Personal History (32 page)

“What do you mean?” I asked indignantly.

“I saw Bill Donovan at dinner last night and asked him how much he really wanted for the house. He said, ‘I want what I’m asking, because that’s what I’ve got in it.’ I then said, ‘All right, Kay will pay it.’ ” When I asked him why he had interfered with my bargaining, since I was the one who was going to be paying, he responded, “When it’s where you want to live, don’t bargain.”

So we bought the house and were always happy that we did. It was and still is our family home, a lovable house with character; it was great for the large family, and it works for me alone. But from the start I quaked at the thought of running it—not to speak of furnishing it. In the beginning,
the house was casual, to put it mildly. One of the two front rooms had been a sitting room for the Donovans’ staff, and the room opposite was a formal living room. The two rooms at the back were a library and dining room. The library was the room we lived in most, perhaps because it’s square and has a beautiful fireplace. As time went on, I realized that there is a magic to square rooms. People are comfortable and can talk easily, but the room is also fine when you’re alone.

It took me years to fix up the front living room so it both looked good and sat well. The other front first-floor room became the children’s dining room, playroom, and storage for baby carriages, roller skates, baseballs and bats, and later on rock-band equipment. Because I ate breakfast there with the children, Phil referred to it as the Shredded Wheat Room.

F
ROM HIS BEGINNING
at the
Post
, Phil had been working full-steam. Though he knew nothing about the newspaper business—or any business, for that matter—his brains and abilities served him well. At once he became my father’s close collaborator, both inside the paper and outside. He joined my father at the Advertising Council, which Dad had inspired to secure the cooperation of the large agencies and advertisers on public issues for the war effort. This helped Dad, but also helped Phil, who knew no one in the newspaper industry or the business world, either locally or nationally.

They also assumed public obligations together. Early in his presidency, Harry Truman had asked the nation to focus on the problems of hunger in postwar Europe. In response, my father proposed to the secretary of agriculture a volunteer program to enlist public support for famine relief. His plan became the one essentially adopted by Truman when he appointed the Famine Emergency Committee. My father, along with members of the
Post’s
staff, then worked to get newspapers and the public behind the idea of helping meet the needs of the world’s hungry. The committee was an interesting example of a cooperative effort between government and the press—one that would be more difficult today, if not impossible. In general, the press now sees its role as covering an issue like world hunger and commenting on it editorially rather than being a participant in trying to alleviate it. I wonder if this isn’t journalistically right but, still, a loss to society.

Because his responsibilities multiplied quickly in the first few months, Phil was making decisions even while trying to learn. It was clear that my father loved having him there. He was already a terrific help with things that somebody else should have been doing long before. Then, in June 1946, President Truman called and asked my father to become the first president of the World Bank. That night my parents and Phil and I dined
together to talk it over. Dad was somewhat reluctant to assume this large, complex job at the age of seventy, but he thought it vitally important that the international bank be launched on a sound basis. And he couldn’t understand why other men were running from “the outstanding banking opportunity for world service in world history.” Having been an astute businessman and government official for years, Dad understood the situation—the job would be a strenuous full-time one, requiring all his energies. He also knew that if he accepted it he would have to make Phil publisher of the
Post
. He put it up to Phil, saying, “This has always been my primary interest, but if you don’t want me to go, I won’t go.” Of course, Phil encouraged him to take the job. He felt it was the right thing for him to do, even though, as he wrote to his own father, “He undoubtedly deserves a little rest at this point.” He assured my father that both he and the
Post
would be all right.

So, on June 18, 1946, the
Post
announced that my father was withdrawing from active direction of the paper and would have no control or responsibility over news or editorial matters, although he did retain ownership. Phil would be publisher in title and in fact. He had been there only five months and was one month short of his thirty-first birthday, the youngest publisher of a major newspaper in the United States. My father’s confidence in Phil was evident in his comment at the time of the announcement: “Under those who today take the responsibility of its affairs, I know that
The Post
will be true to its trust.
The Post
will not only carry on; it will go forward.”

