Phil Graham

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For the U.S. Senator from Texas, see Phil Gramm

Philip Leslie Graham (July 18, 1915 - August 3, 1963) was an American publisher and businessman.

Among his many accomplishments was his position as publisher of The Washington Post, a position he held from 1946 until his death in 1963.

Contents

[edit] 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 has had a notable career in government, as a former governor of the state of Florida (1979-1987) and a former United States Senator representing Florida 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.

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] Leadership of company under Graham

  • 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.

[edit] Involvement in politics

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.

In 1961, Kennedy named Graham to serve as an incorporator for the Communications Satellite Corporation, known as COMSAT, a joint venture between the private sector and government for satellite communications. In October 1961, he was appointed chairman of the group.

[edit] "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....

[edit] Health problems and death

In Katherine Graham's book Personal History, she notes that Philip Graham was always intense and spontaneous, but occasionally lapsed into dark depressions. The first clear sign of Graham's manic behavior, which would later be identified as manic depression, came in 1957. He suffered a severe episode and, at the time, no medicines were available for effective treatment. 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.

Through the Post Company's Newsweek arm, Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. In 1963, he and Webb flew to Arizona; he appeared at a newspaper publishing convention inebriated and/or manic. At the microphone he made a number of provocative comments, including the observation 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, Glen Welby, for the weekend. While his wife was in another part of the retreat, Graham committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. He was 48 at the time of his death.

During probate, Katharine's lawyer challenged the legality of Philip Graham's last will, written in 1963. Edward Bennett Williams testified that Graham had not been of sound mind when he had instructed Williams to draw up his 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' their relationship. The judge in the case ruled that Graham had died intestate.

[edit] Trivia

  • The Washington Post Company's ABC affiliate station in Miami, Florida, has call letters that were assigned to the station in honor of Philip Graham in 1970 - station WPLG uses his initials.

[edit] References

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