Personal History (38 page)

In April of 1949, Prich and his law partner, Al Funk, were indicted under the criminal code and charged with “conspiring to impair and dilute the effect of the votes cast for the Republican candidates for President, Senator and Congressman in Kentucky” in the general election the previous year. Prich pleaded “not guilty,” but though Funk was ultimately absolved, Prich was sentenced to prison for two years.

Phil and other friends of Prich’s tried to help as best they could. They collected and sent money, which was always in short supply with Prich, but particularly so as his lawyers prepared appeals and his own source of income—his law practice—ceased to exist. But the appeals—on which Joe Rauh and others had worked tirelessly—failed. When the first judgment was affirmed by the United States Circuit Court, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the lower court’s decision for lack of a quorum on June 5, 1950. Prich filed a petition for executive clemency, asking for a pardon or commutation of sentence, but he went off to prison and served five months of his sentence before being pardoned, just before Christmas of 1951, by President Truman, largely at the behest—ironically—of the very decent Senator Cooper, who had won the race against Chapman, for whom Prich had stuffed the ballots.

Our hearts were broken for our friend. We were dumbfounded. Here was the man among us most destined for greatness; yet now he’d been found guilty of so stupid and irresponsible an act, and was off to prison. It was hard to understand how such a distinguished mind could have done such a shocking thing. As Prich told a reporter in 1979, “I got to feeling, perhaps, that I was bigger than I was, that the rules didn’t apply to me.” My own inclination is to believe that, flawed as he was in character, Prich let his desire to be “one of the boys” overcome his intelligence and his judgment. He had perhaps been too successful at too young an age and had lived a pattern of permissiveness and laxity, which had always been the despair of his many friends. Even after he got out of jail and began to make a scratchy living, he occasionally neglected to finish work that had been contrived especially for him. Some of his old habits of not always fulfilling his part of any bargain endured. Yet still we loved him. Somehow one couldn’t help it.

He wrote Phil from prison that “while I have many moments of bitter self-reproach, I cannot afford the excess baggage of feeling sorry for myself or plotting revenge against those who may have treated me badly (though I hate them plenty).” He found the prison to which he was assigned to be “as good as one could hope for: mild in its discipline and a
comfortable enough stopping place.” In the end, he regained his influence in Kentucky as head of an education commission appointed by Governor Ned Breathitt, which succeeded in implementing important education reforms. He regained his life and died, in 1984, the heroic figure we had envisioned, enduring his many afflictions with great courage and continuing to function, despite being diabetic and becoming blind.

F
ROM THE TURN
of the new decade, politics seemed to heat up. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his campaign against a so-called Communist conspiracy to subvert American life. Phil’s first response was to dismiss McCarthy’s tirades and the senator himself. A few months after the beginning of McCarthy’s invective, Phil said of the senator, “McCarthy is causing a lot of noise here and doing a lot of harm, but I am hopeful that he will eventually end up on his backside.”

Phil had to tread a fine line in this very difficult time. He had been an ardent liberal, but in this period when he was fighting for the life of the paper he was clearly becoming more conservative and more anticommunist—mostly, no doubt, in response to events in the real world, but also to some extent in response to the constant attacks on the paper and on him personally.

Outsiders didn’t realize that Phil had many problems with the internal politics of the
Post
during this period, some of which stemmed from the increasingly differing political views of Phil on the one hand and Alan Barth and Herblock on the other. For example, a real brick fell on Phil’s head one day in the spring of 1950. He and I were returning together from New York by train, and he was going through the
Post
. Suddenly, reading an editorial he knew to be written by Barth, Phil went ballistic. In this editorial, Barth had commended Earl Browder, the former secretary general of the Communist Party in America and the communist candidate for the presidency in 1936 and 1940, for defying a special subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was trying to compel him to disclose the names of his former associates conspiring against the United States. Barth was a brilliant and brave defender of civil liberties and constitutional rights, but in his appropriate concern for the right of privacy he tended to minimize the real dangers of communism. All the paper’s top editors and managers were alarmed at the stick we had handed our enemies with which to beat us. And, of course, beat us they did. The
Times-Herald
dubbed us “Browder’s organ.”

Phil was so deeply upset that he wanted to fire Alan immediately. Luckily, during one of our Sunday-morning visits to Frankfurter, Felix quietly but firmly persuaded him not to, but several days after the editorial appeared, a note was printed in the paper regretting it.

The tensions between Phil and Barth remained. Several months later, Phil wrote to my father that he had been changing or killing a lot more editorials than usual—almost entirely Barth’s production—and he was worried that Elliston would think
they
were having differences. Phil met with Elliston outside of the office to review the general situation and philosophy of the editorial page, explaining that he was extremely concerned about Barth. As he wrote to my father and as he told Elliston, he did not “want to slip into being a namby-pamby paper like the N.Y. Times, but at the same time I did not want to throw away the prestige and the power of the paper by getting in trouble on minor fronts through sloppy work.” Eventually, however, Phil calmed down and lived with Alan Barth, who went on to be a great adornment to the page and to the
Post
. Joe Rauh later said of the terrible strain between Alan and Phil:

I
’M NOT SURE
exactly when Phil began to think in terms of Eisenhower as a possible presidential candidate, or even whether he came to this himself or was influenced by someone, possibly my father. In one letter to Prich, who preferred Dewey to Eisenhower but was convinced the Republicans would win in 1952 no matter who the candidate was, Phil urged him not to be “too anti-Ike,” admitting that he himself had been until Eisenhower’s last visit to Washington, when Phil met him at a small private lunch for newspapermen and began to change his mind.