Although our friends and the press seemed to view Phil’s rise to publisher positively, we knew things would not be easy. He had come into a job for which he was ill-prepared, and at once he was responsible for figuring out how to make the paper a viable enterprise. He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world.

Indeed, the paper itself was still struggling for its life. It had made profits in most of the war years, but was sliding right back to losses. The
Post
was certainly a marginal paper, and it felt like that to us. Even though the
Star
was the big money-maker, our biggest competitor, because it was our direct morning rival, was the
Times-Herald
. The
Post
had continued to improve in editorial quality and advertising volume and general prestige, but there was a great deal of rebuilding needed after the war. The competition for good people was intense, and it was a competition in which the
Post
had little strength. The paper was quite a small organization and, of course, the company was private and family-owned. Once my father left for the Bank, Phil had to learn even faster, but he had grasped the overall picture, so he focused on finding the right people to carry the paper forward editorially and financially.

Some of the personnel decisions my father had already made had a
positive effect on Phil and a lasting effect on the paper. For example, Gene Elderman, the
Post’s
editorial cartoonist since 1932, had been imperceptibly drinking himself out of his job. From the beginning of 1943 until the beginning of 1946, the
Post
had no cartoonist, and my father had been on the lookout for someone. He heard about a man just coming out of the army who, before the war, had drawn cartoons for the
Chicago Daily News
and in Cleveland for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. When Herbert Block and my father met for the first time at the Yale Club in New York, Dad asked to see some of what Herb had done before the war, since in the army he hadn’t been doing political cartoons. In return, he sent Herb a subscription to the
Post
so that he could see “how you like us,” which Herb found interesting and inviting. Herb was hired and arrived simultaneously with Phil. As “Herblock,” this amazing man has been drawing cartoons for the
Post
for over fifty years. His creative genius remains as strong as ever after all these years of solid performance, even at the age of eighty-seven.

In 1946, Herbert Elliston was still the editorial-page editor. My father’s old associate Charles Boysen was business manager. There was an experienced advertising manager in Donald Bernard. Wayne Coy, Phil’s friend and wartime associate, was assistant to the publisher. There was no one reliable in either production or circulation, or in labor relations.

Phil had his work cut out for him. Under him, as managing editor, was Casey Jones, who had helped my father so much from the time he came to the
Post
in 1935. But after working with Jones for only a short time, Phil decided the paper needed a more sophisticated approach. Casey Jones had done a great deal, but he was an old-fashioned
Front Page
type of character, and Phil was more ambitious than that; he began looking for a managing editor with whom he might be more comfortable. He heard about a man who had been working as editorial writer, managing editor, and Washington correspondent for the
St. Paul Dispatch–St. Paul Pioneer Press
, so he and I went out together to Minnesota to meet him. Phil was drawn to Russ Wiggins, a dynamo who had completed only high school but was extraordinarily well read, and he offered Russ the job of Sunday editor, I suppose hoping to bring him up through the ranks gradually. After much anguish, Russ, being in the enviable position of having two good offers, turned Phil down, understandably choosing to become assistant to Arthur Sulzberger, then the publisher of
The New York Times
.

Phil was also focusing on the news side of the paper. Believing that much of the postwar world would be shaped by decisions that were then being made at the peace conference in Europe, he himself left for Europe in August with Herbert Elliston, while I stayed at the farm in Mount Kisco with the children. This was Phil’s first journalistic tour and his first trip to Europe. One of the great perks of journalistic life, whether one is
reporter, editor, or publisher, is a trip of this sort. If you love learning as much as Phil did, and I do, these trips bring endless satisfactions. At the same time, you can occasionally do some good for the publication you represent—and for the governments involved—by reporting what you see and learn. This was just such a trip for Phil, one that made a deep impression on him; Isaiah Berlin always claimed—with some justice, I believe—that it contributed mightily to Phil’s evolution away from the extreme liberalism of his law-school days and the first few years after graduation.

