Phil Graham

Philip Leslie Graham (July 18, 1915 – August 3, 1963) was publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 to 1963 and husband of Katharine Graham.

Graham, a tall, bespectacled, scholarly looking man, was an intimate friend of Vice President Lyndon Johnson and a friend of President John F. Kennedy. He was deeply involved in the selection of Johnson as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1960. He suffered from bipolar disorder (then referred to as manic depression) for which effective drug therapies were not yet available and which contributed to his eventual suicide in 1963.

Early life

Philip (Phil) Leslie Graham was born on July 18, 1915, in Terry, South Dakota. He was raised in Florida where his father, Ernest R. ( "Cap") Graham, made a career in farming and real estate, and was a state senator. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Phil Graham was one of four children. One brother, Bob Graham is former governor of the state of Florida (1979–1987) and was a United States Senator from 1987 to 2005.

Graham graduated from the University of Florida in 1936, with a bachelor of arts degree in economics, and from the Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and earned a magna cum laude degree, in 1939. In 1939-40 he was law clerk to Justice Stanley F. Reed of the United States Supreme Court, and the following year he was clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had been one of his professors at Harvard.

Marriage and children

On June 5, 1940, he married Katharine Meyer, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, a multi-millionaire and the owner of The Washington Post, a struggling newspaper at the time. The newly wed couple settled down in a two-story row house on 37th Street NW.

During World War II, Graham enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a private (1942) and rose to the rank of major. Katharine followed him on military assignments to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania up until 1945, when he went to the Pacific theatre as an intelligence officer of the Far East Air Force.

Their first baby died at birth. Four children followed: Elizabeth ('Lally') Morris Graham, now Weymouth, born on July 3, 1943; Donald Edward Graham, April 22, 1945; William Welsh Graham (1948), and Stephen Meyer Graham (1952).

Career at The Washington Post Company

In 1946, when Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer was named the first president of the World Bank, he passed the position of publisher to Graham, his 31-year-old son-in-law. When Meyer left the World Bank later that year, he took the title of chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company, leaving Graham as publisher.

In 1948, Meyer transferred his actual control of the Post Company stock (the company was privately owned) to his daughter and her husband. Katharine received 30 percent as a gift. Phil received 70 percent of the stock, his purchase financed by his father-in-law, who trusted Graham and believed that no man should have to be burdened with working for his own wife. Meyer remained a close adviser to his son-in-law until Meyer died in 1959, at which time Graham assumed the titles of President and Chairman of the Board of the Post company.

In 1950, the Post Company purchased the CBS television station in Washington, D.C., and changed the call letters to WTOP-TV. In 1953, the company bought television station WJXT (then WMBR) in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1953. Both purchases displayed good business acumen - television was new and had an uncertain future in the 1950s, and their ownership would generate profits critically needed until the late 1950s when the newspaper finally became consistently profitable.

In 1954, the Post Company bought the competing morning newspaper, the Times-Herald, for $8.5 million. The Post kept most of the Times-Herald's advertising, features, columnists and comics -- and most of its readers. It immediately jumped ahead of the Evening Star, the city's prominent afternoon paper, in circulation, and in 1959, it passed the Star in advertising linage.

In 1961, the Post Company purchased the controlling stock interest in Newsweek magazine from the Vincent Astor Foundation. In New York City when the deal was closed, Graham wrote a check for $2,000,000 as a down payment on the $8,985,000 purchase price.

In 1962, the Post Company again expanded into the magazine field by buying Art News, the most widely read monthly in the art field, and Portfolio magazine, a hard-cover art quarterly, from Albert M. Frankfurter. While running the Washington Post and other parts of the Post Company, Graham played a backstage role in national politics. In 1960, he helped persuade John F. Kennedy, with whom he was friends, to take Johnson, a close friend, on his ticket as the vice presidential candidate, personally talking with both men multiple times during the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, California. During the 1960 campaign, he wrote drafts of for several speeches that Johnson gave. After Kennedy and Johnson were elected in November, he successfully lobbied for the appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, and had multiple discussions with Kennedy about other appointments. In the several years after the inaugural, he continued to write occasional drafts of speeches, primarily for Johnson, but also for the President and for Robert F. Kennedy.

"First rough draft of history"

In April, 1963, Graham delivered a speech to the overseas correspondents of Newsweek in London which continues to be quoted -- though widely misattributed, even by Helen Thomas in her own memoir First Row at the White House:

So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand....

Health problems and death

In 1957, Graham suffered an episode of manic depression (although it was not so diagnosed until 1963.) The medicines that now can effectively treat the illness were not then available. He retired to the couple's farm in Marshall, Virginia, to recuperate.

Thereafter, periods in which he functioned brilliantly alternated with periods in which he was morose and erratic and isolated himself. He often consumed too much alcohol (something he had done prior to 1957), and would become extremely argumentative and blunt.

Graham flew to Arizona in early 1963 with Robin Webb, an Australian newspaper stringer in Newsweek's Paris office, with whom he had started an affair in the summer of 1962. He showed up drunk at a newspaper publishing convention, grabbed the microphone, and asserted that John F. Kennedy was sleeping with Mary Pinchot Meyer. His assistant, James Truitt, called for his doctor, Leslie Farber, who flew in by private jet, as did (subsequently) Katharine. Graham was sedated, bound in a straitjacket, and flown back to Washington. He was committed for five days to Chestnut Lodge, a psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland (closed in 2001).

Graham then left his wife for Robin Webb, announced to his friends that he planned to divorce Katharine and immediately remarry, and indicated that he wanted to purchase sole control of the Post Company. In June, in a depressive phase of his illness, he broke off his affair and returned home. On June 20, 1963, he entered Chestnut Lodge for the second time, and was formally diagnosed as being manic-depressive (bipolar). He was treated with psychotherapy.

On August 3, 1963, after Graham had made repeated requests of his doctors to be allowed a short stay away from the hospital, and "quite noticeably much better," according to his wife, he was permitted to go to their farmhouse in Virginia for the weekend. There at 1 p.m., at age 48, he committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun.

During probate, Katharine's lawyer challenged the legality of Philip Graham's last will, written in 1963. Edward Bennett Williams testified that Phil had not been of sound mind when Williams had drawn up Phil's final will. Williams said that he had, at the same time he prepared the will, written a memorandum for the file stating that Graham was mentally ill, and that he was preparing the will at Graham's direction only to maintain Williams' relationship with the ill Graham. The judge in the case ruled that Phil had died intestate.

References