Personal History (69 page)

Despite what he had said to me, our sticking to our policy of nonendorsement actually hurt LBJ deeply. He couldn’t understand how he could have won over so many Republican, even right-wing papers, and yet not have received the endorsement of the liberal
Washington Post
. I’m also sure that he assumed that Phil’s old paper and his hometown paper, the paper to which he had been so generous, would endorse him. He must have felt that, after all the kindnesses he had shown me, all the extra, special attention, I would surely come round and bring the paper with me. But I not only had inherited this policy of nonendorsement for the paper, I believed in it. Of course, Phil had broken the policy in 1952 for Eisenhower, but that was only for the Republican nomination, not the election itself. I could have changed the policy to endorse LBJ, but Russ didn’t want to, and I didn’t do much independent thinking yet—nor would I have liked to differ with Russ over such a big issue so early in our working relationship.

T
HE FALL CAMPAIGN
was in full swing when Scotty Reston suggested that I go along on the press plane of each candidate for a couple of days, to experience for myself what a campaign is really like. I decided to do just that, so Chal Roberts and I joined the president’s press contingent in Indianapolis. There we met up with Chuck Roberts of
Newsweek
, and the three of us drove to the center of town, where the president was about to speak from a platform next to the Soldier and Sailor Monument. LBJ was on the highest level, and we were on a level below with several other press people. I was walking around enjoying the drama of the scene when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Agent Rufus Youngblood. I was wearing a shocking-pink wool coat, so the president had spotted me.

“Mrs. Graham, the president wants to see you,” he said.

“Wants to see me where?” I asked.

“Up there,” he said, pointing to the higher platform.

“I can’t go up there!” I exclaimed. LBJ was standing almost alone on the small platform several yards above us.

Gently, Rufus said, “Mrs. Graham, you have to.”

I climbed some steps up a ladder and stopped when my head was on a level with his platform and said hello.

“Do you want to ride with me?” the president asked. This was not too long after the weekend at the ranch, and for the paper’s sake I didn’t want to seem too close to him, so I cautiously replied, “No, Mr. President, I really can’t thank you enough for the offer, but I’m out here to ride with the press.”

Typically, he teased, “You got a boyfriend on the plane?”

I said alas, no, but I wanted to get the feel of the campaign and of the reporters as they covered it.

“Well,” he replied, “come and see me at the hotel in Cleveland.”

I carefully climbed back down the ladder and rejoined Chal and Chuck, and we were shortly off to Cleveland. The press plane was great fun, as were the buses that followed the president’s motorcade. No doubt the whole thing can quickly get tiresome if you have to follow an entire campaign, dragging yourself from one campaign stop to another. But for me, limited as the experience was, it was constantly stimulating. It was certainly very different from what happens on today’s press planes, where reporters have much less access to the candidate and his managers.

When we arrived in Cleveland, I went up to LBJ’s room. The president was lying on one of the beds in his suite, and Jack Valenti was there as well. They were talking about how Lady Bird’s train-trip campaign swing through the Southern states was going. Something displeased the president while I was in the room, and I became an awkward witness to a scene I wouldn’t soon forget. He suddenly turned on Jack and laid him out savagely, the unpleasantness exacerbated by being delivered in front of a relative stranger. It was quite callous and inhuman, something I have never witnessed before or since. I had heard about LBJ’s temper but had never seen it in action; Jack, however, was used to these tantrums and remained unflustered while I squirmed. I escaped as quickly as possible.

We went on to Louisville and continued the next day to Nashville, ending as planned in New Orleans, where the president’s campaign group was to meet up with Lady Bird and her entourage, who had completed their Southern swing by train.

In order to stay true to my goal of some balance, I also rode along on the Goldwater press plane, flying first to New York and then on to Los Angeles for the night, from where we left for a whistle-stop tour to San Diego. Much as I disagreed with his views, Goldwater himself was a charming man, and it was fun to watch him speak to the crowds gathered for his quick campaign stops.

