Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  Ben would remain in the doghouse until November, when he and Tony were invited to a White House dance.4 Tony, always the grease for the wheel, sealed the Bradlees’ return to Kennedy’s good graces. “The president and Tony had a long session about the difficulties of being friends with someone who is always putting everything he knows into a magazine,” Ben wrote later. “Everybody loves everybody again.”

  In a review of Conversations with Kennedy in Harper’s magazine in 1975, the historian Taylor Branch likened Ben on the trip to Newport as “more jilted lover than journalist” and ridiculed him for accepting the terms that Kennedy demanded. Twenty years later, Michael Lewis would beat Ben with the same stick in a tough review of A Good Life: “The access journalist is forever deciding whether to protest when, during the waltz, the hand lands on his bottom.” Journalistic standards and expectations were different in 1975 or 1995 than they had been in 1962, and Newsweek’s editors had signed off on the deal, too. They always delighted in Ben’s friendship with Kennedy, pushing him ever closer and then dining out on the details that didn’t make the magazine. But the core truth remains: at that moment, stuck out in the cold, Ben needed Kennedy more than Kennedy needed him, and so he kept on dancing.

  Once Ben was back in, he was back in. Kennedy was like Ben that way. He couldn’t remember why he was mad after a while. They dropped back into their routine of dinners at the White House and gossipy phone calls often only tangentially related to work. Kennedy didn’t feel any pressing need to distinguish between the working Ben and the nonworking Ben, usually assuming now that he was seeing the working Ben but that they could be friends at the same time.

  Jackie was different. She felt threatened by the lurking presence of the barracuda. When the president let revealing details slip at dinner, Jackie would look over at Ben as if to say, “This is not to be repeated.” Every so often she would actually say it out loud, that some part of a conversation was private and never to be printed in Newsweek. (Ben always says that after Kennedy found out that he was writing up their interactions, he was usually more interested in telling Ben what to put in his notes than what to take out.)

  The sudden blow of Kennedy’s assassination would point up all of these dynamics at once. Ben was in Brentano’s bookstore in downtown D.C. on his lunch break when the news came in, and he raced back to the office. It was a Friday, and Newsweek closed (was readied for the press) over the weekend. In addition to dealing with his own personal grief, he had a bureau to run and a magazine that had to be almost completely rewritten, all in roughly two days.

  That afternoon Oz Elliott added to Ben’s burdens by asking him to write a tribute to Kennedy, and Ben said that he would try. As soon as he sat down at his typewriter, he started to cry and couldn’t stop. Late in the afternoon the call came in:

  B: Jackie’s secretary called up and said, will you please go up to Bethesda Hospital where Jackie was coming in that night with the President’s body. And so we said yes and met at the White House and I was trying to write what turned out to be That Special Grace.…

  We went up to the umpteenth floor and there came a time with Jackie in a pink suit covered with blood walked into the room and she made a beeline for me. So I put my arms around her and hugged her for a minute. She said do you want to hear about it. I said of course. And then she said, but you’re not working, okay? That was always between us that she had to worry about that, would I be taking notes. Sort of made me sad.

  Q: That she said that at that particular time?

  B: Yeah, right at that time, which must have been one of the worst moments of her life and there she is having to remember that.

  The next morning Ben went into the office and finished his piece, “That Special Grace,” which ran in that week’s edition of Newsweek and later was published as a small book by Lippincott. The Grant Study researchers were fascinated that he was able to function so well in the midst of so much grief, referring to his reaction as “sublimation.” As Vaillant described it to Ben many years later, “It’s taking enormous pain and being able to keep good enough hold of it so you can make it publicly acceptable. You can do this with affairs, you can do it with anger, you did it with grief. It’s anything that usually immobilizes people.” Ben’s method for overcoming rough spots has always been hard work.

  “History will best judge John F. Kennedy in calmer days,” “That Special Grace” began, “when time has made the tragic and the grotesque at least bearable.” It was a short, plain, sentimental piece, “half elegy, half eulogy” as Ben describes it. He wrote about Kennedy’s physical gracefulness, his taste, his humor on the golf course, his love for politics, for his kids, and finally for Jackie. Many of the images in the piece were drawn from private memos that Ben had written previously for the editors at Newsweek, detailing his own impressions for the kinds of “what he ate for breakfast” stories that newsmagazines used to distinguish themselves from newspapers in those days. He hadn’t ever imagined stringing those observations together for this kind of purpose.

  A few days later, he wrote another private memo for the Newsweek editors, this time about Jackie at the funeral, at which he had been an usher. The lede: “Jacqueline Kennedy added majesty to the American dimension last week.” He talked about how she had refused for a time to take off her pink suit spattered in blood, and about how angry she had been. “After her anger, drama came to Jacqueline Kennedy; she always had a sense and an understanding of the dramatic—visual, historic, and compelling.” The memo ends:

  It was Bobby—perhaps alone among the mafia whose devotion and involvement with John Kennedy was so total—who was completely unsurprised at the great quality that emerged in Jacqueline. The others were amazed at how great she was. Not Bobby, and not the friends that she and Jack shared.

