Phil Graham read this letter and then composed a response to Russ Wiggins, the managing editor of the Post, on July 31, 1952:
Here are my views on Ben Bradlee’s letter, and you can send the attached copy along to him if you like:
(1) Ben is an exceptionally able person—the kind of person we would like to have on the Post.
(2) His experience—in terms of value to the Washington Post—is still a little short of that of Folliard, Albright, Friendly, et al.
(3) From our point of view, Ben’s return amounts to the same thing as though he had stayed here—i.e., he’ll have to come back without benefiting over other people who have not been away. That means, as I figure it, $98.25 per week salary.
(4) Much as I wish we could, we cannot compete for Ben with public relations jobs at $10,000. My own feeling is that ten years from now he’ll prefer newspapering to public relations—but that is conjecture. This personal choice obviously must be his.
(5) If I were Ben I would come back to the Post, because: (a) it’s the brightest, best paper in the U.S.; and (b) it’s young and growing. But, again, that is to some extent conjecture and cannot, of course, be considered as safe a prediction as one about the stability of, say, Metropolitan Life.
P. L. GRAHAM
It’s a rare chance to see Ben as his old boss saw him. Phil would never know just how right he had been.
But the loop didn’t close quite yet. Having made it to Europe, Ben wasn’t going to rush back to D.C. to take a job that offered no advancement from the one he’d left behind. This was his only shot abroad and he wanted to make the most of it, so he cast around for other opportunities. The Hotel Crillon was across the street from the American embassy, and in those days a number of foreign correspondents used to go there for a drink after work—Art Buchwald, who became one of Ben’s great friends, and Arnaud de Borchgrave, who was the European correspondent for Newsweek, among many others.
“Today, nobody even knows who the press attaché is anywhere, but in those days it was a major media presence,” de Borchgrave told me. “Everybody knew Ben. In those days, if you were writing a serious piece about the United States, for a French newspaper, you would go and see Ben. That was how powerful the position was.”
One night they had a drink after work and de Borchgrave told Ben that he was thinking of leaving his post as European correspondent at Newsweek, to move up to become a foreign editor. He needed to find somebody to succeed him who could speak French and was well connected. Instead of offering advice, Ben leapt at the opportunity for himself.
“It hadn’t occurred to you before?” I asked de Borchgrave.
“No,” he said. “Because in those days press attaché was more important than Newsweek bureau chief.” But Ben was bored at the embassy, and he knew an opportunity when he saw one. After some back-and-forths with the editors at Newsweek, Ben was hired.
“You couldn’t help but like the guy,” de Borchgrave told me. “I never saw a side of Ben that I didn’t like. You were happy to be in his company, and you looked forward to having that drink at the Crillon bar.”
I made a joke about how Ben refers to his days in Paris, after the dissolution of his first marriage and before the beginning of his second, as his “brief swashbuckling phase.”
“We used to kid him,” de Borchgrave said with a chuckle, “that there were women queuing up in front of his apartment for fifteen minutes of his time.”
The arrival of Antoinette (Tony) Pinchot Pittman in Paris in the summer of 1954 would bring an eventual end to Ben’s swashbuckling days and ultimately set in motion his return to the States. Tony was blithe, blonde, and descended from the landed gentry—daughter of Amos Pinchot, a wealthy lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, who was twice the governor of Pennsylvania and a conservationist who served as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Tony and Ben had moved in some of the same WASPy circles in D.C. in the late forties, and he had always noticed what he would later describe as her “inner light,” but they didn’t fall in love until she arrived in Paris. That summer Tony and her equally alluring sister, Mary, were traveling through Europe without their children—on a “toot with the diaphragms,” as they called it:
B: That summer we had rented a chateau just west of Paris, southwest of Paris, in a little village called Boissy St. Leger and it was, god, it was the most beautiful place. It was not an old, old castle, it was a sort of post-Napoleonic castle, 1829, 1830. Four hundred hectares, walled-in acres, owned by a man called Rodolphe Hottinguer, who was a baron.… They rented this place to us for a hundred thousand francs a month, that’s three hundred bucks a month. It had sixty-five rooms in it, it had two ballrooms.…
There were a lot of children, we had a swimming pool, we had a pond. It was just a gorgeous place, and it was probably thirty-five, forty minutes from Paris. And we used to give these big parties every weekend which Tish Noyes would cook up a lot of chili or spaghetti or something like that, because none of us had any dough, we really didn’t.… We had a lot of people from the embassy, we had a lot of French types, we had a lot of—I mean there was a party going from Saturday through Sunday night and Tony and Mary came to one of those and Tony and I fell in love.
Q: That day?
B: That day. It was very complicated, very difficult, very—I probably am not terribly proud of that in the sense of although Jean and I were not a viable family we were a family. But nothing really happened for years. That was 1954 and Tony and I got married two years later. She had a family, she had four kids, she went into analysis, I did and—
Q: Jean knew?
B: Jean knew.
Q: Right from the start?
B: Yeah. And we separated. And there was no deception, no dissimulation.
