The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

  Katharine spent her early years under the rule of Agnes at the Mount Kisco estate, which the family referred to as the “farm” because it contained a large orchard, garden, dairy, and an old farmhouse where the farmhands lived in bachelor quarters. Every vegetable and piece of fruit on the dining table came from the surrounding fields and orchards. Kay ate meat from the farm’s own pigs and chickens and drank milk from its Jersey cows. Lavish bouquets of flowers appeared on the tables of each of the family’s houses every day, even in Washington, sped there from the Mount Kisco gardens. The Westchester mansion’s walls were covered with magnificent Chinese paintings; it boasted every status symbol of the era: an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, tennis courts, a massive pipe organ.

  Kay chose her riding horses from a stable of steeds handsome enough to draw Cinderella’s carriage and was taken on incredible vacations, once visiting Albert Einstein himself in Germany. When Agnes took the children camping to teach them independence, they roughed it accompanied by five ranch hands, eleven saddle horses, and seventeen packhorses.

  But the children had to make an appointment to see their own mother. They gobbled down their meals because Agnes, served first at the long dining-room table, began eating as the footmen moved around serving everyone else—and had the others’ plates snatched away the instant that she herself had finished. By her own admission, she did not love her children. She left them to be raised by nannies, governesses, and riding instructors; she sent them off to summer camps, boarding schools, and dancing class. Their only playmates were one another and the servants’ children. Agnes drank heavily, pursued flirtatious and obsessive (although apparently platonic) relationships with a number of famous men, and treated all other women as inferior, her own daughters among them. She compared Kay unfavorably to America’s sweetheart, Shirley Temple, the singing, dancing, smiling child star with golden blond ringlets.4 “If I said I loved The Three Musketeers,” Graham recalled, “she responded by saying I couldn’t really appreciate it unless I had read it in French as she had.”5 Kay was trained like a hybrid orchid, beautifully pampered, savagely critiqued for her show potential, and otherwise largely ignored. Still, by the time she reached the Madeira School in Washington, D.C., she had somehow managed to learn the skills of popularity and was elected head of her class—most surprising at that time and in that place because she was half Jewish.

  In Protestant Mount Kisco, the family had been socially shunned. Since at Agnes’s insistence the children were raised as Protestants—albeit nonobservant ones, for the most part—and were not even aware that their father was Jewish, Graham did not understand the reason for their isolation. Indeed, she would later be stunned at Vassar when a friend apologized because someone had made a bigoted remark about Jews in front of her. She reflected with hindsight that this clash in her bloodlines “leaves you either a good survival capacity or a total mess.”6 Or, perhaps, both.

  From her mother, Kay learned to be ungenerous about small things, fearful of being cheated, unable to give things away, and certain that people were trying to take advantage of her. By her own description, she also grew up inclined to be bossy.7 Yet others saw in her qualities of naiveté, candor, generosity, and open-heartedness that she herself seemed unable to acknowledge.

  She felt closer to her awkward, distant, yet supportive father. To Eugene Meyer, she attributed her zeal for tiny economies—compulsively turning out lights, never wasting anything. Her father’s talent for such economies, along with great infusions of time, money, and energy, had been crucial in keeping the ailing Washington Post alive while Kay was growing up, when the paper ranked fifth in a field of five in the capital area, far behind the dominant paper, the Washington Evening Star.8 But when Meyer began thinking of retiring in 1942, Kay’s brother, Bill, a doctor, had no interest in running an unprofitable newspaper, so the duty fell to Kay and her new husband, Philip Graham. Kay was besotted with Phil, and so convinced of her own lowliness that she accepted as a matter of course her father’s decision to sell Phil nearly two-thirds of the Post’s voting stock, giving him absolute control. Meyer did it because, he said, no man should have to work for his wife. Kay got the remainder.9

