Personal History (59 page)

The president realized, however, that Phil couldn’t continue with COMSAT. He had Clark Clifford work through Les Farber to get a letter of resignation from Phil, which Phil signed three days after arriving at Chestnut Lodge. The president wrote Phil a routine public note saying, “I appreciate very much the devoted service which you have given to this exacting task and with great regret accept your resignation effective this date.” He also wrote a more personal note, showing, as always, his sensitivity
and concern: “I understand you are back in Washington. I hope that you will rest for a while—get feeling well again and then come back to work—as we need you. Best of luck.”

The president answered my note that same day: “All of Phil’s and your friends are strongly with you and are hopeful that things will now go better. No two people deserve it more.”

Phil was seeing Dr. Farber daily at the hospital and Dr. Cameron when Farber was called out of town to visit a dying older brother. When the two psychiatrists and I were meeting with
Post
executives all deeply concerned about Phil, Cameron threw a bucket of cold water on the group by saying, “I don’t understand why you all care so much about this man.” As an outsider who didn’t know Phil, he was reacting to everything he was hearing about Phil’s behavior. I must say, that remark shook us up.

In meetings over the next few days, Farber and Cameron confessed to me that they were puzzled by my refusal just to give up at some point—by my protestations that I was a “one-man dog” and my unwillingness to accept that Phil might have left me for another woman, and my emotional belief that I could never love another man. In a way they were right to ask the questions, but in a way not. It may be unusual to think you can never love another person, and they certainly thought it suspect, but at the time it was true for me.

Phil’s brother Bill came up from Florida to be with him and to represent him at this time. He stayed a few days, making an important phone call to Robin, and being enormously helpful to both Phil and me. Phil wrote him on January 27, thanking him “for electing yourself older brother
pro tempore,”
and adding, “I am doing my steady best to relieve you of the latter responsibility with all deliberate (and prudent, patient, cautious, thoughtful) speed.”

After a few days at the Lodge, Phil began going out to Les Farber’s office for visits. Only five days after he had been flown back from Arizona, I saw him for the first time at Farber’s office and drove back to Chestnut Lodge with him; I went again the next day. We talked for a long time, and he told me in great detail both how terrible the scene had been at George Washington University Hospital and how kind and wise had been the people at Chestnut Lodge, who had “talked him down” to his present fairly cool state.

Phil told Bill Graham of our talks, saying in his January 27 letter, “Kay and I are having especially good talks—the first free from any lies and deceit on my part in a good many years. She is still—as you know—very tired. And more deeply wounded than you may suspect.”

We talked a lot about what had happened. I felt rocked to my foundations by all these events, but I knew I had somehow to endure them, difficult as that might prove to be, and I still hoped—and believed—that we
could restore our relationship and keep Phil functioning and the family together. I suppose the repeated experience of seeing him resume his life after periods of depression encouraged me to believe that things would once again be all right.

Phil was also reading and thinking. He reread an article by Martin Buber on guilt and quoted a few passages to Bill, saying:

After about ten days at Chestnut Lodge, Phil went to see Dr. Farber three days in a row. I don’t know whether I was deluding myself or whether it was some sort of denial, but I actually thought everything was going well and that Phil was once again on the road to recovery. I even wrote our good friend Cy Sulzberger, on January 31, that “things are working out both ‘well and quickly’ as you fondly hope.… You can certainly write Phil anytime and I can get it to him or, in fact, he may be home by the time it arrives as he is very much better.”

Clearly unbeknownst to me, almost simultaneously with my naïve letter to Cy, Phil must have been having very different thoughts about the future. On the last day he visited Farber, Farber released him from the hospital. On February 1, Phil came home briefly, and the next day, a Saturday, he went to Glen Welby with Don and Al Friendly. However, on February 4, he traveled to New York with Edward Bennett Williams and Charlie Paradise and went straight to Idlewild Airport, where he met Robin once more. This time Phil saw his departure as final—something he may have been planning all along, since he later wrote to Clark Clifford, thanking him for “your goodness to Robin during our embattled two weeks. Only you and Frank Stanton (and the Commander-in-Chief) seem
to have remembered that gentlemen should be kind to ladies—even young and beautiful ladies.” He also said that he had “sweated my way out of that jail-sanitarium via a doctor’s discharge, although I was tempted to get a lawyer and some quick habeas corpus until I thought of the kids and the publicity. Then I learned there were plans to shove me back in after I had Robin en route to the U.S. again. At that point I called Ed Williams. I wanted to call you—but you will understand I could not involve you because of some other friends and clients you have”—referring to the president.

Phil did engage Ed Williams as his lawyer and firmly stated his intention to divorce me and marry Robin, announcing this in letters to his friends as well. To Jean Monnet, Phil explained his absence at a dinner in New York by saying:

Phil also wrote a patient he had gotten to know at Chestnut Lodge, saying that he missed him and the other patients and would call on them as soon as he could arrange to. He encouraged one of the patients to write to him at
The Washington Post
, explaining, “After 3 days of ‘returning home,’ and a telephone call to Robin Webb in Paris, I realized what I wanted to do. She came over on February 4th and we are living in New York (in separate apartments on the advice of lawyers) and go for weekends to my funny farm near Hume, Virginia. I hope to get a divorce so that we can marry before too long.”

Phil knew that he controlled the
Post
because my father had given him the majority of A shares. He felt he owned it because he had worked for seventeen years to make it a success, so from his point of view the paper was his. He contrived a plan, which quickly got back to me, of paying me off by buying back my stock with
Post
money. He and Robin would then be in charge.

