Booknotes

Ms. KATHARINE GRAHAM, AUTHOR, "PERSONAL HISTORY": That's a hard question. I'm sure they probably did, but I couldn't tell you exactly what.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes, I think they understand that he was ill. They--the oldest one was 20, and the youngest one was 11, so they had to deal with it then and always.

Ms. GRAHAM: I really don't suppose that I meant to just tell everything to everybody. But once I sat down to write my story, I just tend to be frank and open, and I wanted to be very truthful. And I just wrote it the way I saw it and the way the research came up with. I told it as I--the best I could.

Ms. GRAHAM: About six and a half years ago, I started to do the research for this book. I actually had the idea even longer ago than that. I...

Ms. GRAHAM: I did. But I also had very good assistance from a fine researcher, Evelyn Small, and my editor at Knopf, Bob Gottlieb. So I consider that I had assistance from them, but I wrote the words myself. Right.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, first, we--for about two years, we did research because I had no diaries. So we looked up all the letters and, luckily, I grew up in a day when you all wrote letters all the time, and so we had a lot of those. And we had memos from The Post, from Phil's day, from my day. And we had a lot of paper that I didn't know we had, and that helped a lot. And then we did 250 or more or less interviews with my contemporaries, starting with schoolmates and working on up to politicians and judges and other people that we dealt with. And that helped fill in the record.

Ms. GRAHAM: In 1933. He had just gotten out of the government, been out about three weeks, as--he'd been governor of the Federal Reserve board, and he had started the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under Hoover. And he stayed as Federal Reserve chairman for a little while under Roosevelt. And then he resigned because he didn't like Roosevelt's monetary policies, and went to Mount Kisco. The Post came up three weeks later for auction on the steps of the building, and he bought it anonymously.

Ms. GRAHAM: Eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

Ms. GRAHAM: There were five, and--and The Post was fifth in the field of five. And so it had about circulation of 50,000 in a pretty broken-down building. And so he started in, and he thought--he was a businessman, and he thought he knew to--how to turn around businesses, but he really had never had any newspaper experience, and he encountered the most horrendous difficulties in fighting his way up. But he really did a terrific job starting with nothing.

Ms. GRAHAM: Mount Kisco, where they lived in the summer, was about an hour--it was about 50 miles from New York City in Westchester County. And we went there every summer. And they had built this large house there, thinking that my father was going to live there when he was on Wall Street and was going to commute to Wall Street. But it just got built when we moved to Washington--or they moved to Washington.

Ms. GRAHAM: In 1912, they met in a museum in New York City. My father had picked up a friend, and they were driving downtown in an old car that he had called a Stanley Steamer. And he picked up this friend whom he didn't either know very well or like very much and said that he would like to give him a ride, but he was going to stop off at a Japanese print show. And they did that, and they saw my mother walking around in the show. And my father said to his friend, `That's the woman I'm going to marry.' And so the friend said, `Well, then you have to speak to her.' My father said, `No, no, that would spoil everything. One of us is going to meet her, and whoever meets her first will call the other one.' And about two weeks later, the friend called my father and said, `Guess what?' And he said, `You've met the girl.' And he said, `Damn you, I have, and I've arranged that we're all going to have dinner.' And from then--for two years--that was on Lincoln's birthday, and they were married two years later on Lincoln's birthday.

Ms. GRAHAM: A quite weird one, actually. Neither one of them, I have to say, were very religious, my mother maybe a little more than my father. He had, at the age of 14, studied for a bar mitzvah, and then he decided--he said, `I believe some of that, but not all of it, and I'm not going to do that.' And he never--he was very, very ethical, very driven, very moral, but he wasn't formally religious. She--neither was she, but her family was and his family was. And so she took us to church and--but very--not very formally.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, almost not at all, strangely, when I was young, a couple of times. One was when I was in school and somebody was casting "The Merchant of Venice" and said maybe I should play Shylocke because I was Jewish. And I--I didn't have any idea that I was or that there was such a thing; I knew nothing about it. And at--at some other point, they'd said my father was a millionaire, and I didn't know what either one of them meant. So I'd go on home, ask my mother what--what it meant to be Jewish and what it meant to be a millionaire. And I don't think I got any explanation for either one at that point.

