Guest at Breakfast

(See Cover)

As Washington awakens each morning to a new day at the crossroads of history, the same familiar sight greets the sleepy eye. Across the presidential breakfast tray and over the coverlets and coffee cups of the most influential people in the world's most influential city looms the capital's most influential paper: the Washington Post and Times-Herald (circ. 381,687 daily, 412,121 Sunday).

The Post is not so complete a newspaper as the New York Times (which, with the Herald Tribune, also reaches President Eisenhower's bedside), or so good a paper as the Baltimore Sun, which also gets to Washington at breakfast time. Over the long haul, until last year, it has not been so successful as Washington's ad-fat evening Star (circ. 250,086), long favored by the home-grown Washingtonians, from the society-conscious cliff dwellers to the civil service folk, who do the Government's housekeeping.

But as the capital's only morning paper, the Post makes its impact on official Washington at both the right place and the right time--in the pause before the daily scurry through the bureaucratic and political brambles. "Of all the American newspapers," Britain's Lord Northcliffe (London Daily Mail) once said, "I would prefer to own the Washington Post because it reaches the breakfast tables of the members of Congress."

Material for the Memos. Northcliffe understated the case. The Post's reach goes beyond Capitol Hill and far deeper than the Senate subway. From Foggy Bottom to the fog on the Hill, Washington reaches for the Post as Broadway reaches for Variety or bankers for the Wall Street Journal.

Bureaucrats scan it for news of their own departments that may still be several memos away; except at the topmost layer, the city's 228,109 public servants depend mostly on the press for what they know about the Government and each other. Bigwigs examine the Post nervously to see how their speeches are played--or to find ideas for new ones. The Washington press corps studies it for tips, ideas and slants that often influence the 500,000 words that clack out of the capital every day to news media all around the world.

Out of its unique role the Post has fashioned one of the world's most influential journalists: Philip L. (for Leslie) Graham, publisher, who started at the top ten years ago without ever having covered a news story, written an editorial or sold an ad. Phil Graham, 40, is an energetic charmer whose facial furrows and tall, angular frame (6 ft. 1 in., 160 Ibs.) give him a Lincolnesque look. Lawyer by profession, politician by instinct, latter-day New Dealer by choice, he became a newspaper publisher by marrying the boss's daughter. He quickly showed that the boss, Multimillionaire Eugene Meyer, now 80, could not have picked a more quick-witted, smoothly forceful successor.

"One Party" Press. Graham's Post is part of a larger Washington press phenomenon. Some Democratic politicians among them Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, have often charged that the U.S. has a "one party," i.e., Republican, press. But if the owners and publishers of U.S. newspapers constitute a force for the G.O.P., there is another more effective ''one party" Democratic press: the Washington press corps. An estimated 85% of the correspondents in the capital, conditioned in the Depression and under the New Deal, have political reflexes that respond favorably to Democrats, unfavorably to Republicans. They strengthen their reflexes daily by reading the Post, where their reactions are shared by most of the Post's top brass, including Managing Editor Al Friendly, 44, an active charter member of Americans for Democratic Action, and Publisher Graham himself.

When a Republican Administration came to Washington in 1952, the correspondents put fresh vigor into their classic role as people's monitor over the Government. The publishers had overwhelmingly supported the Eisenhower candidacy, but they were not in Washington doing the prying and prodding that go with the day's work of the good reporter. It was the working press that kept asking what the President would do about Joe McCarthy (and what McCarthy would do about the President), whether "Engine Charlie" Wilson was going to sell his General Motors stock,* or if Republican appointees were trying to "give away" natural resources to special interests.

In their digging zeal, the newsmen have performed a worthwhile service. Government administrators have been put on guard; mistakes have not gone long unnoticed. The working press has helped prod the Administration into swift action in some cases, e.g., the resignation of former Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott. In that way the correspondents have proved a blessing in disguise to the Republican Administration, though as Sir Winston Churchill remarked, when he applied the phrase to the British Labor victory in 1945, "the disguise is perfect."

The Sharpest Cut. In this needling process the Post, an "independent" i.e., politically unaffiliated, newspaper has played its characteristic leading role. It editorially supported Eisenhower in 1952. Since then, it has grown increasingly critical of the Administration, which now finds it unfriendly in tone and attitude. The Post has applauded Eisenhower personally, as well as parts of his Administration's program (farming, foreign aid education, fiscal policy). At the same time, it has condemned Republicans whom it labels "extremist," e.g., Vice President Nixon, has criticized what it considers "disgraceful excesses" of the loyalty-security program, and has hit often and hard at what it calls the tidelands oil and timber "giveaways." It has also sharply needled (but sometimes praised) John Foster Dulles on foreign policy.

