mrs. Anne Green
took over … Maryland’s newspaper … and served with distinction as the official printer
of Maryland. Her establishment was noted for its typographical quality and was guided by
her sure sense of business and her considerable editorial courage in a period of colonial
unrest. When this painting goes on view, in a little while, our visitors will see the
countenance of Maryland’s first woman publisher. But they will never be able to hear Mrs. Green
talk about her life as housewife, mother, and unexpectedly publisher, or to hear her
reflections on the hard work and the daunting choices that faced her when she assumed control
of her business. We are able to do better this evening in the sort of happy coincidence
that so often informs our work here at the gallery. As we welcome, as our guest, a woman
whose life and career are similar in some respects to Mrs. Green’s. Because Katharine
Graham is surely the preeminent woman publisher of the day. The Washington Post accompanies
the monument to her exceptional talent in that quarter. Katharine Meyer was born in
New York City. She grew up in Washington, where she began her career as the editor of
the Tattler at the Madeira School. She left journalism to attend Vassar, briefly, but
wisely transferred to the University of Chicago for her degree. She worked at the Post in
several capacities as a young woman, and even spending the year as a waterfront reporter
in San Francisco for another paper, returning to Washington to work and then to marry and
then to step aside to devote herself to raising her family and her husband took over the newspaper
that had been under her father’s ownership. Following Philip Graham’s death in 1963,
she found herself at the helm and like Mrs. Green she handled her unanticipated new responsibilities
with distinction. I don’t have to tell you that the issues surrounding the Pentagon Papers
and Watergate called for exceptional editorial courage and under her leadership the Post
became noted for its innovation and its reportorial excellence. Mrs. Graham herself emerged as
a forthright crusader for freedom of the press, for honesty in public life, for civil rights,
as well as becoming an admired community and business leader. She retired last year as
chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company. Not long ago I had the delightful
opportunity to show Mrs. Graham through our group portrait exhibition and to get a glimpse
of her memories of some of the fascinating characters who populated the lives of her
parents, Eugene and Agnes Meyer. Her own life has turned out to be no less interesting and
we are honored that she has agreed to help us paint a lifetime portrait of herself in
a conversation with our Smithsonian colleague, Marc Pachter. Please welcome me in joining
Mrs. Katharine Graham and Marc Pachter. Mrs. Graham, you have said in the past that
you have led essentially two separate lives. Of course the changing point would have been
the time that you took over at the Post. I’d like to see if we can’t talk about both
lives and I’d like to begin with your childhood. The way I’d like to do that is to quote
one of many comments that I have read about the nature of your parents and you can tell
me whether it’s accurate. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke of your father as emphatic and your
mother as volcanic, which are wonderful ways to characterize two people. What was it like
to grow up in an emphatic and volcanic household? It was interesting, it was exciting. It was
at times confusing…and somewhat daunting. They were each in their own ways very powerful
personalities and very different and often in sort of sparring conflict, they also had
a very deep devotion to each other. The liked sort of combat around the dinner table.
Did you like combat around the dinner table? Uh, no. I was number four out of five children
and the three older ones were the ones who did most of the combat. And most of the combat
was political or also you argued about issues about the importance of art, the relation
to art to other things, and my mother was always passionate. The first part of her life
she was violently Republican and we were all, all of us I think, were New Deal Democrats.
And did she forgive you for that? No. My father was more tolerant of opposing
views, in fact he liked them. She got quite wrought up.
Would she demand a certain kind of opinion on something? Or did she like to hear an opposite
opinion from the one she just expressed. She liked to engage you, but she really felt
very violently about these issues. She thought Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor were cardinal
sins. She foamed at the mouth at the suggestion that maybe they were alright. She did like
our New Deal friends. My father liked them probably better, but she liked – at one
point my brother had a whole bunch of very radical friends in and my sister that danced
had a lot of white Russians in and she enjoyed that kind of scene.
Did…I’ve read a certain amount about your life – of course you’re the expert here
on it – but I have noticed some sense that your father – and perhaps this was just
in retrospect that people have guessed this – had a particular fondness and respect
for your intellectual toughness, which is not the same thing as saying that you like
to argue, but that you were either strong in your views or your sense of things. Did
you feel that you had communicated that very early because it is often quoted that he had
some sense of that. Maybe it was just in retrospect that people imagine that.
I don’t think that’s really true of my younger years. He was very encouraging. He
demanded quite a lot, I mean he liked you to get good marks and he liked you to do
well and he liked you to be successful. I became president of the senior class at Madeira,
which I think was my shining moment until my sister who was a cut-up and a lawbreaker
when he proudly said “K has become president of the senior class.” She said, “Thank
god it wasn’t student government.” So it sort of deflated. Yes, I was Ms. Prim
and she was really Ms. F. Scott Fitzgerald and I thought she was marvelous and I was
very jealous of her. She was supposed to be here tonight and I wish she were, but her
husband is sick so she couldn’t be. My younger sister is here.
So in other words your views will be tested and challenged later. I know that in a sense,
well I guess that also the children had a life of their own because your parents were
so often away. I know in fact in your early years while you were at Mount Kisco your parents
were getting established in Washington. So did you – they showed up every now
and then? Yeah…I don’t know why I suddenly remember
this poem…they were very engaged in the Republican campaign. If you remember Coolidge
and Dawes, they ran for president and we have a saying that “when Coolidge and Dawes,
Coolidge and Dawes, when miles away they are the cause.”
So she ran with the recreation commission in Westchester County, she did lots of other
things and she was away a great deal. He was away a great deal and we were mostly brought
up by governesses and French teachers nurses before that.
