← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
Katharine Graham
02:15:34
Katharine Graham was the head of the Washington Post empire during a turbulent time in American history. After a personal tragedy catapulted her into the public eye (and the eye of the hurricane), she took on the doubters and became the most powerful woman in media history. She was an icon of resilience and determination, as well as embodying the belief that a cantankerous, vibrant, and free press is crucial to the very principles of democracy.
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the history tricks where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.
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B
And Here is your 30 second summary.
- [00:14]
A
The author, Nora Ephron said Catherine was a painfully shy little brown wren forced by tragedy to take over the family business and become one of the most powerful women of her time.
- [00:27]
B
The end. Good news. Excellent news. Field trip season is upon us. At least the preparation for it.
- [00:37]
A
Now our trip to Paris is all sold out, but the second trip for 2025 is going to be opening registration today and that trip is to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The dates are June 18th through the 22nd and you need to go to Like Minds Travel. There'll be a link on our website and in all of our social media to go get more information and sign up. And now on with the show.
- [01:03]
B
Let's talk about Catherine Meyer. Graham.
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A
But first, let's drop her into history. In 1938, the organization we now know as the March of Dimes was founded to research and combat polio. With 250,000 people in attendance and another 100,000 stuck in traffic, the Eternal Light Peace Memorial at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was lit Kristallnacht. The Night of Broken Glass was a night of violent antisemitic actions that occurred throughout Germany. It was followed by laws, taxes and actions against Jewish citizens. Thornton Wilder's play Our Town premiered and won a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Dupont began manufacturing the first nylon bristled toothbrushes. And later in the year, one of their chemists invented Teflon completely by accident when working on a new coolant gas. A 500 ton meteorite exploded above Western Pennsylvania and H.G. wells War of the Worlds aired. Etta James, Judy Bloom and Natalie Wood were all born. Max Factor and Typhoid Mary Mallon both died. And in 1938, the future Catherine Graham began work at the family business which would later alter the course of her life. We wanted to give a little ears warning on this episode. In the section after the first break there is discussion of the death of a child as well as a death by suicide. So you are forewarned and forearmed. Thank you for understanding.
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B
Catherine Meyer was born on June 16, 1917 in New York City, the fourth of the five children of Eugene Meyer and Agnes Ernst Mayer.
- [02:44]
A
Papa Eugene was the fourth of eight children of a French immigrant and a first generation Polish immigrant. Papa Eugene had come from a long line of rabbis. His great grandfather was especially prominent to a degree that Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him to determine the legal status of French Jews. That's a pretty well placed rabbi.
- [03:06]
B
Absolutely. But Papa himself Came from more entrepreneurial stock. His father, let's call him Grandpapa, came to the United states at only 17 to make his fortune. And he started at the bottom as a warehouseman at a Calif. Store. Now this department store was started to sell goods to gold miners. And I have often told you on this show that the people that made the money in the gold rush were the ones that sold pancakes and pickaxes, right? In fact, on their sign it used to say, we buy gold dust at top prices. So that's where he began to work. But within 15 years, he and one of his brothers owned the whole department store. The original owners had done so well financially that they had split, split off part of their company into a financial services corporation that was doing so well they decided they would concentrate on that. So Papa and his brother ran a store called the City of Paris. Foreign and domestic dry goods, clothing, furnishing goods, boots, shoes, hats, et cetera.
- [04:14]
A
And they weren't just a retail establishment, but it was a wholesale business as well, supplying to merchants as far away as Arizona.
- [04:22]
B
The year of the great takeover of the city of Paris, which is hilarious to me, the store, the City of Paris. That was the year that Catherine's papa was born. And only five years later the whole family moved to San Francisco where Grandpapa had taken over as president of the Lazard fraction in America, the financial arm of the department store. So Papa basically wanted for nothing material as he grew up in California and.
- [04:51]
A
Eugene was the first boy, so he was given the most education. And the self made man of his father guided that education with tutors and immersing the kid in financial news and how the companies operated. He was really being groomed from a very young age to take over.
- [05:10]
B
He went off to Yale, as you do, and after he graduated from university, he took the inevitable pipeline straight to Lizard frere. The words financial sector might have been written on his birth certificate. As Susan said, there was. You know, it's almost like being born a crown prince. There's no choices here. You will do what you will do. Not too long after he started work at his father's company, he started his own company. He was a investor and an extremely successful stock speculator.
- [05:43]
A
According to legend, the financing of that business came about like this. Eugene had been given 800 or $600, depending on your source, for not smoking until the age of 21. It was a deal his father had made with him. He took that and in a year invested it to 5,000. And then within two years that original investment of $800 was worth over $50,000. And that's in modern money, $19 million. So from an original investment of 30,000 he now has 19 million in modern dollars. According to legend.
- [06:22]
B
According to legend, yeah. He also could have been, you know, given some money too.
- [06:28]
A
That's a better story. It makes a great.
- [06:30]
B
Yeah, that is a much better story. Well, he was a very young multimillionaire and on a visit to an art museum, Eugene was hit by the thunderbolt. Who could that angel be that I see ahead of me? A tall, blonde, blue eyed woman had stopped him in his tracks. And here's another story. The story goes. I'm going to marry, marry that girl, he said to his friend. And then pieced out of the museum, leaving it to fate. Which is of course the whole plot of the movie. Serendipity, isn't it? If it's meant to be, it's meant to be. Well, unbelievably, only a week later, what to his wandering eyes should appear across a crowded room. Agnes Ernst, her name was that angel from the museum. And it was on.
- [07:11]
A
Agnes was a native New Yorker, a first generation American of German immigrants. But where Eugene came from a family of raps, rabbis, Agnes came from a family of Lutheran pastors. Her father was a lawyer turned dime store novelist who told his daughter that she should go to secretarial school to help support the family. When she had a scholarship to go to college at Barnard, that's one of the seven sisters colleges, women's colleges in the northeast. She stood up to him and went anyway. At 16, didn't you go to college at 16?
- [07:44]
B
I did, I did. I didn't have to fight anyone to do it.
- [07:48]
A
That's right. Well Agnes, even at this was. I don't know what the word to describe her was. My mother in law would call her a pistol. She lost that scholarship for insolence and poor attitude to professors. She was probably talking back to them just like she did to her father. Argumentative. But she did odd jobs. She didn't want to drop out of college. So she put herself through back when that was possible. Now Barnard is $84,000 a year.
- [08:17]
B
I don't know how many part time jobs you'd have to stack together.
- [08:20]
A
Yeah, that's one hell of an after school job.
- [08:23]
B
You know how in college that you sort of begin to find your people if you're lucky? Mamaw began associating with writers and artists and philosophers and activists. And it was appropriate I think that she met papa at an art museum that was where her heart lay. Also, it was characteristic that even though in the Gilded Age era she had a multimillionaire suitor wrapped around her little finger. She chose to continue her education at the Sorbonne in France, where she began a lifelong process of gathering about her the progressive thinkers in the arts and literature and political thought.
- [09:01]
A
Eugene had been bankrolling her adventures in Europe and what adventures they were. She met Matisse and Rodin. She took fencing lessons with Marie Curie.
- [09:14]
B
I love it so much.
- [09:15]
A
She hung out at Gertrude Stein's salons. She was connected to the whole arts and writers movements in Paris, all the expats. She's there.
- [09:26]
B
She became a very rare creature. A professional female reporter for the New York Sun. And I wrote, my goodness, Mama might make a good episode herself. Yeah, she was definitely a person born in the wrong time for her talents who still managed to accomplish a lot. That's a story for another day, but it certainly goes along with what we are trying to accomplish here. So just let you know, Mama's life is full, but we're probably not going to do anything but give you a link to it at this point. Eugene and Agnes were married in 1910.
- [10:04]
A
When they returned from their honeymoon, not only were they bringing souvenirs of paintings by Cezanne and Matisse and Picasso, they loved modern art. They were expecting their first child.
- [10:15]
B
And over the course of the next few years, three children were born. And as America began to be reluctantly roped into World War I, Wilson held out as long as he could. It was the Great War at the time, of course, since they didn't know there'd be more than one, Papa moved to Washington D.C. as an advisor to President Wilson. He was called one of the dollar men, which means he didn't take a salary because he didn't have to. Mama couldn't accompany him, though, because she was pregnant with Catherine. Our Catherine. Within months of Catherine's birth, Mama too had gone to the nation's capital. She was so interested in the art and swirling intellectualism of Washington D.C. and she did not want to be left out.
- [11:01]
A
I can't say that Agnes showed much maternal instinct toward their firstborn daughter. Her name was Florence. She said, what a horror about the birth and wretched looking object about her daughter. She attacked my nipples and caused more excruciating pain.
- [11:18]
B
Well, yeah, you know, many a tiktoker has said the same. So I'm just saying she was ahead of her time.
- [11:27]
A
It is an excellent point. I'm like, yeah, it hurts, it's just. But she really didn't need to do a whole lot of the heavy maternal lifting because they had hired a nurse slash lady's maid named Margaret Powell. They called her Powley. And she stayed with the family for a very long time. In a very deep irony, Agnes is doing lots of philanthropy because her husband is very wealthy. That's the level of society that she's entered. One of her first projects was serving on a committee to fund maternity care centers in New York City.
- [12:02]
B
I think that's good. That's a lot of what the settlement house movement would end up doing too. Working for the betterment of the working poor. And a lot of times they focused on the women because it was the thought that the women in the family could move the family in the best direction. Right.
- [12:20]
A
And you're so optimistic. Maybe when I was writing my notes I was just being really cynical, but I thought of it like it was on brand for her because it was like a high figure head position, all of the accolades and very little of actual hands on work. Kind of like her mothering style. See, I was so cynical.
