Personal History (63 page)

As difficult and sad as all of this was for us, Phil’s family, it was also wrenching for his friends and for people throughout the company, the industry, and the city. The resonance at Chestnut Lodge, of which I was then unaware, was also immense.

A great many wonderful things were written and said about Phil in the days after his death. The
Post
published a collection of his sayings and writings. An editorial said:

Herb Block wrote a particularly moving farewell. Al Friendly said Phil “could out-sleuth the paper’s star reporters, out-think its fanciest—or most fancied—stylists.” Russ Wiggins wrote a personal note to the staff:

Fritz Beebe was especially a hero in the days immediately after Phil’s death. I was only dimly aware of the mountainous difficulties with which he coped. He maintained stability and continuity and some calm within the company, and was there for me as a friend and as an adviser. At the same time, he shouldered much of the heavy burden of dealing with the whole issue of there being more than one will. Phil, during the height of his last manic period, had written a new one. As Ed Williams later said, “Any will lawyer would have been horrified by the way I handled this, but
if you just operate simply from your instincts you do better.” What Ed had done was extraordinary. Phil had begun pushing Ed to make a new will that would have given a third of Phil’s estate to Robin—who Ed believed was not the instigator of this and may never have known how much she stood to benefit—leaving two-thirds in trust to be divided among the children. At the time, Ed thought that the worst thing he could do was to tell Phil that he wasn’t going to help him make such a will, that in fact he felt Phil wasn’t competent to do such a thing. He knew it would spell the end of their relationship. In trying to hold on to Phil, Ed wrote the will for Phil but simultaneously wrote a memorandum for the file saying he didn’t think Phil was competent to make a will and that he was doing it “solely for the purpose of retaining a relationship with him and exercising what influence I could over him to get him back to his old life.” Just after this will was executed, Phil went back to Ed and wanted to reverse the percentages, making Robin the recipient of two-thirds of his estate and the children one-third. This one was never actually executed. When Phil finally decided to leave Robin and to come home, he asked Ed to destroy the rewritten will, and it was officially torn up in front of witnesses.

But although the Robin Webb will was invalid, a technical question remained: Did Phil’s 1957 will have legal standing, or did he die intestate? This was resolved by a compromise, whereby I gave up part of Phil’s estate in favor of the children, which was fine with me. The children eventually had to have their own lawyer, and after the funeral we all had to go to court to deal with the legal issues involved. I will never forget Steve, then only eleven, dressed up in his little suit, straightening his tie and saying, “I have to go to see my lawyer.” His remarkable and ever-present wit was with him even in these darkest of hours.

As far as I know, Robin received nothing in the end, nor did she ask for anything—ever. She was carried away by Phil and only slowly must have come to understand his illness. I believe that she called to ask if Phil had left a note, but she never reappeared in the life of my family; and she never gave an interview about her relationship with Phil. She must be a very decent person. I understand that she married an Australian diplomat and seems to live a quiet life. I hope that she, too, eventually recovered.

On the day before the funeral, the board of directors of the company met. Fritz suggested that if I felt up to it I should come to the office to say a few words to the directors, reassuring them that the company would go on and not be sold. I agreed, but was terrified. I thought about what to say, wrote it out, and even rehearsed. When the car arrived to take me downtown, Lally, in her nightgown and robe, hopped in and went along with me for comfort and support. I still have her touching and helpful handwritten notes on what she felt I should say—notes that she placed in my hands and which I relied on in what I said:

It touches me still that this young girl, who was, if anything, more devastated than I, could scribble out this simple but correct sequence of thoughts and jump in the car in her nightclothes to put them in my hand.

I recall walking into the room where the all-male board was gathered. To a man they looked almost as stricken as I was. They also seemed to be looking at me hard to decipher what was there. Oz Elliott later recalled what I said better than I could:

Knowledge of that “new generation”—my children—was what led me, however hesitantly, to the decision I made then: to try to hold on to the company by going to work.

P
HIL’S FUNERAL WAS
on Tuesday, August 6, in the Washington National Cathedral, and was so big and so public that in a way it again shielded me from what was really happening. The children and I had all participated in deciding on the nature of the service and the selection of the hymns. President Kennedy attended. He came up the side aisle by himself after everyone was seated. The sun shone through the stained-glass windows, somehow illuminating him as he walked to his seat.

One jolt occurred when we left for the private burial. Others had been to the funeral home to make all the arrangements, but I didn’t know the details. I did know from Phil’s endless jokes that he had procured a plot in Oak Hill, the cemetery across the street from our house. It was extremely
difficult to get in—the Dean Achesons, the David Bruces, and the John Walkers were all planning to be buried there—and Phil had developed an enthusiasm of an odd kind to be buried there, too. One night long before he became ill, he came home from a St. Albans school-board meeting and said there was a man on the board who was influential at Oak Hill and he was sure we could have a plot. He went on joking about it, saying that all I would have to do was to wheel him across the street. I was deeply upset when we pulled up in front of the burial site to find that this was not an exaggeration. His grave is directly in front of a little chapel right across the street from my house, where I can see it every day. I like this now, but in the beginning it disturbed me a great deal.

People came home afterwards—touchingly, people from all over. It’s funny how much you care who is there—and even somehow count the house at a moment like that. For friends to care and to come means something.