Which was probably a clam period between the storms. When the parents showed up and animated
the household. Well they were the continuity, but she – I’m
going to say that my mother was rather eccentric. She moved down to Washington and left us in
New York for about two or three years, I don’t know exactly why. Well except he came down
during the war and they thought, they never thought they were going to stay. So we grew
up in New York for a while, while they were here.
I remember once, again, an account that I read I think it was your sister Elizabeth
that your mother recorded saying that you love daddy more than us. I don’t think she
meant it as serious, but I think that she meant was that they were off together so much
that it was a relationship that was so important to her that in part she probably ran off to
be with him as he had to be at work in Washington. But it no doubt created a household of many
moods. When you left the household to go to college, your first choice was Vassar, Alan
and his chauvinism then rejoiced in your decision to go to the University of Chicago after that.
But what was the transition? What made you decide that Vassar was not the place and Chicago
was? Well, one thing was precedent before me. Everyone
had left and gone to college somewhere else and I thought that’s what people did. So
I finished two years at Vassar and I went abroad that summer with my roommate and her
family and there we talked to Harold Laski and my brother had been sent off before me
because he was so impossible – in Yale and he was practically flunking out and he was
on the diving team so they sent him off in desperation to study under Herald Laski, who
was a friend. You see it’s rather typical that Harold Laski was a Left-Wing Socialist
and a friend of my father’s. Of course unfortunately – since Bill had never read a book before
he arrived – he turned extremely Left Wing to my parents’ horror. So when I suggested
that I went off to study under Harold Laski I was really sure that my father would let
me go because he really did support what I wanted to do and so he said “No, you can’t.”
Because Bill had been ruined. And also he said you have to have a basis of stability
before you subject yourself to all these passionate currents in Europe. There was some truth to
that. So he said you can go anywhere else in America that you want to go and I hadn’t
really given it a thought to go somewhere else in America. But when he said that we
were on a train and he said “Do you want to go somewhere else?” And I said “Sure.”
And he said, “Where?” I said the University of Chicago because I had seen a picture of
Robert Maynard Hutchins in Redbook. You know Redbook used to have full page pictures of
people in the magazine and he was this divine looking man and it said the University of
Chicago was this very exciting place and people were talking about issues – so I said fine,
Chicago. And this was alright because clearly there
was no danger of corruption that they saw. Well thought in a logical way really. I thought
well it’s in the Midwest, it’s coeducational, and it’s in a metropolitan area. All of
which Vassar wasn’t. I think we can agree on that. So again, my
sense of things is that Chicago was a great success for you. That you enjoyed the intellectual
life, it was as you expected. [Graham responds that she liked it] And Hutchins wasn’t disappointing?
I went into a class – they taught a class called the History of Great Ideas of the Western
world and you started out at Plato and went to Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas, Freud,
and Marx…- they challenged you in class and wrestled with you intellectually and said…they
challenged you on what these people thought and what you thought.
Excuse me but its sounding like the dinner table.
It was a little bit…by now actually, you had to be smart alecky back to them. They
liked it and they did teach you to fight for ideas. They did.
Did you see the effects when you went back to your parents’ house? Were you more willing
to take on your ideas? Well by that time times had changed.
As I recall after you completed you had perhaps conceived of the idea of doing some kind of
reporting – although maybe that was connected to a desire to do something with the issues
of the day. For some reason or another I was always really
interested in newspapers and I always thought I was – but I mean it’s true about the
Tattler, I did edit. I thought when I graduated in 1938 – no my father had the Post then
– I decided to go to work for a newspaper as a reporter. 5 Was it in spite of, because of, or irrelevant
to the fact that your father just a few years before purchased the Post?
Both. I mean I had always been interested in the idea of newspaper work. But naturally
– I mean we were very close. We were writing each other back and forth and I was telling
him what I thought about the Post and occasionally – for instance I said there’s this comic
everybody’s looking at in Chicago. Everybody is talking about Terry and the Pirates. Nobody
had picked it up and he picked it up and it was the big comic of the day. So I was kind
of involved with him and I worked summers on the Post.
One of the things – people again really think retrospectively, which is why I always
want you to correct me about what people thought then opposed to what you thought now – but
there was some sense that you, I think it was a letter you wrote in your senior year
where you were thinking about your future and testing the idea. It looked to me as it
was written up, testing the idea that you did in fact want to fully join your father
in the Post as opposed to just journalism in general.
That’s true. I wrote my sister who’d come by to see me, the one who isn’t here, and
we had had a discussion about what she was going to do and what I was going to do. So
I wrote her about a ten page letter after she left. I said that I adored my father but
that I really differed from him about some things and that I was worried about the idea
of just going onto the Post. That I thought I would not. That I wasn’t sure. I said
that I loved editorial things, that I wanted to be a reporter but if there was one thing
I hated it was advertising and circulation. So a complete newspaper career in his terms
would have represented all of that. But you know why then this is probably irreverent
of me to say but somehow I thought of the situation where Nixon said “I am not a crook.”
And when you say that I don’t want to do that, it means part of you must have been
thinking, at least considering it. I was. It is quite strange because when he
wrote me he, too, was obviously considering it because one letter he wrote me said I ought
not to join things because I had to join the American Student Union and he said if you
wanted to be a journalist then you shouldn’t join things and that’s right. But I wrote
him back and said it was an experience that I wanted and I thought I would join them.
But we were so together that I said unless it would really bother or hurt you and then
I won’t, but I really want to do this. Then he wrote back and said no, fine its ok. But
he said parents have to tell their children what they think is right and that’s what
I think is right and I wanted you to know. When you went to San Francisco it seems to
be to have been a natural next step. I think you were involved in labor reporting there?
