Portrait of a Marriage

Katharine Graham was the daughter of the wealthy and influential owner of The Washington Post; her husband, Phil Graham, was a star of his generation, more dynamic even than his close friend John F. Kennedy. But as manic-depression twisted Phil's mind, Kay was the main victim of his increasingly cruel and erratic behavior. In her new book, CAROL FELSENTHAL looks back at a marriage that shaped one of the nation's most powerful publishers

Phil could never shake the idea that the Post had been a dowry from his marriage to Kay.

On June 30, 1987, Katharine Graham's children threw her a 70th-birthday party that provided flesh-and-blood evidence of their mother's standing. Six hundred guests paid homage to the C.E.O. and chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company at a black-tie dinner held in a cavernous federal auditorium festooned with giant bouquets and with 60-foot curtains draping the building's soaring columns. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd called it "by far the largest and most impressive party in the capital since President Reagan's second inaugural." Reagan himself paid Kay an almost unprecedented tribute by staying the whole evening, rather than the customary 15 minutes. After the fish course he led Kay to the dance floor for a spin to music conducted by society bandleader Peter Duchin.

Kay's daughter, Lally Weymouth, who had hatched the idea for the party and organized it—Kay's son Donald served as M.C.—had gone to Henry Kissinger for suggestions on whom to invite. He was heavy on world leaders. "Heads started rolling on my mother's bedroom floor," Weymouth would later recall, as Kay insisted that only friends be invited. Friends indeed.

A cast of luminaries helped Kay celebrate: At dinner, she sat between the president and Secretary of State George Shultz. Also in attendance were justices of the Supreme Court, senators, ambassadors from several countries, network anchors, nearly every member of Reagan's Cabinet, the heads of Sony, IBM, Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Dow Jones. Among the others were Oscar de la Renta, who had designed the black-and-white polka-dot gown Kay wore that evening, Malcolm Forbes, Rupert Murdoch, William Paley, Punch Sulzberger, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, H. Ross Perot, Warren Buffett, Helmut Kohl, former British prime minister James Callaghan, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, I. M. Pei, Jack Valenti, Clare Boothe Luce, Brooke Astor, Ethel Kennedy, and Gordon Getty.

As usual, Art Buchwald was asked to make a toast. He brought down the house when he observed, ''There's one word that brings us all together here tonight, and that word is 'fear.' " In his toast, Kissinger paid sentimental tribute to his friendship with Kay, calling it one of the "central facts" of his life. Meg Greenfield and George Will also made toasts. The showstopper was President Reagan, who took his wineglass with him to the podium and, after praising Kay, rasped, in a fine Humphrey Bogart imitation, "Here's looking at you, kid."

Some children are born to parents who struggle so that their sons and daughters may do better in life than they have. Other children are born to parents who are themselves so brilliant, so extraordinarily talented, that no matter how good the parents' intentions the children are doomed to come in second.

Katharine Meyer, now known to the world as Katharine Graham, was born into the latter sort of family. Her mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, was a woman of stupendous drive, competence, creativity, guts, and soaring selfconfidence. Many found her insufferable and even ridiculous, while others looked beyond the bombast to recognize her genuine gifts; her friend Thomas Mann wrote in 1943 to thank her for extricating him from a passport snafu: "The impression grows that you are running the country." Katharine rarely enjoyed the generosity and largeness of spirit that Agnes reserved for her prominent friends, however. Deep feelings of intimidation infected Kay's childhood and most of her adult years, even when she ran one of the most respected, influential, and profitable newspapers in the world.

Kay's father, Eugene Meyer, was a man whose long life encompassed several distinguished careers, any one of which—even part of one—would have satisfied the most ambitious of men. Had Eugene not been born a Jew in an age when Jews who were too powerful were suspect, his name would be known today to every schoolchild. As it was, he made millions on Wall Street before he turned 40, and served seven presidents, in positions that he sometimes invented but that he nearly always carried out with intelligence so stunning as to render himself irreplaceable. In 1933, 57 years old and exhausted, Eugene talked of retiring. Instead, at a bankruptcy sale, he bought The Washington Post—a newspaper that had sunk to the level of a joke.

Today, Kay Graham is one of the richest women in the world. Her family's wealth is pegged at $565 million, and at the time of her retirement in early 1991, she was one of only two female heads of Fortune 500 companies. Her empire, besides the Post and Newsweek, encompasses a 50 percent ownership of the International Herald Tribune; four television stations and 53 cabletelevision systems; 15 percent of ACTV, a producer of interactive television; and much more.

Kay Graham is not only one of the world's wealthiest women but also one of its most powerful people. When The Washington Post takes an editorial position, hundreds of editorial-page editors follow suit. "The power is to set the agenda," she once said. "What we print and what we don't print matter a lot."

What Kay Graham could be proudest of was that along with her financial success she achieved editorial quality. The mist of nostalgia about her late husband, Phil Graham, who ran the Post until his death in 1963, obscures the fact that, for all his brilliance, all his energy, all his nerve, he published what former Post reporter William Greider calls "a political-hack paper." Veteran newsman Frank Waldrop reduces Phil to "a transition figure"; the Post "came to life under Katharine." Kay brought it off by swallowing her fears and insecurities long enough to put now legendary editor Ben Bradlee in charge. Under Bradlee it became a great American newspaper which published the Pentagon Papers and pursued the Watergate investigation even in the face of serious threats from the Nixon administration. The argument might be made that the Post has coasted for too long on its Pentagon Papers and Watergate fame, but the fact remains that Kay made the right decisions in those cases—decisions that she knew could cause financial ruin. Kermit Lansner, once the top editor at Newsweek, echoes that "under her tenure the two stories of our time were allowed to proceed. She did not stop them. However scared she was, however terrified, it doesn't matter. She did it."

Excerptcd from Power. Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story, by Carol Felsenthal, to be published this month by Putnam; ® 1993 by Carol Felsenthal; printed by permission of the author.