- [12:39]
B
That's the social class, man. That's where we are. Look at Mary Crawley. True, in Downton Abbey, she saw her child every day from 4 to 4:30, starched and presented by his own version of Paoli, the nanny. But I will tell you, this is a little unusual to me. Until Katherine was four, so she had older brothers and sisters that were older than this. Until Catherine was four years of age, she did not live in the same city as either of her parents. I mean, there's a whole cavalcade of servants and I assure you, you'd probably rather be with them hanging out and having fun. But the parents were distant shadows. They were visitors. You got dressed up for once in a while when they came to visit the house, it was a lot of pressure. I will tell you, the mother once wrote, these people try to flatten out my personality. And I don't think she meant her children in particular, but everyone who expected her to be a doting mother. That's who she was railing against. But eventually the family, now including a little sister for Catherine, finally reunited. Under a series of palatial parental roofs all over Washington D.C. catherine began to attend a Montessori school. Highly recommend, highly recommend. They really let you move around and be independent. She was intelligent, she was capable, and I will tell you, her papa admired her from a distance, even once telling our old frenemy Alice Roosevelt that his middle daughter, K, she's the one in the family to watch Alice. Papa hardly knew his children at all. Not really. He was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, so he also had a lot to do. So they were very busy people, capable people were in charge of the children. But I'm sorry to say that the relationship between K, as we'll call her for a little while, and her mama was one of withering scorn. If you weren't interesting, then goodbye. Basically indiscriminately, I don't care how old you are. Interesting, then goodbye. The great and powerful had paraded through that house from Georgia O'Keeffe to Albert Einstein, et cetera. You know, her friends were Mama's friends. You know, keep up or get out kind of. I expect all of you children to also make a difference in the world one day. You've been given a lot of material possessions, but so what? So have a lot of other people. So be interesting or be gone. They used to foster, I'm sure they called them, discussions at the dinner table. If you want to be heard, you got to be loud. And Catherine said in her autobiography that visitors would get very unnerved by everyone having these arguments at the dinner table.
- [15:14]
A
Yeah. And I was reading, this may be from her autobiography, so take it with a grain of salt, but that some of these conversations, especially when the father was there, he would ask a question and ask the kids to give their opinion, and then he'd kind of argue with them, but it ended in laughter. So kind of. There was kind of a joviality to it sometimes.
- [15:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're a visitor expecting a staid, proper dinner, that's not gonna happen. And you got a lot of popping off. I think it would be a little bit concerned to you. You wouldn't know what was happening. Well, there was a lot of pressure on all the children, but on young Catherine in particular, to be accomplished. She, like her two older sisters, was sent at the age of 12 to the exclusive Madeira school, which her parents had sort of provided land and enormous amounts of financial support to. It's still there.
- [16:08]
A
I'm sorry, you're gonna laugh. Go, snails.
- [16:12]
B
Oh, okay. Well, all right. Yeah, that's. You know what? Snails are tenacious. They are.
- [16:19]
A
They have their house, they are in.
- [16:21]
B
They. They take their strength with them wherever they go. Yeah.
- [16:24]
A
Tuition now is $70,000 a year for room and board. So those are some mighty fancy snails. Let's just call them escargot.
- [16:33]
B
Oh, yes, excellent. Well, this school, then and now reminds me of Chilton. Do you remember Rory's School in Gilmore Girls. I am currently obsessed with Gilmore Girls. And I don't know, I go in, like, these periods. I think it's like the colder weather comes about and it's like that thing you have on in the background while you're doing other things. Do you know how it goes? You don't have to get too committed. It's either West Wing or Gilmore Girls, and I'm all done with West Wing. So, yeah, the academic standards were so, so very high. Very high. And their mission was to prepare girls for the women's colleges that had opened up during the past decades. But unlike now, the school K went to really had its roots in traditional gender roles. That old sentiment again, that educated women produce educated citizens for the country. The hand that rocks the cradle, you know, is more powerful than the one that wields the sword kind of thing. The director of the school wrote in particular, the pivot of civilization is the home, which in every instance must be made by a woman who makes these homes beautiful, charming, sober, earnest, serious. The quality of our personal culture is the index of the culture of the home. Catherine said later that, and I quote again, subliminally, we absorb the idea that women were put on earth to find a man, make him happy, keep house and have children. That is no longer their mission.
- [17:57]
A
Oh, goodness.
- [17:58]
B
Let me just be very clear. At the Madeira School, I mean, the part about preparing women for women's colleges is. Or any colleges, really. It's a very, very highly regarded prep school.
- [18:08]
A
Oh.
- [18:08]
B
It has won major worldwide awards.
- [18:11]
A
Yeah. It's the best boarding school in Virginia. And there are a lot of boarding schools in Virginia.
- [18:16]
B
Well, Katherine's days were just packed. She did get good grades, which we would only expect. Right. She was on multiple sports teams. Choir, theater, piano. And directly related to her future, she wrote for the school paper, the Tatler. Ironic. Ironic, because her senior year, her father bought the ailing, decrepit Washington Post newspaper. He had to do it anonymously. He had four years before offered to buy it for $5 million, which is $92 million in today's money. But the guy, I mean, didn't kick him in the ding ding, but certainly kicked him out of the office for that insulting offer. Well, Papa scooped it up anonymously at its bankruptcy auction for the bargain price of $20 million in today's money. It's a great deal, right? Catherine over at school, the writer and now the business manager of her school paper, she of whom her classmates once wrote, Catherine will become a big shot in the newspaper racket. Someday found out by accident that her father now owned a major newspaper. No one bothered to tell her. She found out like through the grapevine. So class president Katherine Graham graduated from Madeira and immediately began working at her papa's new endeavor over the summer. The paper's reputation had really suffered over the years. Their integrity had been questioned. The quality of its reporting was very questionable. But Papa's credo, tell the truth and don't be an ally to special interests, was very admirable. And that is what he was starting to put into place at the Washington Post. Like her grandpapa so long ago, Catherine started at the bottom. She was really a glorified messenger, really. But she saw how the paper was run. She saw her father's managerial style. She absorbed the presence of female reporters on staff and the reemergence of her mother as a journalist. Specifically articles critical of the brand new Works Progress Administration, or wpa. That's our friend Frances Perkins baby there. A series of programs that were intended to pull the country out of the Great Depression. So for more on that, really like, if you want to get into what Mama was railing against, why don't you listen to our Frances Perkins series of episodes. But reading her later material. I'm talking about Mama here. It seems like maybe Agnes didn't think that the WPA went far enough that it was just painting over the bugs on the wall, you know, instead of really fixing things. So Papa was delighted with Catherine's interest. You know, he kept her in with all the business as she began her first year at college.
- [21:09]
A
And the college that she chose of the seven Sisters was Vassar. It's in upstate New York. It's only about 50 miles from Mount Kisco where they spend their summer. So it's in that same general area where she's been spending a lot of time. Originally she had wanted to study German, but when talking with her father, they decided that she was going to study literature. She also was involved in a lot of on campus clubs, including one controversial liberal club on campus, which led her to be a founding member of a national organization called the American Student Union, which was a left wing pacifist organization. They did a lot of protests up in New York, up in Albany. The first one was to protest all students signing a loyalty oath to the Constitution. It was a successful protest because it didn't pass.
- [22:01]
B
Well, there you go.
- [22:03]
A
On a national level, the organization never really got any momentum going. There was too many factions, too many isms, and everybody had their own agendas and they just couldn't get a solid path to work. But while it was in action, it was a kind of a big deal. And she was one of the founding members of it.
- [22:24]
B
Of course, again, she wrote for the school paper. And during a summer internship at a different paper, she got her very first official byline. Her papa was very, very proud. Catherine wanted to transfer to the London School of Economics, but Papa was reluctant. He had sent his son there and evidently it didn't go so well. By the way, let's mention the brother, Bill actually went into medicine. He did not want to go into the newspaper business. He had an affinity for taking care of people and being a doctor. And that's the direction that he went. So let's not worry about him. But Papa was reluctant to send another child down that same path because it didn't work out so well. And he wanted her to go pretty much anywhere close to home. He had a suggestion.
- [23:12]
A
Why don't you go to the University of Chicago and study journalism? It's the best school for it right now. And he's thinking, well, my son is definitely not going to come into this family business that I'm growing this newspaper business, but my daughter might. The other girls, that's. They're not the targets. They're not. This isn't their thing either. But she's kind of inclined to do kind of work like this. So maybe Catherine is the person.
- [23:39]
B
The head of the University of Chicago had an interesting style. He hearkening back to the dining room tables of old. This college was very focused on, number one, reading what they called the great books. I think a basis in literature and history is an excellent way to have critical thinking skills. But they also use the Socratic method to argue with your teacher during class. And you would get the best score, such as it is, if you whooped the professor in a sparring match.
- [24:15]
A
Verbal.
- [24:16]
B
I mean, nobody was like fighting with like swords or anything, but if you, if you stumped him or like made everyone mentally go ooh or whatever, A plus, you know, so yay, that dinner table finally came in handy. I love the sit around and debate nature of college also, but she, Hermione Grangered her way through school. She got the thickest books out. Taken this out for a bit of light reading.
- [24:39]
A
Right, Right.
- [24:39]
B
It's four inches tall, you know, type of thing. She described herself as confident on the outside so she could hold her own in those classrooms. And she was a bag of nerves on the inside and admitted to being pretty lonely. And her whole college experience was, you know, she felt very Brave, because she was doing something very scary for herself.
- [25:01]
A
She was not one to talk about her wealth at all. She dressed just like everybody else in, you know, baggy sweaters and long skirts and saddle shoes that were all beat up. It took a lot of conversations with her to realize that her family had money, and only a few people realized how much. Because she had invited a couple back over the summer break to go to.
- [25:24]
B
The farm, she accidentally ended up in an actual scary situation. She and a fellow student went to see, perhaps cover a strike at a steel plant and witnessed police violence against the protesters that ended up with 10 dead, many others injured. Some had been shot in the back as they were fleeing. Catherine used her influence and her father's name to get inside the building, and her friend was able to write several articles about it. But this incident ignited a spark in Catherine to go into reporting specifically on the labor movement. She thought at last she might have found her calling.