But then later in college, it came up because, of course, Hitler had started and it was more of an issue. But I spent my whole youth s--bizarrely unaware of the issues or of anti-Semitism or of anything. I mean, I should have pra--known a lot more about it. I should have known both their heritages and what it meant to be Jewish, what it meant to be Lutheran, but it simply wasn't mentioned. Not--by the way, I'm sure they weren't ashamed or worried about it; it just was that nothing intimate was really talked about in my family.

Ms. GRAHAM: There are five of us in all. Now I was the fourth.

Ms. GRAHAM: I have two sisters, one older, my sister Elizabeth Laurents, and one younger, my sister Ruth Epstein. She was four years younger than me, and there were two years between all the rest of us.

Ms. GRAHAM: In Wash--well, we live--we spent our first years in New York, and that's kind of a strange part of the story because my family had moved to Washington, but they were there for almost four years before they moved us down to Washington. So we were living mostly with governesses and nurses and music teachers and things like that in the New York apartment. And then, in fact, they'd come up in between and visited us, and occasionally my sisters would go down to Washington, but I was a baby. And when--when I was four, we all moved to Washington.

Ms. GRAHAM: I went for two years to Vassar and for two years to the University of Chicago. I changed.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, it was a course taught by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins together, the president of the university. And it was the history--the i--great ideas in the Western world. They thought that--Hutchins had a theory that, I think, started at St. John's College in Annapolis, that if you learned the great ideas of the Western world, that that would be your education. And so this course started with Plato and Aristotle, then worked all the way up to St. Tho--through St. Thomas Aquinas and to Freud and Marx. And they drilled you; there was a Socratic method, and you had to kind of stand up for yourself and defend your ideas to them. And it was very rigorous training, and I really liked it, but it was very hard.

Ms. GRAHAM: I think I liked the Greeks. I liked Aristotle and Plato talking about happiness and the ends of life and what you thought about. I was really interested in that.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I had proudly gone off and gotten myself a job at the University of Chicago. I mean, I'd use my--my law prof--my labor relations professor, Paul Douglas, who later became a senator, knew the publisher of the then Chicago Times, the afternoon tabloid. And I went down there and asked him for a job, and he said he would take me, but if I wasn't any good, then I shouldn't think he was going to keep me. And I said, `That would be fine. I'd love a tryout.' Then I went home and my father asked me to go out to San Francisco with him on a train trip he was taking, because he was going to the Bohemian Gro--Grove men's reserve. And I said, `Fine.' I'd never seen San Francisco. And I stayed there while he was at the Bohemian Grove, and he came back, and I said, `I love this town and if I will swallow my pride, give up my job in Chicago, will you help me find a job here?' And he did.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I covered a longshoremen's labor dispute; it was a lockout on the whole waterfront of everybody who was working in the warehouses. It was after--two years after the very bloody, well-known longshoremen's strike. And I was asked by the labor reporter to do the legwork on this. And I went up and down the waterfront and got to know the negotiator for the union, Sam Kaegel, and the head of the warehousemen's union, Gene Patton, and the--occasionally Harry Bridges. And I have to say, although it isn't correct these days, I socialized with them at night and we went up and down the waterfront drinking what is known as boilermakers.

Ms. GRAHAM: I fear they were whiskey--whiskey and beer mixed, and you could get three of them--you could get a third one free if you paid 25 cents for the first two.

Ms. GRAHAM: N--honestly, not. I mean, I am in that you deal and want to deal with organized labor, and we do. But I think that as it w--then, they were just getting organized, and the--the industrial unions were all new, the steel and miners were--were unorganized, and they were just getting organized. And so their situa--their labor conditions were quite bad. Right now some of the unions are fine and needed just the way they are, and some, like many businesses, I feel, have gotten into practices that are not particularly constructive and that have to be rethought, like featherbedding when it's not needed.