Frank Waldrop credits Kay with having "something very few people have: the capacity to be underestimated. It's a priceless gift. Phil was overestimated." It is touching that Kay is not one of those who believe that Phil was overestimated. On the day in 1979 when she made her son Donald publisher, she paid tribute to his father for "infusing [the Post] with quality, energy, drive, momentum, local strength, and national impact, and—last but not least—his own characteristics: irreverence, healthy skepticism, and gaiety."

On the morning of August 5, 1963, the day before Phil Graham's funeral, Katharine Graham rehearsed, over and over again, the remarks that James Reston, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, had helped her compose and that she would deliver to the board of directors of the Washington Post Company. She was terrified of these men. They felt sorry for her, she knew, but they could barely hide their contempt for the very idea of this shrinking, fragile woman running a multimillion-dollar corporation.

Those who knew Kay well at the time stress that her total lack of preparation and confidence cannot be overstated: "Kay really knew nothing when Phil killed himself," says former chief of correspondents for Time-Life Richard Clurman. "She knew nothing about anything. She wasn't even a Washington socialite. She seemed a pleasant woman whom you sympathized with [for] being married to this electrifying . . .kinetic figure. Kay was a big brown wren in every department." Howard Simons, who had joined the Post in 1961 as a science writer, said that Kay reminded him of "a shaky little doe, coming on wobbly legs out of the forest."

Kay Graham herself has admitted that a story that sounded outlandish enough to be apocryphal was true: Before the Post Christmas party in 1963, at which she was expected to make some innocuous remarks, "I was walking up and down at home saying 'Merry Christmas' to everybody. The children were convulsed by that. They'd say, 'Really, Ma, do you have to practice "Merry Christmas"?'

During Christmas week 1939, Katharine Meyer, 22, more than a year out of the University of Chicago and recently employed by her father, Eugene, at The Washington Post, went to a party at Hockley Hall, the Arlington, Virginia, mansion where Phil Graham lived with a group of other eligible bachelors. It was there, according to her escort that evening, that she met Phil, Harvard Law graduate and clerk to a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Her companion was smart enough to make a speedy and graceful exit.

"She was extraordinarily shy, a person who really didn't express her opinion," said Truman Capote.

On their first date, Phil told Kay that she would marry him. By their third, they were engaged and Phil had informed her that he would take no money from her father, that she would have only two dresses, and that when his clerkship ended they would move to his home state of Florida, where he would enter politics. People who knew him understood why Kay could do nothing but nod yes.

Phil Graham was routinely described as the most magnetic young man in a city packed with the finest of them, all there, in one way or another, to help F.D.R. change the course of history. "Of all the young men of my generation," says Kay's college friend Sidney Hyman, "he had the most energy, dash, imagination, charm, wit, capacity, looks.'' The socially and politically prominent Marietta Tree de-

Kay would sometimes talk to Phil for eight hours at a time, trying fruitlessly to lift his spirits.

scribed Phil as "knockout attractive.'' But more than that, people thought he would become at least a Supreme Court justice, or, more probable, president of the United States.

His early years offered no indication that he was destined for such accolades. Philip Leslie Graham was born on July 18, 1915, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, in a mining town called Terry that is no longer on the map. Light-years separated the Graham family and its hardscrabble life from the Meyers, who that year moved into their Fifth Avenue apartment with their two daughters, newborn son, and retinue of servants. By the end of the First World War, Eugene Meyer's wealth was estimated at $60 million.

Ernest "Cap" Graham did not strike it rich as a miner. He moved his family to the Florida Everglades, ran a dairy farm, and eventually made it big: he had bought up real estate around his farm, in what was a mosquito-infested wilderness some 20 miles from downtown Miami—a city that was just beginning to boom.

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If Cap Graham was rough-hewn, Phil's mother was genteel. And she was determined that her son understand that there was a fascinating world outside the swamp. Phil skipped grades in elementary school and junior high, progressed to Miami Senior High at age 12, then entered the state university in Gainesville, graduating in 1936 with a major in economics, and was accepted at Harvard Law School. In June 1938, Phil Graham of the Florida Everglades was voted president of the Harvard Law Review by his fellow editors. He had also come to the attention of Professor Felix Frankfurter, whom F.D.R. would name to the Supreme Court the following year. No one at the law school was more important to know, and when Phil graduated, in June 1939, he went to Washington to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed—on the recommendation of Justice Frankfurter.

On June 5, 1940, less than six months after their first meeting, Phil and Kay were married—like her parents, Agnes and Eugene, in a Lutheran ceremony, with the reception at the Meyers' estate in Mount Kisco, New York. Alan Finberg, later a lawyer for the Washington Post Company, observes, "Phil was a much better catch for her than she was for Phil. He was a blazing star.''

It would not be an easy marriage.

When Kay Graham arrived at the Post in 1939, editor Felix Morley noted in his diary that she was "a well-poised and intelligent girl who evidently was to be groomed as the eventual owner-publisher."

With her marriage, Kay's ambitions died. Perhaps it was her assumption that her father no longer took her seriously as his successor and was passing the mantle to the son-in-law, whose potential, like his own, knew no bounds. Nothing was said, but Eugene's biographer later wrote, "If Graham would interest himself in the paper, with Kay at his side, that might well be the ideal solution." Fascinated as he was by public affairs, Phil could not help but take an interest in the Post. As for Kay, her belief that this man was destined for greatness was so overpowering that she felt it was a privilege to do anything to ease his way.

In the meantime, another Supreme Court clerkship—one that he knew would prove all-consuming—awaited Phil. Having placed him with Stanley Reed for the 1939-40 session, Felix Frankfurter took Phil for himself for the following year.

The newlyweds, still clinging to the idea of remaining independent from the Meyer millions, set up housekeeping in the decidedly downscale neighborhood of Burleith, just outside Georgetown, in a $75-a-month two-story row house on 37th Street.

Wanting to be the conventional helpmate and as different as possible from her domineering mother, Kay suggested that she quit her job and learn to cook—this from a woman who was said to have rarely even seen the kitchen in the houses she grew up in. "My God," Phil told her, "I don't think I could stand having you wait around with a pie for me to come home from the Court. You continue to work and we'll pay a maid with what you make." So Kay worked, but without the commitment she had had before.

