Join Facebook to connect with Robin H Webb and others you may know. All right, she told Bradlee on the telephone, in the midst of a reception at her house, with the Posts lawyer counselling caution in her free ear. Young & Hungry He was quite a success. He ended up on his hands and knees, crawling around at the last minute to retrieve one of Lyndon's contact lenses. Robin . Robin Webb. A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. Gradually, I ceased talking much at all when we were out together. She felt like Trilby to his Svengali; she felt as if he had created her, that she was totally dependent. Graham was from a Florida family whose financial prospects, while far from dire, were a matter of occasional drama. Nixon told his men to treat the Post absolutely coldly and spoon-feed scoops to its local rival, the Star. It is not usually advisable, or possible, to argue with a Soviet bus, but my priorities were clear. An exception is David Halberstams 1979 book, The Powers That Be, which provides a vivid group portrait of the men and women behind the Post, CBS, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. If you have the goods, you say, Screw it, and publish. Only 15 years later, when things were very bad, did I look at the situation ruefully. There was the Latin-American correspondent for the Post, who wandered the continent for weeks in advance, arranging hotel suites, hairdressers, and interviews with heads of state from Caracas to Tierra del Fuego. Advertise with Us, Sponsored Posts from our Partners How could a woman reared in such exquisite privilegeone whose circle of friends, among them Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson and Nancy Reagan, rarely widened beyond the most powerful lites of Washington and New Yorktake such risks? When they were taken to see JFK, Phil spoke -- "shrewdly and eloquently," according to Joe -- pointing out all the obvious things that Johnson could add to the ticket and noting that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble. Mrs. Graham spotted a map of the Aegean and Black Seas and began to talk about a cruise she had taken in the summer of 1963, not long after her husband died. On Aug. 3, 1963, former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, having struggled with severe bouts of depression for at least five years, went into the bathroom of his family farm near Marshall, Va., and committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. But there was also a certain Africa-based correspondent who carved his own career coffin by arranging for a balloon safari over the Masai Mara at dawn; just as the sun was glinting off the savanna and the balloon was rising above a herd of grazing giraffes, Mrs. Graham is said to have turned to the correspondent and announced, with a profane burr, You know, I didnt travel all the way here to be a fucking tourist. It is said that the correspondent ended up as a recipe checker in the food section. Because of this, he never put a name to Phil's illness. He was in charge of a losing newspaper in what was rapidly becoming the capital of the world. But that statistic has to be balanced by the conservatism of nearly all publishers. On the first great story of her era as publisherthe war in Vietnamthe Posts performance was nearly an embarrassment. Inside the TV Star's Beverly Hills Home. . Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. Getting it launched was a full-time job, requiring massive organizational skills, infinite tact and patience, and a huge amount of time and energy. View the profiles of people named Robin H Webb. It was a fleeting, mystifying moment, but a very real one. 318 Robin Webb Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images CREATIVE Collections Project #ShowUs Creative Insights EDITORIAL VIDEO BBC Motion Gallery NBC News Archives MUSIC BLOG BROWSE PRICING ENTERPRISE VisualGPS INSIGHTS BOARDS CART SIGN IN Images Images Creative Editorial Video Creative Editorial FILTERS CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO She attended the Madeira School, in McLean, Virginia, one of the few girls schools intent on training young women for a career. You are stuck with me as a mascot repeat mascot. . robin webb phil graham photos Coach Thomas returned to Servite in January of 2018 after coaching at his alma mater, Crespi from 2012-2017. The Post pursued Watergate as a news story, not as an ideological crusade. Only a few minutes later, there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. She, too, saw it, felt its heat, and began running for the exit. Born Katharine Meyer on June 16, 1917, in New York City; died on July 17, 2001, in Idaho; daughter of Eugene Meyer (owner of . Week after week, the leading figures of the Nixon Administration lambasted Graham and the Post for the Watergate stories. All that was mostly over now, though I tried to be with them as much as possible. This is not the sort of moment one could hope to find in the self-examination of Andrew Carnegie or Colonel McCormick, much less of Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch. He does not travel the globe to interview foreign leaders. Philip L. Graham. I was already committed to Kennedy. All rights reserved. One did not want to spend the remainder of ones career taste-testing lima beans. Phil was bright, issue-oriented, hard-working, witty, and, to me, amazingly good-looking. However, on Feb. 4, he traveled to New York and went straight to Idlewild, where he met Robin once more. I did not go because I did not want to help you. Loose Lips Into this vacuum, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. The phone rang and I picked it up, not realizing that Phil, too, had picked it up, in his dressing room, with the door shut. Under Phil Graham, the Post had a well-respected editorial page and mediocrity nearly everywhere else; it was not even the best paper in the city. Despite his early