  Despite Meyer’s zeal in keeping the paper alive, when Phil Graham took it over, matters were out of hand. Certain people in the newsroom and the circulation department spent most of the day playing the horses and drinking. When Meyer was out of town, the first thing the office boy did every morning was bring one man a half pint of booze and the Daily Racing Form.10

  Phil Graham got the place shipshape, gave it an identity by fostering vigorous political coverage, and stamped its editorial page with a strong liberal voice. He bought Newsweek magazine and several television stations, and proved to be a brilliant publisher. But over time, drinking binges, a violent temper, unstable moods, and a cruel sense of humor showed themselves, with particularly devastating effects on his wife. When Katharine gained weight, he called her “Porky” and bought her a porcelain pig. She thought so little of herself that she found the joke funny and put the pig on the porch for display.

  “I was very shy,” she said. “I was afraid to be left alone with anybody because I’d bore them. I didn’t speak when we went out; I let him speak…. He was really brilliant and funny. Marvelous combination.”11

  Her husband played on her fears. When they were out with friends, Phil would look at her in a certain way when she was talking. She sensed that he was telling her that she was going on too long and boring people. She was convinced that she occupied some lesser sphere and could never meet the expected—but impossible—standard of living up to Shirley Temple. No wonder that, over time, she ceased speaking in public and let Phil take center stage.12 She grew so insecure that she vomited before parties. And by some accounts, the way Phil treated her in private was even worse.13 Her four children grew up seeing their father tear their mother apart. He would drink and build up to a violent rage; then she froze and shut down.

  She never confronted Phil, even when he embarked on a series of affairs with other women that supposedly included swapping mistresses with Jack Kennedy.14 Instead, she defended him, swept away by the force of his personality, wit, and brains. The more cruelly he behaved, the more she seemed to want to please him.15 “I thought that Phil literally created me,” she said. “My interests were better. I was surer of myself.”16 He thought she was lucky to have him, and she did too. When he finally left her for Newsweek staffer Robin Webb, she was stunned by the response of one of her friends, who said, “Good!” It had never occurred to her that she might be better off without Phil. But then he began trying to take the paper away from her, since he controlled two-thirds of the stock. Kay was terrified that she would lose her family’s newspaper.

  In 1963, in the midst of her battle to keep the paper, Phil Graham suffered a spectacular public breakdown, was diagnosed with manic depression, and committed himself to a mental institution. Six weeks later, he talked his way out of the hospital for a weekend leave. He came home to Glen Welby, the Grahams’ sprawling rural Virginia farm retreat. On Saturday, after eating lunch with Kay, he shot himself in a downstairs bathroom while she was upstairs taking a nap. He was forty-eight.

  His suicide left Kay with the paper, no longer threatened with its loss. She dreaded being in charge, but even though some suggested that she sell, she was absolutely determined to keep it; she saw her stewardship as a holding action until the next generation was ready to take over. “I didn’t know anything about management,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about complicated editorial issues. I didn’t know how to use a secretary. I didn’t know big things and small things and, worse still, I couldn’t tell them apart.”17

  While Graham could project a determined confidence at times, at work she began to rely on other people as she constantly rethought and questioned her own decisions. “I just kept trying to learn the issues from the men who were running things,” she wrote. “And of course, they were all men.” She nev
er trusted them or anyone else—but, of course, no one close to her had ever treated her in a trustworthy way. She would tentatively extend her confidence to someone, then second-guess herself and pull back. Alternately enthused, then disenchanted with her executives, she gained a fearsome reputation in the office. And all the while, she never stopped seeking advice.

  “As decisions would come along in the course of a day where she was very uncertain how to proceed,” says her son Don, “she was literally reinventing the wheel. She would be called upon to be a top manager of a company when she’d never been a bottom manager of a company. She hadn’t watched people who were CEOs, except the way you watch your husband or your dad.