[Graham responds yes] And that seemed to fit your New Deal perspective on what needed to
be done? 6 Yes, I was really very – it was really a
very extraordinary time if you remember. It was the organization of industrial unions,
the CIO was being formed, and we all thought anything Roosevelt stood for was what we wanted
– the free world, and the ability to organize and all that. So when I was typing away the
labor reporter for the San Francisco news, which was the afternoon Scripps Howard paper
was sitting next to me at his desk and said, “I hear that you’re interested in labor
problems.” And I said, “Oh yes.” He said “well there are going to be two big
strikes or lockouts, would you like to do my legwork?” I said “Oh yes.” He said
“well the first one is the warehousemen.” So that was where – the warehousemen were
being locked out of the whole waterfront and so he sent me to follow. They had a “hot
car” so called because it had been loaded, a railroad car, had been loaded by strikebreakers
and what they wanted was one union with all these different warehouses, which were picking
them on them one by one. So they were sending the “hot car” up and down the waterfront
and I followed the “hot car.” So that every time they went to another warehouse
and they went on strike Id report it to the home office. So I got to know all the people
on the waterfront and we became great friends. [22:29] And that’s not supposed to be done
either and I notice one or two of our great reporters are here tonight and I hope they
won’t report it back to the home office. But Harry Bridges and Gene Patton, the head
of the warehousemen’s union and Sam Kagel was their organizer.
Harry Bridges was on this stage at some point. Well we all became friends. Less with Harry
– well I became friends with Harry, but he was not your convivial soul as you probably
discovered. But Gene and Sam and I used to go up and down the waterfall at night because
Sam was a jazz buff. We were under all those bridges and you know there was always a piano
player in every bar and it was a really wonderfully romantic moment I had a great time.
Excuse me, but it doesn’t sound demure. It seems to me that you were very engaged
and even sounds like something your mother would have done. Well not the politics of
it, but the spirit of it. So clearly you were involved in any case and probably passionately…
Well then I was also having a very good time, it was a wonderful time, I loved San Francisco.
Which was also a place where your father had grown up in.
Yes and in Los Angeles. He had really grown up in Los Angeles and they had moved to San
Francisco. His family is there and it’s a wonderful part of our family. His older
sister lived there and I saw a great deal of her and she was tremendous and her daughter
was married to Walter Haas and they ran Levi-Strauss. They are just suburb human beings and I got
to know them and love them and I still do. But you only stayed for seven months in paradise.
[Graham responds was almost a year] A year. But then did you return to Washington? My father came out and said I thought you
were coming home and aren’t you coming to work on the Post? At that point they were
riffing people from the news so I felt a little guilty staying because they were in our mode
now of having to cut down. So I came and went to work on the editorial page of the Post
as the editor of the letters to the editor. I wrote occasional editorials, the kind that
tell you not to walk on the grass. Was there the sense among the staff that the
boss’ daughter was among them? Was it not a problem?
Well not really because I wasn’t in the city room which I deliberately stayed out
of in which I think it would have been present. But then since I was in a small secluded corner,
then later I went to work for the Sunday section writing pieces for what is now the Outlook.
So I don’t think anybody minded my being there.
Did you ever wonder at that point why your father was holding on to an institution that
was losing money hand over fist. He had purchased it in ’33 – of course he had a very prosperous
career, a public service career and so forth so maybe he was mentally and spiritually ready
– but really for a number of years this looked like from a commercial sense a lost
cause. What was his investment in it emotionally? Why was he hanging on? Why had he done it?
Well he really had a great drive to public service. He had been in banking and then went
into government. He went into the government during the war and he really stayed through
Hoover, under whom he was governor of the Federal Reserve board and had started the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Then he got out because he disapproved of Roosevelt’s
very loose gold standard policies. [Pachter suggests that Graham’s mother must have
influenced his opinions] No, no she didn’t influence his economic opinions I can promise
you. That was his view. He had offered Mrs. Mclean, who had owned it, the owner of the
Hope diamond, he’d offered her about five million dollars earlier and she had turned
it down because she had wanted to save it for her sons who were really not deserving
of that honor. It went into bankruptcy so just as he was getting out of the government
they sold it at bankruptcy at the steps of the building and he bid on it anonymously.
He bought it for $875,000 or something like that. Well that was just the beginning because
it lost about a million a year and that was big money then, you know, as they say millions
and millions do add up. He got very discouraged because there was no way – you know people
forget when they see the Post now that we spent twenty years of struggle and you couldn’t
see your way out. It was an amazing commitment that he was making.
He used to get very discouraged and my mother was wonderful about that. She used to say
you’ve got to keep going and you’re right and it’s wonderful. When you look back – which
I am trying to do now to write the memoirs – he kept building it up in the most incredible
way and great credit is due to him for all that he did. Because he first made a great
editorial page and he started building up national – and he didn’t have any resources
and he was selling advertising. He used to sell circulation; he used to sell papers to
taxi drivers when he got in a taxi. He took my sister and me, the
one who is here, who may not remember this scene but we were taken to buy a dress in
a second floor of a G St. store who might advertise. I mean there was nothing he wouldn’t
do to work on building up the paper. He believed in it, but you couldn’t ever see…there
were five newspapers and…you couldn’t see your way out. The way out did come in
1954 when Colonel McCormack… Well his health was bad. He had wound up with
the Times Herald that was a process sort of too long to go into – but you all probably
remember Sissy Patterson, she was his cousin and she had bought the paper from Hearst and
had run it as a combined paper. It was quite jazzy. She was a wonderful publisher – and
right wing and isolationist. But she was, it stood for something, you knew what it was.
It was the sort of scandal sheet; on page three you got sex and crime. But she had a
lot of circulation, she probably made a little money but I’m not sure. Probably not actually.
