Personal History (53 page)

The rest of that day was taken up talking with the press, and Phil made an appearance at the
Newsweek
offices. He went over to meet Betts in Malcolm Muir’s office but didn’t identify himself to the receptionist. Muir apparently knew what was afoot but wasn’t aware who the victor was, so told his son Mac (Malcolm Jr.) to go out and see who was in the reception room. Mac, recognizing Phil, reported back to his father, and that’s the way Muir learned who had bought
Newsweek
.

Newsweek
gathered twenty or so editorial and businesspeople in the
conference room, and Muir handled the situation with real elegance, saying, “As you know, I’ve been trying to raise the money to buy the magazine myself and I’ve failed, and in that failure I can imagine nobody more appropriate to be the owner than Phil.” Others were slightly more cautious. Many of the staff, knowing only of the reputation of the
Post
as anti-McCarthy, wondered who this man was, and ran to the library to study a
Time
cover story on him that had run in 1956.

Ben Bradlee wrote me a note shortly after these days of frenzied activity. It was so typical of him in its tone and stream-of-consciousness style:

The day after our victory, Phil and I took the train back to Washington, traveling in one of those small compartments in a Pullman car. About halfway home, I felt I had to tell him what was happening to me and what the doctor suspected. It was a tremendous shock to him. His reaction was strange and should have warned me about his state of mind. He simply denied the possibility, saying it couldn’t be TB, that was out of the question, of course it was a mistake, he would take care of it, etc., etc. Nevertheless, I went to the hospital the next day and stayed there for a week, during which time it was confirmed that I did indeed have TB. I wonder now about the relationship between my illness and stress. It was very rare in those days for someone in an upper-income bracket to develop this disease. Maybe all the stress of Phil’s illness had come to be more of a factor than I realized.

The combination of events—his anxiety over the purchase and my illness—sent Phil into a bad spin of drinking and frantic behavior of every kind. At one crucial moment in the hospital, the doctor and I waited to discuss my diagnosis with him. Phil came in and never drew a breath, talking incessantly, being so witty and so funny that we rocked with helpless laughter, and it wasn’t until he had left the room that we both realized no serious word had been spoken, no difficult issues had been dealt with. It sounds incomprehensible, but it was true.

Many people believed Phil had endless energy, but a few of the hundreds of congratulatory letters Phil received after the
Newsweek
purchase expressed concern for his health. One was from Tommy Toms, who had
worked for Ernie Graham for years and had known Phil since he was a little boy in Florida, and even in Terry, South Dakota, before that:

Phil thought this was one of the nicest letters he received, but he sloughed off Tommy’s concern by writing, “Just remember that unlike my father and you, I sleep late in the morning.”

Phil wrote my mother of his excitement about
Newsweek
, soberly adding, “Now we go slow.… [R]eally there are few problems and lots of opportunities. But easy-does-it is the watch-word.” Yet, despite his talk of going slow and easy-does-it, Phil speeded up again. He wrote to his friend Harold (Andy) Anderson that buying
Newsweek
“was somewhat like doing the four-minute mile—quick but exhausting. Yet, for someone who believes in the slow and steady approach, I find myself exhilarated at having made the dash.” He immediately set to work to get rid of the deadwood at the magazine and start hiring talent, promoting Oz Elliott from managing editor to the top editing job.

Probably the most important move Phil made just after the purchase was persuading Fritz to leave his law firm, Cravath, and join him in running The Washington Post Company as his equal partner. Fritz was to remain in New York, overseeing
Newsweek
, but to have a large role in all the company’s activities and business. My father had once told Phil that, when you are operating with a full head of steam and have a lot of responsibilities, you ought to have a partner—not an employee who is your executive officer but a real partner. Phil knew he had found that real partner in Fritz. He made him a handsome offer, which eventually rewarded Fritz well. Still, Phil had to use all his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion. Fritz had to think long and hard, because he obviously was destined for higher things at Cravath—in fact, several Cravath partners never forgave him, regarding his defection as a kind of betrayal.

Fritz’s becoming chairman of the board of the company and vice-chairman of
Newsweek
was probably the saving grace for the company in the immediate time to come, and certainly was a key factor in the survival of The Washington Post Company in the decade after I took over. Fritz was an extraordinary combination of qualities. Above all, he was wise and bright and had a great legal mind, always thinking ahead conceptually. He was devoted to our family and to the company, possibly in that order, but there’s no way of telling, since the two were so intermingled. He was editorially involved, and the editors at both the
Post
and
Newsweek
became devoted to him. For his part, Phil was so elated that, in responding to a congratulatory letter from Frank Stanton on the
Post
’s getting Fritz, he said: “Now I am completely free of duties! Eureka!”

This, however, was far from the case. While reinventing
Newsweek
, Phil took a renewed interest in the
Post
and attended to his duties there and throughout the company once again. He involved himself in editorial improvements at both places and watched the stations’ business closely. He always kept his office door open when he was at the
Post
, allowing reporters and others from throughout the building to come in to discuss anything. He enjoyed arguments and back and forth, and was known for his salty language and loved for his informality. He provided many ideas for news stories and often contributed to the reporting of them as well.

In February 1961, Phil had promoted Russ Wiggins from executive editor to editor and John Sweeterman from general manager to publisher; Phil himself would now use the title of president. But though he was still going into the office, he soon grew less and less patient with the details of the job. Early in 1961, he described his office in a letter to the book publisher Blanche Knopf as “the usual sort of thing: phones and mail and teeming people moved by the unurgent urgency of the day-to-day; a place I go to as late as I can and leave earlier than is at all proper.”