Tony was married with four kids, and Ben and his first wife, Jean Saltonstall—a Boston Brahmin whom Ben had hurriedly married just before the war—were still officially together, though their marriage had been dying on the vine for a while. Over the course of the next two years, both Tony and Ben would break up their marriages and uproot their lives in order to be together. Eventually they struck a deal: they would get married, Tony would come to Paris for one year with all four of her kids, and then the following year Ben would return to the U.S. with his new family.
This meant Ben was going to have to find a new job in Washington. As the Newsweek correspondent in Europe, he had been his own boss, leaving to cover a war in Egypt on a whim, traveling between Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia with luxurious weekend respites at the home of Marion and Irwin Shaw near Biarritz. That was hard to give up, but Ben worked it out so that he could return as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of the magazine. He hadn’t wanted to make a lateral move when he was in France with Jean, but he was willing to make one in order to be with Tony. In 1957, the newly combined Bradlee family moved into a house on N Street in Georgetown, and Ben set about working his way up the ladder at Newsweek.
Two important things happened next. The first was that, shortly after Ben and Tony moved to 3321 N Street, Senator John F. Kennedy and his young wife, Jackie, would buy the house at 3307. The second was that a couple of years after Ben returned to D.C., Newsweek’s owners decided to sell the magazine.
Ben often says that you really only make a couple of major decisions in life, that everything else is window dressing and logistics. He would later write, of Watergate, that “a chance like this comes only once in a lifetime, and I suspect our contribution was simply to recognize it when it came.” He recognized another of those opportunities—outside of Watergate, perhaps the most important opportunity of his life—in February of 1961, when he picked up the telephone and called his old boss, Phil Graham, to pitch him on buying Newsweek.
Ben and Oz Elliott, the managing editor of Newsweek in New York, had been wondering for months who was going to buy the magazine and what that would mean for them. Eventually, Ben decided he was going to try to find a buyer himself. He knew people with money, and Phil Graham wa
s at the top of his list. “In my circle, when you said publisher, that’s what you meant,” he once said, referring to Graham. “If you were going to buy Newsweek, you weren’t going to see some buddy of yours who was also making nine grand a year.”
It was late when Ben decided to call, somewhere around eleven o’clock. (Over the course of that evening he had downed “a couple of pops,” as he likes to say, and the liquid courage helped.) To Ben’s surprise, Graham answered the phone himself and told Ben to come over right away. Ben hurried over to Phil and Kay’s house on R Street, where he and Phil spent most of the night in conversation. “I didn’t have a goddamn clue as to whether I was getting anywhere,” Ben says, but as dawn neared Graham asked him to put together a memo about who he thought were the best people, who should play an important role at the magazine if the Post Company were really to take a serious interest. Graham was using words like “we.”
Ben didn’t know it—nobody knew it yet, really, except for Kay—but Phil Graham was a manic-depressive, and he was in one of his up phases. Had Ben caught Graham at a lower moment, the outcome would surely have been different.5 As it was, Ben went home and hammered out a long handwritten memo, “stream of consciousness stuff,” all about who was good and who wasn’t, making the hard sell for the Post to take the chance. (Sadly, this memo is lost to history, one of the few things that nobody can find.)
Graham bit, and so did Fritz Beebe and the rest of the Post Company. A couple of weeks later, after a fair amount of secrecy and intrigue—code names on the telephone, the invention of a fictional “Uncle Harvey”—the sale was final. Fifteen million dollars, but very little of it in cash, one of the best deals in the history of the Post Company.
However good a deal it might have been for the company, it was a far, far better deal for Benjamin C. Bradlee. In the first instance, Graham offered him the role of Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, and Ben took it. His days as a lowly correspondent were over. Now he would be the boss, managing the bureau, directing coverage, assigning reporters, answering only to Oz Elliott. He had officially become a fair-sized cheese.
But that was only the start of it. Because Ben had brought the deal to Phil Graham and the Post Company, the company awarded him a finder’s fee of Washington Post Company stock in the form of options. In the years to come, Post stock would skyrocket and Ben’s allotment would yield millions of dollars. Ben had some family money, and he was always paid pretty well, but nothing like this. “Without putting too much arithmetic on it,” he once said, “it made me many times the millionaire, it bought me houses, it allowed me to do things I never could have done otherwise. With the most innocent, naïve of motives.” He had been far more motivated by the prospect of professional advancement than by any grand dreams of a finder’s fee. The payout was a wonderful surprise, a bonus in the true sense of the word.6
The purchase of Newsweek brought Ben back into Phil Graham’s orbit, and into the Post’s, for good. He would never work for anybody other than a member of the Graham family again. But there was also a deeper symbolic meaning:
B: [I]t occurred to me that we, me, should try to influence who bought us. Therefore influence our own future. That if we could persuade somebody to buy it who shared our goals in journalism that it would be a wonderfully worthwhile thing to do.
Q: Did you have an epiphany?
B: No. I just—no—I just said that—perhaps even a moment of introspection whether man did have control of his fate, in any way. Whether you could influence your own future. Whether you could do something that would decide history, that would make your history. I don’t want to leave the impression that this was an epiphany of any kind.… Suddenly I was determined to try, that’s all.