- [26:06]
A
So when she graduated with a degree in history and a graduation ceremony that neither parent attended, that just broke my weird. Let's. Let's send you to this school, and I want you to go to the University of Chicago, and, oh, you're graduating. Well done. Mom even had her secretary write Katherine a note in Congratulations. And the secretary misspelled Katherine's name because this Katherine is spelled K A T H A R I, N E. So getting it misspelled is probably a very common thing for her. But from a note on graduation from her mother. I know I should be more pro Agnes because she did a lot of really cool things and she was a very powerful and smart woman, but, yeah, that just kind of broke my head.
- [26:53]
B
But did her father's secretary bother to write a note, misspelled or not? I think he sent flowers.
- [26:59]
A
I'm not making that up. I'm just trying remembering it from somewhere.
- [27:04]
B
I'm just saying if we're going to be mad at one secretary, be mad at the. It's correct.
- [27:08]
A
It's absolutely correct.
- [27:10]
B
Well, after graduation, she just knew that Papa wanted her to come back and work for him at the Post again. It was pretty obvious up and down the line he'd picked her out for, if not his successor. This early. Exactly. But at least his trusted assistant, Katherine held out. She described it herself as, quote, a dog's life. If she had accepted that she was going to be walking into.
- [27:34]
A
And she actually had an offer from the Times in Chicago right up on graduation. But she and her father had gone to San Francisco at some point, and she just loved the City and the fact that she was so interested in labor movements and there was a lot of union activity out there. Her father was able to use some connections and get her a summer job at the San Francisco News. It paid just $21 a week, which is about $470 now. So, you know, journalism is never paid. She dove right in. She was assigned to cover a dock workers strike. And she went right in and she talked to people and she got as much information as she could and she wrote up articles. The editor said soon she was our chief outside reporter on the strike. Seldom has anyone take hold of an assignment as she did. She was called a very objective reporter. And a digger. She was a digger. I love that.
- [28:34]
B
She wrote well researched and well regarded pieces for her employer. And one of her father's friends wrote back, your daughter is hanging out with radicals here in San Francisco. And her father's like, let her. There'll be time enough to hobnob with the conservatives later in her life. Right?
- [28:54]
A
Well, she was hanging out with him in college, too, and his son. That's why he knew he wasn't going to come in to the family business because he was also hanging out with radicals all over Europe. That's fine. Let them do their thing.
- [29:07]
B
Those radicals. So spicy.
- [29:10]
A
I was just gonna say, like the University of Chicago was considered very radical because they accepted women from the moment they opened their doors, like in the 1800s.
- [29:20]
B
Yeah.
- [29:21]
A
So radical.
- [29:22]
B
Let's fan ourselves about that. Well, less than a year into her glorious career at the San Francisco News, Papa exerted pressure. Come back to the post. I'm not 100% sure he said please, but maybe he did. He's a nice man, he's sweet.
- [29:38]
A
And the kitty. He offered her $4 more a week to work for him.
- [29:41]
B
Oh, my goodness me, that's my $90. Well, she did. She went back. Whatever incentive there was, she did. But here's the sad thing. It was not thought seemly for the chief's daughter to be an investigative reporter anymore. So that freedom, the, like, digging, the like Inspector Clouso thing was over. And she reluctantly put her metaphorical bulletin board with the red ribbons, you know, away in a closet. You know, she was a proofreader. She was an editor. She wrote over a hundred editorial pieces just in her first year there. Although it must be said, almost everything you read, make sure to categorize them as light editorials. So not hard hitting political hit pieces. Yeah, necessarily. But under her own name in the paper in her first year there, that was an accomplishment. It was widely assumed at this point that Catherine was in training as the heir of the paper. Why else would she be there? Why else would she have these opportunities and be groomed this way? She was intelligent. She was brave. She was connected. She was full of energy. Her future seemed bright. All eyes were turning to her within the paper. And then she met Phil Graham. This show is brought to you by Lumi.
- [31:05]
A
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- [31:14]
B
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- [31:15]
A
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- [32:38]
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- [32:59]
B
Outwardly, Phil Graham seemed like a great match for Katherine Meyer. He had gone to Harvard, where he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and was in Washington to clerk for Supreme Court Justice. I promise this is true. Frankfurter. Frankfurter Struck me as funny.
- [33:15]
A
No, it absolutely struck me as funny, too. I read it, and I'm writing it down. I'm like, is that really what it was? Yeah.
- [33:21]
B
And the fact that the most famous hot dog in the world is Oscar Mayer.
- [33:25]
A
Oh, my gosh.
- [33:26]
B
So he's just, like, surrounded by hot doggery. Anyway, so he was funny and intelligent and popular. Mama certainly approved of him. And Mama had thought very little of Catherine's accomplishments to date, believe it or not. But landing this man, well, you've really done something. He didn't have the background.
- [33:45]
A
No. He was not from money. He wasn't even from the Northeast. He had been born in South Dakota. He was the son of a gold miner and a teacher. The family moved to Florida because the father thought that he could start farming. And he was very successful. He started with a sugarcane farm. And then when sugarcane wasn't growing very well there, he turned it into a dairy farm. And it was very successful. And it was in Dade County, Florida. So the land that he was on was also very, very valuable. So eventually, the family has money. But when they started out, when they moved to Florida, they lived on a houseboat before the father could build a house. But the mother, the former teacher, she had plans for her son. She got him a subscription to the New Yorker when he was just a little kid because she wanted more for him than being on a farm. He was an exceptional student. He skipped grades and entered high school at the age of 12. He was president of his class. He was on the debate team. He was very witty. So much so he was voted most witty his senior year. And he went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, which, by the way, the cheer is two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for the Gators. Stand up and holler.
- [35:05]
B
I have to tell you, that is also a cheer. In the script for the play Cheaper by the Dozen.
- [35:12]
A
Love, love, love, love. Although that cheer didn't start until after Phil's time. It started in 1949. But the fact that they still say it, that's quite a tradition. Phil's father entered local politics. He saw a future for his son, where he went to college, went to law school, came back, worked in Florida politics. But Papa had made a deathbed promise to Phil's mother that he would send Phil to Harvard Law School. So he was pretty much tied to having to do that. He used his connections with the Senators in Florida and went to Harvard. He entered a program at the Harvard Law School that weeded out a full third of the students. But he rose to the top. He was number 15 in his class in the second year. And the next year he became president of the Harvard Law Review. One of his professors, Felix Frankfurter, was named to the Supreme Court. And he recommended Phil as a clerk. And that's how he landed in Washington.
- [36:12]
B
I will tell you, Katherine's course in her school also was called, and I quote, an intellectual boot camp that broke lesser mortals. So this is a match of intellectual equals here. Both very driven, both on a path to greatness. Really very, very soon, after only a few dates, they were engaged. And at the engagement party, let me tell you, brother Bill saw the red flags early. Even at the engagement party, Bill took Catherine aside and he is like, catherine, do not, do not marry this man. He got embarrassingly drunk at the party, and that might have been nerves, but he embarrassed her in front of people. He acted domineering over her. And her brother is like, don't do it, don't do it. He doesn't treat you very well. But on June 5, 1940, Katherine Meyer and Phil Graham were married at one of her parents grand houses in a beautiful country setting. And it was genuinely all downhill from there. Katherine Meyer, intrepid reporter and admired professional, became, in the words of one of her friends, Mrs. Phil and nothing more. For a short while at the very beginning of their marriage, Catherine worked at the Post. And weirdly, Phil had her use her paycheck from that job specifically to pay a housekeeper to, I guess, do her real job. I don't know. I don't know.
- [37:45]
A
Yeah, I know. Well, even when they first got engaged, he still had plans to go back to Florida. He had no intention, he said, of taking any of her family's money and that she should be okay owning only two dresses. Meaning, you know, we're not gonna have a lot of money because we're gonna live on my salary, not your family money.
- [38:05]
B
There is something admirable about that. To a point, yes. You just gotta have a mutual agreement, you know, you gotta. I don't know.
- [38:14]
A
I know, I know.
- [38:15]
B
Well, yeah, when he said it to.
- [38:17]
A
Her, you know, she had all the googly eyes, you know, it was all hearts and birds flying around. Sure. Two dresses. You know, maybe she thought he was just joking.
- [38:26]
B
Well, she definitely has more by powers of ten than two dresses right now. So, you know, she had years before they even wore out, I guess. But, you know, and I guess you can see it as an admirable thing if you're looking with the eyes of love. And she had an early Miscarriage and blamed herself, I'm sorry to say. Also, as the country plunged into the war after Pearl Harbor, Catherine and Phil had a child who died at birth. And that was a truly traumatic experience for Catherine. Phil, as most men his age did, enlisted in the military and Catherine followed him from post to post in, in America. She didn't like go overseas with him. His manners toward her were becoming more I. What is the word I'm looking for? Like Dick tater, like dictatorial. And it was after the birth of their first child, Elizabeth, who everyone called Lally. That's super cute. That Phil and the marriage began to go off the rails. I mean, off the rails. And I'm not sure how much detail we need to go into about the behind the scenes reality of Catherine's marriage. I mean, she spends a lot of time in her autobiography going into great detail and we're not gossiping and speculating no matter what we say, you know, no matter how far we go. She went further in her very public, Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography.
- [39:45]
A
It's a big book, it's like 600 pages. It's 30 hours of audiobook. 30 hours.