  “And so she had the great habit, when she faced what she thought of as a difficult decision—it usually was a difficult decision—she would call directors, she would call friends whom she thought might have a relevant experience. It was partly getting advice to help her handle the problem. And it was partly trying out the friends as advisers to see who seemed to make sense and whom she’d call the next time.”18

  Early on, Graham began to lean on Fritz Beebe, a lawyer and the chairman of the Washington Post Company, finding him a strong source of support as she struggled with her new job.19 By then, the Post was the smallest of three remaining Washington newspapers, with $85 million in yearly revenues and $4 million in profits.

  Gradually she grew into her role. She and her managing editor, Ben Bradlee, had a vision of a national paper that would set a standard to rival the New York Times. Bradlee, born the WASPiest of Boston WASPs, a Harvard graduate whose Brahman of a first wife was the daughter of a U.S. Senator, had worked closely with intelligence agencies before turning to journalism. He was funny, brilliant, had an unexpected saltiness that belied his background, brought out the best in Graham—and encouraged reporters to thrive in an informal atmosphere of ambition and competition. Before long, the Post had developed a reputation for solid journalism. Three years after taking over the paper, Graham made Bradlee executive editor.

  In 1970 Kay was freed from the tyranny of her mother, Agnes, who died in bed while Kay was visiting Mount Kisco on Labor Day weekend. Kay went up to her mother’s bedroom to check on her after the maid told her that Agnes had not rung for her breakfast, and found her in bed, “weirdly inert and already cold,” Graham wrote in her memoir. She did not cry; while superficial books and movies could turn her into “a weeper” and she sometimes cried when angry or hurt—as she explained in her book—she never cried when anyone died.20 And while the death of Agnes Meyer relieved Graham of a burden, it did not cure her insecurities.

  In March 1971, amid continuing protests of the Vietnam War, the New York Times was leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers—a top-secret and ruthlessly honest history of the decision-making that led the country into and through Vietnam that had been commissioned by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.21 Comprising forty-seven volumes totaling seven thousand pages, the Pentagon Papers showed conclusively that the government had perpetrated a vast deception on the American public. The Times published its account of the scheme on Sunday, June 13.

  On June 15, about two weeks after Buffett and Munger had gone down to Washington to meet Graham in her office, a federal district court enjoined the Times from publishing most of the Pentagon Papers. It was the first time in history that a U.S. judge had restrained publication by a newspaper, raising a major constitutional question.

  The Post, mortified at having been scooped, was determined to get its hands on the Pentagon Papers. Through informed guesswork and contacts, an editor tracked down their source, Daniel Ellsberg, an expert on the Vietnam War. The editor flew to Boston with an empty suitcase and brought the Pentagon Papers back to Washington.

  By then Graham had mastered some of the basics of being a publisher, though she remained deferential and ill at ease. Further, “we were in the middle of going public [but] we hadn’t sold the stock,” she recalled. “It was a terribly sensitive time for the company, and we could have been very badly hurt if we’d been to court or criminally enjoined…. The business people were all saying either don’t do it or wait a day, and the lawyers were saying don’t do it. And the editors were on the other phone saying you’ve got to do it.”

  “I would have had to quit if we hadn’t published it,” says Ben Bradlee. “A lot of people would have quit.”

  “Everybody knew we had those papers,” Graham wrote later. “It was terribly important to maintain the momentum after the Times had been stopped, because the issue was the government’s ability to prior-restrain newspapers. And I felt what Ben said, that the editors would really be demoralized, that the news floor would be demoralized, that a great deal depended on our doing it.”

  Notified on the terrace of her Georgetown mansion that beautiful June afternoon that she had a call, Graham went into her library and sat down on a small sofa to pick up the phone. Post chairman Fritz Beebe was on the line. He told her, “I’m afraid you are going to have to decide.” Graham asked Beebe what he would do, and he said that he guessed he wouldn’t.