The Post's sharpest cut into the elephant's hide appears daily on the editorial page and in 150 other U.S. papers: the brilliant political cartoon by Herblock, 46-year-old Chicago-born Herbert Lawrence Block, No. 1 U.S. cartoonist, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner. A left-wing Democrat, Herblock almost quit the Post in 1952 because it was supporting Eisenhower, did not do any cartoons for the paper during the week before the election.*

Publisher Graham, who registered Republican in 1952 (to help Ike defeat Robert Taft for the nomination), insists that the Post is merely following its independent conscience, recalls that "Harry Truman didn't like the Post either."* The Post has, indeed, taken its rapier (and at times its club) to anyone at the seat of Government. It approved of much in Harry Truman's Fair Deal, but it was unrelenting in its criticism of the corruption in his Administration. It praised Alf M. Landon and Wendell Willkie highly, but withheld formal support from any presidential candidate until Graham broke that precedent in 1952 by endorsing Eisenhower.

In the case of Richard Nixon, the Post has attacked when the Democrats were in power and again after the Republicans took over. The Post first criticized Nixon when he was helping to unmask Traitor Alger Hiss. Publisher Graham contends that "all men of good will," including the men of the Post, were embarrassed by the Hiss case. The paper sprang to Hiss's defense, switched later when the evidence piled up against him. In the Post's more recent anti-Nixon efforts, largely aimed at Nixon's use of the subversion issue as a political weapon, Graham has had to restrain Herblock. In his Republican gallery (Ike as a perplexed boob; Dulles, a smug bumbler; Wilson, a predatory capitalist), the cartoonist began drawing Nixon as a heavily stubbled, bestial figure resembling the famous Herblock caricature of Joe McCarthy. Graham sternly ordered Herblock to shave the Vice President. "Nixon is not McCarthy," he scolded, "no matter what else you may think of him."

Estes & Frankenstein. While the Post's thrusts against public figures it dislikes are spectacular, it has produced more significant results in the area of issues that are broader than any personality. It was the Post (long before Phil Graham's time) that first stripped the camouflage off F.D.R.'s Supreme Court packing bill and led the fight against it. Its internationalist editorials impressed Roosevelt into recommending them to press conferences as insights into his foreign policy.* Post editorials helped to assure civilian control of atomic energy, and to trigger emergency operations that spared Europe a famine in 1945-46. One gave Arkansas Senator Fulbright the idea for the exchange scholarships that bear his name. The Post's latest crusade has been to build a fire under the clean elections bill now before the Senate with 85 Senators as its joint sponsors. Based on a Graham idea, the bill would outlaw heavy individual campaign contributions, provide for financing campaigns instead through bipartisan mass money-raising.

The paper also wields its influence behind the scenes, helps make the news it reports. In late 1949 Post editors grew concerned over the rising influence of gangsters in U.S. politics. While Star Reporter Eddie Folliard went to New York to do a series on such "tygoons" as Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, Graham conceived a congressional investigation and began scanning the U.S. Senate to cast a likely Senator in the top role. He needed a man who 1) did not come from a state to which the corrupt trail would lead, and 2) could handle himself on TV.

With the help of his longtime friend, Washington Lawyer Ed Wheeler, Graham hit on the virtually unknown junior Senator from Tennessee. But Estes Kefauver was reluctant. Graham gave him a long pep talk, finally exploded: "Damn it, Estes, don't you want to be Vice President?" That was the speech that launched Kefauver into his celebrated investigation and the deeper waters of U.S. politics. Since then, Graham, who shudders at the thought of Kefauver for President, has begun feeling like Frankenstein.

Graham was the first newsman to wrest assurance from Adlai Stevenson that he would accept the Democratic nomination in 1952. Through Reporter Folliard at the convention, the publisher sent Delegate Stevenson a note asking him to telephone. On the phone he got Stevenson to agree that it would be "an act of arrogance" to turn the nomination down. The result: Folliard scored a beat in the Post with a story that Stevenson would accept.