Ms. GRAHAM: I think I'm just about where I was. I f--I'm centrist, probably more Democratic than not, but I'm independent. I've voted for--for Republicans as well as Democrats. But I feel strongly about issues of racial justice and poverty and cities, and I feel strongly that there has to be something done within the context of our--of--of the way this country is. And I'm obviously committed to all the values such as freedom of speech and--and the things that I feel that enlightened semiliberals are for.

Ms. GRAHAM: I suppose so, because I think the most surprised person would probably be President Bush.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I think that most presidents get sensitive about The Post and Newsweek as well. And they--he had his issues with us, but I think any president does. But I th--I--I suspect he would not think I'd voted for him.

Ms. GRAHAM: We're at about $1.6 billion in annual revenues, and the company holds mainly The Washington Post, and we have a small newspaper, the Everel--Everett Herald and half of the International Herald Tribune. And then we have Newsweek and we have six television stations and a million and a half cable connections. And we also have Digital Ink, which is our electronic media and a Washington Post Web site.

Ms. GRAHAM: No--oh, yes, I am chairman of the executive committee. I thought you were going to say chairman. No, I am chairman of the executive committee.

Ms. GRAHAM: Thirty years.

Ms. GRAHAM: That's a little bit average.

Ms. GRAHAM: In 19--well, actually, I'd worked there summers in college.

Ms. GRAHAM: But after school, in 1939, when my father came out and suggested that I come back from San Francisco and work on The Post. And I was--it was time for me to leave there in many ways, and I was happy to do that.

Ms. GRAHAM: It was low person on the editorial page. I edited letters to the editor, I made up the page, and I wrote a few editorials of no great moment.

Ms. GRAHAM: That year that I came back. I was really surprised because when I'd left Washington to go to college, it was still a very Republican town, and it was kind of stuffy, you know. There were parties of my parents' age and then our parties were kind of dances in their third-generation real estate. And when I got back, the New Deal had come and grown up, and it was prewar, and--and the town was just full of attractive young men. And it was not the town I remembered, and I was simply thrilled.

Ms. GRAHAM: I met him in a house where I got to know some of the people--two of the people who worked on The Post were living there. And there were 12 bachelors in this house, and he was one of the 12, and I didn't me--meet him till he was going out with some other women--girls. And I m--actually met him one night when we'd all gone to a restaurant and were coming back. And I--they were living at S Street; they hadn't moved to Arlington, which they later did. And I leaned out the window with a lot of other people because the tail end of the party was coming in, and I--unfortunately, the screen fell out onto his head, and he was startled and looked up, and we--I looked at him.

And in fact, I met a girl that night when I went to the bathroom, and I--she said she went to law school, and I said, `How marvelous. I could never do that. Tell me about it. How do you do it?' And she said, `Well, I'm engaged to Phil Graham, and he comes by and picks me up, and we talk things over and that helps a lot.' So I just said, `Oh.' And then he l--they broke up and he went out with a friend of mine called Alice Barry. And she said did I know Phil, and I said, `No, I didn't.' And she said, `You should. He's just the greatest here.' And I said, `Oh.' And then about New Year's, my sister gave a party and invited everybody at the house where they were then living, and there were 12 of them. And he was in the party, and we first got to know each other that way. And this developed rather quickly because the third time we went out together, he discussed marriage.

Ms. GRAHAM: The third time.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I said, `We sh--this was a little hasty and not,' but I was really intrigued by the idea. But I said we had to be very deliberate and wait a month. And I think we hardly did wait a month, and we were married that June, after the s--he was working for Justice--Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, and he was going to clerk for Justice Frankfurter the next year, so when the court adjourned, we were married June 5th, 1940.

Ms. GRAHAM: They were.