Phil would arrive home late, often with a fellow clerk or two in tow, after hours of arguing and socializing with Frankfurter and his former clerks. To one acquaintance, Kay seemed "very shy, very withdrawn. And Phil was ebullient and very attractive and full of ideas. I never heard her assert herself in that period." The late Libby Rowe, whose husband, James, was F.D.R.'s secretary, recalled Phil as "a dominating presence" and "such a great talker there wasn't time to get into the conversation."

Unlike Agnes—surely deliberately unlike Agnes—Kay wanted to have children and to devote herself to them, at least when she wasn't devoting herself to Phil. But having children was not as easy for her as it had been for her mother. Kay's first pregnancy continued to term, but the baby was stillborn, strangled by the umbilical cord. Kay, being Kay, must have believed this was somehow her failure, especially as her friends delivered healthy babies. The tragedy was doubly sad because the dead baby was a boy and Kay no doubt felt that she had somehow deprived her husband of his first son. Two miscarriages reportedly followed before she finally gave birth to Elizabeth, called "Lally," in 1944.

Kay told no one that her husband, who always appeared perfect to the outside world, had periods of despair. Although it was not clear why he suffered these episodes, and though they passed quickly, Kay probably blamed herself, focusing on the death of the baby boy and the suffocating wealth and stature of her family.

Some of Phil's friends speculated that the plunges in Phil's otherwise relentlessly high spirits may have been triggered by his sensitivity to being the poor son-inlaw. After his year with Frankfurter, Phil went to work for two New Deal agencies on the front lines of the war-preparedness movement. The audacity and arrogance behind his ability to get things done were also bound to breed resentment, and thus came whispers that Phil, the redneck southerner, had married Kay for her father's money, power, and position and the instant legitimacy they bestowed upon him. Phil wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly under the byline of his boss, who gave him half the $800 fee. His colleagues describe his waving the four $100 bills about with a giddy exultation, as if to say, "Look at me, I can make money, too."

On weekend visits to Mount Kisco, Phil appeared both to enjoy the farm and to sneer at its overstated opulence. Kay's friend Betty Frank and her new husband visited the Grahams there: "We'd come up with dirty socks and pajamas thrown into an old suitcase, and the butler would unpack for us. There would be a Brancusi in the middle of the floor." She recalls Kay and Phil "standing under the old man's window and singing the 'Internationale' to needle him." The impulse, she says, was surely Phil's.

"I'm 67," Eugene told Phil in 1942. "I've got to know if you are interested in coming to the paper."

He stressed that he was asking Phil to commit to a newspaper that was bleeding $1 million a year. It was, Kay would say years later, "the one paper in town that everyone just assumed would go out of business."

Still, the Post was winning kudos for its editorials—and that, for Phil, was everything. The national press took note of the Post in a way that confirmed for him the effect he could have at the helm. In 1943, Time called it "one of the world's ten greatest newspapers."

It was, however, not an easy decision for Phil, who "had some apprehension about the son-in-law situation," according to the late Post reporter and editor in chief of Time Inc., Hedley Donovan. "Phil was a little bit of a Hamlet at that time about whether he should do [it]," his lifelong friend Joe Rauh recalled. "He didn't just say, 'Yes, I'm coming. Boy, what an opportunity!' " But he did encourage Eugene to assume that he would cast his lot with the Post.

Meanwhile, Kay continued to work at the Post, in the editorial department and then, when she seemed eager to diminish her role, in circulation.

In mid-1944, Phil left for the Pacific and became an intelligence officer on the staff of Far Eastern air commander general George Kenney in the Philippine bombing campaigns. He performed with his usual flair, and in the fall of 1945, Phil Graham, recipient of the Legion of Merit, was discharged from the army as a major. He had, presumably, every reason to feel happily expectant. The Grahams' daughter was joined in 1945 by a son, Donald. (Two more sons, William and Stephen, followed.) Phil was returning home to a wife who worshiped him, in-laws who adored him, and a clear route to the top of The Washington Post. Yet he still suffered from periods of dejection. "Yesterday I was saturated with gloom and had been for some days and could see nothing bright at all presently or for some time to come," he wrote home the month after Donny's birth. But he could bounce just as quickly into high spirits: "Today for no good reason I feel quite jubilant, life seems better and easier; and all in all I feel that it is my oyster."

In January 1946, Phil assumed a $30,000-a-year position as associate publisher of the Post. Kay retired from the circulation department. Perhaps she sensed that her presence would broadcast the fact that Phil had the second-mostpowerful job at the paper because he was the owner's son-in-law. Or perhaps she was merely following the droves of women leaving newspapers to make room for returning veterans.

Retirement was not easy for Kay, especially when it was coupled with having Phil back. She had grown accustomed to her freedom, and now she was under his disapproving gaze. Family friend June Bingham and her husband, Jonathan, who had both grown close to Kay while Phil was in the Pacific, saw a disturbing change. "She was very different when Phil [came back]," June recalls. "We had gotten to know her when he wasn't [around], and she was outgoing, fun, and bright, and had convictions. It was a pleasure to be with her. And then when he was around, she was a mouse." The Binghams did not like the way Phil treated "Kate," as he then called her: "There was a little too much of the taming of the shrew, except she didn't need to be tamed."

One friend speculates that Kay allowed herself to be squashed "because she did not want to be anything like her mother." "In a funny way," says June Bingham, "Phil was Agnes Meyer in male clothes." Although "he was bright, sharp, and could charm the birds off the trees, he was potentially cruel, somebody I would never drop my guard with. He was self-centered, self-important, arrogant. You had a feeling when you were with him that you had to be witty or otherwise hold your peace, and Kay, I think, held her peace pretty much."

Kay was accustomed to living in something grander than the row house on 37th Street. She had heard about a place that seemed more suitable for the newly named publisher of The Washington Post —an eight-bedroom brick mansion at 31 st and R, one of the most valuable houses in Georgetown, complete with a circular driveway, expanses of lawn, and a view over Georgetown from the rear and Oak Hill Cemetery from the front. It was not affordable on Phil's salary, so Kay went to her father for the down payment.

'I'm better-looking than Jack Kennedy, I'm more successful with girls, I'm a lot smarter. Why is he president?"