- [39:52]
B
So everything from his getting too drunk to help her pack when they were moving, to mocking her in front of their guests at the dinner table, to a black eye, to bruises all up and down her arms, to, if not open affairs, at least open flirtations with people in their friend circle. Though outwardly, Catherine led an enviable upper, I mean, I mean upper upper class lifestyle. She sat on philanthropic boards and she chaired committees. She became a shadow of her former self. And on the first day of January 1946, Papa had just been named the chairman of the World Bank. And so he named his son in law Phil, not his well prepared and able daughter Catherine, as the associate publisher of the Washington Post. It must have stung. It must have stung. But Catherine was a product of her era, as was her papa. By the way, this is what she wrote in that autobiography we were just talking about, and I quote, far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me. It pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper. Now this is Beckett saying, I cannot believe that. I am so sorry. Especially that last sentence he had once written to her during her San Francisco experience when she was super investigative reporter, Girl Genius Reporter 5000. He wrote to her, you ought to be on the job of putting the Post up to the top when we get there. I'm going to go out looking for some trouble somewhere and let you, mother and a couple of editors keep this machine running. So the sentiment seems misguided that she never thought of it. And neither did Papa, though perfectly in keeping with her, I don't know. Real housewives of the 1950s scenario, right?
- [41:48]
A
For sure. And she was working at the Post while Phil was in the Pacific during the war. But like a lot of women, as soon as the war was over, they went back home and men took their jobs. And that's what happened with Catherine. It was just. That's just the way it is. Go back home.
- [42:06]
B
We talked about that in our episode Housewives of. Real housewives of the 1950s. Is that what we called it?
- [42:12]
A
I don't think we did, but that would have been a good idea.
- [42:15]
B
Well, we talked about how the period of time just after World War II in America mostly is what we talked about, but it happened all over the world was all about a return to home and hearth for those women who'd gotten a taste of independence during the war. And this was intensified in Catherine's social class because, you know, there was no, quote, need for these women to take jobs from deserving men, you know, type of thing. This is the era of that movie with Julia Roberts, the Mona Lisa Smile, where these women are in Ivy League universities in order to become better mothers to the future citizens of America. You know, that was happening all over her social class. So her husband Phil was the prominent one. She was Mrs. Phil. But in Phil's mind, think about how Desi Arnaz acted when people called him Mr. Lucille Ball. Infuriated, Phil started to feel like maybe he was only in this position because of who his wife was. Do you think so, Phil? Yeah.
- [43:16]
A
And he's. He's becoming increasingly resentful of it now. He is doing the job. He is running the paper. Eugene was off doing another job with the World bank, but he stepped down from that, opened up an office in the Post Building and kind of just said, I'm just here if you had any questions. And he just puddled around the building and sat on people's desks and asked them questions and would operate the elevator just so he could talk to people. But Phil is just getting increasing. He's, like, thinking. He's looking over his shoulder. And Phil is also thinking that he was just given this position because of who. Who he married. There are reports of him saying things like, the only smart thing to do is marry the boss's daughter. That's what I Did I wouldn't be anyplace. Now. This is a guy who, when he'd gotten out of Harvard, people said you could go to the presidency. His peers were getting elected as senators and going into politics. And here he was running a newspaper, which in his mind was not a career path that he was going to do, but it was one because he married into the family and the wealth that he's not accepting.
- [44:22]
B
He felt like he was forced into this subsidiary track. Yeah.
- [44:28]
A
And then, you know, the whole living on your salary thing. The family was growing and there were eventually four children, a daughter and three sons. And Catherine knew that as the wife and the family of the publisher of the Washington Post, they needed to have a more A house, a party house, you know, a bigger house in Georgetown, something opulent, a show place. And she found an eight bedroom in Georgetown, big old brick mansion with a huge yard. And she got the down payment for it from her father, which must have really burned Phil's butt. Can I say that? Yes.
- [45:06]
B
Well, all these undercurrents, I just don't know. Could anyone have just at this point talked it out? I know that's not what we did in the 1950s, but Papa showed his faith in his son in law when Catherine was 31, in. I just think it is so shocking the way he did this. So Papa decided that he was going to let his stock in the Washington Post go. He sold it to the young Grahams. But famously, Phil got 71% to Catherine's 29%. And I quote, papa, you don't want a man working for his own wife. To which I say even the goodish ones are straight up problematic. Is that too harsh? When I say even the goodish ones are sometimes problematic.
- [45:56]
A
Nobody's perfect. You know, we all do problematic things in our life.
- [46:00]
B
Maybe I just think that was.
- [46:01]
A
You know what? Maybe her father was seeing that Phil, how he felt, that he felt like he was only in this position because he was in the family and if he wasn't married to her, he'd be out. So maybe Eugene was trying to, you know, speak Phil's language.
- [46:18]
B
Oh. And bolster his confidence. Like. No, you're the owner.
- [46:22]
A
I'm just a consultant. If you need me, I'm here.
- [46:25]
B
You know, ironically, and I didn't write this down, I read somewhere that Phil had to borrow so much money to buy his shares of stock that Catherine was the one that had to support the family financially.
- [46:36]
A
No, I thought the father had loaned him the money to buy the stock.
- [46:40]
B
Yeah, but then Phil had To spend all his money paying that loan back. And so Katherine had to support the household with her money. And it was very defined that her money was to go to even buying his clothes and cigars and stuff. Her money equaled the only household money. This power catapulted the Grahams to social prominence. I will tell you, political luminaries from Kennedy's, Johnson's. A little bit later, senators, representatives, ambassadors, and captains of industry paraded through that house. Phil bought a radio station, television stations, rival papers. He had a workload that was absolutely crushing. His fingers were in all the pies. Maybe he was a micromanager, but, you know, people said he did a great job or at least appeared to do a good job.
- [47:27]
A
Yeah.
- [47:28]
B
Catherine's role behind the scenes, who knows what advice she may have been allowed to give, but her role, increasingly, was to walk on eggshells at home, keep the fragile peace, and protect her children from their erratic and angry father. No one at the time knew this and may not have even diagnosed it if they saw it, But Phil, in addition to his alcoholism, which was a pretty great problem, was also suffering from, at the time, what they would have called manic depression, and at the time would now have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder.
- [48:04]
A
Catherine had gone to her brother Bill, who was a psychiatrist, and she said, this is what's going on with him. He's got these erratic behaviors, up and down, making poor decisions, just not really being himself. And Bill said, I can't diagnose him. He's not my patient. But here's a whole bunch of literature about manic depressive psychosis, bipolar disorder. Now, unfortunately, at the time, there was no medical therapies for this other than talk therapy. There was no medication that could help him control his impulses and his. Level off his mood a little bit.
- [48:43]
B
When Catherine was 42, Papa died suddenly, leaving Phil as the chairman of the Washington Post and his daughter Catherine in the depth of despair. Rather than be supportive or understanding of her grief, Phil became dismissive of her mind, her appearance, her talents, and her worth. Catherine was an attentive and affectionate mother. She was a supportive spouse. She was a charming hostess. But like, and I never can remember this, a lobster or a frog in a pot. The lobster makes more sense to me, But I have a vague, vague knowledge that it's the frog in the pot.
- [49:21]
A
Yeah. No, it is the frog.
- [49:22]
B
Slowly boiling, she became internally shy, downtrodden. I'm going to go out on a limb and say bewildered. Ultimately, it was 23 years of being treated like dirt.
- [49:35]
A
She called herself a doormat. A doormat wife is what she was. She said I was the kind of wife that women's liberationists talk about. I was a second class citizen and my role was to keep Phil happy, peaceful, calm and functioning and the children the same.
- [49:52]
B
She was anxious and embarrassed by Phil's behavior. He called her a cow at dinner with guests. He called her a Jewish cow, which on a technicality, I suppose, through her father, she was half Jewish. It had hardly ever come up, other than a couple of brief things in college where she didn't get admitted to clubs. But like, where did that come from suddenly at dinner from your husband. People started noticing that she was holding back tears almost all the time. And they would see her bruised and do nothing. You know what? Do something. Hopefully times have changed, you know, it seemed to be, well, it's their business, it's none of our business. It all came to a head though. On Christmas Eve, the year Catherine was 45. She innocently picked up the phone receiver to hear an R rated conversations. Do the listeners listening know how a landline works? Worked, I guess I should say your mom could pick up an extension at any time and suddenly be all up in your business. She innocently picked up the phone to hear this saucy conversation between her husband in another room of her own house and a newspaper journalist named Robin Webb. Catherine's heart broke into a thousand pieces, like this was the breaking point. And when she confronted her husband, he mocked her with his other affairs, like, you only know about this one, and left to live with Robin Webb. It was an open scandal. Everybody knew, going every place. Everybody liked to report back where they'd seen him and everything. Not only that, he was conspiring to transfer Catherine Meyer Graham's shares of the Washington Post to Robin Webb. As the owner of Katherine Graham's shares, yes, nefarious. Phil himself broke into a thousand pieces. About a month later he was at.
- [51:51]
A
A convention, a media leaders convention in Phoenix. Robin was there, he was giving a speech. Suddenly what he was talking about had absolutely nothing to do with media leaders. He started accusing Kennedy of having affairs, which he probably was. He made rude comments. Then he got off the stage and went into the audience and started taking his clothes off. They were able to contain him. Kennedy flew Catherine and a doctor out to Phoenix and Phil was taken in a straitjacket after he had tried to punch a man in the airport. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital outside of Washington where he had stayed previously. This was his second time there. Phil was there For a six week stay, he asked Katherine not to divorce him. She agreed if he would take his mental health seriously. And after a six week stay he was doing well enough that he was given a day pass to go and meet Katherine at their country farm which is called Glen Welby.
- [52:54]
B
At this point I'm going to say if you have children in the room with you and they are listening, probably take a second and push stop and come back to us when you are by yourself. And also would like to let you know that we are going to talk about S U I C I D E in just a moment and just wanted to give you the opportunity to avoid that conversation unexpectedly happening in your life.
- [53:25]
A
The two had a lovely morning together. Catherine went to take a nap. Phil went to a bathroom in the house with a gun and died from suicide.
- [53:35]
B
Catherine heard the sound and rushed to her husband's side. But it was too late. It was the end of a confusing and painful era in Catherine's life. And now she would have to decide what the shape of her future was going to be. Okay, friends, the days are shorter, but somehow the list of things to do never seems to get smaller. We can power through our busy days with factors. No prep, no mess, meals, floor. All the meals in your day factor has easy and nutritious options to keep you fueled.