  After the funeral, Ben and Tony spent a couple of weekends alone with Jackie out at the Kennedy retreat in horse country near Middleburg, Virginia. These were difficult weekends, full of tears and torment and not a whole lot to talk about. “We proved only that the three of us had very little in common without the essential fourth,” Ben would write in his memoir.

  During one of these visits, Ben and Tony encouraged Jackie to marry again someday. Shortly afterward, Jackie sent them a handwritten note on a small mourning card with black trim, explaining that she couldn’t even consider the idea. Her husband was dead, and in every important way so was she.

  It’s a sorrowful note, and it also holds the seeds of a rift between Ben and Jackie that would intensify in later years and last for the rest of Jackie’s life. Ben always moves on, but Jackie couldn’t, at least not yet.

  * * *

  1 The order, for Ben to depart Paris within twenty-four hours, had been rescinded shortly after it had been issued when some of Ben’s Parisian friends intervened on his behalf. For a few weeks, Ben had been the talk of expatriate Paris—without filing a word of copy on the story.

  2 The official date of this meeting isn’t fixed. In his book Conversations with Kennedy, Ben says first that it happened in January of 1959, then that it was “a sparkling late summer day in 1958.” In A Good Life he goes with “a warm Sunday in early 1959,” a kind of compromise.

  3 Before the election in 1960 rumors swirled that Kennedy might tap Ben as press secretary. Ben told me flatly that he never wanted that job, but in his Grant Study form from October of 1960 he was significantly more open to the idea. He was happy at Newsweek, he wrote, “but this might change if some job in a Kennedy administration were offered.”

  4 The dance had originally been scheduled for June; otherwise, they might not have been invited.

  MUMS

  K: And so then time passes and …

  B: Well, time passes and the telephone rings and it’s you. That’s the next event in my life.

  K: And I say, “Would you like to have lunch?”

  B: Yes.

  —BCB interview with Kay Graham, October 9, 1989

  One day, at the back of one of Ben’s
boxes, I encountered an undated document titled “A case-study in prestige institution building.” There was no author listed on the cover page, only the designation “rough draft” and a handwritten note from Ben’s old secretary referring to the author as a “French b-school professor.”

  I eventually figured out who wrote the report, and why, but for two years I knew him only as “The Frenchman.” It really is as if de Tocqueville had materialized in the Washington Post newsroom. The Frenchman was an outsider, observing the operation and culture of the Post clinically but with a distinctly French sense of whimsy. “With an elusive smile,” he writes of Ben at one point, “I would say that the Executive Editor is a fundamentalist.” You can almost smell the cigarette smoke.

  He fully grasps Ben’s vision for the Post:

  In our case, as the French would say, Mr. Bradlee’s coup de genie has been first to visualize the intuitive relevance of a new image for the Post and then to give it an appropriate formulation.… The mid-sixties conceptual breakthrough was (to use an old fashioned military catch-word) to provide The Washington Post with a mission. In brief, it was to move The Washington Post from a parochial and liberal newspaper to a prestigious national one.

  He saves some of his most incisive analysis for the relationship between Ben and Kay:

  In what respect can the [goal] formulation and the concomitant vision of The Washington Post have been the seeds and means of a committed working psychological contract between Mrs. Graham and Mr. Bradlee? Serious professors would label this operation the formation of a “dominant coalition” between Mrs. K. Graham and Mr. B. Bradlee, I will rather use the more musical French term “duo.” Cheap talks of pop-psychoanalysis speculate a lot about the “duo.” In fact, social scientists are better off—and better novelists—if they stay with the plain facts of human action.…

  Pundits are delighted to guess who is in charge at the Post? It’s like making waves in a glass of water. Both can attempt to carry the mission and try to become “number 1” in their respective domains. Mr. Bradlee’s line of conduct was restricted to gaining the support necessary to lead an autonomous news room dedicated to making a prestige institution. Mrs. Graham’s opportunity [lay] in directing the paper as an organization, to control its editorial component and, of course, in the area of “critical decisions” to have the last word. The rationale of the “duo” is that of a positive sum-game: both actors are dependent upon each other, the two of them have stakes but the more they cooperate the greater the chances to win together—and in that case, to win big.

  There is a lot of truth packed into those two grafs. The Frenchman couldn’t have known how right he was, even in terms of how Ben and Kay saw themselves. This is an exchange the two of them had in January 1974, during Watergate, when a media report named Kay “Outstanding Newspaper Executive” and Ben runner-up:

  Dear Katharine:

  When I was at boarding school too long ago, I chased one classmate for five goddam years in the scholarship department. In forty months of grades, he finished first, and I finished second … except for one month when he was recuperating from undulant fever or something.

  So I was accustomed early to being runner-up. But it pissed me off!

  It is one of the pleasures of working for you to tell you that I don’t mind being runner-up to you one damned bit. In fact, I’m all-out flattered.

  Love

  Kay wrote back to Ben the next day:

  Dear Ben:

  That note was a Bradlee gem. It was full of charm; I loved it.…

  The reason you and I get along so well, notwithstanding the fact that we are both innately endowed with a primordial urge—not at all competitive, mind you—to be No. 1, is because of this—our routes run parallel and synchronize.