There was one astonishing incident that I read about in one place, that your father
had done something that she had not approved of. I’m sure your father did many things
that she did not improve of – the world did. She sent him symbolically a gift that
was very unattractive. I’ll tell you that story. He had just acquired
the Post as this auction and Sissy who was his friend, they were friends my family and
Sissy Patterson, and do you all know that her house was the Washington Club and Mrs.
Lighter lived in the house next door it was an apartment. The streetcars went around the
wrong side of Dupont circle when they put them in because she said not in front of our
house. So Sissy was marvelous. She used to describe herself as shanty Irish. She was
charming but she could also be very vicious. She swiped the comics because her cousin,
Bertie McCormack, who bought the paper had all the syndicates. He had the comics and
all those things that are syndicated, the columns. So he woke up and she had said to
Bertie, her cousin, the contracts are all out because this has sold at auction so give
me all the comics. And he did. So he sued her and he got them back after a while from
the court. She said well they already arrived and can I run them this Sunday. He said yes,
if you give us credit. She said she didn’t run them, I guess. She sent him a huge hat
box and in it was a pound of raw flesh, not terribly attractive.
No, this was an allusion to… After that they never spoke, at all, for about
twenty years. Before we proceed in your life as well, although
all of these are principle characters in your life, your mother’s interest in Chinese
art is something I just want to stop at briefly because it’s so enriched this city. One
of her passions, was it not, was a serious scholarly interest in Chinese art. Was that
something again that was a private passion or did you almost through osmosis learn of
this? Did she share it with her family or was this her own special love? No she was not very good about sharing her
– she did not encourage you. She thought we were beneath understanding these things.
My mother was marvelous she really was, she knew Brancusi, Stieglitz, she was into 291,
she knew Freer she collected with Freer, but she had a certain amount of condescension
for the rest of the human race including her children. She thought we were not worthy of
discussing these high values with. She really didn’t encourage us to be interested, but
she had – she had written a book on a Chinese artist. When they went around the world on
their honeymoon she found Chinese art and she snapped it up. Then she got to know this
extraordinary man from Detroit, Charles Freer. She became his great friend and they collected
together and when he would send for these shipments from China and he would take what
he wanted – he would divide them up – and so she bought a lot of things. When he started
the Freer Art Gallery he had five directors who would pass on – people were not even
allowed to give gifts to the Freer Art Gallery unless they were accepted by this committee.
My parents were two of the five so they were all very close.
In her autobiography out of these roots, she gave an explanation – I don’t know what
you’ll think of it – for why she was so passionately interested in Chinese culture.
Of course it was the beauty of it and so forth, but why it struck a chord she said it was
the only way you could lose a sense of self. She never lost it. Maybe you could but she
didn’t. Well I think it’s time to go into another
important stage in your life. You married in 1940 – this is beginning to sound like
this is your life. I don’t mean it that way, but you married a remarkable man, Philip
Graham. That you marry, of course, is part of every human life. The spirit with which
you married, the expectations you had as a woman as far as your own career went or your
husband’s is something that is often talked about in various books occasionally you’ve
been asked about. In my understanding you felt very strongly that having married this
very remarkable individual that your position was as a support to his career and as a mother.
Is that true? You thought that consciously or it just evolved as a pattern in your life?
I think I thought it. I think subliminally it was in all our lives then that what you
did was marry a man and please him and keep the houses, bring up the children, and do
good works. It’s funny because my mother did all these other things, but nevertheless
she too said her role in life was to support my father and she did that first. But you
see the thing about my mother was she thought you had these obligations, which was to get
married, do the houses, and bring up children and that was it.
And that’s all she wanted or expected for you?
Yes, I think so. No that’s not fair I take it back. We were told all our lives that you
owed the world something and had to work. It didn’t matter what you did but you had
to work. [Pachter asks if that was a mixed message] Yes. So I worked but I never thought
I’d be a manager or run anything, or that I was competent even. Well we will develop that theme in a second.
You married and had four children. Your husband established a remarkable bond with your father.
Was that from the first… No. He was, as we all were, a liberal New
Deal-er. The first thing they had was an enormous fight. In fact my father began to smell out
a romance and said was I interested and I said yeah I thought I was. He said well in
that case could I meet him. I said sure and I had him over for dinner and warned him that
he was being looked over. He showed Phil, who was a Supreme Court law clerk that year
for Stanley Reed, that he was a Frankfurter protégé and became Frankfurters law clerk
the next year. So there was a cartoon in the paper of Hugo Black in Klan robes because
when he had been confirmed they discovered he’d been on the Klan momentarily. So my
father was horrified at this and showed Phil this picture and said didn’t he think it
was wonderful. Well Phil said he thought it was a very good drawing but he thought Hugo
Black was one of the most distinguished justices on the Supreme Court. And at that point the
whole room went up in smoke. I thought my God is this what is going to happen for the
rest of my life? The next day I said to my father “well that didn’t go very well,
did it?” He said, “what do you mean?” I said “well you know, there was this argument.”
He said “I thought it was terrific.” But Phil was very weary of my father when we were
married. He thought that he was a great, rich, Republican ogre. Out of whose hands he clutches
– he wished to stay. His plan was to go back to Florida and to go into law and politics.
But he did fall into his clutches, what happened? Well they got fonder and fonder of each other
and enormous love and respect developed between them and when Phil went into the Army was
about to leave my father said that he was discouraged about the paper – that my brother
was a psychiatrist – and he had to know if there was a future for the paper. Was Phil
interested or wasn’t he? Well we had long talks and he said what did I think. I said
well it was his life and he had to decide and I’d do anything he wanted to do. Finally
he decided although he had really wanted a political career that this was another way
of serving the public and that he would like that. He said OK before left for the far East,
where he went for about a year and a half. So the minute he got back, after we went on
terminal leave, he went on the Post. So that was the beginning of our life then.