Ms. GRAHAM: No.

Ms. GRAHAM: He was a mentor to Phil, who had gotten to know him when he was still at the Harvard Law School and who chose the first five clerks from the law school boys he knew, an--of which Phil was one. And he w--I had known him because my parents were friends of his, too, but I didn't know him well. And that year, we really became great friends, and he was simply wonderful to us. And he was so funny and so intimate. He--he--he liked the boys to argue with him, and particularly his law clerks were--and they were--if they didn't agree with him, they would all indulge in screaming fights to my kind of--I was shocked by some of their manners, but he liked this confrontation, and he liked to discuss issues like that. And he was wonderful to me and to us, and both he and Mrs. Frankfurter, who became a friend, too, were very, very close to us.

Ms. GRAHAM: We had four. We had--I have four. My oldest is Elizabeth Weymouth, who is a journalist and writes for The Post and on foreign affairs, but other things, too.

Ms. GRAHAM: Known as Lally. And Donald, who is chief executive officer of the company. William, called Bill, who has an investment partnership in Los Angeles, but who lives on the vineyard in the summer and is very interested and loves the vineyard and lives next door to me with his children, and I love that. And Steven, who is married and lives in New York and is getting a postgraduate degree in--in literature and is in teaching, but he has been in the theater and has produced and--and has an experimental theater going.

Ms. GRAHAM: I lost our first baby, which was tremendously traumatic, who was born full term, but because it was in Washington during--at the beginning of the war and the hospitals were very busy. And it was an--it was a s--an accidental thing in the hospital; it really shouldn't have happened. And Phil went in the Army right afterwards, so it was pretty devastating, yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I w--it was just awful, because I thought Phil was going in the Army, it was the end of everything, we'd never have any children, something might happen to him. It was a pretty awful moment.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, he went in in--it was two and a half years, I think.

Ms. GRAHAM: My father talked to him when he was in officers school. He had, by this time, invested heavily of both financial resources and energy and--and effort in building up The Post. And it was very discouraging because they were losing money every year. And he was making progress of great kinds, both in circulation and, to some extent, in advertising, but it just looked terribly discouraging. And h--he wanted to make sure that he had a successor in place, that there was some point to all this work. And my brother was a psy--was, by then, a psychiatrist and was interested in medicine, and so he asked Phil if he'd be interested. And we had long talks about it, and I said he had to decide, and he did, finally. And he said what did I think, and I said, `Well, I loved Washington, but I was willing'--he wanted, originally, to go into law and politics in Florida, and so...

Ms. GRAHAM: That is true. And Bob did just what Phil kind of aspired to, and that's nice. I think he's a great and very fine senator.

Ms. GRAHAM: Seventeen. And during that time--he became publisher when he was not quite 31, because my father--he went on The Post right after he got back and we had terminal leave. It was January of '46. And six months later, my father was offered to be president of the World Bank by President Truman. And he said to Phil, `I won't leave if you don't want me to, but this is kind of my first love,' because that was the kind of thing he'd done for the government, and he thought somebody ought to start this World Bank. And Phil said no, that was all right, he should do what he wanted to do. And so my father did that and named Phil publisher. So he took up the struggle.

And from '47 to '54, he, too, had the same kind of time, really, really, difficult time. And in '54, my father, who had come back from the Worlds Bank--or the World Bank, actually, six months after he went, because he did get it started and he did get the regulations changed that made him really frustrated, and he felt that he couldn't do any more than he'd done at his age. And so he had resigned and come back, but he left Phil as publisher.

Ms. GRAHAM: He did. He had this great big, heavy kind of wonderful desk, and he left it to the bank because, I guess, it was huge and kind of cumbersome, and he left it there. And Bob inherited it, I believe, took it with him--Did he?--to his own office.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yeah.

Ms. GRAHAM: I am. He's a good friend.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

Ms. GRAHAM: Not co--coherent--not consecutively. I think most of what I told had been here and there.