apprehensions about my father's wealth, politics, and possible impulse to control, Phil gradually grew very close to him. It was unendurable to him not only that he couldn't make any of it right but that he might cause more hurt again. Events: A heads up about City Paper events, from panels to parties. She had not thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children, Graham writes. As far as I know, Katharine Graham had not written much since her early days on the Post, when she wrote a magazine column and was the anonymous author of such editorials as On Being a Horse, Mixed Drinks, and Spotted Fever. And yet I dont know of a more complex autobiography by an American business figure, certainly not one that allows itself such moments of weakness, embarrassment, and pain. ), it is preposterous to say that the rules of the game are the same. . "Y'all are doingreallocal D.C. For the second, I went with the upbeat, down-market option: the circus. The pressures were enormous and her preparations for them slight. Which is precisely the wrong way to conduct business as the publisher of a newspaper. Phil knew he controlled The Post because my father had given him the majority of A shares. These days, the Post is usually thought of as the second-best paper in the country, after the Timesor, if not the second-best, then at least tied for that honor with the Wall Street Journal and, stretching some, the Los Angeles Times. AKA Philip Leslie Graham. Phil, who had been helping him prepare for this moment for months, was at his side working on his statement. That decision may have been right for me, she writes, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Donso wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. I'm not sure what triggered Phil's relationship with Lyndon Baines Johnson, but it now seems predictable, even foreordained. The Post Company had gone public just two days before getting the papers, and publication could easily have affected its stock prices for the worse. The most imposing woman in journalism delivers an unexpectedly confessional autobiography. 12 Phil Graham pictures. By mid-1948, The Post was still a rocky, if lively, paper. Phil wrote a letter in return that Katharine rightly describes as pretty strange: One morning when you were despairing I tried to help you by words. I did not go to help you. In the end, Joe and his like-minded friends bought Phil's argument that this bill was better than nothing. He kept questioning whether this was the reason for his success and his prominence. In England, she lunched with Harold Laski, but then went off to Salzburg to meet her mother, who treated us to the Hotel Bristol and tickets to the music festival there. While a friend went on to visit the socialist experiment in Moscow, Katharine, on the stern advice of her father, did not. By the way, Senator, I didnt say I hated Nixon, she told Dole. She was in a good mood. Phil's early memoranda to his executives are stunning in their detailed outline of problems, potential, and objectives. Grahamone always referred to her as Mrs. Graham, even in private and at great distancesdid not travel in the style of the British Raj, but she was not arriving on a Eurailpass, either.. After we had lunched as long as we could, someone suggested driving to the country, and we spent the afternoon there. It is hard to remember now just how far in front the Times was after the Second World War. Phil wasn't much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy -- so much so that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear. Sometime after the "brainwashing" party, Johnson urged Phil to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. In an otherwise blissful spring of journalistic overload, a time when the merest cough in the Kremlin merited front-page attention, it came about that the Post and its sister publication, Newsweek, were being awarded a plum: an interview with the General Secretary of the Communist Party. And he was very interested in ensuring that women were working on the paper as well as reading it. Contact Us COMSAT was a groundbreaking public/private organization, half government, half telephone company. With Webb, he traveled to a publishing convention in Phoenix and caused a stir when, taking the microphone in a manic state, he started talking about the alleged affairs of John F. Kennedy, with whom he had been closely associated for some time. He sparked ideas, praised and persuaded, criticized and cajoled. Phil's activities in regard to Little Rock were the first sign for me that something was wrong with him, that his powerful talents could be used in such an idealistic but confusing and irrational way. Pretty soon this kind of thinkingindeed, this kind of lifetook its toll: most of us became somehow inferior. . Believing that he knew enough of the key players that he could solve the problem with behind-the-scenes maneuvering, he kept several phones going day and night. She went ahead with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and she backed her reporters and editors during Watergate, when the Post Companys survival was under threat and the paper was all alone in pursuing the story. My father received a confidential letter from his friend Kent Cooper, former general manager of the Associated Press, who was living in retirement in Palm Beach. For her part, Katharine would go on to helm the Post, becoming its de facto publisher during the famed Watergate era and, in 1979, becoming the first woman to hold the title officially. Phil and my mother also got along well. Sometimes Katharine glimpsed her parents as they were dressing to go out, or as Agnes was being massaged and manicured in preparation for the evenings entertainment. Olympic Sports, Savage Love The evening was fine and fun. Graham found herself agreeing: Saarinen would not get an offer. 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