Eventually, supporting Phil became harder and harder, publicly and privately. His drinking accelerated, and his unpredictability wreaked havoc on their lives. She knew he was on a manic upsurge when he decided to buy Newsweek in 1961, and she was so worried about his health (and the success of the deal) that she didn’t even tell him, when she arrived in New York, that she had been preliminarily diagnosed with tuberculosis. She began to understand that the gutting depressions that followed the up phases were symptomatic of a true sickness.
And then came Robin Webb.
In those days Washington “society” still existed, and the Phil-Kay-Robin situation caused a stir. The idea that Phil would both leave Kay and then take the paper away from her and the Meyer family didn’t sit well with the prim matrons who called the social shots. Much of high Washington society rejected Phil and wouldn’t allow him to come to dinner without Kay. People took sides.
This is where Ben comes back in. As he says, “I worked for Phil Graham.” He didn’t know Kay all that well and felt no particular allegiance to her. It was Phil who had bought Newsweek and promoted him. And so when Phil called once from New York and asked if he and Robin could come to dinner that night at Ben and Tony’s house, Ben checked with Tony and then said okay. News of that kind of thing got around. Worse, Kay had heard rumors that Ben had been making jokes about the situation in public, saying that the only thing Phil Graham needed was a divorce.
Kay never confronted Ben directly about any of this until decades later. During their interviews for her memoir, she remembered an interaction they’d had sometime just before Phil’s death. “I said something about Phil being sick,” Kay told Ben. “You said that there was nothing wrong with him except that he needed a divorce and that I should give it to him.”
“I said that to you?” Ben said. “Absolutely made up. I would never do that, Katharine.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think you did, Ben.”
Whether Ben said it or not matters less than that Kay thought he did. “She says, ‘There are only two people I thought I would never forgive, and one was Ben Bradlee,’ ” David Halberstam noted after one of his interviews with Kay in the late seventies. “Ben going around saying that [Phil’s] unhappy and all he needs is a divorce.”
When Phil died, the tension between Ben and Kay deepened when Ben didn’t attend a small gathering that Kay held at her house, on R Street, after the funeral. Ben had flown home for the service on an emergency basis, interrupting a vacation in France with Tony, and he wanted to get back to Europe as quickly as he could. He also felt Kay hadn’t explicitly invited him to her home. Word eventually trickled down to him that she resented him for not showing up.
“[Fritz] Beebe said that you were furious at me because I hadn’t gone to [your] home,” Ben said to Kay when they finally talked about it all for the record, years later.
“See, I don’t remember that,” Kay said. “I wouldn’t know that.”
“I said I didn’t go because I wasn’t invited,” Ben said.
“I wouldn’t have thought I would have noticed,” Kay said.
It seems likely that she had noticed, and that in the interview she was playing it cool for posterity. Either way, it’s striking that there were still such uncertainties and unresolved feelings on both sides regarding a funeral that had happened more than twenty-five years before. If it was that way in 1989, after all that they’d been through together, it’s hard to imagine what simmered between them in 1963.
Kay had been ready to fight Phil for the Post, but his effort to take the paper away from her died when he did. When he drew up Phil’s revised will, Edward Bennett Williams had also written a memorandum saying that he didn’t think Phil was in his right mind when he made the changes that left the company to Robin. After some minor hiccups, the paper was Kay’s. Largely because she was a woman, people expected her to sell it, and the vultures circled. “Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward,” she once wrote of this time in her life—sounding, incidentally, a lot like Ben. “And that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”
On September 20, 1963, Kay assumed the presidency of the Post Company and set about conquering her own fears about being a female boss and running a newspaper. There were a number of sideways steps at the start. (“She spits out executives like tobacco juice,” Edward Bennett Williams once said, of Kay’s capriciousness as an early manager.) As she got deeper into the job, she began to hear from her friends around town that the paper had been coasting for a while, that it had been losing steam even while Phil was still alive. Scotty Reston, the famed New York Times D.C. bureau chief, once asked her, “Don’t you want to leave a better paper for the next generation than the one you inherited?” She had been so busy getting her legs under her that she hadn’t had time yet to think about it that way.
By December of 1964, she had started actively to think about what she might do to put some spark back into the Post. Even though she didn’t particularly like Ben, she was curious about him. She knew he ran a good bureau, that the people who worked under him were happy. Newsweek had twice tried to promote him to positions of higher editorial authority in New York, and he had refused each time. She worried that he would leave the Post Company, maybe for a job in television, and she felt that she should try to keep him. “In some ways it still rankled her years later,” a close associate of Ben and Kay’s would say privately, “the idea that that son of a bitch was dining out all over town, going the wrong way on her and making fun of her. And yet she’s very tough and she knew she needed him. A lesser person might have held it against him.”
October 9, 1989
K: I just wanted to have lunch with you and talk to you. And it was such an awkward thing for me to ask someone to lunch that I took you to the F Street Club because there would be no bill.