In some ways, this was the bottom moment for me—very confusing, very difficult, and very painful. Not only had I lost my husband but I was about to lose the
Post
. I saw his plan as a logical aspect of his illness, and I knew he was really ill, but by now the effect was real and I was frightened. I was also terrified by Ed Williams’s new role as Phil’s lawyer. I didn’t
know Ed very well then, but I was aware of his reputation as a successful criminal attorney and litigator, and I envisioned terrible court scenes and battles.

I had to face facts—Phil was really gone. He had left me for good, and I had to come to terms with this devastating reality. It was almost more than I could bear. My feelings about the
Post
, however, were very clear. My father had indeed given Phil the major part of the stock, and Phil had run the company well, but it was my father’s financial backing that had enabled the
Post
to build a new building and later to buy the
Times-Herald
and ensure its future. It was the millions invested in the paper by my father that enabled it to survive the years of losses. It was my paying all our living expenses that had allowed Phil to purchase his stock with his income from the
Post
. So my bitterness about his plans was extreme, and my intention to dig in was total. I was not about to give up the paper without a fight.

I needed a lawyer. As head of the company, Fritz Beebe—Phil’s friend and mine—had to be neutral in all this, so the Cravath firm, our estate lawyers, sent me to the respectable and able Whitney North Seymour of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett who advised me just to sit tight for the moment. Although I was prepared for the roof to fall in on me, nothing actually happened for the next few months. There was no movement toward divorce, despite all Phil’s talk about it. Ed Williams told me later that he had advised Phil not to move right in with Robin but to live separately and to wait—that you couldn’t walk out of your house one day and ask for a divorce the next.

Although I wasn’t directly talking with Phil, I was always aware of his and Robin’s whereabouts, either through other people’s reports or through his calls to the children, which began soon after he left. He took Robin to Florida to meet his father, who, as Phil reported in a letter to Clark Clifford, “promised Robin he’d live long enough to come to our wedding even if the divorce took two years.” Phil and Robin returned from Florida to settle in at the Pearson farm, the farm he had bought in the fall of 1962, with my help. There he began to build ponds and in essence to reproduce the life we had at Glen Welby. It was not unnatural that Phil would want to create a nice farm out of this ramshackle place he’d bought, but I found it haunting that the life he was reconstructing seemed to be a mirror image of everything we had done together—the farm, the house near Georgetown he eventually rented, and even his trips to Sioux Falls, Phoenix, and Puerto Rico, all of which were places where we had been together.

I went to Florida to see Bill Graham, to ask his advice. Bill was a true support for all of us throughout those months. After our talks, Bill flew me up to Hobe Sound to visit Douglas and Phyllis Dillon, two loyal friends. While I was there, I called the
Post
’s switchboard to connect with my
house. The operator made a mistake, and before I knew it, I was connected with the farm and Robin was answering the phone. I hung up instantly, but the mistake let Phil know I was out of town. I then got a wire from him asking if he could see the children at the house alone. I was so tense about everything that I left the Dillons at once and flew home early to prevent Phil’s coming over. I think now that I may have been too rigid at first about not letting him visit with Bill and Steve. They missed him and wanted to see him, but I was frightened by the unpredictability of his behavior. I didn’t trust him or believe him. I didn’t have a very clear idea of his condition and just reacted emotionally.

L
IFE FOR ALL
of us settled into a strained and endlessly painful pattern. I was on my own, trying to hold things together for myself and for the children. I kept working on the Junior Village project and was also engaged in an undertaking to start a modern-art museum in Washington. But Phil still dominated our lives. He wanted to see the children and to have them, particularly Lally, meet Robin. I feared he would even introduce her as their potential stepmother. This wouldn’t have been the end of the world, I suppose, but, not surprisingly, I thought at the time that it would be. When Phil telephoned, the boys would go into a room and close the door—with me fully aware that they were experiencing the worst of all worlds, not being able to talk to one parent about the other. It was excruciating for all of the children in different ways, but especially hard on Lally. She showed great wisdom and strength and love for him, but not for what he was doing or the people around him at that time. She agreed to see him in New York, but found herself in a large group, including Robin, and firmly said that she didn’t want to be a part of that. Don, too, was very vulnerable and supportive of both of us. We finally worked out times when Phil would take Bill and Steve out by himself, usually picking them up from school to avoid encountering me.

I continued to get reports from mutual friends about where Phil was and what he was up to, or I heard about his activities directly, in part because some of what he was doing was spectacular and quite public. At other times, things were quieter, but I would be aware of what Phil and Robin were doing because of bills or other mundane things that brought their comings and goings into my sphere. They seemed to be settling in together. I got wind of credit cards having been established for Robin, and that Phil had separated our billing in the country, so that everything at Glen Welby was in my name and everything at the Pearson farm was in his. When Phil’s secretary, Charlie Paradise, asked me if I wanted to be listed in the phone book as “Mrs. Katharine Graham” rather than “Mrs. Philip Graham”—another small but severe irritation and wound—I said no.

Even during these months when he was living separately from me, I could see indirectly that Phil was doing some things that made sense and others that were puzzling. One of the more bizarre occurrences of this difficult time took place from February 22 to 26, when Phil went up to New York and inserted himself—uninvited and unwanted by the publishers—into the New York newspaper strike with the firm conviction that he could settle it. Here again, Phil involved President Kennedy, calling him to discuss the implications of the strike. In his 1975 book,
Conversations with Kennedy
, Ben Bradlee recalled: “Holding his thumb and forefinger close together, the President said, ‘The line is so damn narrow between rationality and irrationality in Phil.’ ”