——

A
MONTH FOLLOWING
the first anniversary of Phil’s death, Lally came to me in great excitement with her young beau, Yann Weymouth, to tell me they were engaged and wanted to be married in a few months. Yann was in architecture school at MIT, and Lally would be entering her senior year at Radcliffe. I felt that they were both awfully young, but I kept my concerns to myself, deciding that articulating them would do no good and might harm my relationship with Lally and Yann. I even wrote my mother trying to be reassuring about the marriage to a greater extent than I felt. A part of that letter expressed both my anxiety and some of my attitudes about women in those days:

I spent much of November, after the president’s overwhelming election, dealing with company business while at the same time immersing myself in plans for a Thanksgiving-weekend wedding. One interlude was an evening at the White House that didn’t seem so funny at the time as it does today. Joe and Susan Mary and I were invited to a small party for the Johnsons’ thirtieth wedding anniversary. We were the only three semioutsiders at what was essentially a party of close friends and associates—the Valentis, Liz Carpenter and her husband, the Abe Fortases, and only a few others were there.

The president was in, or perhaps developed over the course of the evening, a very bad mood. There was a coffee table “smothered in lovely done-up presents,” Susan Mary recalled. He looked at it and said, “What’s all this trash? Get rid of it, Bird, and let’s have something to eat.” We had dinner in the beautiful oval family dining room upstairs, with the French wallpaper paid for by the Dillons under Jackie’s restoration project. Joe, unfortunately, banged on a bit about Vietnam, which didn’t help the president’s mood.

After dinner, which hadn’t lasted long, we returned to the family living room, but LBJ left early for his bedroom, which was adjacent to the living room, while the rest of us sat around talking. We were in the process of saying good night to Lady Bird when the double doors of the bedroom
were flung open and the president looked at me in obvious anger and barked, “Come here!” I glanced hopefully over my shoulder to see if he could possibly be referring to anyone else, but it was clearly me he wanted. “And you come here, too,” he called to Abe Fortas.

We went into his bedroom, where on the turned-down bed lay the early edition of the
Post
, with a large headline saying that Walter Tobriner, the lead commissioner for the District of Columbia—in effect, the appointed mayor—had named a new police chief. LBJ was livid. He said he had told Tobriner not to do anything without discussing it with him, because he had wanted to appoint a “super” police chief to address the problem of crime in Washington—the only place a president can get his hands on the issue, since elsewhere it’s up to the states.

President Johnson equated me with the
Post
and viewed the article’s appearance in the next morning’s paper as entirely my fault. The
Post
had endorsed Tobriner, and “this stupid son of a bitch,” as LBJ referred to him, had gone ahead and deprived him of appointing the kind of person he wanted. He was ranting at me: “Tobriner was your creation,” etc., etc.

As he was yelling at me, he started to undress, flinging his clothes off onto a chair and the floor—his coat, his tie, his shirt. Finally, he was down to his pants. I was frozen with dismay and baffled about what to do. I remember thinking to myself: This can’t be me being bawled out by the president of the United States while he’s undressing. Suddenly he bellowed, “Turn around!” I did so, obediently and gratefully, and he went right on with his angry monologue until I turned back at his command to find him in his pajamas. He bid the two of us a curt good night, and Abe and I turned on our heels and vanished.

The last big event of the year for me was Lally and Yann’s wedding, held in the Navy Chapel in Washington, with the reception at home. Felix Frankfurter had written Lally saying that he felt Phil would have wanted him to give her away, but by that time he was in a wheelchair from a stroke. And so it was Don who walked her down the aisle. She wore a beautiful Mainbocher dress given to her by her grandmother. Although the marriage lasted only a few years, out of it came two marvelous children, Katharine and Pamela Weymouth, my oldest granddaughters.

F
OR PEOPLE WHO
lose a spouse, the year that immediately follows is horribly painful—and so it was for me. After the first year, however, comes a more bearable kind of grief that allows accommodation to the outside world, the world that just carries on no matter what has happened to you.