By the summer of 1951, Phil was so disgusted at the idea of more leadership on either the Truman or the Taft level that he joined my father in becoming a strong Ike man. Dad was convinced that Eisenhower “has the one thing that we have been looking for in recent years.… It is generally described as character.” Although “independence” was the watchword at the paper, the editorial line clearly began to back Eisenhower, and on March 24 the
Post
endorsed him over Taft for the Republican nomination. Herbert Brownell, Ike’s unofficial campaign manager, close friend, and later attorney general, called the endorsement “the most effective journalistic blow that had been struck for Ike.”

The endorsement caused waves everywhere, not least within our family.
My father’s health and strength had begun to fail, and he was feeling “out of the loop” and insufficiently consulted, despite Phil’s best efforts to keep him involved in the paper and the company. Apparently, in the case of the endorsement Phil had neglected to bring my father, who was in Florida at the time, into the decision and in on the timing of the editorial. Dad was understandably unhappy at not knowing in advance that the
Post
was going to endorse. My mother wrote Phil that something had to be done to build up my father’s ego and restore his self-confidence, that he was feeling fairly useless. On the very day the editorial appeared, Mother followed up with a private, anguished letter to Phil, saying she was worn out trying to keep my father on an even keel, and chastising Phil for not having included him.

There is no record of Phil’s response, but clearly he must have taken her words to heart. Following this letter, he wrote Dad several times in great detail about various issues involving the paper, consulting him on different matters, from a proposal to revise the format of the editorial page and the women’s section to the idea of a rotogravure section for the Sunday paper. I was concerned about my father’s hurt feelings, but I confess that I identified completely with Phil and with the pressures under which he operated—even though I differed with him about backing Eisenhower.

Phil and I went to the conventions that summer, both of which took place in Chicago. Eisenhower was nominated, and Phil was of course happy with the victory. I see now that we all regarded Taft as too much of a right-winger and an isolationist—the latter he was, but his political views were really moderate, farsighted, and decent. Our fears at the time were very real, however, and seemed very valid.

I was slightly more skeptical than Phil about Eisenhower. I suppose, somewhere deep inside, Phil was seeking recognition as an independent, in contrast to his liberal history. My own political views never changed much, and usually made me support the Democratic candidate, although I was and am a centrist. When, in 1952, the candidate turned out to be Adlai Stevenson, I had no doubt where my allegiance lay. Like many people of my general persuasion, I was swept away with excitement by Stevenson. I well remember the impact of first seeing him at the convention: I thought he was marvelously charismatic, and was immediately enthusiastic about him. His acceptance speech—made in the late hours of the night and with its rather pretentious Biblical quotation about the cup passing from his lips—was electrifying. The
Post
editorialized that, for Stevenson, “The office chose the man.”

Phil, of course, knew how I felt. In a letter to a friend at the end of the summer he wrote, “I confess that my wife (since seeing Adlai the adorable) has shown signs of being a Crypto-Democrat.” Despite my excitement
about Stevenson, however, I was under no illusion about the possibility of his winning. Adlai’s ambivalence about the presidency—both wanting it and not wanting it—was his Achilles’ heel. For a politician to equivocate about his desires regarding the presidency disqualifies him, I later realized, but in the summer of 1952, like so many of us, I was overwhelmed by this extraordinarily articulate, witty man.

Phil, on the other hand, was fervently embracing Eisenhower and the Republicans. That summer he got to know Richard Nixon, who had been taken on as Ike’s vice-presidential candidate. Phil was impressed with him and thought he would be a big help in the campaign. Nixon had lunch in midsummer with Phil, Russ Wiggins, and my father, and Phil reported to a newspaper friend that “the three of us all felt that he is obviously a person of major talents,” whereas I and most of my friends were deeply concerned about his red-baiting victorious early campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas and about his pronounced right-wing proclivities and seeming sympathy for McCarthy.

Throughout this campaign, Phil was constantly having to defend both the
Post
’s endorsement in the primaries of Ike over Taft and his own surprising political views. To those who chided him about his strange bedfellows, his comeback was to suggest “they might shake up their own sheets and take a look under the covers.” Yet even though the paper was supporting Eisenhower, Phil tried, as he said, “as carefully as is humanly possible not to be prejudiced or blind to the qualities of Stevenson or some of the weaknesses of the Republicans.” Among the weaknesses of the Republicans was the failure of Eisenhower to speak out against McCarthy and the excesses of the right wing.

As far as I was concerned, the last straw was added against Eisenhower in the now well-known incident involving General George C. Marshall, whom McCarthy had been viciously attacking. Ike’s decent instincts came to the fore, and he had apparently decided to defend the general in a speech on one of his campaign swings through Wisconsin in early October. Wisconsin Republican leaders, however, leaned on Eisenhower’s political counselors to dissuade him from making the favorable and supportive comments. Ike, still relatively new to politics, gave in to his advisers and eliminated the paragraph, but did this so late that the whole affair became public.

I had remained open-minded until then, but now I was solidly for Stevenson. Although Phil, too, was shocked at Ike’s lack of strength in standing up to McCarthy, my views didn’t worry or influence him—nor his me. Our political differences didn’t come between us personally; we each understood where the other one was.

Phil’s direction of the
Post
during the campaign stirred up some resistance
and problems from within the ranks of the staff. At some point, several staffers wanted to run an ad in the paper declaring themselves for Stevenson, but Phil apparently talked them out of it. Most important, he and Herblock had quite a struggle. Herb’s cartoons had always been searing and powerful. He had first drawn Nixon in a cartoon on May 16, 1948, in which Nixon and two others, all dressed as Puritans, were pictured building a fire under a chained Statue of Liberty and saying: “We’ve got to burn the evil spirits out of her.”