Dream Man. The pattern of Phil Graham's life is the envy of many a politician and looks, indeed, like a quick montage of the American dream. Graham was born in South Dakota in the Black Hills mining town of Terry, near the site where Calamity Jane died. When Phil was six, his father Ernest, an engineer who had tried mining and farming in South Dakota and Michigan with no luck, took the family to the Florida Everglades to launch an ambitious agricultural experiment for a sugar company. After a dozen years of floods, muck fires, hurricanes, frost and insects, the company wrote off the experiment as a loss and let Manager Graham keep as much of the land as he could pay taxes on. He began dairy farming. During the Depression, Phil took a year away from the University of Florida to drive milk trucks for his father. Later the elder Graham helped introduce beef cattle to Florida. Today, at 71, he runs a 7,000-acre empire with 2,500 head of dairy and Angus cattle, smack at the edge of the booming Miami environs, where 162 acres that he gave Phil are now being negotiated for sale at $3,000 an acre, which works out to $486,000.

As a skinny lad nicknamed "Muscle-bound," Phil read omnivorously, graduated from high school at 16, "wittiest" and president of his class. He breezed through college, where he roomed with Florida's Democratic Senator George Smathers. At Harvard Law School he won the prized presidency of the Law Review, graduated tenth in a class of 400 and caught the eye of New Deal Talent Scout Professor Felix Frankfurter. That landed him a job as Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed's law clerk. The next year Graham clerked for Frankfurter himself.

When he went to Washington in 1939, Graham joined a group of eligible bachelors in a pillared Arlington mansion called Hockley Hall. Slim, attractive Kay Meyer, then 22, who attended Hockley Hall parties, invited all the residents to a coming-out party for her sister Ruth at the Eugene Meyer mansion on Washington's Crescent Place. There Graham met Kay, a $25-a-week editorial assistant on her father's paper. A University of Chicago graduate (and ex-student of Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas), she was as keen a New Deal supporter as Graham himself. After two more encounters and a single date, they became engaged. They were married in June 1940.

"Look into Gas." After his year with Frankfurter, Graham saw the New Deal fading into the defense effort. He followed, landing with one foot in the Lend-Lease Administration and the other in the Office for Emergency Management. As an ''expediter,'' Graham bowled through bottlenecks and red tape with highhanded ease, won kudos for his role in boosting high octane gas output and lending $8 billion in V-Loans to get defense plants humming. When he lacked the right to check on lagging gasoline procurement, he had OEM's Chief Wayne Coy put a slip of paper on the President's desk reading: "Look into high octane gas." F.D.R.'s initials turned it into a badge of authority.

In July 1942 Graham enlisted in the Army Air Forces as a private--but he went right on operating in uniform. He wound up as an intelligence officer on the staff of Far Eastern Air Commander General George C. Kenney. Learning that General Douglas MacArthur's staff was holding out information on Kenney, he set up a short-cut system of getting it to the air general. When Kenney, on a mission to Washington for MacArthur, was barred by the Pentagon from seeing Roosevelt, Graham fixed up a White House visit out of channels.

After the war (he was discharged as a major), Graham felt tempted to return to Florida and enter politics. He also felt the pull of Washington--and an offer from aging Post Publisher Meyer, whose only son, Dr. Eugene Meyer III, now 40, had staked out an interest in medicine. Graham brooded, finally chose Washington. The publisher pondered whether to break Graham in at the bottom, then decided to skip the red tape. On Jan. 1, 1946 he went to work as associate publisher. Six months later, Graham became publisher of the Washington Post.

"Can We Buy a Pitcher?" When he brought in an amateur at the top, Yaleman Eugene Meyer was following his own pattern. He had never dipped a pen into journalism until he was 57. By then he had succeeded in two other careers. As a financier, he multiplied the real estate and banking fortune built by his father, who came to the U.S. from Alsace. As a Government administrator--governor of the Federal Reserve Board, first chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corp., etc.--he served under every President from Wilson to F.D.R. He wanted the Post not only for the role it would give him in Washington's life, but to perform another kind of public service.