Friends say that Phil could never shake the idea that the Post had been a dowry of sorts from his marriage to Kay. But if it was a dowry, it was an unsatisfying one to the impatient Phil: while Eugene had given Phil the title of publisher, he waited until 1948 to transfer the voting stock to him and Kay. Consequently, Phil was torn between loving his new career and feeling cornered and used—the kept sonin-law—when he might have been practicing law and starting a political career. He watched with envy as some new and old Washington friends and peers, such as John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and his college roommate George Smathers, were elected to Congress—making policy, not merely reporting on it. He despaired that he had made a terrible mistake.

Phil turned his anger toward Eugene Meyer because, the former Post reporter Bernard Nossiter explained, "Phil was not a self-made man. Phil was a man made by the old man. My guess is that when Phil married this [then] ugly duckling, which she was—insecure, nervous, bright perhaps, but much too timid—he must have heard an awful lot of talk, joshing, but [also] serious talk about 'Oh boy, I can see why you married her.' Who knows? Phil was an ambitious man. Perhaps that was a motive, to promote himself, get himself a rich father-in-law and a standing high jump into the upper reaches of Washington. Yep, a man on the make, Phil certainly was."

But Phil's hand grew stronger, and at the end of the day it was Phil making the important decisions. Eugene Meyer and Kay, the daughter he had once considered his heir, were lost in the shadow of a man who was becoming increasingly powerful—and unpredictable.

Phil had spells of despising his fatherin-law; he would call him a "kike" to his face, and threaten that if Eugene tried to intrude into the paper's management he would take up the practice of law. Phil insisted that, without Eugene's money and power, "I would have made it on my own," and that had he not acceded to Eugene's demand to take over the Post, and instead returned to Florida to practice law, "I might be in the Senate now."

As "kike" was sprinkled more regularly into Phil's conversation, some of his friends began to question his mental health; a few even spotted classic symptoms of manic-depression. But George Smathers, among others, saw nothing odd about Phil's behavior: "I never heard him say anything that would indicate to me that he was the least bit anti-Semitic, not the least." Smathers adds, however, that "if Phil was angry and trying to hurt somebody, he might say, 'Well, that's a kike for you.' But I don't think he had any basic dislike of all the Jewish people. 1 knew a lot of Jewish boys he was very friendly with."

To the outside world, this side of Phil would have been considered amazing. During his energized, "up" cycles, no one was more dazzling. "Phil Graham walked into a room and took it over," David Halberstam wrote, "charming and seducing whomever he wished, men and women alike. No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he smiled. . . .everything stopped. He was the Sun King." Jean Friendly, Kay's childhood friend and later the wife of Post managing editor AI Friendly, remembers that Phil "could get on the tennis court without a racket in his hand and defeat you. You cannot imagine what an influence he was on everybody around."

Phil's craggily handsome face adorned the cover of r/me for April 16, 1956, under the headline A MONTAGE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM, and it seemed only natural that he should be gazing out from one of the world's best-known magazines. Though conservatively slanted, the weekly fawned over him, calling him "an energetic charmer" with "a Lincolnesque look." As for his paper, Time claimed, "Washington reaches for the Post as Broadway reaches for Variety or bankers for the Wall Street Journal."

There was one dig, though, that certainly did bother Phil—the observation that he had "started at the top ten years ago without ever having covered a news story, written an editorial or sold an ad. ... He became a newspaper publisher by marrying the boss's daughter." Kay paid dearly for that comment.

Overweight, pale, dowdy, and thinhaired, Kay was Phil's most convenient target. His magnificent verbal agility, when aimed at a person who had sparked his anger, contempt, or self-loathing, was truly terrible. "What he did to Kay to destroy her was awful," recalls Jean Friendly. "He was so clever, he was like a dentist's drill, [knowing] just where to hit the nerve." The nerve, according to friends, was Kay's Jewish blood. "He played the 'Horst Wessel' song [a Nazi march] to her," said Bernard Nossiter. "He called her a dirty Jew. He found the nerve that would vibrate the house. I think this was Phil also pouring shit on himself. This comes under the heading of psychopathology and not politics."

Phil had no compunction about letting everybody know he found Kay distasteful. Jean Friendly says he disparaged Kay in front of everybody and, most wickedly, in front of their children. At dinner parties, he would ask the guests, "Do you know the first thing Kay does every morning? She looks in the mirror and says how lucky she is to be married to me." No matter who was at dinner—a Supreme Court justice, a university president, Lyndon Johnson and his wife. Lady Bird— Kay was invariably the butt of her husband's jokes. Nothing was off-limits, not her medical problems, her weight, her clothes, her intellect. Kay herself told Post reporter Chalmers Roberts, "I was always the butt of family jokes. You know, good old Mom, plodding along. And I accepted it. That's the way I viewed myself."

Kay was at her worst in those years; Phil, at least to the outside world, was at his best. One friend observed that they were less like husband and wife than like "prince and attendant." Nossiter remembered the annual party that Phil gave for Post reporters, editors, and executives at Glen Welby, the family farm in Virginia. "Kay would be so nervous and tight and clenched that she could barely shake anyone's hand or squeeze out a word, and Phil, of course, [would be] beaming and making verbal love to all the wives."

Erwin Knoll, then a Post reporter, also recounts Kay's behavior at these annual events: "She went around apologizing for his language, which was incorrigible. He was profane at all times. In front of [everybody]. I don't think he knew how to talk any other way. He was charming, but he had this macho compulsion to talk in obscenities."

Despite her background, Kay seemed ill at ease at Glen Welby. Her home, her dinners, her clothes—all lacked elegance and style. She knew it, of course, and neither her mother nor her husband would ever let her forget it.

Phil particularly abhorred Kay's lack of style because she was, in his mind, a reflection on him. Before an important party, he would call an editor at Harper's Bazaar and ask her to find something suitable for Kay to wear. But Kay needed more intensive care, and Phil would also come to depend on Richard Clurman's wife, Shirley, to keep Kay from being too much of an embarrassment. As a director of public relations at Time Inc., Shirley knew Phil; she had never met Kay. He arranged a lunch for them to meet. After a long and friendly meal, according to a friend, Kay told Shirley, "I'm so glad to meet you. I always thought my husband was having an affair with you, but now I can see that he wasn't. You're a nice girl."