The difficulties of my job remained enormous. I still had little idea of how to relate to people in a business environment, and no idea how closely I was being watched by everyone. Within the company, whatever I said or did, even my body language, sent a stronger message to people than I realized. In addition, I had spent a lifetime with dramatically impressive people and probably dismissed as unimportant too many quiet, unassuming, but hardworking people throughout the company. It took me a while to learn that certain people may have important skills that are not always blazingly apparent. Gradually I came to realize—slow as I may have been—that what mattered was performance, that sometimes people might have to be helped to develop, and that it takes all kinds to make an organization run properly.

I made mistakes and suffered great distress from them, partly because I believed that if you just worked diligently enough you wouldn’t make mistakes. I truly believed that other people in my position
didn’t
make mistakes; I couldn’t see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience. What I did that I’m certain my male counterparts did not, and which was particularly tormenting, was to lie awake at night reliving events of the day, going over and over certain scenes, wondering how I could have managed whatever it was differently.

Yet, despite all my insecurities and misgivings, I was gradually beginning to enjoy myself. And unconsciously, somewhere along the line, I seem to have begun redefining my job and what it was I was doing. Indeed, within the first months of my new working life, the color started returning to my face, my jaw was beginning to unclench, and what I had
once called “my initial girl-scout type of resolve” was turning into a passionate interest. In short, as I said in a speech at
Newsweek
, I “sort of fell in love.” I loved my job, I loved the paper, I loved the whole company. As I wrote Frank Waldrop, “I suppose it’s odd to speak of loving the Company but all I’m doing is agreeing with Colonel McCormick when he said a newspaper is a living thing.…”

Gradually, too, I began to learn. The Montessori method—learning by doing—once again became my stock in trade. One of my greatest learning tools over the years was the trips I took with various editors and reporters from the
Post
and
Newsweek
. These trips—which, more than thirty years later, now number nearly as many as the years that have passed—were among the richest and most rewarding of all the many opportunities available to me as head of a communications company.

Of course, I had been to Europe several times with Phil, but my first trip as the executive rather than as the spouse who often got left out of the most interesting occasions was something altogether unusual. It was an around-the-world venture with Oz Elliott and his then wife, Deirdre, or Dee, and I loved it. The only drawback was having to leave Bill and Steve again—this time for six weeks, far too long.

I may have been the president, but I was still a woman, and I recall being upset when I received a letter from
Newsweek
’s correspondent in Hong Kong, Bob McCabe, asking if I really wanted to be included in stag lunches and substantive briefings during the trip. “Naturally I want to go,” I replied, somewhat indignantly. “Since I have been working, I never seem to notice whether I am with men or women. As I happen to be on this job, I obviously want to learn as much as I can.”

Some matters specific to women couldn’t be avoided, however, as evidenced by the expression of horror on Oz Elliott’s face when I met him in San Francisco at the end of January 1965. I was carrying a large, not inconspicuous yellow-and-red box with the name “Kenneth” on it, for the well-known hairdresser in New York. It was the fashion in the mid-1960s to use fake hair or “falls” over the back of your head, with your own hair combed over the front, which both puffed out your hair and eliminated the need to have it done when you were traveling. My box contained my fall, or wig, pinned to a felt head-shape inside. On seeing me, Oz announced firmly, “Don’t think I’m ever going to carry that for you.” I laughed, realizing how ridiculous it looked, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll carry it myself.” That settled, we took off.

Our first stop, in Japan, included a visit to
Asahi
, then the largest newspaper in Japan, with a circulation of many millions. Next was one to a large advertising agency, Dentsu, where I was stunned to find a big sign reading “Welcome Mrs. Philip L. Graham” and about eighty people, mostly young women, who applauded as I stepped inside, a startling
Japanese display of manners. We had a brief meeting with Prime Minister Sato, and within the next few days we also met separately with Kiichi Miyazawa and with Yasuhiro Nakasone, both of whom later became prime minister. I am abashed to admit that what I remember of Nakasone from that meeting is that he made the list of sexy men which Dee Elliott and I were compiling as we circled the globe.