You can wait a long time and never hear Ben admit to “a moment of introspection,” so you know it meant something to him. He was never a shrinking violet; when de Borchgrave said he was looking for a replacement, Ben hadn’t hesitated to recommend himself for the job.
This was different, though, more broadly gauged and fundamental. You had to raise your hand. You could shape history, and certainly your own history, but you had to be willing to put yourself in the hunt. Throughout the rest of his career, Ben would always cotton most to the people who were willing to go for it, to take a chance, to run with something. The people who wanted instruction or guidance from him never fared all that well. After the sale of Newsweek, with his star on the rise and his good friend newly installed in the Oval Office, Ben was in the hunt in a way that he never had been before.
Ben’s story from there is such a happy one that it’s hard to stomach what would happen over the course of the next two years to the man who had made so much of it possible. Phil Graham played a pivotal role in Ben’s life, and they were roughly the same age, yet in a basic way Ben never felt that he knew him. He wasn’t alone. “His wit was a way of keeping people away from intimacy,” Kay once said privately of Phil, who could keep dinner parties going for hours with his command of fact and humor. “He had no intimates. He had a lot of people who were friends of his, but he had no real intimates.” Phil was so supercharged that nobody could ever get a handle on him, and he struggled to get a handle on himself.
In August of 1963, on leave from a psychiatric institution and stuck in the grip of a deepening disease, Phil took his own life with a shotgun at Glen Welby, the Graham farm in Marshall, Virginia. He had been acting out, carrying on an open affair and even threatening to divorce Kay and take the paper away from her. There’s no way around those uncomfortable facts, and it’s all a part of the path that Kay Graham would have to walk toward her own unexpected future.
There’s also no way around the fact that Ben and Kay would stand on Phil Graham’s shoulders. He left them a newspaper and a media company on the rise, financially secure and growing after long years of scraping by. His decision to buy the Washington Times-Herald in 1954 (and to continue to print the two pages of exclusive comics that came along with the deal) had established the Post’s morning monopoly and made the modern Post possible.
When he was starting to lose it toward the end, Phil had called President Kennedy and berated him, shouting into the phone, delusional, “Do you know who you’re talking to?” And JFK had answered, “I know I’m not talking to the Phil Graham I have so much admiration for.” As crazy as things got, people loved him. When Ben came back over to the Post as an editor in 1965, he had his old boss’s distinctive oval desk brought down to use as his own. All of the big decisions that have come to Ben’s desk since then have come to Phil Graham’s desk, too.
* * *
1 More Cohen, to me: “I never met anybody like him in my life until I got to know him. I mean, I said to him, there wasn’t anybody in my entire postal zone that had hair as straight as his.”
2 The law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore was, for a time, Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine & Wood.
3 The “bulldog” is the first edition of the next morning’s newspaper, often produced at about 11:00 the night before and distributed in those days to movie houses and newsstands for the late night crowd looking for a jump on tomorrow’s news. When New York Times copyboys began swiping copies of the Post’s bulldog out of the alley behind the building in the late sixties, Ben viewed it as a sign of great progress at the paper. When Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968 the bulldog had already come out and Ben actually yelled, for the one time in his career as an editor, “Stop the presses!” so they could remake an entirely new front page.
4 At dinner one night, when my wife discovered that Ben had rented a weekend place outside Paris for a couple of summers, she asked him, “Was it some kind of timeshare?” Ben turned to her, incredulous, and bellowed, “Timeshare? It was a fucking château!”
5 K: Well, now, Ben, after Phil bought Newsweek he was pretty involved, very involved with it until that summer.
B: He was and then …
K: … and then he got depressed.
B: And then he got depressed.
&nb
sp; K: But you all didn’t know it.
B: We didn’t really know that.
K: No … Well, you know, he was, when he bought Newsweek it has to be said, he was manic.
6 B: Just for one good idea.
Q: It was a pretty good idea, though.
B: Yeah, it was a pretty good idea, but was it a multi-million dollar idea? I don’t know. “Hey, let’s call up Phil Graham.” Doesn’t seem in retrospect.
PREZ
Ben and Tony with Jackie Kennedy, The Washington Post, January 4, 1960.
Ben and Antoinette Bradlee, interview with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., March 26, 1964:
Q: Were you and Tony with him [JFK] the night of the West Virginia primary?
AB: Yes.
Q: Do you remember anything about that evening?
AB: I do. We had dinner with them, at their house, and then Jack was so restless after dinner that we all decided that we’d better go to the movies …
B: … and they wouldn’t let us in because it was a horror movie—one of those things that “We won’t open the doors after the show started.” And we said, “This is Senator Kennedy. He’s running for President.” And there was a big yawn from the guy.
[They ended up across the street at a movie called Private Property, which was on the list of banned films for Catholics, “a nasty little thing … starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife who kept getting raped and seduced by hoodlums,” as Ben once put it.]
AB: … But he spent most of the time there leaving and going next door to a drugstore and telephoning to see how things were going.
B: Two or three times.
AB: And then we sort of finished the movie out and we went back to their house, and he put in a phone call to—I guess Larry O’Brien.
B: Bobby.
AB: Was it Bobby?
B: Yeah.
Yours in Truth Page 7