Kay started out relying for fashion advice on Washington cave-dweller friends, with whom she felt more comfortable, but not even Lorraine Cooper, the very stylish wife of Senator John Sherman Cooper, or Evangeline Bruce, wife of Ambassador David Bruce, known throughout the world for her elegance and taste, could pull Kay together. Kay would later turn to Babe Paley; CBS head William Paley's wife, Kay said, "really knew how to do it." At a lunch with her, Kay met Truman Capote, who was unimpressed: "She was extraordinarily shy, a person who really didn't express her opinion. Not well-dressed, seeming not to have any interest in that at all. She was a person who just didn't care."

In many ways, Phil damaged Kay's confidence more than her mother ever did. He could be meaner and cruder than Agnes, who would not have bothered to waste her animus on so unworthy a target as Kay. Agnes was often absent, while Phil was virtually inescapable, his unforgiving eye trained on his nervous wife. Agnes would become so caught up in herself that she hardly noticed her children. Her selfishness rendered her barbs less targeted, relevant, and hurtful. Phil was so attuned to his wife that his arrows always pierced.

Once Kay had married, Agnes's attentions turned to Phil; for her, Kay might as well have been a girl hired to bear his children and run his house. An oft told story has Kay, children in tow, approaching her husband and her mother as they talked in a hallway at Mount Kisco. "Pardon us, dear," Agnes said, "we're having an intellectual conversation."

People who were around Phil even in a casual way began to see that he was "off his center." By the end of October 1957, he had sunk into a full-fledged depression and, with Kay, retreated to Glen Welby. He told three of his aides that he had had a nervous breakdown and was going to the farm to recuperate. He and Kay stayed there for a full six months, Phil spending his days and nights in bed, curtains drawn, or fishing on Lake Katharine. The burden on Kay was terrible—to pull him out of a despondency that seemed to have no bottom. She would sometimes talk to him for eight hours at a time, trying fruitlessly to lift his spirits.

A manic state followed, and Phil went back to Washington in preparation for returning to the Post, but his friends knew that he had not recovered. Kay called Joe Rauh: "Phil's ready to go out. Can [we] come over for the evening?" Rauh saw immediately that Phil was sick; his talk was a stream of profanities. "Our son and his fiancee were here. Phil wouldn't talk that way in front of a young lady. It was sad. We acted as if nothing had happened."

Newbold Noyes, once executive editor of The Washington Star, remembers Phil's profanity—in front of women too—as extreme; it might have been comical had it not been so pathetic. "He got to a stage where he couldn't hold a conversation with anyone without absolute gutter language streaming out, for no reason at all. He wasn't angry, but every other word was a four-letter word, and talking with a woman [was] no different."

There is a genetic, physiological predisposition to manic-depression, and many of Phil's friends believe the profession he chose exacerbated it. He was enormously frustrated to find that publishers did not have the kind of power they were purported to have, former Post editorial writer Karl Meyer (no relation) contends. A publisher's power is "hostage to the organization [he's] part of, and that is different from running a corporation. . . . Newspapers can do many things—they can make issues, they publicize people—but when it comes to the great decisions of war and peace, press power is marginal." Phil was an "energetic lobbyist" for his views, explains Meyer, but he could not "impose" them on everything the paper did.

Meyer insists that Phil Graham was simply unsuited for the role of publisher. "Part of Phil's mental problem was that he was a ferociously ambitious fellow who really wanted to be president of the United States, or at least a figure of political consequence, but he was running an institution with a very tricky form of power. It's not a coincidence that so many great publishers have gone mad or otherwise have been mentally unhinged—[Lord] Northcliffe, or Hearst. Megalomania is a common problem."

In the summer and fall of 1960, Phil Graham was well out of his depression, and in a manic state. For Kay Graham, the most painful three years of her life were ahead.

In July, Phil was off to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention, where he would finally have a chance to play kingmaker. Having earlier championed L.6.J., he urged J.F.K. to select Johnson as his running mate once it became clear that Johnson wasn't going to make it. The Post maintained an independent, nonpartisan stance, yet no one doubted for a second where Phil stood. Knowing that he would have a place in the inner circle, he desperately wanted Kennedy to win.

Phil was particularly captivating that year. "I could feel patronizing toward a Kennedy who was running for the presidency," says Kay's friend Sidney Hyman, but "to feel patronizing toward Phil Graham, I'd [think] the Lord God Jehovah would strike me dead with a lightning bolt. ... He was an outsize figure."

Phil harbored a similar view of himself. A crack heard often in Washington, and attributed to Phil, went: "I'm better-looking than Jack Kennedy, I'm more successful with girls, I'm a lot smarter. Why is he president?" Phil got good and drunk at the inaugural ball.

Several weeks later, he was in another state of euphoria, this time transported by the possibility of buying Newsweek. The deal was concluded by mid-March, and it was brilliant—for a net cost of just over $9 million, Phil got what David Halberstam would call "one of the great steals of contemporary journalism."

Phil was ecstatic. Nearly everyone was on a high the evening he and his top men celebrated the deal at '21.' Osborn Elliott, whom Phil named editor of the magazine, would have a salary twice what he had earned before. Ben Bradlee, whom Phil named Washington bureau chief, would receive a finder's fee of Washington Post Company stock options which would later help make him a multimillionaire.

Phil had taken to bringing Robin Webb to the newsroom and introducing her as "the next Mrs. Graham."

Oz Elliott had met Kay only briefly before and remembered her as "quiet and shy. ' ' That night at '21,' she was also sick with tuberculosis. Her doctor had told her only hours before that she had a spot on one lung, but she waited until the next morning to tell Phil, not wanting to dampen his excitement. She waited another few weeks before taking to her bed for three months.