Ms. GRAHAM: It wasn't ev--easy, and not only because of the sensitivity of what I was writing, but because I wanted to be sure to put it in context. It was a comparatively short period in which he was--in which he was finally very ill and did some quite aberrational things; and that most of our life together was wonderful and that he was wonderful. And I didn't want the bad part at the end to overshadow the very, very good part. And I wanted to tell--one of the reasons I wrote this book was to say how great he was and my parents were, each o--in their own way. I thought they were three people who deserved to be remembered and--and to be written about.

Ms. GRAHAM: He was subject to manic depressive illness before lithium. I think it was being experimented with, but it certainly wasn't being used. And he went to a psychiatrist who didn't believe in drugs of any kind of electric shock or anything. And so Phil himself didn't because of the psychiatrists and because he naively thought it left you not as--as human as you had been, that it affected your mind.

And so he didn't want--I--I don't think there were any--much was available, but he didn't want it, either. And so he essentially suffered from untreated manic depression. At the end, he went off with a young woman, a researcher at Newsweek whom he met and very quickly picked up and took up with, and it was finally, after some hesitations and backs and forths, he left with her and said that what was the matter with him was me and that he wanted a divorce, and he was going to keep the paper and--and he was going to marry her. And then, as I kind of thought might happen because this was pretty spectacular, as you can imagine, in '62...

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes. Of, course, it finally had to be. It wasn't for--at first. But we had successfully hidden his illness, which had really started getting serious in 1957, and from then on the cycles were getting closer and--and worse. But people didn't know about it until this very public event happened. And so they thought, `Well, this--this is what happens sometimes,' and he--they didn't really like it. I even said to one friend, `You know, he's ill,' and she said, `Don't say that. Everybody says that when their husband leaves them.' And so I realized that I'd better not say that, but I knew that this was part of it. And he got depressed in the summer of that year, in July, and came...

Ms. GRAHAM: 1963.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Ye--well, not close, but they were--they were friends, and Phil knew the president pretty well, and I--I knew of them, too. And we did see something of them. And he was also good friends with the vice president. And so he came home and asked the girl to go back home, and he came back to us, but he was so ill and so depressed, and I had seen him through two of these depressions, and I just felt unequal to doing it again. And he was asked to and voluntarily did go to a hospital from which he succeeded in getting a day off during which he killed himself.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes. He'd gotten--he'd gotten involved a little bit. I think he was very--he--he felt very Southern, and he was very involved in civil rights and in civil liberties. And actually, in 1957, he had become involved with then majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, in passing the 1957 civil rights law, and he had very much helped him get that law passed by talking to Joe Rou and the NAACP and by telling them that the voting--there were no Voting Rights in--Act, and it was--I mean, there were--there were voting rights and not school desegregation, and there was a jury regulation in it that it--you could appeal to a jury, which at that time were largely white. So it was a very weak civil rights law, but it was the first one in about 84 years. And Phil persuaded Joe Rou, who persuaded the NAACP to accept this, and that's the way it got passed.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes. And during--actually, during the Eisenhower period which you referred to, he had become involved in the desegregation of the Little Rock school, and he wanted to prevent Eisenhower sen--sending the troops in there. And he worked very hard and somewhat frantically to try to get everybody together and get the school desegregated. And when it failed, which it o--was going to because Governor Faubus was standing firm against the idea of de--school desegregation. I think it threw him into his first depression in 1957, actually.

Ms. GRAHAM: I see you were talking about--just before he died, he was head of the Communications Satellite...

Ms. GRAHAM: ...Incorporated. And he was head of that. And I...

Ms. GRAHAM: Half government, half private. And yet he maintained his role as publisher. I think that's really not what anybody could dream of doing these days. And before that, he was heavily involved in politics and involved with Lyndon Johnson and involved, as you said, with Little Rock and involved, actually--I tell a story about desegregation of the--of the swimming pools in Washington, which he kept the story out of the paper and made a deal with this Interior Department that if he quieted the story of a riot that had taken place about swimming pools, that they would desegregate them. Well, that was using the paper and--and influencing the news. And I think that's unacceptable these days and--because you have to influence events by telling--giving people information by which they can make decisions. And so I think it wouldn't happen today.

