Then, in June 1946, President Truman called and asked my father to become the first president of the World Bank. Dr. Phil and Wife Robin Live in a Sprawling Mansion! He does not live in Georgetown. He was intent, however, on making his mark in public life as well as on the stock exchange. In an otherwise blissful spring of journalistic overload, a time when the merest cough in the Kremlin merited front-page attention, it came about that the Post and its sister publication, Newsweek, were being awarded a plum: an interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party. A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. The second week in February, he called me at work late one afternoon suggesting that we have dinner at Harvey's, a famous old seafood restaurant next door to the Mayflower, where we could buy the early edition of The Post. Housing Complex Bradlee had been Phils friend, not hers, but he pushed for the job of managing editor, pushed with his customary blend of charm and vulgarity (Id give my left one for the job, he told her at lunch one day), and she melted. During his time in D.C., Graham rubbed shoulders with a group of like-minded politicos known as the Georgetown Set, and came to know both Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Robin, who is a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, opened up about their marriage on her husband's podcast, "Phil in the Blanks." "We don't have the perfect marriage," she admitted. Dr. Phil McGraw and his wife Robin McGraw attend the ceremony honoring Dr. Phil McGraw with a star on The Hollywood Walk Of Fame on February 21, 2020. Her beginnings were at once privileged and starved. 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. During the 1988 visit to Moscow, I remember, Mrs. Graham said that perhaps she ought to telephone Nancy and tell her about the lengths that the Kremlin was going to in preparing for an imminent summit. On Aug. 3, 1963, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, having struggled with severe bouts of depression for at least five years, went into the bathroom of his family farm near Marshall,. CAPTION: The Grahams with their children at Glen Welby in 1956; Lally, left, Katherine, Phil (holding Steve), Bill and Don. Robin Lee Graham is seen on his boat "Dove" during his solo trip around the world in the late 1960s. Everything except Phil's personal expenses was carried by me from the modest trust started for each of the Meyer children by my father. I think he felt he'd done such harm the last time around that he just couldn't deal with it, couldn't fix everything. In the beginning, even Richard Nixon got the same treatment. I cannot tell you how pained I am by the circumstances which have caused you, quite unnecessarily, distress and concern, Jovanovich wrote in a cowering letter to Mrs. Graham. I remember his commenting on how well Phil wrote and how much he'd like to have him work for The Washington Post. I had visions of that fellow in the balloon, high above the plain, floating into journalistic obscurity, so I did what one cannot ordinarily do with a babushka. Pretty soon this kind of thinkingindeed, this kind of lifetook its toll: most of us became somehow inferior. Robin Webb was raised in England, UK. According to Otis, who told me all of this only much later, Phil was disheveled and spinning out ideas, some of which were unintelligible. He does not have to invent himself, nor does he have to invent a set of principles. Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk. In later years, he wanted to mold the career of his friend Senator Lyndon Johnson. It was incredibly exciting. Darren has released eleven albums to date, plus she has been featured on various other albums and compilations. Grahamone always referred to her as Mrs. Graham, even in private and at great distancesdid not travel in the style of the British Raj, but she was not arriving on a Eurailpass, either.. In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. ~ Gambling. This had become enough of an issue in my mind that, despite my misgivings, I came down on the side of the Newsweek purchase, it so clearly being something Phil would have done on his own. This is about enough to mention about the family except possibly to reemphasize that they are lousy rich -- for instance, they live in an absurdly huge vulgar castle here, have another in N.Y., have a ranch in Wyoming, etc. Her gesture in retrospect seems to me undignified, considering the awful slamming we were taking from him, she writes. that he wrote speeches for him and advised him on civil rights and key appointments; he even had power of attorney for Johnson and went out and found him a house to buy. A heavy drinker who reportedly had manic-depressive tendencies, Graham, in some respects, was his own worst enemy, stridently abusive to his wife, both privately and publicly. We don't have one. 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. Instead, it appeared on Page B7. Local Dining Guide, City Lights He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell. The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was an analyst heavily into existential psychology. I told her that this woman, this very important woman, was gravely ill and in need of immediate medical attention. But although I was thoroughly fascinated and charmed by Phil, I was also slightly resentful, when I thought about it, at feeling such complete dependence on another person. His widow was left to confront all the myths and all the insulations that her marriage, her class, and her sex had imposed on her. He stepped up his connection to Lyndon Johnson. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs. Graham, and a hundred dollars. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. During that Leningrad trip, the only moment that hinted at something mysterious and human came when we were in a map room at the Hermitage Museum. Almost pathetically, he asked not to go back to Chestnut Lodge. In the midst of the crisis, she wrote to Ehrlichman, saying, What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings. Mixing Politics. She was in a good mood. The two most powerful presences in her lifeher mother and her husbandwere both clearly suffering from psychological problems, yet Katharine still felt inferior to them. Phil received the larger share of the stock because, as Dad explained to me, no man should be in the position of working for his wife. At about the same time, she was on a cross-country flight and ran into Senator Bob Dole, who was then working as chairman and chief hatchet man for the Republican National Committee. 