Phil Graham

Infobox Person
name = Phil Graham

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imagesize = 200px
caption =
birth_date = birth date|1915|7|18|mf=y
birth_place = Terry, South Dakota
death_date = death date and age|1963|8|3|1915|7|18|mf=yes
death_place =
occupation = Publisher
Businessman
salary =
networth =
education = University of Florida
Harvard Law School
spouse = Katharine Graham
website =
footnotes =
children = Christian

Philip Leslie Graham (July 18, 1915 – August 3, 1963) was an American publisher and businessman. He was the publisher (from 1946 until his death) and co-owner (from 1948) of "The Washington Post". He was married to Katharine Graham, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of "The Washington Post".

Early life

Philip (Phil) Leslie Graham was born in Terry. He was raised in Florida where his father, Ernest R. ("Cap") Graham, made a career in farming and real estate, and was elected to the State Senate. His mother, the former Florence Morris, had been a schoolteacher in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Graham was one of four children. One half brother, Bob Graham, is a former governor of the state of Florida (1979–1987) and a former United States Senator representing Florida from 1987 to 2005.

Graham graduated from the University of Florida in 1936, with a bachelor of arts degree in economics, and from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the "Harvard Law Review" and earned a "magna cum laude" degree, in 1939. Graham was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and was both a fraternity brother and roommate of the late Senator George A. Smathers. In 1939–1940 he was law clerk to United States Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed, and the following year he was clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had been one of his professors at Harvard.

Marriage and children

On June 5, 1940, he married Katharine Meyer, the daughter of Eugene Meyer, a multi-millionaire and the owner of "The Washington Post", a struggling newspaper at the time. The couple settled down in a two-story row house.

During World War II, Graham enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a private (1942) and rose to the rank of major. His wife followed him on military assignments to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania up until 1945, when he went to the Pacific theatre as an intelligence officer of the Far East Air Force.

Their first baby died at birth. Four children followed: Elizabeth ('Lally') Morris Graham, now Weymouth, born on July 3, 1943; Donald Edward Graham, April 22, 1945; William Welsh Graham (1948), and Stephen Meyer Graham (1952).

Career at The Washington Post Company

In 1946, when "Washington Post" publisher Eugene Meyer was named the first president of the World Bank, he passed the position of publisher to Graham. When Meyer left the World Bank later that year, he took the title of chairman of the board of the Washington Post Company, leaving Graham as publisher. Fact|date=August 2007

In 1948, Meyer transferred his actual control of the Post Company stock (the company was privately owned) to his daughter and her husband. Katharine Graham received 30 percent as a gift. He received 70 percent of the stock, his purchase financed by his father-in-law. Meyer remained a close adviser to his son-in-law until his death in 1959, at which time Graham assumed the titles of President and Chairman of the Board of the Post company.

Leadership of company under Graham

* In 1950, the Post Company purchased the CBS television station in Washington, D.C., and changed the call letters to WTOP-TV. In 1953, the company bought television station WJXT (then WMBR) in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1953.
* In 1954, the Post Company bought the competing morning newspaper, the "Times-Herald", for $8.5 million. The "Post" kept most of the "Times-Herald"'s advertising, features, columnists and comics — and most of its readers. It immediately jumped ahead of the "Evening Star", the city's prominent afternoon paper, in circulation, and in 1959, it passed the Star in advertising linage.
* In 1961, the Post Company purchased the controlling stock interest in "Newsweek" from the Vincent Astor Foundation. When the dea' was closed in New York City, Graham wrote a check for $2,000,000 as a down payment on the $8,985,000 purchase price.
* In 1962, the Post Company again expanded into the magazine field by buying "Art News", the most widely read monthly in the art field, and "Portfolio", a hard-cover art quarterly, from Albert M. Frankfurter.

Involvement in politics

While running the "Washington Post" and other parts of the Post Company, Graham played a backstage role in national politics.

In 1960, he helped persuade his friend John F. Kennedy to take Lyndon Johnson on his ticket as the vice presidential candidate, personally talking with both men multiple times during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, California. During the 1960 campaign, he wrote drafts of for several speeches that Johnson gave. After Kennedy and Johnson were elected in November, he successfully lobbied for the appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury, and had multiple discussions with Kennedy about other appointments. In the several years after the inaugural, he continued to write occasional drafts of speeches, primarily for Johnson, but also for the President and for Robert F. Kennedy.

In 1961, Kennedy named Graham to serve as an incorporator for the Communications Satellite Corporation, known as COMSAT, a joint venture between the private sector and government for satellite communications. In October 1961, he was appointed chairman of the group.

"First rough draft of history"

In April 1963, Graham delivered a speech to the overseas correspondents of "Newsweek" in London, which continues to be quoted — though widely misattributed, even by Helen Thomas in her own memoir "First Row at the White House":

:"So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a "first rough draft of history" that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand…" [Emphasis added]

Health problems and death

In Katharine Graham's book "Personal History", she notes that her husband was always intense and spontaneous, but occasionally lapsed into periods of depression. In 1957, he suffered a severe manic episode and, at the time, no medicines were available for effective treatment. He retired to the couple's farm in Marshall, Virginia, to recuperate. Thereafter, periods in which he functioned brilliantly alternated with periods in which he was morose and erratic and isolated himself. He often drank heavily (something he had done prior to 1957), and would become extremely argumentative and blunt.

Through the Post Company's "Newsweek" arm, Graham eventually met Australian journalist Robin Webb, and in 1962 they began an affair. In 1963, he and Webb flew to Arizona; he appeared at a newspaper publishing convention inebriated and/or manic. At the microphone he made a number of provocative comments, including the revelation that Kennedy was sleeping with Mary Pinchot Meyer. His assistant, James Truitt, called for his doctor, Leslie Farber, who flew in by private jet, as did (subsequently) Graham's wife. Graham was sedated, bound in a straitjacket, and flown back to Washington. He was committed for five days to Chestnut Lodge, a psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland.

Graham then left his wife for Robin Webb, announced to his friends that he planned to divorce his wife and immediately remarry, and indicated that he wanted to purchase sole control of the Post Company. In June, in a fit of depression, he broke off his affair and returned home. On June 20, 1963, he entered Chestnut Lodge for the second time, and was formally diagnosed with manic depression (now called bipolar disorder). He was treated with psychotherapy.

On August 3, 1963, after Graham had made repeated requests of his doctors to be allowed a short stay away from the hospital, and "quite noticeably much better", according to his wife, he was permitted to go to their farmhouse in Virginia, Glen Welby, for the weekend. While his wife was in another part of the retreat, Graham committed suicide with a 28-gauge shotgun.

During probate, Katharine Graham's lawyer challenged the legality of her husband's last will, written in 1963. Edward Bennett Williams testified that Graham had not been of sound mind when he had instructed Williams to draw up his final will. Williams said that he had, at the same time he prepared the will, written a memorandum for the file stating that Graham was mentally ill, and that he was preparing the will at Graham's direction only to maintain their relationship. The judge in the case ruled that Graham had died intestate.

Posthumous honors

The Washington Post Company's ABC affiliate station in Miami, Florida, has call letters that were assigned to the station in honor of Philip Graham in 1970 — station WPLG uses his initials.

References

* "Personal History", Katharine Graham, Knopf, 1997, ISBN 0-394-58585-2.
* [http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/09/reviews/graham-philip.html "Philip Graham, 48, Publisher, a Suicide"] , New York Times, August 4, 1963
* [http://www.washpostco.com/hist4.htm Washington Post Company history, 1950–1974]