Ms. GRAHAM: I meant that just the way it's written. I didn't feel put-upon, and I adored our life. I liked being what I called the chief operating officer. I did everything at home. I kept the houses running; I took care of the children. I made the decisions about summers. I bought and sold houses and moved. I did everything that most families, I think, share because he was so--working so hard, and I knew--I was trying to take the pressure off by doing everything at home. And I was interested in our life; I was interested in meeting the people we met. I adored the family. I don't know that I saw myself the way people would view that situation now in which you really were brought up to think that men were intellectually superior, and that you kind of live intellectually off them, which is, of course, ridiculous. Even--you can work or not work these days; women have choices. That's the main point. But you have to have your own identity and your own interests.

Ms. GRAHAM: That's true.

Ms. GRAHAM: In a really weird way, because the cemetery--it's a perfectly beautiful cemetery across the street, Oak Hill, and there weren't many places--and it's a very old cemetery. And he got kind of interested in having a plot there for us and it was kind of like getting into a club or something. Our great friends, the Bruces, and the John Walkers and the Atchesons and people we knew all had these plots there, and he made jokes about this and said we should be sandwiched in there somewhere. And one day he came home from a school meeting and said, `Well, I've got this plot because I've become acquainted with somebody on the St. Albans School Board and we can get in. And it became a family kind of joke and he even made lugubrious jokes about, `You can just wheel me across the street.' I mean, you know, with what happened, of course, it's--it's appalling, but you--you never thought of it as a reality.

And so we were at the church at the funeral and my children--and one of my sons and other people had made the arrangements, so I had no idea that this plot was literally across the street from the house in front of the little chapel. And I was pretty startled when we arrived there after the service to find that it was right there in front of my eyes. And at first it bothered me, but now I really like it.

Ms. GRAHAM: Fifty.

Ms. GRAHAM: No.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I--you know, I had friends. Let's put it that way.

Ms. GRAHAM: Actually, no, because I really work terribly hard and I moved around where I had to and I led a life that was, really, essentially, work; even if I went out in the evening, it was either something I had to do or really did want to do, or I stayed home. And I--I don't think there was room in that life to get married to anybody that is very strong and wanted me to be there more than I was. So it really never came up as a practical fact.

Ms. GRAHAM: I went away for a month and came back and went to work, but that wasn't to say I took over The Post. I went to work to learn the issues. I didn't really see myself as taking over The Post, but I did go to work right away. And gradually I learned that you couldn't sit there studying the thing. And I was encouraged to by some of the executives and mainly by Fritz--Frederick Beebe, who was--whom Phil had made the chairman, who had been our corporate lawyer. And he said, `You have to come to work.' And I was happy to do that, because I cared a great deal about the company and about The Post which I'd lived--struggled for its existence. It'd been part of my whole life, and I knew what had gone into it making it as successful as it even was, which was still competitive. And so gradually, having gone to work to learn, Fritz be--I worked with him and worked as president of the company and I became publisher when John Swederman, who had publisher--made publisher by Phil--left. And then Fritz died 10 years later just after we'd gone public. And so then I became head of--then I did take over the company.

Ms. GRAHAM: Right. Well, because rapidly we went through the Pentagon papers and Watergate, and just as I thought things had calmed down, we went through a very violent pressmen's strike in '75. So those--those were three really cosmic events and--that happened and--and in public, so to speak.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes, that was...

Ms. GRAHAM: No.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes. Right.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Roz was not--A, he was in a--involved with us as a law partner in Cravath and before that he'd been in the government.

Ms. GRAHAM: And then he went on--he was on our--yes, he was deputy s--defense secretary.