Did you – again I know it’s the wrong question for the time because clearly it seemed
at the time appropriate that your husband, not you, get involved in the business. You
just described your philosophy of marriage and the son was not interested of the Meyer
family – so it was the son-in-law…and that’s just the way it was going to be.
Of course this was a relationship that did become very strong and very important in the
life of the Post. They must have quarreled about some things, but basically did they
have a similar philosophy about what the next stage should be? Did Phil Graham surprise
your father with the direction he took… Occasionally, but I think for the most part
they were very much alike. My father had gotten a little more liberal by then and my husband
got a little more conservative. But it didn’t matter really what they thought about politics.
About how the Post should run and how it should grow they agreed. My father was worried when
Phil wanted to buy a station, a television station in Jacksonville, with which to pay
the Post losses. He thought he was paying too much for it and he wasn’t sure that
television was here to stay. He did sort of question that. They had this wonderful mutual
friend called Donald Swatland who was head of Cravath, Swain and Moore. My father went
to Donald and said what did he think of this. He finally sort of went into it with Phil
and said OK, they bought it. [43:40] My father backed him in these. He kept doing things
and it built up the company. It began to make us much more – it began making money eventually.
It was really in ’54 at the time of the purchase, of the Times Herald, that there
was a turning point in both Washington and the company.
That was the corner stone of the Post. Phil was there – what happened I should add is
that after six months he was 31 years old and my father went to be president of the
World Bank and he left the paper and said to Phil, “Do you mind if I leave because
Mr. Truman has asked me to be the first president of the World Bank and that’s my first love.
If you don’t want me to go I won’t.” But he was 70 then and Phil was 31. So six
months after he went on the paper he was the publisher.
Did he express some concern – he of course seems in retrospect someone with immense confidence
and drive in his great years – but did he confess to you some concern?
Oh sure. It was a learning curve, naturally. It was very, very hard, because again don’t
forget we weren’t still viable – I mean we were still struggling for our lives. So
it was very, very tough until ’54 when this extraordinary thing happened, which is a go
between a friend of my father’s and a friend of the Colonel’s wrote him and said the
Colonel was interested in talking. So they went down to Miami where he was and he said
he wanted to sell the paper. He did…its very interesting because he kind of liked
my father from a distance with all their fighting and he admired his professionalism. He had
fired his niece, Daisy Miller Tankersley, a couple of things that he did not really
like that were not a good idea like forging a picture of Grouter shaking hands with Joe
Tydings who was running for office. The Colonel didn’t like that, he was professional. So
he sold the Times Herald to us and said he didn’t want to discuss it, here it is I
want what I have in it. My father and Phil said John that was the whole thing. Then he
went off on a trip and he sent Campbell, who was business head of the Tribune, to do the
negotiating. They were done in 24 hours and put the papers together, started Sunday and
published together Wednesday. That’s why we’re here.
When one reads this history of the Post one sees certain epic moments. It’s very dramatic,
the turning points, that built it. They were commercial and they were of course journalists
as we will get to. You once described your husband as a very glamorous personality – have
I gotten that wrong? No? Was that difficult to be pulled into that kind of a world? Again,
I understand that you both had an interest in this world, but did that force you into
more participation into the Washington world or were you intrigued by it?
No I loved it. It was intimidated by it a little – because he was terribly funny,
terribly witty, and terribly brilliant, and terribly charming. He was really brilliant
and charismatic and I guess in a way I thought nobody could equal that. And nobody could
almost…I have to say that I still think that. He established a very close bond with
LBJ. Yes. I guess one of the negatives from a journalistic
point of view was that he had a tremendous passionate interest in politics and in politicians
and in the use of power to achieve worthy goals. Lyndon Johnson and he both shared this.
When they met each other they instantly went “pow.” Another great friend of his was
Edward Bennett Williams there was a great similarity there really.
There’s a fascination with power, with having things happen and so forth.
Yeah and most of the things they wanted to happen were good things. I mean look at what
Johnson accomplished. Indeed and the Post was there for him…
In fact as Joe ___ knows as he was here, he got Phil to go up there and to help him pass
the ’57 Civil Rights Bill. Phil was working at his side so they shared a lot of the same
goals. Your husband’s investment in these issues
– again we come back to that there’s a lot of passion in both your lives in terms
of what needs to be done – was very strong around Civil Rights I know and often in fact
when people begin to talk about the time when he became uncertain emotionally, the speak
of the time of Little Rock – the kind of disappointment. But there was some sort of
dismay about that and some sense that things could not be the way he wanted them to be.
Is that accurate? Um…yes. I used to think that his first great
depression set off after he got involved in the Little Rock school desegregation and buses
fighting integration. He very much wanted to try to promote the integration of the schools
without having to use troops. But I think that I’ve talked about that with Joe and
the others, I think there was no way that that was not going to happen without the use
of troops. He thought that Eisenhower was up at Newport playing golf and there was this
great sort of vacuum in Washington so Phil moved into the vacuum and began calling everybody,
but it was a little bit of manic stuff as well as good stuff – which I guess often
happens. [50:54] So when the troops went in it did leave him very…devastated.
The next few years of course the six were very hard years for you and for him. I suppose
in the cycle of his emotional life there were good times too, I know he was still very involved
in the Post. So he didn’t really lose the reins. [Graham states “Not until the end.”]
Not until the end. In 1960 he was very involved in the convention
and putting the Johnson Kennedy ticket together. So there were a lot of good years, yes. The early ‘60s has to be the bleakest of
your life; you yourself became ill with tuberculosis I think in ’61. Well he was not well too
it must have been extraordinary. [Graham responds that it was “pretty tough.”] When your
husband died, clearly this is the turning point of your life, as you’ve spoken of
two different lives this is the moment where the life divides in a sense. I’m sure you’ve
been asked this many times but I still want to ask how you made the decision, or whether
you thought there was a decision to be made, about whether to jump in his place. Might
you have done something else? Were you tempted not to go to the Post?...