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 called and told her to come back to America as soon as she could. In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male, and since my brother was in medicine and had shown little or no interest in the business, my father naturally thought of Phil. There is plenty of material in Personal History to satisfy the most obvious expectationsall the familiar episodes of the Posts history are replayed, and famous faces bob into sight as if in a capital version of Grand Hotelbut more interesting is the degree to which this memoir is a description of the muggy intimacy of the world of Washington and the way one powerful woman learned to live her life there. The talent level in the newsroom began to shift, and so did the culture of the place. He told me that he loved me and said we would be married and go to Florida, if I could live with only two dresses, because I had to understand that he would never take anything from my father and we would live on what he made. At that point, Phil got together with {columnist} Joe Alsop to discuss the merits of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy's running mate. All that was mostly over now, though I tried to be with them as much as possible. This is not the sort of moment one could hope to find in the self-examination of Andrew Carnegie or Colonel McCormick, much less of Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. To this day, I cannot say what the beast wasa leopard, a cougar, a jaguarbut I can still see its talons not an inch from the hose and flesh of my proprietor. Advertisement. And he wanted many things. For years, Katharine witnessed her husbands violent mood swingshis periods of heavy drinking, his bizarre behavior, his prolonged depressions. The first nights entertainment was an easy choice: the Kirov Ballet. As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures. She'd been told that Harvard was the best, so her dying wish was that he go there. Phil was clearly upset, too. with that of the increasingly powerful conservative media (the Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, etc. So did Meg Greenfield. They met earlier that year. Nobody knew what to do. CAPTION: A June wedding: Phil and Katharine Graham married in 1940. Both were full of humor -- with an edge. At dinner at Joseph Alsops one night early in 1961, Graham continually offered political advice to the new President, John Kennedy. Hockey Signing On to The Post. John Ehrlichman, Ronald Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman, and Nixon himself all charged the Post with disloyalty. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. I passed the box without incident. But there are also relationships that start out that way yet cross over to become real friendships that last forever. He wanted Estes Kefauver to head an anticrime commission and told him so, repeatedly, until Kefauver did it. Agnes was perennially engaged in writing books-in-progress. This is a very significant case and has huge repercussions for freedom of expression & religious liberty in our country. In some ways, this was the bottom moment for me -- very confusing, very difficult, and very painful. She once took the time to introduce her friend the architect I. M. Pei to Agnes. When they were taken to see JFK, Phil spoke -- "shrewdly and eloquently," according to Joe -- pointing out all the obvious things that Johnson could add to the ticket and noting that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble. Yet, the publisher must realize that he has obligations which transcend any commercial interest.". . By this time, Robin had returned to Paris. Few suggested that Katharine the Great was a first-rate book, or even a solid oneit was flatly written and salted with highly suspect, even paranoid, materialbut one had to wonder if Mr. Jovanovich would have done the same for anyone else. This was in 1988, and I had recently been assigned to the Washington Posts bureau in Moscow. Graham heard him. In my boyhood as a reporter, I nearly killed the matriarch of the liberal-media conspiracy. The Post was his instrument, his means of being listened to. The evening was fine and fun. He also began making public scenesonce launching into an obscene tirade during a speech, and, on another occasion, punching out a detective at an airport. See Photos. He was really a. Love is still strong between Dr. Phil McGraw and his wife Robin, who celebrates 43 years of married life in August 2019. . Eugene served Agnes breakfast in bed every morning; he ate at the bedside table. . The Times was immediately in trouble with the White House and the courts. Nor did Phil Graham always have the mettle to stand by his best people. It all seems so odd in retrospect. Phil's activities in regard to Little Rock were the first sign for me that something was wrong with him, that his powerful talents could be used in such an idealistic but confusing and irrational way. I gather Dr. Farber initially tried to read him passages from Martin Buber, and when this failed to work, they forcibly tranquilized him and put him on the plane. . Im here If you need me and I love you. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Post vice president James Truitt arranged with Kennedy to send Air Force 2 to retrieve Graham, who checked in for the first of two brief stays at Chestnut Lodge, then a leading psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Md., that has since burned down. Grahams mentor, Felix Frankfurter, talked him out of firing Barth, but Graham did print an apologetic note in the paper undermining the original editorial. Its hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. . Graham also had a hand in the appointments of no less than three more friends to the Kennedy administration, including then-Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon. Early in 1940, I was invited by a friend to Sunday lunch with a group at the Ritz Carlton. {Rauh favored a much broader civil rights bill, but the Senate had watered it down.} I was earning about $1,500 a year. With me in the lead, the three of us walked down a ramp and past what appeared to be a coffin-size box with open slats. . There are plenty of lousy biographies in this world, and they languish on musty shelves, ignoredbut whole. The charge of subverting a whole political process, that is a fantasy, a work of fiction rivalling only Gone with the Wind in circulation and Portnoys Complaint for indecency, Colson said. With Grahams support, Bradlee was soon firing the lazy and the mediocre, the racist and the dull, and he then set about raiding topflight papers around the country for their best talent. For the first time I had found a man who was that right mix of intellectual, physical, and social charm, and warm and funny on top of that. For nearly a year, Phil went to the office hardly at all. Unlike Phil, I find it hard to express emotion. All right, she told Bradlee on the telephone, in the midst of a reception at her house, with the Posts lawyer counselling caution in her free ear. 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