To Phil, Kay was, as usual, a drain, certainly not someone to impress his new friends. The other wives seemed daunting to her. Graham-family lawyer Fritz Beebe's wife was charming and witty, "a European beauty. . . whose family background was so complicated that," according to Elliott, "she insisted the only way it could be explained was that her grandfathers were sisters." Bradlee had divorced Jean Saltonstall and married, in 1956, the very blonde and beautiful Antoinette "Tony" Pinchot, an artist who was close to Jacqueline Kennedy.

For Kay, this evening was a taste of things to come—the Kennedy years, when everybody, it appeared, was so bright, so witty, so attractive. Yet here she was, so clumsy, with looks that merited not a second glance and conversation that was stunted into near muteness, so fearful was she of saying something that would reflect badly on Phil.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Phil's next major acquisition would be female. In Paris on business, Phil ordered Larry Collins, then head of Newsweek's Paris bureau, to find him a secretary who could take dictation in English. Collins asked Robin Webb, an Australian who was his girlfriend's "best pal" and who had been working in the bureau as a secretary and stringer.

Phil summoned Robin to his hotel for some dictation, then asked her to handdeliver a highly confidential business letter to Bill Paley at CBS in New York. Collins had no choice but to let her go. Robin did not have an American visa, and it was after embassy hours. Phil told Collins, "I'll get Chip Bohlen [the U.S. ambassador]. . .to get his ass into gear and over to his frigging consulate, open it up and give the girl a visa." At dawn the next day Robin had her visa, and Phil instructed her: "You are only to give this letter to Bill Paley personally, not to his secretary." He drove her to the airport and accompanied her as far as he could before security guards stopped him. When she turned to say good-bye—according to Arnaud de Borchgrave, then Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent, who heard the details later from her— "he grabbed her in his arms and kissed her passionately."

At the airport in New York, a limousine awaited her with flowers and a note directing her to proceed to the Carlyle hotel and, except to deliver the letter to Paley, not to leave her room until Phil arrived, as he did three days later. "She called me right away," de Borchgrave recounts, "and said, 'Incidentally, what am I supposed to do? Larry wants me back immediately. It's all very embarrassing.' And I said, 'Phil being our boss, you'd better carry out his orders. Stay until he gets back. Call Larry and tell him what you're doing.' "

Robin Webb had been a journalist in Australia. When she turned up in Paris, Collins hired her to replace his vacationing secretary. "I kept her on afterward as a stringer," he says. "She did some very good pieces for me." She was attractive but, according to de Borchgrave, "not a big bombshell or anything like that." Collins describes her as "very much an Australian girl, kind of matey." Jim Cannon, a former Newsweek editor, puzzles over why Phil was so attracted to her: "If she had been a willowy beauty or [an Italian] princess, you would have understood better, but she was unimpressive physically, socially, in terms of beauty, in terms of intellect." He adds that "she had the vilest mouth of any woman I had ever met up to that point, and maybe still."

In some accounts, Robin is portrayed as manipulative—a woman who saw Phil Graham as a ticket to wealth, position, and power. To Larry Collins that is "absolutely incorrect. The last thing in the world that Robin was was manipulative. She was very—as the Australians tend to be—almost bluntly straightforward." De Borchgrave calls her "rather proper, no easy lay."

She simply fell passionately in love with Phil, as was no surprise to anyone who knew him. When in a manic phase, Phil was irresistible. At first, Robin was alarmed by Phil's intensity, the relentlessness of his pursuit, his extreme generosity, but she quickly accustomed herself to the attention and the perks. Phil put his employees at her disposal, and this, inevitably, bruised some feelings. When Robin asked Mel Elfin, then education editor at Newsweek, to do a story on the American College in Paris, he "checked into it because she was walking around the office in New York like queen of the plantation." (Elfin adds that when he got to know Robin he found her not imperious but "nice.")

Robin quickly understood that Phil had no interest whatsoever in concealing their affair from friends, colleagues, family, casual acquaintances, even the president of the United States. "I was with President Kennedy," relates a man who was close to both Kennedy and Graham, "[when] Phil called the president. I watched the president's face: first he turned red, then he turned angry, then he hung up. Phil was in bed with Robin Webb, screwing her, and he was introducing her to the president over the phone. Kennedy told me. That was the first inkling I had that Phil was really off his rocker."

Both Robin and the president quickly accustomed themselves to the affair. "She used to tell me about how exciting it was to live with Phil," de Borchgrave says. "Once, she was at the Carlyle and Kennedy was on a higher floor. He called down. Phil and Robin were in bed at four in the afternoon. T'm on my way down to discuss de Gaulle,' the president informed Phil. He came with all sorts of secret C.I.A. files. She leaped out of bed and put on her peignoir and her robe, and said, 'Should I stay in the bathroom?' 'No, don't worry,' Phil said. He was in his shorts and sat on the edge of the bed with Kennedy, and Kennedy was going through all these confidential things in front of Robin."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy aide, reads the president's attitude toward Phil's behavior quite differently: "Kennedy was very much embarrassed when Phil took off with Robin Webb, [embarrassed] by his efforts to get Kennedy to confer a sort of spurious legality on it. Kennedy certainly didn't want to appear to be siding with Phil on this matter against Kay. He recognized that Phil wasn't himself."

People who knew both the president and Phil say that de Borchgrave is probably right—that while Kennedy may have been insulted by Phil's treating him as just one of the guys, Kennedy's own philandering was so flagrant that he would not have judged Phil. "At one point I got Arthur Schlesinger on the phone," recalls Jean Friendly, "and I said, 'You have got to get these men under control. It's a scandal.' " She claims that "in some ways Phil was dominating Kennedy. And the pair of them were sleeping around with the same people."

There was also the matter of the president's affair with Mary Meyer, Ben Bradlee's sister-in-law (but no relation to Kay). Phil was undoubtedly aware of the intimate details of the affair, including the fact that the president and Mary had smoked marijuana in a White House bedroom shortly before he convened a conference on narcotics. Kennedy, horrified at how recklessly Phil handled his own affair, saw that he could no longer trust him to keep any information confidential.

Increasingly, Phil conducted his business, personal and otherwise, from his office couch, drinking, crying, throwing books and water glasses, and working the telephone. He would sometimes call Lyndon Johnson just to taunt him: "You'H never be president, Lyndon. This is the end of the line. Just vice president."

