Personal History (115 page)

What followed was not untypical: the Bush people distanced themselves from
Newsweek
reporters. Finally, in September 1988, a meeting was set up at the vice-president’s residence, between Rick Smith, Evan Thomas, and me from
Newsweek
, and Bush, Jim Baker, and Craig Fuller, Bush’s chief of staff. Bush claimed that the whole story had been wildly distorted by playing up the word on the cover, for which he accurately blamed the editors. His family, whom he’d asked to cooperate on the story, was naturally upset and angry and had advised him that further cooperation with the magazine, in any but a technically correct manner, would only prove the point: that he was indeed a wimp.

I earnestly tried to explain about the complicated newsweekly process, until Bush, without relenting, said that Rick Smith and Jim Baker should talk. As the vice-president and I walked toward the door, he whispered to me in the nicest possible way, “We’ll work it out, but don’t tell them.” Rick did get together with Baker and managed to clear the air enough so that we could do the necessary background reporting, but the issue never really died and was compounded by others.

We—that is, reporters and editors from both the
Post
and
Newsweek—
had, of course, also met with Dukakis. Throughout the winter and spring, he had made a poor impression in several areas, but especially in national-security policy. His campaign manager called me late in the campaign and
said the candidate would like to meet with several of us informally. I went with a group from the
Post
and
Newsweek
, hoping we would see a side of Dukakis we hadn’t seen before and get to know him a little as an individual. We all sat around his hotel room and he talked, but nothing new was said and nothing personal about his views was revealed.

Despite his campaign, which I disliked, I voted for Bush; I thought Dukakis too inexperienced to govern. It was my only Republican vote for president. After Bush was elected, our relations were unexpectedly cool if not hostile throughout the four years of his administration. I rarely saw him and Barbara, except occasionally in long receiving lines. Perhaps my amicable relations with the Reagans, and with George Shultz, for whom the Bushes had no love, compounded our problems. These cool or antagonistic relationships are part of life in Washington and are accepted as such, but I often think how self-defeating they are and how much better polite professional relations would serve political figures
and
journalists in situations like this. I agreed with a charming message I got from George McGovern after he had been defeated for the presidency. He recalled making some bitter remarks about a couple of our columnists at a dinner party, but wrote me:

With rare exceptions, I feel strongly that McGovern’s rule is an appropriate one for all of us. The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is most debilitating to the person who bears it.

I
N THE IMMEDIATE
years following Phil’s death, it was terribly difficult for me to separate my work life from my private life; they were clearly so intermingled. For years, I had been on a kind of automatic pilot, trying to give attention to so many aspects of life at once—with two children still at home in the first years, friends, business acquaintances, always too much work, too many meetings, too many dinner parties. Fortunately, somewhere along the line, perhaps with the help of lessons learned from the women’s movement, I began to have a happier time in my private life.

Family and friends have always been vital to me, but at some point I started to enjoy other people as well, to connect more, even to appreciate male friends more. There were always men in my life—romances and close friends—and I enjoyed them all. As long as Phil was alive, I so
adored him that I never thought about another relationship. In truth, that “one-man woman” thinking stayed with me for years, and vestiges are there still. I have often been asked why I never remarried. In my early years at work, I resented the question, which I felt would not be asked of a male publisher. I usually answered that I really didn’t know why. I still don’t know all the reasons, but what I came to understand was that my job made it difficult, if not impossible.

Men who appeal to me are strong, bright, tough, and involved, but that kind of man would probably not accept my own active and absorbing life. Those men need more attention and emotional energy than I had left over at the end of any working day, and I wasn’t looking for a prince consort. In fact, I wasn’t looking at all. Because I was so engrossed in what I was doing, I rarely gave a thought to possible remarriage. When I did think of it, it occurred to me that, although the idea had some appeal, it would almost surely never happen. When you’ve lived alone for a number of years, I’m afraid that you begin to realize how hard it would be to accommodate to living with someone else, adjusting to or even indulging his desires and his life. It was clear to me that I was married to my job, and that I loved it.

When marriage works—and it does take a lot of work—it’s the best way to live. I enjoy being around married people who really love each other, are constantly polite and caring about each other, and between whom you feel a real and supportive relationship. Henry and Nancy Kissinger are examples for me of two people who are very much in love with each other. Henry teases, complains, whines at this or that, but he once told me he couldn’t exist without Nancy. Scotty and Sally Reston had a model marriage for nearly fifty years. I loved watching them together and understood how much they meant to each other. Scotty wrote me once, “I cannot imagine how I could have endured these years without Sally and do not know how you have borne them without your guy.” What I believe to be true is that I couldn’t have borne the dreariness of life without Phil had my life remained the one I had before he died. But mine was a changed life, and I couldn’t imagine a new marriage working for me once I took over the Post Company.

Being single poses some difficulties, however, especially for weekends in the country, vacations, and summers—moments when two people together do much better. After a while, I knew I had to figure out some way to spend these times alone or with my family. Buying a house on Martha’s Vineyard was a step that altered my life very much for the better and added greatly to my happiness. When I first found the house, it was completely tumble-down, having been rented by people who basically camped in it, but I loved its shape and the way it sat on the beautiful land. From my first look at it, I began to imagine that the house could become a family
center if the children liked it, or they could leave grandchildren with me if they wanted to travel. Since I bought it in 1972 and renovated it the following year, I have spent every August there, and my children and grandchildren love it as much as I do. My stays there always restore me.