- [54:18]
A
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- [54:49]
B
I'm particularly interested in trying the sweet potato and chickpea curry. That kind of spice really appeals to me right now. Hmm.
- [54:56]
A
Well, speaking of appealing and spice and heat, they have a whole bunch of dinners that are called winter warmers like grilled chicken and brown butter yam mashed. No.
- [55:09]
B
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- [55:18]
A
That's code 50HC@factormeals.com 50HC to get 50% off YOUR first box plus free shipping while your subscription is active.
- [55:38]
B
After Phil's death, there was a barely socially acceptable pause, let me say, before offers began to pour in to buy some or all of the Post empire off of Catherine, the bereaved little widow. I mean, it was like people scavengers gobbling up something on the highway. Catherine seemed to shock everyone with her determination to take over from her husband as CEO. But she said again in her autobiography, I didn't go in intending to take over, only to be a family presence, holding a position for a while, maybe until her son, who was in college, could take over.
- [56:20]
A
She was very, very insecure. That sounds really calm. But at the time, she didn't know what to say when she was going to talk to the board. Her daughter Loli had helped her write just some bullet points and practice them before she went into this meeting. So she's very insecure, very inexperienced in the job she's about to walk into, but like you just said, set on keeping it in the family.
- [56:48]
B
She certainly got at least a happy face with a straight line for a mouth, you know, at first from a lot of the mostly male staff, even though she was by no means the first woman to run a newspaper. I did look up who was the first woman to run a newspaper, and I was actually kind of surprised. Her name's Elizabeth Timothy. Can you guess the year?
- [57:10]
A
Actually, I didn't look it up. So, no, I can't. I'm gonna go with 1879.
- [57:15]
B
I don't know, 1738.
- [57:17]
A
Shut up. Wow.
- [57:19]
B
It was the Carolina Gazette. And her partner was. Drumroll. Benjamin Franklin. Oh, so there you go. And there were many after her, too. But at best, she had that indifferent response. At worst, there was an antagonism, especially from the business manager. And Catherine had a lot of confidence to reclaim from 24 years ago. You know, in the knowledge is power department, she began to learn all she could learn from people at all levels and departments of her company. She asked the direct questions. She went outside the company for advice from trusted friends, some of which pulled the veil away. Look, we all thought Phil was great, but that Post is just not a great paper. Kind of a shock.
- [58:04]
A
And it wasn't just the Post. This is now the Washington Post Company. It's an umbrella. There's television stations. There's Newsweek magazine. You know, there's a lot of things that are going on. And she wasn't going in completely blind. She had talked with her husband and her father over the years, so she was aware of the players and things that were going on. But her confidence was so low that she might as well not have known anything going in. She said, I just put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and stepped off the ledge, she.
- [58:36]
B
Had an unexpected ally in her mother. Finally, her mother's independent spirit would take hold. Her mother said, you need to drive this car. You know, I have faith in you. From her, it's almost like the heavens have opened and there's a thunderbolt coming. Like, we never thought we'd hear that from her. Phil had had, or at least used. I don't think he made it up. What I think was a great saying that a newspaper was the first rough draft of history. Yes. Right. Or at least, you know, it used to be. So I can't speak for today's newspapers, but, you know, you could look back on the newspapers of the past and see what was important to people and how they processed it. It's a huge responsibility, of course. And ideas began to percolate in Catherine's head about what she wanted to do to improve the organization and the product and. And all she could be was herself. She couldn't be her dad. She couldn't be Phil. She had to find her own way to start pushing the company in another direction. It had a lack of fire, a lack of energy. You know, almost everyone in the building had sort of, to use a modern term, quiet, quitted the hard parts. Yeah. And as you would expect, the Boys Club on staff even had very little respect for her authority if her own father, who actually had known how good she had been, passed her over. I'm not sure what we all expect from relative strangers in that time, as much as we'd like to report differently.
- [60:04]
A
Yeah. And I think that Old Boys Club was really meeting behind her back and campaigning to force her into basically just a figurehead position, you know, keeping things from her, not telling her everything she needed to know. So it's a good thing she went beyond them, went out into the field and asked other people. And I think she was realistic about what she was trying to learn. She said, there are things I'll never catch up with, the kind of training and experience that most people in this kind of job have had. So I think she was pretty realistic. You know, a lot of that might have been her insecurities talking, but maybe that made her more realistic about what she needed to learn.
- [60:42]
B
Have you ever started a new job and been just, like, at sea, like, what the heck the work is, even what the culture is, who does what, who is what, you know, ideally, Catherine could ease in. You know, she began signing her name Katherine Graham Instead of Mrs. Phil Graham, for one. So we are drawing a line. This is a new era, but it was not to be the growth in secrets. A short five months after she took over the paper, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, catapulting Lyndon Johnson into the presidency. I would like to read you an anecdote. She went to call on Lady Bird Johnson. Phil Graham had been instrumental in getting Lyndon Johnson into the Vice presidency in the first place. So they were close. They were calling upon each other worthy. And Katherine called on Lady Bird Johnson, who said to her, katherine, I feel like I've just gone on stage for a role I've never rehearsed. Girl, Same. To which Catherine replied, I seem to be carrying inadequacy as baggage. I'm glad that there was somebody who understood the magnitude of what each other had to take on. You know, like, you don't have very many peers when you get to that point.
- [61:53]
A
Yeah, probably. Unfortunately, the relationships that the Grahams had with the Johnsons had really crossed that line between, you know, the press and the politicians.
- [62:04]
B
At 46, she was wrestling with an enormous amount of pressure. She felt guilty almost all the time about the time she spent away from her young sons. My mom once said, only the good parents worry about whether they're good parents. I sort of think that's true. She had taken a lot of pride and satisfaction in her children, like in being a different parent than her mother and father had been. And with these new responsibilities. She actually once said, these children have lost both of their parents at once. The juggling was and remains real. She was very hard on herself. But you know what? She didn't have a lot of role models. There weren't a lot of women with major corporate responsibilities at this time in the whole working mother divide, which, of course, people in the working class had dealt with for all eternity, hadn't really touched the upper classes to this degree. She didn't really have a role model. No, her doubts were also real. One book I read referred to it as imposter syndrome. We all know what that is. Who was she to get on the phone with the President who asked her for a favor? Could you push the House of Representatives? Because they're holding up my Civil Rights Act. I wish you'd tell people about it in your paper what you know. Catherine slowly started to realize her power and her influence. You can see it moving in her psyche through the autobiography like a heat map, like something long frozen was slowly thawing out. I have to give you another anecdote because, you know, I don't know if you've listened to the Zephyr Wright podcast, but we talked about President Johnson and how there was Bad Johnson and Good Johnson. And here's two anecdotes. Once he demanded that she and some other people come in so he could start screaming at them in the. You know, in the residence in the White House bedroom, while he literally stripped to his underwear, realized, oh, wait, there's a lady in here, and made her turn around because he had a lot of pain. You know, he used to like to go poop with the door open and make powerful men stand outside to prove, like, who's more powerful, you or the man who can. Who can make you watch him poop, like, it's so dirty. Whatever.
- [64:13]
A
In the bathrooms, too. He is at a urinal talking with heads of state. You know what?
- [64:19]
B
So there's one, there's Bad Johnson, and then here, honestly, here's an attempt at Bad Johnson that was thwarted. President Johnson and Lady Bird had invited Catherine down for one of their famous barbecues down at their ranch, probably involving paternales. Chili, hooray. Which I like, although I prefer beans in my chili. I know. Don't come at me. Unfortunately, he was being Bad Johnson. He was shirty about the schedule and how he felt rushed and blah, blah, blah. And he was jovial in public. But the second that car door shut, he started to lay into his wife in the car on the way out to the ranch. Why are we late? You messed up. Blah, blah, blah. And Catherine said tartly, your wife got you where you are today, and you should shut up. And then she's like, Mr. President. But you know what? We learned a little bit about him, and that's the way to get some respect from him, is to call him on his crap. So Catherine put her personal feelings aside and recruited, I'm going to call him at this point, an adversary into the Washington Post, a man named Ben Bradley, who worked for her at Newsweek, a man who had famously hosted her husband Phil and his affair partner Robin at a dinner which started the gossip fuel on purpose in Washington. And then he had said, and I am quoting here, Ben said, there's nothing wrong with Phil Graham that a quick divorce wouldn't cure. Yeah, I mean. I mean. But his professional reputation was stellar. He had a good nose for talent. He was insistent upon solid reporting. He had good business acumen, also had, you know, his finger on the trends. His professional achievements led Catherine to court him as a powerful personality that she could put in place as managing editor at the Post, displacing a loyal family friend in order to do so. She hated displeasing people, and she hate at upsetting people. But she wanted to make the paper go in a different direction and she wanted to improve it. And this man, regardless of his personal character toward her, seemed to be the way to do it.
- [66:26]
A
And I think at this point, she's starting to realize that just like in a lot of organizations, when new leadership comes in, they really need to get rid of the loyal ones to the former leadership, and that the old boys club was not serving her vision. So she's starting to realize it. And I think she did it fairly quickly, a lot quicker than I think I would have. You know, within a year, she's starting to make these kind of power moves.
- [66:53]
B
She and Bradley struck a great balance with their partnership. She gave him freedom to operate as he saw fit. That's very important to him. He returned the favor with loyalty and respect.
- [67:04]
A
My father told me when I was in college, if I got out of college, learning one thing, it's that people in leadership, people in management, the best ones, the most effective ones, are people who know what their shortcomings are and hire people that can do the job that they really can't and then stay.