Ms. GRAHAM: When he was--when he was thinking he wanted a divorce.

Ms. GRAHAM: We became very close friends, and then he came in as the lawyer mu--later--actually, we--Fri--Fritz Beebe and I brought him in together.

Ms. GRAHAM: Right.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yeah.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Mmm.

Ms. GRAHAM: A little.

Ms. GRAHAM: No, because once people are in the government, the relationship changes. And you can be friends with people in the government, but you have--they remember and you remember the paper comes first. And sometimes the paper attacks your friends or does things even that you think are even unfair to your friends. And sometimes you can reason with the editors, but mostly you have to just stand by them.

Ms. GRAHAM: Sioux Falls.

Ms. GRAHAM: Not much. It's really Washington most of the time.

Ms. GRAHAM: I try to explain what the power of a newspaper or a magazine or television stations are. For instance, The Post has the power to inform people, and where they play a story matters, probably. If they cover it well, it matters. Because you're talking to the government as well as people in Washington. But you don't have the power they--sometimes people think you run downstairs and talk to editors. You don't--I mean, about a story, a particular--you never see stories before they get in the papers. You have the power to pick an editor you think--or a publisher or whatever it is--that will do the job well and that is in your general mode of thought. But after that, they really have autonomy. And so you don't have the power to--I mean, that people envision you as having, of making or breaking people or influencing events directly. You have more--it sounds like goody two-shoes, but you have more responsibility than power.

Ms. GRAHAM: `Detached' is the word that I think is better because--and objectivity, the way that most people interpret it, you can have. But you exercise--an--an editor exercises a judgment when you just think, `What is relevant?' You have to make selections of what goes into the paper and what doesn't. So that's what I mean by there is no--there's no such thing as objectivity, because the human being does that. And you do it the best you can to be fair and detached and--and accurate. But you are making a human judgment and a--there is a person making it. That's all I mean.

Ms. GRAHAM: I do, but I don't want to talk about it.

Ms. GRAHAM: I talk about it in the book, that he was a dear friend and it was very painful.

Ms. GRAHAM: No, Al Friendly.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes, Andrew.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes. Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: Dereaux.

Ms. GRAHAM: Mortifying but true.

Ms. GRAHAM: I really don't know. Maybe I shouldn't have. But I tend to be up-front and honest, so I guess I just told it the way it happened.

Ms. GRAHAM: He was--I don't know, I forget his actual title. He was the running--he was--first he was number two businessperson at Newsweek and he--then, actually, after that incredible scene, he came back from CBS and ran the business side of Newsweek.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yeah.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: I can't answer that. I don't know.

Ms. GRAHAM: It seemed like the thing to do at the time, but it was--wasn't a good idea.

Ms. GRAHAM: Time and experience.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I think I could make decisions better and--and more firmly and stick by them and not quite ask so much advice.

Ms. GRAHAM: Although I think you always ask some advice.

Ms. GRAHAM: Couldn't open my mouth. I had to practice in front of the children the first year I was working at the paper. I was asked to go down and say `Merry Christmas' at the company lunch and I literally--my children are hilarious, they keep telling this story. I practiced making this speech saying `Merry Christmas' in front of the children, because I'd never said anything in public to--even my children lined up in a row.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I made a lot of speeches defending us during Watergate. I guess that's when I started really speaking the most. And I was trying to explain that we were reporting a story and that we weren't after the administration and that we weren't--it wasn't our intention to do them in, that we were following the footsteps of the story. And so I started speaking quite a lot that year, '72, '7--well, probably it's later, '73 and '74.

Ms. GRAHAM: I found him irresistibly charming, attractive. And it was awfully exciting having someone you knew as president--having your generation in the White House and having these young people there. I thought they were marvelous.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, I think that he did turn things around and excited people, but in the three years he had before he died, I don't think he had the chance to really get an awful lot done of what he was trying to do. I think that President Johnson succeeded him and got legislation passed that he wanted to get done but didn't.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, that was another quite funny story, because I was at his 34th wedding anniversary, and just as we were--he was in a pretty bad mood, anyway. It was during the Vietnam War. And afterwards we went upstairs and he just went to bed and left us. And his bedroom, oddly, was right next door to the upstairs living room, the yellow room, and there were some double doors between.