He also took to calling the president at all hours, until Kennedy asked Kay to do what she could to stop him. According to Time Inc.'s Hedley Donovan, "He several times called up the White House in the middle of the night to tell this or that to Kennedy. Kennedy finally had to [instruct] the White House switchboard not to put Mr. Graham through after nine P.M." Once, when Phil got angry at Post editor Russ Wiggins, he called Kennedy and asked the president to fire Wiggins.

On another occasion, when Phil began to berate Kennedy over the phone and Kennedy tried to quiet him, Phil shouted, "Do you know who you're talking to?" According to David Halberstam, Kennedy replied, "I know it isn't the Phil Graham that I love and respect."

Bob Estabrook, a Post editor, recounts the time Phil "was in seeing Kennedy, and he grabbed the red phone, literally lifted the receiver, and said, 'Scramble the planes,' and Kennedy had to come on: 'This is the president. Cancel the order.'

Phil's top people began to fear that he was irretrievably lost. No one could continue to describe his behavior as brilliantly eccentric. He had taken to bringing Robin Webb to the newsroom and introducing her as "the next Mrs. Graham" or simply "Mrs. Graham."

Phil installed Robin in a house on exclusive Foxhall Road. When he moved out of the R Street house—Arnaud de Borchgrave says that the story has been told a hundred times—"Kay ran out on the sidewalk in her nightie in the very early morning, begging him not to leave."

With Robin, he hosted dinner parties to which he invited his and Kay's friends. A few were outraged and declined his invitation, but many, for professional reasons, could not.

Much more menacing was the looming, ugly divorce that Phil wanted desperately and that Kay, despite the pain and humiliation, did not. The top editors at Newsweek, according to one of them, discussed endlessly what they would do if asked to testify in court, getting down to such specifics as whether to say "We perceived him as disturbed" or "He was just an eccentric publisher, which is common enough in publishing history."

Newsweek's Kermit Lansner found a college psychology textbook and looked up manic-depression. "I remember calling Oz [Elliott] and saying, 'Let me read you this page: "heightened eroticism, foul language, acquisition mania, feelings of omnipotence, a tendency to disrobe in public."'"

Kay put up a remarkably brave front, giving parties on her own and inviting those who had remained allied with her— and she never forgot or forgave those who turned down her invitation. A guest at one party later reported that "Kay had to hold her head back to keep the tears from falling. She was grief-stricken. Why she gave those parties, I don't know. She never seemed to enjoy them." But Marietta Tree, for one, remembered a dignified Kay Graham, who "tried to behave as if everything was perfectly all right," and "wouldn't mention a thing." June Bingham agrees: "She never complained about him. She was loyal, longsuffering."

And she remained so, even when Phil told anyone and everyone the unthinkable—that he planned to cut Kay out of the Post and hand it over to Robin. He changed his will to leave a third of his estate to Robin and the remainder to his children. Then he changed it again, increasing Robin's share to two-thirds.

When Phil threatened to hand the Post to Robin, Kay started to worry. Her father had given the paper to Phil, but with the expectation that Phil would turn it over to their son Donny. Donny was now a student at Harvard, and it would not be long before he was ready for the Post.

Before Phil added this latest piece of nastiness to the breakup, Kay's mother had been merely irritated with him for, in the words of Joanna Steichen, the young wife of photographer and family friend Edward Steichen, "making a public spectacle" of himself. "I don't think she would have cared if he had quietly had affairs. That's what people do." But a married man did not, in Agnes's world, marry his girlfriend. Agnes took to referring to Robin as "that awful girl," and the idea that Phil planned to snatch the family jewel from her grandchildren enraged her. To Marietta Tree, Agnes was a "tower of strength," much more eager to fight Phil than Kay was.

Agnes gave a cocktail party, a formal affair, at Crescent Place, her Washington home; she stood with Kay in a receiving line. Joe Rauh and others recognized it as a virtual coming-out party for Kay—a signal that she would not be beaten by Phil, that she would gather herself for a fresh start. "It was quite wonderful," saidRauh, "really very touching. Everybody came and buoyed Kay up at a very critical time."

The party also signaled a change in Agnes's treatment of her daughter. Kay would later relate that around the same period, "I was giving a party for my 18year-old daughter [Lally]. As we were doing the preparations, my mother said, 'Darling, you're so good at lists!' I swear [that was] the first compliment she ever paid me."

In the spring of 1963, Phil and Robin went to Europe. Phil called Bob Estabrook, whom he had dispatched to London, at his Hampstead home to inform him that he and Robin would be by that afternoon for tea. "It was a very pained affair," Estabrook recounts. Phil expected him and Eldon Griffiths, then Newsweek' s London bureau chief, to reserve the Connaught Hotel for "a party for royalty." Griffiths, a British subject, was able, by "pulling a lot of strings," to reserve the Connaught for dinner. "We had no royalty or nobility," Estabrook says, "but we did get a number of sirs and ladies, among them the publisher of the Telegraph. After the first or second course, in a loud voice from the head table, Phil said [to Robin], 'Come on, dear, let's go up to bed.' And Eldon and I were left during that loud hush to try to put things back together and keep the evening going. He left and nobody saw him again."

Let me read you this page: 'heightened eroticism, foul language, acquisition mania, feelings of omnipotence, a tendency to disrobe in public.' "

Marietta Tree called what happened next "a horror opera." Phil and Robin went to Phoenix for a meeting that drew the nation's most powerful newspaper owners and editors. Jean Friendly felt that if Phil made that trip it might be his last.

Post managing editor A1 Friendly remained in Washington to help get the paper out, and Jean waited for the bad news she

knew would come. What she did not expect was that it would come from Robin Webb, who said she "needed help, she was desperate, he was beating her up." Others reported that Phil had been drinking with abandon and announced that he was going to marry Robin, perhaps right there in Phoenix. (That he was still married to Kay seems not to have concerned him.)