Two messages came to me from President Kennedy. The one I received on the day of the funeral quoted Prime Minister Macmillan saying that when Phil called on him that summer he had found him particularly attractive and interesting. The president then said, “I thought the service today was appropriate and moving—especially the last hymn. Phil was so helpful to me in so many ways since I have come here. We shall all miss him greatly and I send you and the children my deepest sympathy.” Jackie Kennedy wrote me an eight-page letter, one of the most understanding and comforting of any I received. Just a few days after Phil’s funeral, Jackie gave birth to the baby boy who died.

These days—from Phil’s death through the funeral—that we all endured are as hazy to me now as they were then. If there is one regret I feel, one enormous failing, it’s that I was so overwhelmed that I wasn’t thoughtful enough or helpful enough with the children, whose trauma was even worse than mine. Phil was the bright, shining light in their lives. Each of the four had been through the months of his absence, only to get him back and then to lose him again.

Lally and Luvie at some point began insisting that what I needed was to get away from everything. They pressured me to go back to Europe with them, as did my mother by cable. I felt it would be impossible—even apart from the children, there was much too much to do, given the will, the estate, the company. Their rejoinder was that they had already packed for me and had my passport, and that I was going. I finally agreed to the plan. Bill and Steve bravely returned to their camps. Don stayed at his job with Scotty, living at home and spending a lot of time at the Friendlys’. I took off with Luvie and Lally the day after the funeral to join my mother’s chartered yacht at Istanbul.

That decision may have been right for me, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Don—so wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. Would my younger boys have been better off going too? Would it have been better if I’d stayed home for them? This is, for me, the most painful thing to look back on. It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.

L
EFT ALONE
, no matter at what age or under what circumstance, you have to remake your life. When I came back in September 1963 from the trip around the Black and Aegean Seas to take up my life again, there was a great deal of painful loneliness, only somewhat dulled by work and by the necessity of tending to the children, my mother, the business, and the task of balancing them all. The cruise had been a reprieve of sorts—it certainly took me into another world—but I experienced it with a mix of emotions. The inner turmoil continued. Always in my mind was the climax of the years of secret struggle with Phil’s illness, the shock of the suicide, the loss, and the eternal questions about why and what next. I didn’t talk with anyone intimately on the trip; mostly, I kept my agonizing to myself. I couldn’t stop reliving the awful moment of the gun going off, my springing up, racing downstairs, and finding him. The scene replayed in my head until I thought I might be going mad. It took a long time to get through that. To this day, a gun going off or any loud bang nearby affects me profoundly.

Yet, on another level, life carried on. The trip was diverting, no doubt serving my mother’s purpose, bad as it was for my young boys left behind. For me, this was the first of many such trips in which looking around, observing, and learning became almost addictive.

One vivid moment from the end of this interlude took place at a stopover I made on my way home to visit friends on the island of Spezos. As I was leaving, Chip Bohlen asked me, “You’re not going to work, are you? You mustn’t—you are young and attractive and you’ll get remarried.” I said emphatically that I
was
going to work. Chip actually meant what he said flatteringly: for a woman, being married was a goal, a way of life—at that time certainly the most desirable one. But I wasn’t thinking about remarriage at the time. I also saw no contradiction between going to work and whatever happened in my private life. I suppose that, without quite realizing it, I was taking a veil.

——

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
9, the day after I returned from Italy, I did, indeed, go to work. More formally, I was elected president of The Washington Post Company at a meeting of the board of directors on September 20. Often I have been asked how I had the courage to take over the company, and I’ve always replied that I never saw myself as “taking over” anything or becoming the true head of the company. I had no conception of the role I was eventually to fill. While recognizing the importance of controlling the company, and having been willing to fight for it, I saw my job now as that of a silent partner, watching from the sidelines as I tried to learn about the company to which I had tragically fallen heir. I saw myself as a bridge to my children and viewed my role before they could take over as supporting the strong men—principally Fritz Beebe for the whole company; Oz Elliott at
Newsweek;
John Sweeterman, Russ Wiggins, and Al Friendly at the
Post;
and John Hayes in broadcasting—who were running things, and learning what I needed to in case some big decision came to me, as the holder of the A shares. I naïvely thought the whole business would just go on as it had while I learned by listening. I didn’t realize that nothing stands still—issues arise every day, big and small, and they start coming at you. I didn’t understand the immensity of what lay before me, how frightened I would be by much of it, how tough it was going to be, and how many anxious hours and days I would spend for a long, long time. Nor did I realize how much I was eventually going to enjoy it all.

My going to “work”—in the sense I defined it—seemed to be the only sensible step to take and, in some ways, shouldn’t have caused much astonishment. The years with my father and later with Phil were years of absorbing from them, and often with them; fortunately for me, they both believed in sharing what they were doing with daughters and wives. One strength I did bring to the company was some knowledge and appreciation of news and journalism. I knew the principal journalists on the
Post
relatively well—I knew Russ, Al, Chal Roberts, and Eddie Folliard as old friends—and had spent my life listening to talk about the news and about the company. I had some sense of whom to listen to. Rightly or wrongly, I felt competent to size them up. On the other hand, I felt awfully new and raw, and the job, even as I had limited it, looked very big. It seemed like the difference between watching someone swim and actually swimming. As I wrote a friend in late September, “I am quaking in my boots a little but trying not to show it.”