No. I hadn’t ever thought about it in those terms…but it never occurred to me not to.
I mean there were about three choices you could make. One, you could sell it. Two, you
could go get someone else to manage it and three, you could at least go and try to learn
what was going on and what you could do about it. Fritz Beebe, who was his co-executive
who he had gotten to come on the year before from our law firm in ’62, he had been our
family corporate lawyer and they had done a lot of acquisitions together and had worked
together and so forth. So Phil had asked him to come when he bought Newsweek in ’61,
he asked Fritz to come run, be the head of Newsweek, and to be his partner. So when Phil
died there was Fritz. Fritz said please you’ve got to come to work. Al Friendly did and Russ
Wiggins…so people think of it as this great drama of did I go and run the Post. Well you
would have been a fool to say that because although it was small and it was private you
could at least think maybe you could do something, but all I thought was going to go – I mean
I had the controlling shares together after he died, the family had them. So I thought
well the only intelligent thing is to try to learn what things are about so that if
I had to make an ultimate decision I will at least know what’s going on.
I’m about to ask an either, or question and I know it’s both. Did you do it for
the family or did you do it for Katharine Graham? Not that that’s two separate things,
but you understand the question. How much of you wanted to do this?
Oh I really did. But I also saw it as keeping things going until the boys grew up. Don at
that point was a freshman at Harvard and I knew that he was passionately interested in
journalism. So I sort of viewed it as trying to make due until he grew up.
I have some sense that a lot of the people associated with traditional publishing management,
both at the Post and elsewhere, were not rushing to your house begging you to do this. Were
you getting a lot of people telling you that the right thing to do was to go out and find
somebody to do this task? Or were you getting encouragement from those you would work with
at that point? Some of them yes, some of them no.
Well you went clearly with your own instincts and you did do that. Now if we go back to
the letter written as a senior, the classic division was between reporting and its goals
and editorial issues and business. My guess is that you didn’t worry too much about
being on top of the editorial issues. [Graham responds that she did.] Oh you did? OK , let’s
start with that. I thought all the terror was with the business side. Well, I just knew very little about either
one. I mean I’d been a reporter, a very low kind, but that doesn’t tell you how
to run a big news organization. So I had to learn that as well…[Pachter asks how do
you run a big news organization?] Well if you’ve got a couple of hours…Well I mean
I can be brief. You have to get the best people in and you have to give them autonomy and
work with them and you have to back them. Part of the legend about your decision to
go in and to do things was that you only said to the people that you found the good people
– and those were some very good people – that you’re only statement to them was “Don’t
surprise me.” Essentially…was that a fair characterization?
It’s a little simplistic because what I said was when we were discussing editorial
page policy and I was saying that he had autonomy but that if there were big decisions that
I wanted to be in on them. What a nice segue as they say into big decisions.
But I would start with the first, as I saw as I read about your career; one of the first
major decisions was of the question of managing editor. That seems in the telling to have
been a very difficult one to make. Was not an easy one to contemplate? You were not satisfied
with the managing editor’s style? Well, it grew on me gradually that the news
product we were getting out was not very exciting. Or that it was not all that it could be. Then
when you got close up you could see decisions being put off or being made strangely, or
not being made, or people who were not charged up. So I could finally see that something
was wrong and I ascertained that with some people. Then I thought somebody had to be
brought into the picture. By coincidence I had a lunch with Ben Bradlee – it was a
coincidence really because he hadn’t gone up the ladder and gone to New York at Newsweek
– I said what will you like and that was the answer. He got pretty excited at the idea
of coming onto the Post, not as managing editor, but as assistant managing editor. So that
happened that way. One of the – I read at some point that your
son said that hiring Ben Bradlee at that point was the wrong thing to do. Not actually, but
according to the cannons he hadn’t established much of a track record in that position as
he might have. Did it seem an adventurous decision at that point?
It seemed slightly risk taking, but he had run the Washington Bureau of Newsweek and
he had attracted very good people there and he had them excited and the Bureau was very
good. I sort of checked him out with other people like Scotty Reston and Walter Lipmann.
Walter Lipmann was a great friend of his family’s. I did the best I could with Fritz and the
people in New York and everybody – I mean it was within the company, you have to remember
Ben had been a reporter on the Post where he had gone to Paris and come back to Newsweek.
So he knew the paper. It wasn’t totally wild.
Although I would’ve suspected that you wouldn’t have minded if it had been. Yeah you can’t take too big risks. You can
take risks, but you don’t want to bet the company too many times. I did once…well
with Watergate. Well we’ll get to that, but before Watergate
the Pentagon Papers seems the point where you demonstrate the way of making decisions,
that’s the only way I can say it because it was a decision under pressure just so the
audience knows. The New York Times had published some of the study that McNamara asked for
about how we got into Vietnam…) It was top secret. The Post was unhappy that
they had been scooped, I suppose, and had managed to get the papers. However there was
a restraining order against the Times and the issue was would the Post publish what
it had. You got a call, as I understand you were at a party, and you got a call…
I was at a retirement party at our house for a circulation business manager who was retiring.
And the editors and Fritz (Beebe) were at Ben’s (Bradlee) house and they had gone
there to write, you know, so they wouldn’t be in the newsroom. Because nobody was supposed
to know we had them but by the end of the day, a lot of people knew we had them. And
they very much wanted to print. Chal Roberts read two volumes of stuff and wrote two columns
in the most incredible speed, which he was very able to do. So then the lawyers and the
editors got into a fight because the lawyers really were worried that it would be doubly
vulnerable in the face of the Times as having been enjoined.