B: There would be no bill? … Oh, because you could charge it.
K: Yes, that’s why we went to the F Street Club.
B: Oh, no. Really?
K: Yes.
B: Isn’t that wonderful? I’d have paid, Katharine.
K: And I asked you the question. I mean we chatted and then I said I’ve just noticed that you have twice turned down New York. And what is it that you kind of want to do?
B: When you grow up, yeah.
K: Yes, and you instantly said, well, now that you ask me …
B: No, no, no. That’s not true. I’ll tell you exactly what I said. I said that Phil had always said that there should be continuity in the bureaus, that changing the bureau chiefs of these weeklies every [two] minutes prevented … giving the person who had the job enough time in the job to assume a leadership position of some kind.… I was really quite happy where I was. And thought it was honorable work. But then you, then something happened in which I bit.
K: Well I must have said what do you want to do in the long run? Next question. And that’s when you said, “Well, now that you’ve asked me, I’d give my left one to be managing editor of the Post.”
B: “If it ever came open,” I must have said that.
K: Yes.
B: That’s a little rough even for me.
K: I’m not sure what you said, Ben, but we’ll amend that for history.
B: Whatever you say I said, I said. I’ll have my innings later.
Kay’s openness to the possibility of a return to the Post lit a fire under Ben. Whatever lessons he had learned from the sale of Newsweek—about seizing your own destiny and making your own history—he had clearly made part of his permanent practice. And whatever reservations Kay harbored about him at the start, she admired how ferociously he pursued her for the job. This is from a private interview that Kay did in the seventies:
[Ben was] pushing like hell. And it made me like him. From then on every time I saw him—when are we going to do this? … And he was pushing in a very decent way. I mean, Ben’s pushing is somehow attractive.… It was almost sort of like you k
now the old Perils of Pauline, and Pearl White, and the villain you know has the woman strapped in bed, and you’re about to do some awful thing and then it’s continued for the next week … and he’s always pushing, and he was relentless.…
I sensed that he was right, that there was a drive and ruthlessness about him and I felt I needed someone to push.
In November of 2010, stuck after two days of trying and failing to write about the beginning of Ben’s real working relationship with Kay, I decided to go down to the paper and talk to Ben about it. The last few times I’d been in to see him he had seemed tired and a little uninterested in my questions, so I wasn’t sure how much more I was going to get.
“Hey there, young man!” he said when I walked into his office.
“Got a sec?” I said. We chatted for a few minutes and then I made my usual segue. “If I can scratch your historical memory again a little bit …”
“Of course.”
I had caught him at a good moment. We started with how little he had known about Kay before he went to work for her, and then we moved on to the famous lunch, a story that’s been told so many times it was hard for Ben to recall anything new.
“Do you remember when it started to become a relationship that you enjoyed, and felt connected to her?” I asked.
“She originally, as I remember it—and even this maybe is a little cloudy—but it was in terms of a year,” Ben said. “Would I come over for a year, just to see whether there was a fit. I was on the ladder to go up to New York”—to move up in the chain of command at Newsweek—“and she knew that. So I think that made her wonder whether there was something for me at the Post here. And what that might be. And could that be explored by my going over there for a year and just nosing around. I think she admired what she called my ‘energy.’ She thought the Post was kind of sleepy.”
“When you would have come over, were you already thinking, ‘I want to run this place’?”
He hemmed a little bit, not wanting to seem immodest. “As I was there and got involved, I got more and more interested in the fact that I had skills that fit. I saw the Post needed an injection of—it was a sleepy paper. There was no energy kicking around the place.” He thought about it a little more, and then said, “Energy is the word. There was just none of it.”
We circled back to Kay. “I guess what I’m interested in is that you really don’t know her and then you get to know her,” I said. “And how important that is for the newspaper. The relationship between the two of you—her knowing she could trust you and you knowing you could trust her, that that’s what made all of this stuff possible.”
“If you really want what …” he said, and then he trailed off. He seemed to sense what I was driving at. “I mean, the mystery is how …” Again, a pause. I waited.
“We had to decide to become close,” he finally said.
“Right.”
“And to keep that out of the physical is amazing.”
It was the question I had wanted to ask but hadn’t quite known how to ask directly.
“Because it’s unlike me,” he continued, and we laughed. “I don’t know whether it was unlike her or not, but it never—there was never a question, you know. I mean, I would tell you if there was a glance or something.”
“Of course.”
“Nothing,” he said. “And that’s hard. And I bet it was hard for her.”
The “Perils of Pauline” image that Kay used to describe how she felt when Ben was pursuing her for the job had always stuck in my mind, along with the act of ravishment it implied. You don’t have to dig very far to find people close to Ben and Kay who will tell you that she was always in love with him.