When we got back to Washington in the fall, Phil was not only running the paper and working to improve it but also lending moral support to my father, who was finding the presidency of the World Bank even more burdensome than he had imagined. Phil worked hard to bolster his morale, helping him in every way he could, from advice to writing speeches.

Trouble at the Bank had arisen for my father almost immediately. The twelve directors had been named earlier and had been working together before his appointment. Many resented someone’s coming in really to impose order, and would rather have had a figurehead. And the job was difficult enough without the political infighting. Dad knew that if he stayed and fought he could probably win, but he felt too old and too weary to try.

Toward the end of October, he began thinking of the long-term future of the Bank—five, ten, or fifteen years ahead. He realized that he wouldn’t be there to carry out his own plans and that the person who made them should be. “I made up my mind,” he said, “that what the president and Jimmy Byrnes had asked me to do, I had more or less done—launched the Bank by organizing it.” On December 4, 1946, he tendered his resignation with only two weeks’ notice, not even having the energy to stay until a successor was found. Ironically, his resignation succeeded in bringing about some of the reforms needed so that his eventual successor, John McCloy, could function effectively.

By the time Dad returned to the
Post
, in January 1947, a transition had occurred. The six months of his absence had given Phil the chance to establish his own authority, and he was clearly in charge. By the end of his first year, he was omnipresent and involved in everything. My father took the title of chairman of a nonexistent board and had the generosity and wisdom to leave Phil as publisher and not try to take back the responsibilities he had ceded to him six months earlier. What he essentially did was to back Phil in all that he was doing. So there began a complicated but overall happy working relationship between my father and my husband—and another between Phil and me and my parents. The Bank interlude simply brought about the transition overnight instead of gradually.

Phil’s respect for my father’s experience and knowledge, and his genuine belief in Dad’s sound judgment, meant that he gladly included him in major decisions and events in connection with the paper. In turn, my father’s
recognition of Phil’s abilities and talents, particularly his facility with people, reinforced his inclination to support Phil’s efforts and to back the paper financially.

My mother, meanwhile, also required some of Phil’s attention. She had gone on traveling, reporting, speaking, and writing on various issues after the war. One series of twenty-four articles on postwar problems resulted from four months of travel throughout the United States and was published in the
Post
during April and May of 1946. Phil thought the whole series was first-rate.

At the same time, Mother was intensifying her efforts on the social and welfare front, testifying before Congress on her conviction that the government’s administrative machinery to deal with health and education had to become more efficient on every level, and stepping up her efforts in behalf of a bill sponsored originally by Senators Taft and Fulbright for the creation of a Cabinet-level department of health, education, and security. Presaging a much later concern, she charged the radio and film industries with using their resources for “a progressive vulgarization of the public mind and for the debasing of public morals.” Somehow she also found time to be president of the Social Legislation Information Service and a member of the President’s Commission on Higher Education, the Federal Hospital Council, and the District of Columbia Planning Committee. In 1947, she helped found the National Citizens’ Commission for Support of the Public Schools, in which she remained active until her death. At sixty, she was still choosing to be, as
Newsweek
called her, not just “a roving reporter” but also “a one-woman reform movement.”

Her pieces for the
Post
were almost always long, frequently too long for a daily newspaper. She thought highly of her own writing—rightly so—and may have created, if not demanded, a hands-off approach on the part of editors. Casey Jones always claimed to have wielded his blue pencil fearlessly when it came to her pieces, but other editors quaked at the idea of editing her copy. Several true stories about her reactions to attempts to edit her work, as well as her conflicts with the
Post
over substance, took on the weight of legend. Once, when she sold an article to
Collier’s
magazine, she was alleged to have flaunted her check in front of Jones, boasting, “See? Some people will actually pay me for writing for them.” Casey gave her high praise by being quoted as saying, “That gal is a good reporter. She’s no trained seal.”