  “Why can’t we wait a day?” said Graham. “The Times discussed this for three months.” Now Bradlee and other editors joined the call. The grapevine, they said, knows we’ve got the papers, journalists inside and out are watching us. We’ve got to go, and we’ve got to go tonight.

  Meanwhile, in the library, Paul Ignatius, president of the Post, was standing at Graham’s side, saying, “each time more insistently—‘Wait a day, wait a day.’ I had about a minute to decide.”

  So she parsed Fritz Beebe’s words and his lukewarm tone when he said that he guessed he wouldn’t and concluded that he would back her if she chose a different course.

  “I said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.’ And I hung up.”22

  In that moment the woman who reached for the advice of others on every decision realized that only she could choose; when forced to reach inside to form her own opinion, she found that she did know what to do.

  Before the afternoon was out, the government filed suit against the Post. The following day, June 21, Judge Gerhard Gesell ruled in the newspaper’s favor, refusing to grant an order restraining it from publishing the Pentagon Papers. Less than two weeks later, the Supreme Court upheld him, saying the government had not met “the heavy burden” required to justify, on the grounds of national security, restraining publication.

  With the Pentagon Papers, the Post transcended its status as a decently run business that produced good local journalism and began its transformation into a great paper of national importance.

  “Her skill,” wrote reporter Bob Woodward, “was to raise the bar, gently but relentlessly.”23

  37

  Newshound

  Washington, D.C. • 1973

  Nearly two years later, the Post was deep into reporting the Watergate story, while in Omaha, the Sun’s reporters were basking in the glow of the Boys Town exposé. Reporting on Watergate, which began in June 1972 when the break-in occurred, had gradually picked up steam as Woodward and Bernstein linked a check made out to one of the burglars to the Nixon re-election campaign. The scandal unfolded over many months as a secret FBI informant, Mark Felt—code-named “Deep Throat” and known to no one but Bob Woodward until thirty-three years later—funneled information to them about CREEP, the Campaign to Re-elect the President, and about various CIA and FBI officials involved in funding and aiding the burglars. But other papers largely ignored the scandal, as did the public. Nixon was re-elected by a huge majority that fall, having vehemently denied any knowledge of or involvement in the break-in. The Nixon White House, which was already actively hostile to the Post because of the Pentagon Papers episode, dismissed Watergate as “a third-rate burglary attempt” and kept up a barrage of threats and harassment against the paper. Attorney General John Mitchell, who had managed Nixon’s election campaign, told Woodward and Bernstein that “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big f
at wringer” if the Post continued to report the story. A Wall Street friend with administration contacts advised her “not to be alone.”

  In early 1973, a Republican fund-raiser who was a friend of Richard Nixon challenged the renewal of the Post’s two Florida television licenses. The challenge, which was probably politically motivated, threatened half of the company’s earnings, an attack on the heart of the business.1 In response, WPO stock plunged from a high of $38 to as low as $16 a share.

  Yet even with a Pulitzer in hand, the Watergate burglars convicted and sent to prison, and a growing body of evidence linking top Nixon administration officials to the break-in, Graham kept second-guessing herself about whether the paper was being set up or misled.2 Most of her time and attention now went to fighting these fires. Her chairman, Fritz Beebe, was ill with cancer and declining rapidly,3 and still in need of an authority figure to rely upon, she increasingly turned toward another of her board members, André Meyer, senior partner of the investment bank Lazard Frères.

  Vindictive, ruthless, secretive, snobbish, and sadistic, Meyer “crushed other people’s personalities.” He was known as “the Picasso of Banking” and a man with “an almost erotic attachment to money,” and called the greatest investment banker of the twentieth century, “a genius of the art of acquisitiveness,” according to his colleagues.4 He was also the well-connected man who had warned Graham during Watergate not to be alone. He “had an ability to relate to people at times of distress in a way that created loyalty and exposed him to grand opportunities in the future,” said a former Lazard executive.5 He soon took up Graham socially as well and was seen with her at restaurants, parties, and the theater.