Publishers: A Discontented Man

“The U.S. is full of totally rational publishers who never did a damn thing for their papers. Under Phil Graham, we at least had the potential of being a great newspaper, nationally and internationally.” So spoke a Washington Post & Times Herald staffer last week, and many another stricken colleague echoed his impulsive obituary. If their reactions seemed curiously defiant, it was because their energetic, engaging boss, whose rapidly expanding press empire consisted of the Washington Post, News week, two art magazines, a pair of profitable TV stations and a burgeoning news service, had for more than a year been suffering from a mentalailment that intermittently but increasingly removed him from his daily work. For the past six weeks he had been a voluntary patient for chronic manic de pression at a psychiatric hospital in suburban Washington.

Last weekend, on a day’s visit to Glen Welby, the 800-acre family cattle farm near Middleburg, Va., Philip Leslie Graham, 48, sat on the edge of a bathtub, leaned against a 28-gauge shotgun and fired a single shell through his right temple. He died instantly.

A Light Hand. Like many a success ful publisher, gangling, Dakota-born Phil Graham never covered a news sto ry. A lawyer by training and a wheeler-dealer by instinct, he started at the top of his adopted profession. In 1940 he married Katharine Meyer, 22, news-minded daughter of the liberal Post’s multimillionaire publisher. At war’s end he joined the paper as associate pub lisher; within six months he took over from Father-in-Law Eugene Meyer.

However, like few other men who marry newspapers, Graham also had an intellectual and temperamental affinity for the business. “He was intensely interested in every story in the paper,” said a Post editor. “But he ran it with a wonderfully light hand.” For Washington’s best-read newspaper, it seemed at times too light. With all its influence, the Post (circ. 409,000) is still pale beside the ranking U.S. newspaper, the New York Times (735,000).

Phil Graham’s impact was greater on the financial side. When he took over from Eugene Meyer in 1946, the Post was in grievous financial shape, while its gaudy opposition, Cissie Patterson’s Times-Herald, was high on the hog. In 1949, after Mrs. Patterson’s death, Meyer and his astute son-in-law tried in vain to buy the Times-Herald, but lost out to Colonel Bertie McCormick. In 1954, after a disastrous attempt to run it like a D.C. edition of his Chicago Tribune, McCormick sold his paper to Meyer & Co. (for $10,300,000), giving the Post & Times Herald a morning monopoly. Graham brought in first-rate circulation and business-office executives, broadened the paper’s base by buying lucrative TV and radio stations.

Fun or Agony. But, he wanted to be an editorial man. He confessed to a “constant foggy discontent about journalism.” Reshuffling the top echelon, Graham made ebullient, liberal Al Friendly his managing editor. Graham boosted staffers’ morale and pay packets—the Post today has one of the highest wage scales in U.S. journalism—expanded his Washington aews staff, took on every last news service. In an unexpected liaison with the ultra-conservative Los Angeles Times, the Post in the past year has stapled together its own news service that boasts a dozen foreign correspondents, a quiver of European pundits, Washington’s second-biggest news bureau, and a bevy of columnists headed by Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop.

In his biggest and boldest venture, the 1961 purchase of Newsweek, Graham beat out Sam Newhouse and Doubleday, the book publisher. Egged on by the newsmagazine’s Washington staffers (and, it was rumored, his close personal friend John F. Kennedy), Graham put out $8,985,000 to buy the 59% controlling interest in Newsweek, which had been turned over to a foundation after Vincent Astor’s death. “It may be fun and it may be agony,” said he, “but I’m glad I did it.”

Though he took an executive suite in the Newsweek Building and hung a handsome Sydney Nolan painting in his private dining room, he seldom occupied it, even for lunch, preferring to leave business and editorial control in the hands of people who, as he put it, “know about magazines.” Gradually, though, he began to interweave the correspondents and columnists of his newspaper, news service and newsweekly, to the financial advantage of all: in the past quarter, for the first time, the Washington Post even inched ahead of the Star in advertising linage.

Graham’s developing empire is more a creature of impulse than vision, and at the time of his death it was growing and changing in ways that perhaps not even he had consciously planned. He owned more than 50% of voting stock in the parent company, which will probably revert to Kay, his widow. She already owns the balance, and will almost certainly be the titular head of the controlling Washington Post Co. For the job of operating boss, the odds-on favorite was Al Friendly, the Post’s liveliest wire and a close friend of Kay Graham, whose liberal Democratic politics jibed with Graham’s. To some extent, Friendly also shares with his old boss the driving discontent that prompted Phil Graham’s familiar expostulation: “What are we doing? Where are we going?”