In New York, Phil was occupied with the final details of the
Newsweek
deal, with becoming the magazine’s leading subscription salesman, as Gib McCabe,
Newsweek
’s publisher, called him in a letter to an advertiser, and with the start-up of the newly formed editorial team headed by Oz with Kermit Lansner and Gordon Manning as his deputies—or, as Oz described it, his equals. Despite differences in background and education, these men worked well together, making a strong contribution to the energizing of the magazine. A nearly ideal political ticket, they were a driven, hard-news, peppy Boston Irish Catholic; a conservative WASPish Protestant; and an Upper West Side artistic, intellectual Jew. The balancing act that this threesome brought to the magazine caused them to be referred to as the Wallendas, the high-wire family, a name still used today to refer to the top editors at
Newsweek
. Oz may have been the driver, but Kermit and Gordon, both more detail-oriented than Oz, were the engine
and the fuel. This triumvirate in New York, with Ben Bradlee in Washington, essentially remade the magazine. Oz recalled the excitement at the time—the Kennedy era was dawning and the World War II generation was coming into its own. The magazine was at last challenging
Time
, which was being edited by the fairly reactionary Otto Fuerbringer and which, because it was number one among the newsweeklies, didn’t worry much about the second-place
Newsweek
. Gordon remembers those months after the purchase as one of the most exciting ever: “When you got out of bed in the morning, you’d say, ‘Hey, the world is my apple.’ ”

On the business side, Gib McCabe was a man who liked his work and was good at it. He also was very protective of and stood up for his editors, even in the face of threats to withdraw advertising or other such trouble, as happened over a
Newsweek
cover story about the right wing in America, called “Thunder on the Right,” which the magazine ran in December of 1961. Thirty years later, a
Newsweek
editor from that time remembers McCabe saying about the advertisers: “Whether it’s true or not, let’s act like they need us more than we need them.” Fritz and Gib both recognized that without a good editorial product there was nothing to sell.

M
Y CASE OF
tuberculosis was an active one, but, on the cheerful side, it was caught very early and hadn’t done any harm to my lungs, and I was not contagious. I was never too worried or too ill, but I was ordered to stay in bed for at least six weeks, taking two pills a day for a year and one pill for another year after that. (I was very lucky to have gotten the disease after the discovery of these pills, which was fairly recent, or I would have been sent away to a sanitarium.) I was also told not to drink any alcohol, which was eventually modified to three drinks a week. Phil brought in two consulting University of Chicago doctors whom he had met while serving on the board of trustees of the university. They confirmed the diagnosis and the prescription of the local doctors.

The weeks I spent essentially in my bedroom were a mixed, ambiguous experience. I was a kind of miscast Camille. Being forced to slow down was not an altogether unhappy thing, and I seemed to be the envy of everyone for my enforced weeks in bed. As I wrote to a friend at the end of March: “If anyone discovers what a racket this is there will be a whole series of blossoming lungs from Georgetown to Kalorama Road: bed; books; see whom you want to, not too many; boss your husband around; no good works; no obligations.” Even Phil benefited from my illness. As I explained to Drew Dudley: “Phil claims that he is hiding behind my lung and there never has been anything so useful to him. He has fended off a galaxy of events and I am sure he hopes I recover slowly if at all.”

I was allowed out of bed only four hours each day. Lally used to come into my room after school every afternoon in her little green jumper, the Madeira School uniform, and have a snack while we visited. One day early in my forced hibernation, she found me reading a mystery, promptly removed it from my hands, and substituted
Swann’s Way
, the first volume of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. She was right that I shouldn’t waste this valuable time in bed reading trash or light, amusing books. All I needed was her gentle push and I finished all seven volumes.

These weeks were a turning point of sorts for me, as was the purchase of
Newsweek
. I resigned from all my welfare projects and withdrew from my outside work in Washington. Owning
Newsweek
meant going to New York a lot, which Phil did right from the start and I did once my health allowed. We began a New York life while maintaining our Washington one, and I decided to use some of my time there by starting to look at paintings with the idea of learning more and eventually buying a few.

The stresses for Phil accumulated. While I was ill, he seemed to be dealing with a hundred things at once, as well as with the children. He coped with their spring vacations from school, had frequent golfing days with Don, bought a new bicycle for Bill, and dealt with a constant convoy of school friends for Steve. He even took Lally to New York to buy dresses for her coming-out parties that year, enlisting my old Madeira friend Nancy White, by then editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
, to help them shop. On one trip, he took Lally to meet Jackie Kennedy at the Carlyle, which thrilled her. He wrote to my mother, who was taking one of her frequent cures at Saratoga, that he had been “damn close to tired,” but felt “brought back” by the peaceful interlude in which he was involved with the children. But in fact Phil was stretched too thin, and drinking a lot. And there were frequent erratic moments.

Ben Bradlee remembers Phil’s sort of dropping out of sight right after the
Newsweek
purchase but then becoming involved one Saturday morning just after the Bay of Pigs, over a
Newsweek
cover story on the CIA that Phil stepped in to tone down. Since Phil knew the players particularly well—friends of his like Frank Wisner and Tracy Barnes—he was very concerned about this piece and went over the story with a fine-tooth comb. He was acting arbitrarily.