And suddenly he came out--we were saying good night to Mrs. Johnson, and the doors were flung open and he came out and said, `Come here.' And I looked over my shoulder hoping somebody was there, but he was saying it to me. And then he said, `Come here' to Abe Fortas who was then, I believe, on the Supreme Court.

And we went into his bedroom and The Post was lying on the bed and to--a man called Tobriner was the chief commissioner in the district--there were still three, but he was kind of like the appointed mayor. And he ha--we had been for him and had backed him, so he was our--from the Johnson point of view, he was our creation. And he had appointed a police commissioner without consulting the president, which he had told him to do, and he was very displeased because he wanted to prove something about being anti-crime by appointing a super police commissioner. So he was really mad that Tobriner had gone ahead and done this.

And he started yelling at me about `our goddamn mayor' and he was--this idea and it was our fault he'd appointed this man, hadn't asked him when he--he, again, consulted him and he wanted to do it. And he started to undress. And I--I mean, I was--this is '64, please. And I was new at the job--I'd only gone to work. And he's flinging his clothes off while he's bawling me out and I thought, `Wait a minute. What is going to happen here? Can this be me? Am I standing here in the president's bedroom? And--and what is going to happen?' And he suddenly said, `Turn around.' And so I turned around and he went right on. And finally he said, `All right, good night,' and Abe and I both left. But, I mean, it was quite a beginning.

Ms. GRAHAM: I never knew him really--personally. I met him and I talked to him and I even interviewed him on--and he came to lunch at the paper--an editorial lunch, so I saw him a little bit, but I didn't really know him personally. And I think that he had many good traits. I think he was a real Jekyl-Hyde character, because he had all these things that we see--keep seeing coming out on the tapes and this really low-level side to him, but he was really brilliant in many ways, and he had very many good people working for him, and I really view him with ambivalence.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, now there was another friend, and Nancy especially I was--knew before they were in the White House. I think you never get to be friends with a president if you don't know them before, because their power is so great and they see people as--as strangers. So I thought he was--he was a leader; he--we knew what he stood for. I think he was a very dignified man. I wasn't particularly--I didn't agree with his--him or all that he did, but Nancy was a good friend and still is.

Ms. GRAHAM: I think this--well, now we're se--starting on second term and with both its promises and its failures, I'm very hopeful that things are going to go well, and I certainly hope they do. I think that there are many good signs.

Ms. GRAHAM: Well, again, he's another generation--they're very polite and we're n--I--I've seen them a little bit and we have a mutual friend, Vernon Jordan, through whom I've seen them a little bit. But there's no reason that I should see them.

Ms. GRAHAM: It was all sort of tough, because I'm not a professional writer and yet I really didn't want to write it with a writer because I thought that I would get too jumpy and want to tell them what to do too much, and so I thought I'd try to do it myself. So it was really hard just to do it.

Ms. GRAHAM: At home on my desk and--and I wrote it by hand.

Ms. GRAHAM: Yes.

Ms. GRAHAM: No.

Ms. GRAHAM: I gave it to my researcher who put it on a computer and put it all in order and helped me shape it and helped me make chapters of it and helped me get it together very--he was really essential. And then we sent it off to the editor, who left half of it on the cutting room floor.

Ms. GRAHAM: I think it might have been 1,200.

Ms. GRAHAM: No, that's it.

Ms. GRAHAM: Sort of.

Ms. GRAHAM: It's hard for me. It's much harder than having written it.

Ms. GRAHAM: I don't know why, but your voice and your--and--and talking about it in public, I find very hard. And I'm not very good at it, either, as you can now see.