At the main banquet, Phil interrupted a speech by Benjamin McKelway, who was editor of The Washington Star and a member of the Associated Press board of directors, and seized the lectern to tell his peers that they were fat, stupid cowards who wouldn't know the truth if they sat on it. And, he said, "he wouldn't wipe his ass with their papers." The thunderstruck audience stared in disbelief, but Phil was just warming up. He singled out various publishers and began to revile them. Newsmen who had stayed behind in New York and Washington were soon abuzz with vivid descriptions of Phil's "around the bend" but "brilliant" performance. "He went through everybody," recalls Arnaud de Borchgrave, "berated every one of them for their lack of balls. Nobody knew how to stop him." He was "devastating and brilliant and accurate, and did beautiful caricatures of each of the big shots present."

Phil reportedly announced from the podium that he was going to tell them who in Washington was sleeping with whom, and that he might as well start at the top with John Kennedy, who was sleeping, in the White House, with Mary Meyer. While his audience waited for the next name to drop, he declared, "I don't know what you other sons of bitches are going to do, but I'm going to go home now and screw my girl."

He then reportedly began stripping off his clothes, and some in the immobilized audience of supposed movers and shakers feared that they would soon face a naked as well as an irreparably damaged owner of The Washington Post. Ben McKelway's wife, Margaret, whom Newbold Noyes describes as "a withdrawn, quiet, Helen Hokinson type of woman, without being funny," walked onstage, took him by the hand, and said softly, "Phil, come with me. You're going to go back and sit down." Phil offered no resistance as she put him in his seat.

In the meantime, a newsman in the audience had phoned the president, who immediately called Kay to say that he was ordering a military jet to transport Phil's psychiatrist to Phoenix. Phil, together with an entourage of doctors and attendants, would be flown back to Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland.

At the Phoenix airport, after punching an airport detective, Phil was wrestled to the ground, forced into a straitjacket, and injected with sedatives.

When Phil, uninvited, had tried to settle the New York newspaper strike earlier that year, he told Bertram Powers, the chief of the typographical union, that he could defecate in Times Square and no newspaper would report it. He knew what he was talking about. It was almost as if he wanted to prove his point, his self-hatred feeding the disdain he felt for his colleagues. He had undoubtedly chosen to have his ugly breakdown practically in their laps. The country's major newspapers ignored the incident.

Left behind in Phoenix, Robin, in tears, called de Borchgrave in New York. She told him that Post Company executive vice president John Hayes had handed her a check for $1,000, hoping, apparently, to buy her permanent silence. "I tore it up and threw it in his face," she said, sobbing. De Borchgrave arranged to buy a ticket for her to New York and told her to take a taxi from the airport to his apartment.

"I brought her upstairs when she arrived," de Borchgrave says. She was ''still sobbing, in a state of shock, couldn't get over what had happened."

Because Hayes had failed in his clumsy attempt to make Robin go away, Kay was forced to huddle with other members of the family and with the upper echelon of Post people to figure out what to do about Robin. They were prepared, says one Newsweek editor, "to buy her off." When they asked her what she wanted, they were surprised when she answered that all she wanted was a one-way ticket to Australia.

"I think she behaved really well," says Jean Friendly, "and Kay does, too." She adds that Robin never tried to capitalize on the relationship and always refused to discuss it with writers and reporters. Kay recently told Oz Elliott, "I've come to believe Robin is a very nice person. She's never given a press conference or interview, or embarrassed us."

Robin's journalism career came to an abrupt end. She went to work for the Australian delegation to UNESCO, and later married Christopher Alan Edwards, a member of the Australian foreign service who would reach the rank of ambassador.

In a deep depression, Phil asked Kay to take him back. She agreed, as long as he sought help in a serious way.

On June 20, 1963, Phil was committed to Chestnut Lodge. He seemed resigned to the fact that his affair with Robin was finished, and determined to regain his mental health and make things work with Kay. She visited him daily, bringing lunch and staying for tennis. According to columnist Drew Pearson's wife, Luvie, despite what Kay had been through, she still loved Phil "absolutely. Kay always did everything to try to bring Phil to his senses and keep the marriage together. That was her objective. She thought when he agreed to go to Chestnut Lodge that that was it, that everything would be hunky-dory."

Phil was wrestled to the ground, forced into a straitjacket, and injected with sedatives.

Phil had been at the hospital for six weeks when, on the morning of Saturday, August 3, he persuaded his doctors to let him check out, with Kay, for a day at Glen Welby.

That morning Kay called Joe Rauh, and "in a voice sounding so much better than it had been for a while, totally renewed and refreshed, [said,j 'We're going to the farm today. Phil's much better and he'd like to see you. Could you go out there [Chestnut Lodge] on Tuesday?' And so I was all set to go. "

Kay and Phil "had a happy morning together," recounts Jean Friendly. "They played some tennis." Then, in the early afternoon, Phil announced that he was going bird hunting. Just after one P.M. Kay went to her second-floor bedroom for a nap.

Phil went to a first-floor bathroom, sat on the side of the bathtub, propped a .28gauge sportsman's shotgun against his head, and pulled the trigger.

Now Phil's whole troubled enterprise was thrown into the lap of his wife— a woman who could not have been more ill-prepared, or more terrified at the prospect of becoming the next Phil Graham.

What Kay did not realize was that the men who ran the Post and Newsweek were nearly as nervous as she was. Contemptuous as they were of Kay, the Post men feared the consequences of an outside takeover of the wounded newspaper and wanted it kept in the Graham family. Staffers at Newsweek were even more worried. They understood that Kay might harbor what they considered an irrational hatred of the magazine, feared she might blame the Newsweek fraternity for promoting her husband's affair with Robin Webb and contributing to her humiliation.

Oz Elliott described Kay at the boardof-directors meeting as looking "ashen, dressed in black, her eyes downcast." She later said that her accession was "agony," and remembered that she could not stop thinking of a scene from The Vagabond King: "the moment when the suddenly enthroned vagabond—for the first time dressed in royal robes—descends the great stairs, slowly and anxiously, tensely eyeing on either side the rows of archers with their drawn bows and inscrutable faces." She assured the men that she had no intention of selling anything, not the Post, not Newsweek. Her only desire was that the paper be safe until Donny was old enough to take over. In the meantime, she said in her quivering voice, she would go to work.