Outbidding Hearst, Meyer bought the Post anonymously at auction for a bargain $825,000 in 1933--four years after he had offered $5,000,000 and been turned down. He found it "mentally, morally, physically and in every other way bankrupt," the raddled plaything of oil-rich Playboy Edward ("Ned") McLean. A horse fancier, gaudy Publisher McLean once devoted three of the paper's four sports pages to agate tables on racing performances. He brought his mistress to editorial conferences (so his wife, Evalyn Walsh McLean, charged in a divorce action) and made the old Post building on Pennsylvania Avenue the scene of hard-drinking, all-night parties, including one in which he arranged for General John J. Pershing to head off into the dawn wearing the cap of a Western Union boy. At the end of the McLean regime in 1933, the Washington Post was a paper celebrated in song (by John Philip Sousa's march bearing its name) but $600,000 in debt for newsprint for its shrunken circulation of 51,534.

Eugene Meyer took over the decrepit Post and, as he said, "made all the mistakes in the book." He went on a buying spree, snapping up expensive but unsuitable executives, trained seals, special features and the syndicated columns that were then coming into vogue. (To this day the Post runs 15 syndicated columns, from Walter Lippmann to Walter Winchell, more than any other U.S. paper, plus no fewer than 35 daily comic strips.) Once, during his purchasing zeal, Meyer noticed general gloom over the standing of the Washington Senators baseball team. He called in Sports Columnist Shirley Povich and asked what was wrong. "It's their pitching," said Povich. Asked Meyer: "Can we buy a pitcher? How much do they cost?"

A Glut of Side Dishes. For all his first mistakes, Eugene Meyer, known affectionately to his staff as "Butch," worked wonders. He built a national bureau to cover the Government, patterned after the Washington bureaus of the big Manhattan dailies. He developed an editorial page that, under Felix Morley, began at once to show insight and vigor, gain national prestige. By 1946, circulation had more than trebeled to 168,345.

Yet in the first decade alone, Publisher Meyer lost $5,000,000. The hard fact was that Washington, with one-quarter the population of Chicago, had just as many papers. The Post's wobbly economic base was the toughest problem inherited by Publisher Phil Graham when Meyer stepped up to become chairman of the board.

In 1949 Graham and Meyer thought they had the solution: a chance to buy the gaudy but prosperous opposition, the Times-Herald, a year after Publisher Cissy Patterson's death. Instead, Cissy's seven heirs sold out to her cousin, Colonel Bertie McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. Graham saw no hope of competing from the Post's ramshackle old plant. So Meyer put up another $6,000,000 to build a new Post building (on L Street), complete with color presses and air conditioning.

In 1954 the Post's big chance arrived. A.P. Chief Kent Cooper got in touch with Meyer from Florida, hinted that there might be a newspaper for sale. "Is it in Florida?" Meyer asked. "No," said Cooper guardedly. "Washington?" tried Meyer. "Yes." Meyer then knew that Colonel McCormick wanted to sell out. McCormick, who had tried to run the Times-Herald like a Washington edition of the Chicago Tribune, had been losing heavily, while the Post had edged into the black. Six weeks later the Post closed the deal for the merger that gave it a morning monopoly in Washington. Cost: $8,500,000 for the Times-Herald, plus $1,800,000 for severance pay and incidentals. The money came this time mostly from loans, partly from Phil Graham, who decided that Gene Meyer had done enough already in pouring some $20 million into the paper.

From the Times-Herald, the Post kept two pages of comics, a picture page, extra sports and financial coverage and a raft of features. The merger also left the paper with the combined services of A.P., U.P., I.N.S., Reuters and the syndicated output of the Chicago Tribune and Daily News, plus the New York Herald Tribune and News. On Sundays the merged paper offers a glut of side dishes: two magazine sections, two comic sections, two tabloid magazines. More important, the Post managed to keep its old self dominant and yet hang on to the bulk of the old Times-Herald circulation.

No Clink or Patter. The merger is the major landmark in Publisher Graham's ten-year-old regime. He has kept busy beefing up the paper's neglected business-office side in other ways. He brought in top circulation and business executives, hedged against the future by buying radio and TV stations WTOP in Washington and WMBR in Jacksonville (total cost: $7.8 million). He also raised the Post's long-pinched salaries. Fortnight ago he signed an unprecedented long-term (five years) contract with the Newspaper Guild giving staffers the top U.S. newspaper wage ($160-a-week minimum in four years).

On the editorial side, where his heart lies, Graham has boosted community coverage and recast the top echelon. Managing Editor Friendly and 37-year-old Ohioan Robert Harley Estabrook, chief of the editorial page (who voted for Stevenson in 1952, though the paper had plumped for Eisenhower), serve under Executive Editor J. (for James) Russell Wiggins, 53.