I brought up another of their better-known exchanges on the subject. When Ben retired in 1991, Vanity Fair ran an extended profile of him in which a former city editor at the paper claimed that he watched Ben roll up his sleeves right before a meeting with Kay, just so she could see his muscular forearms. “He came into the room and the sexual energy of him and her titillation was about as obvious as my stomach,” the editor claimed. “She was very much, and I don’t mean this in a carnal way, she was very much in love with Ben. But then again, so was I.”
At Ben’s seventieth birthday party, a month or so after the Vanity Fair piece ran, Kay gave a toast. “I’d like to use this opportunity to knock down many of the rumors about Ben and me. One is that I was in love with Ben. This is nonsense,” she said. “Another bummer was that I was impressed with Bradlee’s muscles and when he rolled up his sleeves, I keeled over. What I really did is say to myself, ‘This man wears cheap shirts.’ ”
She got off another good line toward the end. “Someday when I reach my seventieth”—she was four years older than Ben—“I hope I’ll be as sexy as you are. It’s difficult when you’re seventy years old to be described in the press as a sex symbol. It’s even harder to prove it.”
“It was clear that you guys felt comfortable joking around about it,” I said to Ben.
“Very comfortable. But that was the magic of the relationship, is that it was comfortable. I hadn’t had all that many bosses. And certainly none of the opposite sex. But it was she who made it comfortable. And she didn’t make it comfortable by flirting with me. There was none of that.”
A little later I asked him if he had ever thought consciously about trying to preserve some boundaries as they began to get closer to each other.
“Oh, I was worried about it,” he said. “I was scared of it. You know, because I could see that we were getting to be friends. And I think I worried …” He paused. “I never thought of fucking her.”
He looked right at me as he said it, as if to say, “There’s the answer to your real question,” and I laughed, hard.
“Put it that way,” he said. “And I didn’t get any sense that she thought of fucking me. I thought that she wanted to be friends. And I started to call her Mums. And that, you know, that describes the relationship. You wouldn’t call a girlfriend ‘Mums.’ And yet, I didn’t feel maternal—I mean, you know.”
I could easily envision how much charm Ben had poured on, first to convince Kay Graham to hire him despite her initial skepticism, and then later to keep her happy when they hit rocky spots at the Post. He gave her a lot of his energy, and a lot of Ben’s energy is a very seductive thing. He would have needed to preserve the space between them somehow.
As we continued to talk about Kay, I made reference to having been surprised by the almost comical stiffness of her upper lip in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, right before Nixon resigned.
“Can you say to me truthfully, Mrs. Graham, that you never said to Ben Bradlee, ‘Ben, come on, we’re having—it’s beginning to cost us’?” Wallace asks.
“Heavens no,” Kay replies, in the most aristocratic way you can possibly imagine. “I wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think it would move him a bit if I did.” Total lockjaw. It’s like a parody of somebody trying to sound like a rich person, and yet she’s saying exactly the right thing. The paradox of Kay Graham.
“She’s got this upper lip that just—it doesn’t move,” I said to Ben, trying to convey this point as our interview drew to a close. I wasn’t criticizing her, but I realized that he thought I was. He pointed toward a framed picture hanging on his office wall, of him and Kay laughing together in a Post meeting room someplace. He’s grinning widely and her head is thrown back in a full gleaming belly laugh, as it is in so many of the pictures of the two of them together.
“It moves in that picture,” he said.
* * *
1 As with the date of Ben’s first meeting with Kennedy, this lunch date is a little uncertain, too. Ben wrote in his memoir that it happened in March of 1965, but Kay wrote in her memoir (published two years after Ben’s) that it had occurred in December of 1964. She knew what Ben had written and clearly chose the different date for a reason, in the manner of setting the record straight. Having seen a few of her archival files and all o
f Ben’s, I feel pretty good about sticking with hers.
2 1. The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained.
2. The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.
3. As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.
4. What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old.
5. The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.
6. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good.
7. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
IMPACT
He was determined to make the paper into what it could be: A great paper. Exciting. You had to read it. It was just, impact. He wanted impact. You ought to have impact, goddamnit. Instead of this namby-pamby stuff. And impact isn’t cheap. It ought to have power, authority, and be well written; it ought to say something, and tell you about something you wanted to know; and it ought to be displayed so you don’t miss it. That’s what it’s all about.
—Haynes Johnson, Puliter Prize–winning journalist and one of
Ben’s early hires at the Post, October 11, 2007
On Saturday, June 3, 1965, at 4:30 P.M., McGeorge Bundy, LBJ’s national security advisor, sat down to write a “Memorandum for the President” describing a dinner he had attended the night before at Kay Graham’s house. Bundy was a friend of Ben’s family’s. His father, Harvey, had been a trustee of the estate from which Ben’s parents had bought the country place in Beverly, Massachusetts, where Ben spent much of his childhood.
Yours in Truth Page 10