- [67:21]
B
Out of their way, give them responsibility, give them recognition, and then let them do what they're good at. And all of the new blood brought in by talent scout Mr. Bradley was really upping the standards of the paper. Much has been made, in fact, of Bradley and Catherine pulling the Post back from, quote, being a vehicle for poverty policy based activism, by which I think they mean working as a partner with the government, you know, and you'll see that come into play later on, certainly in this episode. But the Vietnam coverage was so anyone now can tell you that Vietnam was a war that polarized the nation. Right. I mean, and we've talked about this before, it ultimately ended up overshadowing all of Lyndon Johnson's progress on civil rights and his domestic agenda, which he was a pretty good domestic policy president. But we don't remember that. That because of Vietnam. And it took many months in a virtual revolt by the staff, her oldest son's enlistment in the army, and her second son being arrested in a protest against the Vietnam War for her to begin to take a hard look at what was really going on. She let her relationship with President Johnson overshadow her. I mean, do we dare call it journalistic integrity on this subject? I mean, this is. This might be my personal feelings about it. She rode that train for far too long. She herself even said later that she regretted that the Washington Post had Supported Johnson for so long, she felt like the influence of the Washington Post actually led other papers, especially in the Midwest, to also support the war long after it should have been supported.
- [68:59]
A
Now that we're talking about Vietnam, and her son going, this is her son Donald. And he said that he thought it was unfair that rich kids could get out of the draft. So after graduating Harvard, he enlisted and was sent overseas. And he had a situation that was very similar to Prince Harry and Prince William. And that his superior officers did their best to not say who he was, you know, not say who his mother was, because that would make him a target, keeping him in kind of a safe place as a information officer. I just think that's important because he is looking at it and saying, yeah, rich kids are getting out of serving in the Army. Why is that? Rich kids are getting out of dying in Vietnam. Why is that? It shouldn't be that way. We're all equal, period.
- [69:50]
B
In addition to a re evaluation of their Vietnam coverage, the Post also printed the story that the Pope, at a private meeting, read Johnson the riot act about the Vietnam War. They printed that story. So the President of the United States was. Was mad at Katherine Graham. You know what? If you give him a cape, he can be super mad.
- [70:11]
A
Like, I don't care.
- [70:13]
B
It's not my job to keep the President happy. It's my job to say what happened. So that about face about Vietnam and the paper's position change infuriated Lyndon Johnson so much that he stopped reaching out to Katherine, and he wouldn't even take her calls. He was so stressed out about how to shape war coverage in an election year, and the Washington Post wasn't playing ball. I'm trying to protect my country, and they're all out here whipping me. Spoiler alert. At least one president will have it worse than you. Stay tuned.
- [70:43]
A
That's true. And other.
- [70:44]
B
Spoiler alert.
- [70:45]
A
The Post was absolutely doing the right thing and not just taking the information that the government was giving them to print, you know, and really printing the truth. They were absolutely. And it will be proving in the not too distant future that they were doing the right thing.
- [71:02]
B
Her friend and neighbor, author Truman Capote, called and said, I want to give you a party to cheer you up. To which she said, I don't need cheering up. Like, yeah, the President can stay mad. I don't care. Really. I feel like finally she really wasn't. She really wasn't upset that the President was so angry at her. She's really gotten over her sort of fear of angering powerful male figures.
- [71:27]
A
And it really, like I said before, isn't taking her long to see this. This is only three years into her tenure that she's to these realizations and developing that thick skin, maybe.
- [71:37]
B
I'm sorry to say that she'd faced so much trauma and disapproval that she was used to it or had some skills.
- [71:46]
A
Oh, she had the thick skin going in. Yeah, good point.
- [71:50]
B
Catherine had developed a hard shell, and I assure you the B word had been applied to her quite often in the past year by the disgruntled misogynocracy.
- [72:00]
A
You mean a Great American B in that Broadway musical. Sups? There's a song that's called Great American B Word. And it's wonderful, and it's very empowering. And it's like, if you're called this, it's a badge of honor, though. I mean. And I'll tell you, all the merch they had with that slogan on it. I bought a couple things, so we all did.
- [72:20]
B
Awesome. Yeah. So Truman Capote, again, you'll be the guest of honor, darling, at the nicest party you've ever been to. Catherine was genuinely bewildered. Like, okay, Truman Capot hobbed and knobbed with the most glamorous people in the world. Like, what? What the heck am I even involved in this for? Much less be the guest of honor. You know, people looking back at that black and White ball think that he chose her as a powerful person because he was so nervous to kind of nominate any of his, like, other lady friends as the bride because there would have been infighting. And this was an indisputable honoree. You know, no one could be mad about this.
- [72:57]
A
No. And he did a wonderful of spinning the whole thing. He said Kate hadn't built up an identity. She's a person who's only 12 years old. So he's thinking he's like, the spin. Golly, for her. And that's the spin he put on it.
- [73:10]
B
Katherine was a powerhouse. She had a hard candy shell. But just like in Eminem, Catherine had that soft candy center. And you should see how happy she was in these photos. At the famous Black and White Ball of November 1966, anyone who was anyone was there. And anyone who was anyone now knew who and what Katherine Graham was after that night. We'll have to give you some links to the photos. I mean, literally, the great, the good, the glamorous, the rich, the powerful, the fancy, the beautiful. I mean, it was just like.
- [73:44]
A
And she was only allowed to invite five people. And Truman Capote handled the Rest of the list. And it was like you were saying, it was so varied, you know, actors and politicians and of course, Alice Roosevelt was there, as was Cecil Beaton. Remember him? The photographer from Britain?
- [74:02]
B
Royal photographer. Yes.
- [74:03]
A
Yeah. After it was over, Katherine described it as an odd, overaged and gray coming out party.
- [74:12]
B
You know what? I'm glad for her. I'm glad that she had that cool experience. Because the next few years, though increasingly profitable and reputation building, were fraught. Fraught. Johnson decided not to run again. We've talked about that again in the Zephyr Wright podcast. Martin Luther King and then Robert Kennedy assassinations led to nationwide unrest within the family. Everyone seemed to collapse in one way or another. Everything was an A priority. Everything needed her full attention simultaneously. To which I again say girl, same. Ugh. You just don't know, like, there's no ranking. Everything is equally as important. The profit at her empire doubled just in the few years that Catherine had been at the helm. She reorganized and she rehired at the highest levels of her empire in order to find the right combination of strengths to move her strategies forward. And she no longer masked her anger in professional settings. I call it writing an email like a man. Yeah. There's no more of this. Well, if we were to have thought about it or if we could take a moment. No, it was more like, do this. Yeah.
- [75:18]
A
And even in her personal interactions, her attitude. Attitude is changing at this point. She's able to walk through the newsroom, stop at someone's desk, look at them and say, your column this morning was a piece of crap. Only she didn't. Only she didn't say crap. She's one of the boys now.
- [75:35]
B
She was featured in major publications, even on their covers. But weirdly, even as late as 1969, this is after all this had happened, she said something to Women's Wear Daily that boggles my mind.
- [75:50]
A
Mind in Women's Wear Daily, she said, I think a man would be better at this job that I'm in than a woman.
- [75:59]
B
A woman employee at the Post called her out on it too, and said, you know what? If you really think that I ought to quit, every woman working at the Post and Newsweek should quit. And you should quit, too.
- [76:12]
A
Yeah.
- [76:12]
B
It was the women employees after this comment and a new acquaintance and younger, I'm going to call her, a mentor called Gloria Steinem, who slowly began to chip away at Catherine's reluctance to be a face for the women's movement.
- [76:27]
A
What makes that comment even more kind of ironic, she did have women in mind Real women, Modern women. She took the Style section and had it totally redone. So long Society ball coverage. Hello. A profile of a woman on the FBI's most wanted list. She was having the Style section reflect modern women's lives. Not. Not just society, upper echelon, women's lives.
- [76:53]
B
And then in March 1970, still before my birth, by the way, I was here already. Newsweek, remember this magazine? Newsweek is under the Post umbrella, published a startling cover, bright colors, with a nude female subject punching through that circle and cross female symbol with the title Women in Revolt. Now, this had been written by a woman freelancer because no female employee at Newsweek had been thought experienced enough to write it. And that rankled. That rankled the staff greatly. That same week, 46 female employees of Newsweek sued the magazine for gender discrimination under Johnson's Civil Rights Act. It was the very first lawsuit like this filed against a US employer for gender discrimination. Whose side am I supposed to be on? Said Katherine Graham. She referred to herself as Aunt Tom, which is a reference to Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom's Cabin. How do I put this delicately? Someone being an Uncle Tom is someone working for the oppressor? Yeah, sort of. And so she called herself Aunt Tom because she was a little bit conflicted. Am I a mogul, heartless and prophet motivated, or am I the face of the women's? Like, what am I? I don't. And one of the ladies that had put that lawsuit forward said, my male friends used to think we were funny in the women's movement. I guess they've started taking us seriously because now they get very mad. That reminds me of that trend, that women in male fields trend that's going around on threads right now.
- [78:34]
A
What is that?
- [78:34]
B
So it was all fun and games until you start really poking fun at some sensitive areas and people are getting mad.
- [78:40]
A
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- [78:42]
B
Honestly, this article covers a lot of ground, from suffragists, the og, you know, with their purple dresses in the sash, to lesbians, to professional advancement and political activism. We'll have to give you a link to the whole text. It's very, very long, very, very thorough. And let me just jump forward a couple years just to complete this little story during the lawsuit on hiring practices and promotion over the course of the next couple years. Finally, the verdict came down. The Post agreed that by 1974, a third of all writers would be women, women, and a third of foreign correspondents would be women. There is a show on Amazon that specifically talks about this lawsuit, its inception and its results. It's called Good Girls Revolt. And it's on Amazon. I am one of those people that would really love to sleep in complete darkness. But in this elderly house with the blinds that honestly I think came with the house, the blinds always allow light in at the crack of dawn. Worse in the spring. Slowly getting better. But like why am I lurking around waiting for it to get better, better? I can shop for almost anything from my house now, so why not shop for blinds at home too? Well, three day Blinds has local professionally trained design consultants who have an average of 10 plus years of experience. They provide expert guidance on the right blinds for you, especially in this neighborhood with all of these cockamamie hand carved window sizes. You know what?