An alumnus of the New York Times, Minnesotan Wiggins (who stands politically in the middle of the road) runs his operation with the cold, neat passion of a spinster picking cat hairs off the chesterfield. Under an intricate system that he devised, an assistant city editor giving an assignment records it on a dark green slip; if photos are needed with the story, he uses a red slip; for morgue pictures, a pink slip; if a cab is needed, a light green slip. Oldtimers wistfully recall the clink of glasses and patter of mice in the battered old Post city room. In the antiseptic new one--done in a sterile grey--Wiggins permits no coffee or sandwiches at desks, nothing on the walls but maps. Staffers may smoke if they wish; Wiggins provides ashtrays.

Journalists as Generalists. Publisher Graham has made himself the pillar of the Post. He calls the turn on editorial policy (and, a skillful writer, occasionally drafts an editorial himself), keeps his hand on newsroom salaries, hiring, new features and on such decisions as how many reporters will cover the political conventions (eight), and whether the paper should hold open for late Wisconsin primary returns (it did). Staffers like his flair for an old soldier's easy profanity, his first-name familiarity and quickness to bestow praise.

From the start Graham meshed well with father-in-law Meyer, who has gradually moved to a back seat, where he now watches the Post editorialize for low tariffs instead of the high ones long dear to his heart. Graham has also won the admiration of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Agnes Meyer, 69, longtime reporter and sometime Post contributor--though he refused to run her latest story, a piece attacking segregation, because he thought it overstepped the paper's gradualist line. In 1948 he became proprietor as well as publisher when Meyer turned over all the voting stock to him and Kay Graham. To keep the paper on the public-service track, Meyer also set up a self-perpetuating board with veto power on any buyer.

In his grey-curtained office, puffing a Parliament (40 a day) with his long legs stretched over the desk, Graham keeps communications lively between top-layer Washington and the Post on two softly ding-donging telephones. Often he has a Senator, an ambassador or a Cabinet officer to his luncheon anteroom, where he also holds executive conferences regularly. He manages to get to dinner only three or four nights a week with Kay and their four children (Elizabeth, 12; Donald, 10; William, 7; Stephen. 3) at his eight-bedroom Georgetown mansion.

The expanding Post and Times-Herald plans next year to more than double its five-year-old quarters with a $5,500,000 building addition. But as a newspaper it has more vital needs. Its local staff is still undermanned and stretched thin; its seven-man national bureau (one-third the size of the New York Times bureau) does a spotty job; it has never had its own foreign correspondents. Phil Graham is aware of these problems. "Until two years ago," he says, "we did not know if we would survive. I'm a non-rushing fellow. I hope to expand everywhere in a patient, planned, overall manner."

Meantime Graham enjoys his work. "The most rewarding thing," he says, "is that journalists are among the very few generalists left in a boringly specialized world. You are in touch with everything from the local grass roots to the most complicated international thing. You rub up against so many things that you have an opportunity to be decent, constructive and half intelligent about some of them."

As the man who comes to breakfast with the most influential people in the world's most influential city, Phil Graham has great power and responsibility. He realizes this, and aims beyond it. He dreams of greatness for his paper. "I want independence and institutionalism," he says. "Before I die, I should like to see the Post like La Prensa of Buenos Aires, the Times of London or the New York Times, with a sense of vocation on the part of the people who write and edit it, and with a continuity of fundamental principle."

* In stones based on a garbled leak from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, the Washington press corps propagated the apparently indestructible myth that Wilson said: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." The official transcript of the hearing released later, showed that what Wilson really said was: "I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. But the impact of the first stories was never overcome by the fact, and probably never will be. To its credit, the Washington Post reported the story correctly from the start.

* Another famed Democratic cartoonist the St. Louis Pest-Dispatch's Daniel Fitzpatrick refused to draw political cartoons in the 1936 campaign after his paper came out for Alf Landon.

* Truman says that he thinks the Post handled the news fairly when he was in the White House, but he has shown his dislike for its comment. Most famous example: his invective-choked letter of protest about Post Music Critic Paul Hume's criticism of daughter Margaret's singing in 1950. Publisher Graham has two far hotter letters from Truman that he says he will never make public.

* The Post also delighted F.D.R. with a gift of 50 suppressed copies of an edition with the classic typographical error headline: PRESIDENT CONFINED TO BED WITH COED.

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