Phil Graham

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Phil Graham
Graham in 1961
Born	Philip Leslie Graham (1915-07-18)July 18, 1915 Terry, South Dakota, U.S.
Died	August 3, 1963(1963-08-03) (aged 48) Marshall, Virginia, U.S.
Resting place	Oak Hill Cemetery Washington, D.C., U.S.
Alma mater	University of Florida Harvard Law School
Occupation	Newspaper publisher
Spouse	Katharine Meyer ​ (m. 1940)​
Children	5
Relatives	Bob Graham (half-brother)

Philip Leslie Graham (July 18, 1915 – August 3, 1963) was an American newspaperman. He served as publisher and later co-owner of The Washington Post and its parent company, The Washington Post Company.

During his years with the Post Company, Graham helped The Washington Post grow from a struggling local paper to a national publication and the Post Company expand to own other newspapers as well as radio and television stations. He was married to Katharine Graham, a daughter of Eugene Meyer, the previous owner of The Washington Post.

Graham, who had bipolar disorder, died by suicide in 1963, after which Katharine took over as publisher, making her one of the first women in charge of a major American newspaper.

Early life

Graham was born to a

Graham attended

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

During

Their first baby died at birth. Four children followed: Elizabeth ('Lally') Morris Graham, now Weymouth (b. July 3, 1943), Donald Edward Graham (b. April 22, 1945), William Welsh Graham (1948–2017), and Stephen Meyer Graham (b. 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.^{[citation needed]}

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. Phil 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 1949, the Post Company purchased a controlling ownership interest in Washington radio station WTOP, jointly owned with CBS. This marked the beginnings of the Post Company's involvement in broadcasting. The following year the Post/CBS joint venture bought the CBS-affiliated television station in Washington, and changed the call letters to WTOP-TV (later WDVM-TV, and now WUSA-TV), and in 1953 the company bought WMBR radio and WMBR-TV (now WJXT) in Jacksonville, Florida. The company gained full ownership of the WTOP stations in 1954.
• 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 deal 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.

In 1954, Graham was the leading force behind the founding of the Federal City Council, a highly influential group of business, civic, education, and other leaders interested in economic development in Washington, D.C.^[1]

In 1960, he helped persuade his friend

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.

Mental health problems and death

In Katharine Graham's book

, 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 with CIA connections.^[2]

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. Graham killed himself with a shotgun while his wife was in another part of the retreat.^[3] His body was found in a bathroom about 1:00 pm.^[3] He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.^[4]

During

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. A compromise was eventually reached whereby Katharine Graham

gave up part of her inheritance in favor of her children.

Posthumous honors

On March 16, 1970, the ABC affiliate station in Miami, Florida (then WLBW-TV), changed their call letters to honor Phil to WPLG-TV; The Washington Post Company (later called Post-Newsweek Stations, and now known as the Graham Media Group) owned the station until it was sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2014.

"First rough draft of history"

In April 1963, Graham delivered a speech to the overseas correspondents of Newsweek in London:

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  ...

The phrase "first rough draft of history" may have been popularized by Graham, but it did not originate with him. It had been used repeatedly in the Post in the 1940s and the earliest known use was by Alan Barth: "News is only the first rough draft of history,"^[6][7] and earlier expressions of similar sentiments dating to the first decade of the 20th century.^[8]

See also

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 2)
• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 6)

References

1. ^ "L'Enfant's legacy: A worthy capital?". The Economist. April 16, 1988. p. 64.
2. ISBN 978-0-9777953-7-6
   .
3. ^ ^{a b} "Philip Graham, 48, Publisher, a Suicide". The New York Times. August 4, 1963. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
4. ^ "Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown, D.C. (Chapel) - Chapel Lot 24" (PDF). Oak Hill Cemetery. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 2, 2022. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
5. ISBN 978-1631681585
   .
6. ^ Alan Barth, review of The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon by Harold L. Ickes in The New Republic, 1943, collected in The New Republic, Volume 108, p. 677
7. ^ "Who Said It First? Journalism is the ‘first rough draft of history.’" by Jack Shafer, Slate (August 30, 2010)
8. ^ Journalism - Wikiquote

General references

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Phil Graham.

• ISBN 0-394-58585-2
  .
• Philip Graham, 48, Publisher, a Suicide, New York Times, August 4, 1963
• Washington Post Company history, 1950–1974