- [80:32]
A
No. Yeah.
- [80:33]
B
Like no matter what your unique need in this old neighborhood, they have a design professional that can help you.
- [80:40]
A
Not just weirdly sized windows, but how about arched windows? Or maybe it's time to upgrade to motorized blinds or I know, doesn't that sound cool or what blinds are better roller shades or roman shades? I do not like going to stores to do things. I love shopping from home and shopping from home for home decor and home improvements. Like three day blind blinds makes so much sense.
- [81:08]
B
They're the leading manufacturer of custom window treatments in the United States and right now they're running a buy one get 50% off deal.
- [81:17]
A
Right now you can get three day blinds buy one get one 50% off deal on custom blinds, shades, shutters and draperies for a free no charge, no obligation consultation. Just head to 3day blind blinds.com chicks.
- [81:34]
B
That'S a buy one get 150 off when you head to threeday blinds.com chicks one last time. That's the number 3D a Y blinds.com chicks let's go back just a tiny bit to Catherine's friendship with Gloria Steinem, who is by the way still with us and therefore not a former subject of ours. So a quick 30 second summary of Gloria Steinem is she was an immersive investigative journalist a la Nelly Bly. She embedded herself in in the Playboy culture and wrote an expose on how she became a Playboy bunny. She was a prolific writer and likely more importantly for our purposes here, the most well known feminist activist in America. They developed a relationship and even though Gloria Steinem was younger, Katherine regarded her as kind of a mentor about what was happening with feminism and women's rights in America. Gloria Steinem encouraged her to, for example, take ownership of your own accomplishments. Don't say that. It was just luck. Don't say, oh, other people deserve it more than me. Take ownership of what you have accomplished. So we'll slowly see that start to happen. Steinem had a radical idea to create a feminist magazine.
- [83:13]
A
Catherine, impressed by Gloria and impressed by the idea of this magazine that could do for the country what Gloria had been doing for her, decided to invest $20,000 into Ms. Magazine. So she's one of the reasons why Ms. Was created. We were in what's called second wave feminism at the time. But Ms. Magazine was able to get that message even wider. Kind of like a rogue wave coming up on the shore.
- [83:41]
B
It was a magazine by women for the modern woman. It took on political and societal issues in a way no publication had ever dared to before. Ironically, for listeners of this show, there was a very public hill that Ms. Magazine chose to defend. It was Wonder Woman and how DC Comics was diluting her original meaning as a feminist icon. In fact, I think Wonder Woman might have been on the COVID of both the second issue and a 35th anniversary issue. It was that important.
- [84:11]
A
Yeah.
- [84:11]
B
And we did do an episode on Wonder Woman, so I know. Surprising, surprising background on Wonder Woman. They addressed the tough issues in there. Domestic violence, abortion, the fact that women were still discriminated against when attempting to do things like open credit cards or bank accounts. Technically, since the 60s, there wasn't supposed to be discrimination bot banks and other financial institutions freely discriminated against women. It wasn't until the Equal Credit opportunity Act of 1974 that women could typically and routinely get a loan or a credit card without a male co sign.
- [84:50]
A
As far as the impact it had on Catherine herself, it kind of took some blinders off of her eyes. And she did. It sounds so little, but it was huge at the time. She did things like, okay, think of any period dinner party. After the meal, the men went to one room and smoked cigars. The women went to another and talked about kids. She decided that wasn't cool. She didn't want to do. So if she was at her house, she just didn't have it happen. And if she was at someone else's house, and it did, she just left after dinner. Simple as that. She saw the inequality in it. And there was a gentleman's only club called the Gridiron. They had invited her to a dinner, and everybody told her, no, don't go. They don't admit women. They're just inviting you kind of as a token figure for this one event. So she didn't go, and they kept inviting her to others. And when she finally accepted, that was the time that they also began to.
- [85:51]
B
Let women join Catherine Graham personally supported the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, although it was against the general sentiments of her editorial staff. By the way, the first iteration of the Equal Rights Amendment was actually written and proposed by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923 and had been introduced every Congress until 1970, but had never been brought to a vote. Huh. The women's movement of the 1960s energized specifically our old friend Shirley Chisholm and surprisingly, Representative Martha Griffith from Missouri. You wouldn't think of Missouri as being the forefront of women's liberation. They worked through Congress to finally pass both houses in 1972, and it went to the states for ratification. It takes three quarters of the states to ratify an amendment to the Constitution. And I'm sorry to say that it was not until January 2020 that Virginia, the 38th state, finally ratified the amendment. By then, the time has passed. And so it's still under discussion, as of this recording in December 2024, whether the equal Rights Amendment is technically ratified or not, or if the time having expired, they need to start over, blah, blah, blah. Missouri, the state we both live in, has not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. They've had over a hundred years, and it's a hundred years they've had, and they haven't done it. But nevertheless, I mean, so Missouri obviously has a complicated relationship with feminism. You know, they proposed the Equal Rights Amendment and then they didn't ratify it. But Katherine Graham herself had a complicated relationship with feminism. Like some of our other subjects, it seemed like her sentiment boiled down to, I myself deserve to be treated equally because I have worked hard to get here, but other women should be taken care of almost, you know, yeah, yeah.
- [87:45]
A
Which on the surface sounds nice, right? Because I can take care of myself. I'm here. I should be treated as an equal. But not every woman is where I am, and they do need some help.
- [87:57]
B
So she supported the ERA in private, but had Gloria Steinem come in and address the board at the Post, and I think she kind of punked out. Like, Gloria Steinem even said, I don't know any of these people. They don't know me. I have no credibility here. I hadn't prepared for this meeting. And it's almost like. Like you're not willing to stick your neck out in this room, the room that you could have in effect. I mean, I'll do it, but it's not going to work. And sure enough, it did not. So. Well, let's go back to a time that Katherine Graham did not pass the buck. The year is 1971. That spring, there had been a lot of buzz in the newspaper world that the New York Times was working on, quote, something big. No one, despite all of their connections. You know that drink at the bar with your friend from the Times? Nope. No skills could get to what it was. All these New York Times reporters had been holed up in a locked office, and something was about to blow. And can you imagine how frustrated Katherine Graham and the whole editorial staff at the Post would be that they can't figure out what it is they're going to get scooped? But on what they don't know. Katherine Graham finally found out what it was while she was a guest at a wedding, sitting there through the whole ceremony, unable to run and call the paper. So. So she knew the answer, but could tell no one for like, please, I do just say, just say I do just cut the cake. Oh, my God.
- [89:21]
A
Do you see her now, though, like, taking her phone out and sending a text. The news was what will become called the Pentagon Papers. 36 analysts had found 4,000 pages of original documentation, which they consolidated into 3,000 pages of analysis that documented from 1940 until 1967. And to make things a little bit more sticky, all of those documents and the analysis were top secret classified information.
- [89:55]
B
It was called the report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Task Force. Honestly, we are not going to be able to summarize a hundredth of the contents here. Upon examination, what these documents proved was that the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administration specifically had. Had lied to the American people about the scope, about the goals, about the intentions of the United States with regard to the aftermath of World War II, of the Korean War, and the entirety of the Vietnam War. It was shocking evidence that integrity had had no seat at the table for a very, very long time at the White House. I guess that's, that's, that's the 32nd summary.
- [90:37]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [90:37]
B
The New York Times had been given an illicit copy by a whistleblower, and now they were prepared to begin publishing excerpts and expose days. And Catherine read it just like everyone else did on the first page of the New York Times. The Post had to rely on the New York Times articles to report the story in the first place. Well, Katherine Graham was literally at dinner with the editor of the New York Times when he got the call that President Nixon had immediately begun legal action to stop them publishing any more. And Nixon did get an injunction to stop them publishing after only three articles calls. So that lawsuit that resulted began making its way to The Supreme Court. Now, meanwhile, the leaker had passed a copy of those documents to a former colleague of his in a motel parking lot. Like any spy movie you've ever seen. And this man had hand carried the papers Susan had mentioned. They're called the Pentagon Papers. The original name was just too. It wasn't spicy. It wasn't like the Wet Bandits you can have like the Secretary Report of the Baba Dib. No, not be spicy.
- [91:42]
A
Yeah.
- [91:43]
B
So he passed it to his friend and ours. Ben Bradley at the Washington Post.
- [91:48]
A
Katherine had a choice. Could they start publishing articles while this injunction was in place for the New York Times?
- [91:55]
B
It was a gray area.
- [91:57]
A
Totally a gray area. She really needed to be brave and bold if she was going to publish it.
- [92:02]
B
The whole senior staff got on the phone to hash it out. Because even if they were not bound by the injunction specifically, did they dare publish such inflammatory articles? Also Catherine's connections in D.C. you're gonna certainly damage all those relationships. She also had to decide how far to stick her neck out. The Washington Post had just gone public. You know, stock offerings. Two days before, which had been in itself an agonizing decision. She hated the thought of loss of control and increased scrutiny. But more importantly, had worried her mission of telling the truth would be at war with the bottom line of a boy concerned with stock prices. This is. This whole Pentagon Papers thing was as if the universe was testing the principles she was worried about during the stock offering. It's the immortal soul of the Washington Post at stake, said her most trusted advisor. And if we don't publish, we are the paper that helped the government cover up. I mean, the lawyers advised against publishing. Publishing. We could go down. Catherine Graham could be seen as personally criminally liable for defying the injunction. And if convicted, she could no longer own her TV or radio stations because convicted felons could not own broadcast licenses. So the empire will begin to crumble. And what about the stock prices? Publishing could destroy the paper. Not publishing could destroy the paper. So here was her test. Was it principal or profit? Like she had only moments to decide. They had been working on these stories since they had gotten those copies. The reporters were ready, the typesetters were ready, their fingers were poised. And everybody was waiting for Catherine. And there was a moment of silence.
- [93:47]
A
And Catherine said, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let's go. Let's publish.