You were also considered by the public… And we had just gone public and we hadn’t
sold the stock. We had announced it. And so we were right in mid-passage of going public.
And so a criminal indictment would not have been exactly what we needed. But the editors
were all lined up on the telephone saying, “We have to print. You know, our lives depend
on this and the honor of the paper.” And they would threaten to quit, presumably?
One did. But you know they were just excited. So I listened to them and then I said to Fritz,
what did he think. And he said he thought maybe he’d wait. And that really was difficult
because we had always been very together on everything and he was very liberal and very
pro-editorial so it wasn’t as if McCormick had told us to wait, if you see what I mean,
it was my colleague whom I loved. And whom I trusted. But he said it in such a way, that
I felt that I could still make the choice. He really did hold that door sort of open,
I think. And I just felt that the editors were right and that we had to go ahead, so
I said, “Ok, go.” Again we each make decisions our own way,
but you were at peace with the decision having made it.
Hmm, sort of. It was scary. And they did enjoin us and we did get stopped, and then I think
the Boston Globe took it up. And then we and the Times went up to the Supreme Court in
about a week and got a decision that allowed us to print. But it was not a wonderful decision,
it was a split decision, and they said don’t, but it did stop them from prior restraint,
which was stopping presses before they ran, but that said you could prosecute us criminally
afterwards. What decision would your father have made
and your husband in that case? I know this is just speculation, but given their characteristic
style as… I suspect they would have made the same one.
Let me tell you why I’m surprised that you said that. Weren’t they more willing to
form part of the establishment? They understood the role of newspapers and had taken some
very tough decisions, but something about a secret government document. Your husband
had been very involved in military terms, I think in intelligence, I just wonder if
they would have paused more and said well there are some things you don’t do. You
don’t think that would have been it? I don’t know, maybe. My husband – well
you see times were different. You’re right in a way. He made deals with the government.
He made a deal with the government that enraged Ben. At the time that Washington was having
integration problems, he and the Secretary of the Interior had at each other because
we were going to report a riot about a swimming pool and Phil said he wouldn’t report it
if they were going to open the swimming pools. And they did. I mean I wouldn’t have done
that and maybe he was right but that’s the kind of thing he did…He downplayed that
story and they opened the pools. Well it seems now, and again, in historical
terms the Pentagon Papers led to the Watergate issue. What was really leading on was of course
the country’s experience with the war, disillusionment, the spirit of the suspicion of government,
and then the Watergate story broke. We all know it, we don’t have to define it here.
But again, I would love a sense of how risky it seemed to you at that point to pursue the
issues associated with Watergate: the burglary, the notion that a President of the United
States was potentially involved. There was a time when you were out there very alone
with the Watergate story. Yes, but the difference between Watergate
and Pentagon is very big. Watergate was like wading into a stream in which you get in deeper
and deeper. When it started, it was a farce. I mean there were these five clowns who were
found in the Democratic Headquarters with surgical gloves on, and you know it just seemed
like a farce. And it was only gradually that the reporting led to the White House and then
led to all the rest of it. And so by the time the final two stories ran in October right
before the election that linked it to the White House staff, and that linked all the
dirty tricks together. By then, that was when it got scary, obviously. And at first it was
scary for a different reason, which was that usually when you have a great story it isn’t
exclusive very long, because everybody else jumps on it. But with Watergate, I thought,
if this is so great, where the hell is everybody else? And that’s when it really did seem
lonely for a while before other people started coming in, but that was fairly far into the
summer. Where the hell were they? Why did they hesitate?
Well I don’t know in retrospect. I think that Woodward and Bernstein, the two reporters
whom we had on it, were workaholics. Neither one of them was married fortunately because
they worked all the time. And they got these sources and I think finally they had the sources
kind of locked up, and I think it was hard for other people to break into the story.
And at first I think they didn’t believe it. I mean, it was just so hard to believe.
We’d send these stories out on the wire and nobody would run them…in the country
that were taking the wire service. Did you ever think you were being used…
Oh yeah you had to worry about all of that. I think that when I talked to Ben about the
possibility we were being used or set up, which of course, he was worried about too,
I think he knew that some of their sources, and he shared with me that some of the sources
were Republican, and that we were allegedly double checking everything, and that sometimes,
a lot of times, we’d withdraw a story, and wait until we could check it again.
Were you sleeping well during this period? Not always. But what the worst thing that
happened to us was that we had these two Florida television stations. And, well, it wasn’t
exactly the Administration, but it was led by people sympathetic with the Administration
or in the committee to reelect the President. There were four challenges to these two station
licenses that were up for renewal. This had the air of retribution.
It had more than the air. Haldeman and Nixon were, when the tapes came out they, Nixon
says to Haldeman, “Well they’ve got these licenses, and you know, they’ve got to be
renewed.” So they weren’t. Of course that made our stock fall. And then there were all
these really ridiculous things they did to us like, well they wouldn’t answer the phones,
they wouldn’t have anything to do, they were told not to go near the Post, not to
talk to our reporters. And the worst of all, they were not supposed to go over my house
to dinner. That was really tough. The most dramatic thing that’s ever said
about, in retrospect, about Watergate, is that the Post brought down the U.S. government.
You’ve heard that said. Here’s your chance to tell us if you think that’s the right
way… Oh yeah. I don’t like it, yeah. That’s
really awful, I think, because it is not up to a newspaper to bring down a government
and we didn’t. What we did was a newspaper’s defined job which is to keep the story alive
when they are trying to hush it up. And that is a newspaper’s job and that is the
job we did. Now, who brought down the governments were constitutional procedures, it was the
courts, and the grand juries, and finally the congressional committees.