So the Vineyard helped my summers, and my friends helped throughout the year. The lives of those of us who stay on in Washington change somewhat with a change of administrations, but our core friendships remain pretty much the same. There is a saying about relationships in Washington: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Maybe because I’ve always lived here, because this is in a very real sense my hometown, I’ve found that not to be at all true. I’m sure it’s different if you arrive here as a member of a new administration: it always takes a while to make new friends in a strange town, and undoubtedly there will be people who try to wangle friendships with those in power in order to use them for one reason or another.

Jim Jones, a congressman who had been defeated for election to the Senate in 1986 and is now our ambassador to Mexico, was quoted as saying he had learned during his tenure here about “friends and friends of convenience.” But I see nothing wrong with the fact that people in power often deal with others on more than one level. Sometimes you become friends with people with whom you work because of some common interest or just because you have to work together. But there are also relationships that start out that way yet cross over to become real friendships that last forever. Some of my deepest friendships began with an administration person whom I got to know because of my association with the paper—Bob McNamara and Henry Kissinger come immediately to mind—but grew over time into relationships whose core had nothing to do with politics or work. This is true of others as well—Paul Nitze, Douglas Dillon, Mac Bundy, Jack Valenti, Joe Califano, Larry Eagleburger. In business, the same is true for my relationship with Ed Ney, whom I met because he was head of Young and Rubicam, but with whom I have maintained a friendship. What began as another business relationship with the head of the Hecht Company, Allan Bloostein, also developed into something beyond that for me.

George Shultz and I had been friends when he was in Nixon’s Cabinet, and he was one of the few administration officials who remained friends with me through Watergate. I admired and liked him. We remet at dinner at Meg’s house when he returned as secretary of state under President Reagan. He asked if I was still playing tennis and said he’d love to play, so I worked him into a game the following weekend, and we fell into a routine of Sunday games with more or less the same foursome. We soon added Saturday games and ended up playing every weekend for six years, unless he was away on trips. He loved the game so much that he went to
great lengths to be there. Once he was engaged in some heavy negotiations having to do with the Middle East, and I assumed he would skip tennis, but he insisted on playing. Wondering how he had gotten out of his meetings, I asked him what he had told Yitzhak Shamir, with whom he had been talking. It didn’t surprise me at all to learn that he had said, “I’m going to play tennis.” Another time, during a particularly hard match, Bill Webster, then head of the FBI, and I both went for the same ball and collided. I went down so hard I was afraid I’d broken my hip, and a baseball-sized lump quickly formed on my rear end. In the car, George asked if I was all right or if he should take me to an emergency room. “I’m fine,” I told him, “but I have this huge bump on my behind. If it weren’t for your security men, I’d let you feel it.”

From driving together to and from our games, our friendship deepened. I must have spent as much time with George as anyone in Washington except Obie, his devoted wife, who died recently. But I never learned anything professional from him in all those hours we spent in his car, though I must say it was apparent that something was wrong during Iran-Contra; he would make oblique remarks and was visibly disturbed and down. Always, George was the soul of discretion and integrity.

I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications or at the stations. Most of the editors didn’t know or care whom I knew. More important, I understood my priorities. In any altercation between the publications and people who were friends, I backed our reporters. Occasionally, if I thought we’d been unfair, I would ask about it, but only in an effort to try to ensure even-handed treatment. If there is a complete conflict of interest—that is, if a friendship develops and the paper has to report something negative that has to do with your friend—you either lose the friend or, if you’re lucky, have one who is big enough to forgive, and eventually maybe forget.

I
WAS MOVING
inexorably toward the end of my seventh decade, and was enjoying myself increasingly with each passing year. Up to now, I had never minded getting older; in fact, I hadn’t thought about it much. But 1987 was a landmark year—the year I turned seventy—and this was a birthday I really did mind. My friend Luvie Pearson had tried to soften the blow by assuring me, “Seventy is nothing. It’s when you hit seventy-five that you really begin to feel it and then you feel it increasingly.” From my experience, I think she had it just about right, but I didn’t know that at the time and was bothered about being seventy. I certainly didn’t want to broadcast my age to the world, especially not to the business world, so I was not interested in a party. Polly and Clayton Fritchey and Bob McNamara and I planned a motor trip in and around San Francisco and
Yosemite and the Napa Valley, timed deliberately so that I would be gone on my birthday.

What I hadn’t reckoned on was Lally’s persistence. A strong figure in my life from her very earliest childhood, Lally had combined forces with my three sons to override my real feelings and convince me to go along with the idea of a small party to be given by her and her brothers and their spouses. Reluctantly, I acceded to their wishes, insisting only that it had to be kept to really close friends and family. Lally agreed but applied her own definition of “close friends and family.” To my horror (and delight, in the end), we wound up with over six hundred guests in a huge auditorium in Washington. The guests came from all periods of my life and from all over the world. Lally had gone to great trouble to have the huge room decorated with enormous bouquets of beautiful roses, coaxed out to full bloom, on each table. In an anteroom, there were blown-up pictures of me from every phase of my life, including one of a report card from the Madeira School. Many people had worked on a four-page mock edition of the
Post
with a banner headline that read “Katharine Graham Says ‘No’ to Birthday: Rejects Any Hoopla, Opts for a Quiet Evening at Home.” Don was master of ceremonies, and Lally had arranged for eight toasts. Art Buchwald got off a great line: “The fantastic turnout tonight can only be attributed to one thing—fear.” President Reagan wound up his words about friendship with, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” as he raised his champagne glass.

Although, for me, the party was a genuine reflection of how filled with friends was my life, as I got older I naturally began to lose some of these friends, who, as Joe Alsop used to say, had been “gathered.” During the 1980s, there were many deaths with which I had to deal, beginning with that of my brother, Bill, a wonderful human being, sweet, generous, respected in his profession, and much of the time deeply unhappy.