  I know I’m No. 1 because you are No. 1. You know that I know that I am No. 1 because you are No. 1 … I don’t mind it and even quite like it. That’s why it doesn’t piss you off and you don’t wish for me undulant fever.

  It’s a privilege to work with you, in the words of a great man.

  Love

  “If you go over the whole of Kay Graham’s life,” Don Graham, Kay’s son, told me one afternoon in his office, “Ben was the biggest right decision she ever made.”

  Graham succeeded his mother as publisher of the Post in 1979 and as chairman of the Post Company when she retired in 1991. When I asked him what had stuck with him about Ben over time, he said, “Obviously his relationship with Kay was something you had to see to believe. I don’t know if you’ve read her book …”

  “I have. I loved it.”

  “She is not overstating how self-doubting she was.”

  “And Ben’s the opposite.”

  “He was the best thing she had going,” Don Graham said.

  They didn’t know each other very well when they got together for their fateful lunch, at the private F Street Club in downtown Washington, in December of 1964.1 If anything, they had actually gotten off on the wrong foot. The main obstacle between them had also been their main point of contact: Phil.

  In the last year or so of his life, as his bipolarity worsened, Phil had taken up with a young woman named Robin Webb, a stringer who worked in Newsweek’s bureau in Paris. In addition to all of the marital hurts inherent in such a betrayal—Kay found out by mistakenly picking up a second telephone in their home on Christmas Eve of 1962—it turned out that Phil had retained Ben’s friend Edward Bennett Williams to draw up a new will excluding Kay and leaving his controlling interest in the paper and in the Post Company with Robin.

  It’s hard to convey what an affront this was to Kay, and to her family. Her father, Eugene Meyer, had bought the paper in 1933, right before Kay turned sixteen, and the Post had been central to her life since then. Meyer was a successful financier who had mapped out and then executed his life in thirds: the first for education, the second for asset accumulation, and the third for public service. He viewed the ownership of a respectable newspaper as a kind of public trust, and the Post was his baby. He had nurtured it back to life from near-financial ruin with sound management and adherence (generally speaking) to the seven principles of running an effective newspaper that he set out when he bought the Post, principles that even in this digital age still sit in hard copy in the Post’s lobby.2

  “He is a Jew, a Republican, and rich as hell,” Phil Graham wrote of Eugene Meyer, with typical directness, to his own father after deciding to marry Kay in 1940. According to Kay’s memoir, Meyer was worth somewhere between forty and sixty million—in actual dollars at that time, not adjusted for inflation—when he left Wall Street shortly before the First World War to begin the public service portion of his life in Washington. In accordance with principle number six, he would pump more than $20 million of his own funds into the struggling Post before it became consistently profitable.

  Kay and Ben shared an elite pedigree, which was one of the reasons Kay felt so comfortable around Ben, but her upbringing was much posher than his. There was an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a vacation home on seven hundred acres in Mount Kisco, New York—indoor swimming pool, bowling alley, tennis court—and a large mansion on Crescent Place, off 16th Street, in downtown Washington. Kay attended private schools, took French lessons, made her debut, and generally lived the life of one of the richest young women in Washington.

  For all of the privilege, there was also a heavy dose of loneliness and distance. Kay’s mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, was an intelligent, imperious woman who cultivated intense friendships with writers like Thomas Mann and didn’t have a great deal of interest in mothering her children. Shortly after Kay was born, in New York, Agnes departed for Washington to be with Eugene, leaving her children in the care of paid staff in the Fifth Avenue apartment for more than three years. “I can’t say I think Mother genuinely loved us,” Kay would later write in her memoir, one of that book’s sadder sentences.

  Kay worked as a copygirl at the Post between high school and college (two years at Vassar, t
wo years at the University of Chicago). She claimed to have read the paper every day while she was away at school, sometimes offering her father welcome suggestions about how to improve it. He added a famous, prophetic postscript to one of his letters to her while she was at the University of Chicago:

  P.S. If you don’t soon get down here on the Post there won’t be anything left to do but the routine jobs of trying to hold our position. You ought to be in on the job of putting it to the top. It is much better sport fighting to get there than trying to stay there after you have gotten there. When we get there I will go out looking for some trouble somewhere, and let you, Mother, [and two editors] keep the machine running.

  After graduation, she spent a year working as a reporter for the San Francisco News, but she knew that she was only postponing the inevitable. In early 1939, she came home to work for her father as an editorial writer at the Post, and later that year she met Phil.

  The Meyers embraced Phil Graham, and he them. He and Kay started a family (the only time that Kay stopped working for the Post), and when Phil got back from service in the Army during World War II Eugene Meyer brought him in as an associate publisher. From then on, but officially beginning in 1948, Phil ran the paper with Eugene Meyer’s blessing, and Kay generally supported Phil. He was voluble and hated to be alone. When he took a bath, he wanted her to sit in the bathroom with him. When he worked late down at the paper she would often join him and hang out on the couch in his office.