I want to spend a little bit of time as well on the business side because that was an important
achievement. It took as long, or longer, to learn…I don’t know but it should certainly
took a long time. You once said that you had two teachers and that professors I think was
your phrase, and that one was Warren Buffet and experience. What did Warren, he was one
of your counselors I’m sure, tell me how you came to terms with your position as a
business woman. Well the first ten years or so I learned quite
a lot about management, which is really not business, but its management. I had to learn
that by experience. Then just as we’re talking about the moment when the Pentagon Papers,
Fritz Beebe died of cancer and we had just gone public. So I then had to have a whole
new learning curve about how you coped with a public company and how you ran a business.
That’s a whole other subject. To my surprise I found I really loved it. I love the problems
of management and business and they fascinated me – how to run a good business and how
to keep you’re…It was really hard at first and Wall street thought I was this crazy lunatic
who had done the Pentagon Papers and was into Watergate, although they thought the stock
was sort of like typhoid and malaria. I invented this sort of goody two-shoes phrase to try
to say I wanted to be a profitable well run business, but since they also knew I cared
about the editorial produce I used to say “Excellence and profitability could go hand-in-hand.”
But what I really meant was I cared about profitability as well as excellence, which
I did. You know you can’t be excellent in editorial unless you are a profitable company.
Because you don’t exist and you don’t have the money to invest in editorial products.
So when Warren Buffet bought into the company he was unknown, he is now known to all of
you I’m sure as an investor and the man who is unfortunately having a very tough time
now because he is taken over Salomon’s. But he is a really wonderful man and he is
just an incredible business mind. So after he arrived on the company after really being
scared of him – he couldn’t take it over because when we went public we went public
with two shares and the family still controlled the A shares. The majority of the company
was B shares and that’s what he was buying so he couldn’t take us over. But nevertheless
I didn’t know what his purposes were, but he – after a while I realized how great
he was and that he would be good for us. So we invited him to go on the board. Then after
a while he became a great friend of mine. He would come to board meetings and bring
with him 20 annual reports and he would take me through these annual reports saying “this
was a good business deal, this is a cash intensive business, this is a utility, this is why you
should be interested in this…” I mean it was like going to business school; it was
really wonderful because he was such a good teacher. But finally he sent me the back of
a Disney annual report and there was a kid on it and a stroller and he was like that
[she slumps over in chair] and he said “this is you after the 20th annual report.” He
had the patience to do this and I mean not many people would’ve. They would’ve just
taken one look at this idiot and gone the other way. But it really saved my life.
Wall Street is not a sentimental place and it began to value your stock in the end very
highly so clearly the reputation of a well managed company became pervasive. Is there
one moment – again I’m looking perhaps for an overly dramatic moment – when you
felt that you had, as you once wondered you would, the Pulitzer Prize in management that
that effect where you felt yes, this company is working well, I have the respect of my
peers and the industry. Was this something that you were looking for? Or was this something
that was just demonstrated in the price of shares?
I think it…I’ve had a lot of luck and I’ve worked hard and done some things right,
but we had very valuable properties and finally we got on top of them and got them well run.
We’ve had our ups and downs, but I have to say we went public at 6 and even in the
economy now we’re at two hundred and twenty-something and we’ve been to three hundred, but we’re
more humble now. We split the stock twice so it has done very well. It’s a good report
card. But I will tell you one more story – I’m sure we have to stop – well we had a very
hard time. At one point we’d done some dumb things and we bought a paper in Trenton that
we weren’t running very well and we started a magazine that wasn’t exactly wonderful
either. We had been public a while by then and then the stock had gone up but they thought
it was going down because of these dumb things. So two of the biggest investors sold their
stock and Warren told me, they were friends of his, he said that they were going to sell.
I have to confess to you and I know that nobody will tell anybody – but anyway I thought
it was the end. I had messed it up and I burst into tears. You’re not supposed to do that
but I did. So we were talking many years afterwards about it and he said “Don’t be silly.
Wall Street has never really appreciated valuable stocks until they get bought up and it’s
too late, but that’s Wall Street and don’t let it upset you.” And I did. So anyway,
we were recalling this incident many years later and he said, “Well just buy in their
stock.” Well we bought in stock, which no one was doing then. They did it later – but
we bought in the stock. He said, “Well we made about $300 million off that. Next time
you burst into tears call me first.” The last question, and I would love to talk
forever, but the last question I would like to ask you is this: you are always saddled
with the title of most powerful woman in communications and the most powerful woman in America, probably
you’ve heard it even grander than that at some point. I understand that you don’t
like that kind of phrase or characterization. [Graham replies “God no.”] Why does it
bother you? First of all because you sound like a weight
lifter – but what they really mean is that you’re a woman at a head of a company. [Pachter
adds “And they can’t believe it and it’s clearly nonsense?”] Well Punch Sulzberger
they don’t talk about as the most powerful man in America, do they? I mean it’s somewhat
sexist. I think they also view power as something that is wrong. They view it erroneously because
they really are thinking that you run down and tell the editors to get so-and-so or do
something, but you never do. Or you kill a story. Those are powers that you may have
– I don’t think you do have, actually. I don’t think it’d work. So I think you
have a responsibility and you try to do your best but I don’t see that as this great
powerful witch on a broomstick. Well, that is the odd last word. Thank you
so much. [Audience applause.]
Mrs. Graham, we thank you very much. I will not remind you that at an earlier moment this
evening you wondered if could find anything to say tonight. When in fact you left us with
three more hours I think than promised. We must try to find time to work that in. What
we are going to do now, as is our habit, is to go down one floor and we join Mrs. Graham
in an informal reception and we can all visit and ask the questions that didn’t get asked
and try to extract the answers that didn’t get answered. Thank you very much for being
with us.