- [93:53]
B
And so they did on June 18, 1971. Immediately, the Attorney General sent a formal request for the Post to cease its coverage.
- [94:02]
A
Did you not see what was happening out there? Yes. Oh, did we? Well, it didn't apply to us. That's up in New York. We're here in London.
- [94:08]
B
You know what that reminds me of is when you tell your little kid, like, don't poke the dog. And then the next thing you know, they're scratching the dog. Well, you didn't say don't scratch the dog exactly. Oh, my God. I remember one time I was talking to Jet and I don't know, I was just. And I can't remember all the things, but I was like, don't sing, scream, yell, groove, dance, kiss, pick, poke. I had to, like, list all these, like, verbs. That's what's happening verb, you know? Yeah, it's just like, had to close all the loopholes. Well, anyway, this case, which the Supreme Court agreed to just glom the Washington Post's case on with the New York Times, is. Which was already making its way to them. It was fast tracked 12 days later. I mean, when has that ever happened? I know, but 12 days later, the newspapers versus the president of the United States, basically in the Supreme Court. And it could have gone any way. And honestly, I mean, it could have fallen apart. It really could have. The newspapers employees had no fingernails left, I think, by the end of this. Okay, but they won the right to publish. In fact, Justice Black wrote, only a free and unrestrained press can expose deception in government. The newspapers have done precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted that they would do. I mean, hooray. You can't have. You know, it seems like a ringing ruling, right? But it was all a little bit like on a technicality, we'll give it to you. Except for that specific opinion, everybody else was like, oh, they haven't submitted the burden of proof from the President's office. It was more weak. Like, it was not a resounding defense of a free press.
- [95:48]
A
Right. It was arguing the paperwork, you know.
- [95:52]
B
No.
- [95:52]
A
Yeah. Oh, no, it was doing exactly what you were saying. It was scratching the dog instead of poking it.
- [95:58]
B
Yeah. Well, I will tell you that Mr. Bradley, Ben Bradley later wrote, and I quote, that was a key moment in the life of this paper. It was the graduation of the Post into the highest ranks. One of our unspoken goals at the paper had been to get the world to refer to the Post and the New York Times in the same breath, which they previously had done. But after the Pentagon Papers, they finally did so they graduated. They had become real. Like the velveteen rabbit, they had become real.
- [96:27]
A
But also real was that Nixon and his administration were very anti Washington Post. The Washington Post was not given any information from the administration. As far as they were concerned, the Washington Post was blackballed.
- [96:42]
B
Oh, my God. He went ape. Dude, do.
- [96:45]
A
I was like, are you gonna say that word? Yeah, well.
- [96:49]
B
And he even said, we'll just see if this arrogant press is free to undermine the security of this country. We'll just see about it. He actively sent his vice president on tour to undermine the integrity of journalists as a class of people. This might sound familiar. Talking about the vicious lies of the mainstream media, the eastern elitist journalists who just wanted to take the president down. They actually were trying to collect basically a clip show of things the Post had said against Nixon and kind of take everything out of context and say that it was just a vendetta. The Post is just out to get me. It's not real. It's not real. There was a large protest, by the way. You know, you've seen it. If you've seen Forrest Gump, you've seen the protests, right? Like where Jai Jenner is in the bouncer. So it was a protest like that, that big. You've seen how many people were there. And it was a protest against the Vietnam War. And somebody asked Nixon on the record, what did you feel about that protest? And he goes, I didn't see it. I was watching football. To which the press said, let them eat cake.
- [97:56]
A
Right?
- [97:57]
B
He wasn't really helping himself, number one. And also, what do they have to lose now, you know? So it was obvious that Nixon had a particular bad feeling about the Post posts specifically. Now moving on to another one of his targets, the original leaker, one Mr. Ellsberg, was indicted, almost inevitably on the charge of stealing classified documents. But in the courtroom, after the Nixon administration was revealed to have broken into Mr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to try to steal his medical records. In fact, that beat up file cabinet that they tried to steal is in the Smithsonian as a marker of American history. They also tried to bribe officials with high positions if they would vote a certain way about his case. And they also had set up some illegal wiretaps. The judge heard all this stuff and declared a mistrial because of the, quote, bizarre actions of the government in this case. And Mr. Ellsberg was not convicted. No. Bizarre actions of the government.
- [99:04]
A
Now, if that sounds familiar to you, and you're sitting there saying, oh, right, that was Watergate. No, no, it wasn't. It hasn't happened yet.
- [99:13]
B
Almost a year to the day that the Post published their Pentagon paper's coverage, a news story came in five men, five well dressed men carrying sophisticated spy gear had broken in to the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Office building. Building. And hilarious to me. Were busted by a security guard who was just irritated that someone had taped a door open. You know we used to do that in the dorm like everyone did to get their boyfriend in. You would tape.
- [99:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. You can't do that anymore, am I? No, no. They, they're all electronic entry. So you hit a code on your phone to get in.
- [99:51]
B
So you just give him the code, right?
- [99:53]
A
You know what, I'm not sure. But you can't. We used to take like at a hotel, put the lock outs so you could. The door would jam open. That's what we used to do. But now an alarm will sound if that happens to. If the door doesn't engage with the lock.
- [100:07]
B
Oh my God. That was like the funnest thing for the person monitoring the lobby. When the alarm went off that the side door had been open, they would run.
- [100:14]
A
You know, like what. It was so funny.
- [100:17]
B
Well, here's the thing. Those guys, the guys that broke in and they were, their mouths were a circle like they were completely surprised. Like how did you ever find us? It's like there's this literal series of doors taped open leading straight to this office. Yo.
- [100:31]
A
Which is dark. Except you're for your flashlights on your frickin head. Yeah, we can see you.
- [100:39]
B
Like. Does this surprise you?
- [100:42]
A
So they got you see me, I'm wearing my cloak of invisibility, but I'm.
- [100:46]
B
Wearing a suit, right? Well it's whatever like those guys though had the ties to the Committee to Reelect the President or to other government officials. Which made this a very interesting story indeed. And the Post assigned two young reporters to the possible. We don't know what it is yet. The possible interesting story of whatever that just was.
- [101:10]
A
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward started digging. They used every journalistic skill that they could think of. They crossed a little bit of a line of ethics to try and get the information about what was going on here. And was the government covering it up. And then the government when called out on it, denied even knowing about it. When obviously Nixon knew about it. It was his people. The buck stops there and he's raising his hands going I don't know these guys. When they finally revealed that yes, the answer to that was yes, the government was covered. And it was an elaborate cover up. To try and keep themselves distanced from this break in.
- [101:54]
B
The Post was mostly alone in covering this story for almost a Year. That is very unsettling. Think about that. Like, did you. Were you feeling your oats after the Pentagon Papers? Were you in a real, real thing or were you just high right on excitement from last time? I mean, you know, you had to ask yourself the tough questions. And Catherine Graham put down very stringent regulations for articles that got published about this. Like, you had to have another source than where you got it the first time. You had to run it by the editors before it printed. It just, it was so unsettling that they were largely by themselves on this. Think about how, how long would you go on telling a story if everyone around you is like, I don't. I think that's cocky though. Yeah.
- [102:37]
A
And who's gaslighting who here? Yeah, yeah, it comes down, you start second guessing everything. So with all those checks and balances.
- [102:46]
B
In place, ultimately the Post published hundreds of articles. And, you know, all of which irritated everyone at the White House and honestly kind of irritated people at other papers, like, let it go. Oh my God, what is the deal? Hundreds of articles. But there was one specific incident that I think is just comedy.
- [103:05]
A
Woodward and Bernstein had a piece of proof. They wanted a comment from the Nixon administration to run with this article. So they called up the Attorney General, John Mitchell, and told him what they were about to publish. And John Mitchell knew exactly how defamatory this bit of information was. And he screamed into the phone, all that crap you're putting in the paper, it's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tick caught in a big fat wringer if that's published.
- [103:38]
B
And so they published that as the common from the White House, Except I.
- [103:44]
A
Think they took the word tit out and put something else in. But. Yeah, but the. But the meaning was there.
- [103:50]
B
Oh, my gosh. And so I think it's so funny Catherine showed up at the desk of that reporter the next day and said, hi, do you have any more messages for me? So hilarious. And even more hilarious, she kept an antique ringer on her desk from now on. Hilarious. Hilaire.
- [104:09]
A
So they have this published. It really hit national awareness when on the CBS News with Walter Cronkite, which Americans all tuned into every night, spent a good chunk of one episode discussing exactly what the Post had found out. Giving the Post credit for all the work and saying, this is a major government cover up. Walter Crime. Cronkite, Uncle Walter, the guy we turned to for our news, we expected him to be unbiased and objective and honest. And he's saying this is all fact.
- [104:44]
B
Nevertheless, despite the basically proven criminal activity, Nixon was reelected by the people. And he immediately tried to retaliate by getting her broadcast licenses revoked. And it was obvious to almost everyone that this was politically motivated. Why target hers in particular? There's nothing different from hers than other people's. The, her stock price ended up tanking due to the bad publicity. You know, Wall street is jumpier than other places.
- [105:17]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [105:18]
B
They're like almost like those cows that see a drone and start running away, you know, oh, what is it? And so Catherine faced her demons to go out on a speaking tour and convinced against the Wall street heavyweights of her value of the Post, value of its truth, basically had to sing for her supper. That was actually more stressful than the entirety of the Watergate situation. Woodward and Bernstein, though, had a secret weapon, a secret source calling himself Deep Throats. So the post coverage, Mr. Cronkite's involvement, government investigations, corroborating evidence, and additional coverage by other papers led to Congress subpoenaing Nixon's White House voice recording, which he fought like a trapped animal to prevent having to give up those tapes. Congress began to call for presidential impeachment. At one point, toward the end of the whole affair, when the Vice President was under investigation for corruption and bribery, his lawyers wanted to subpoena all reporters notes that had ever covered the Vice President. And I think they were going to do that same kind of clip show. See, it's just a vendetta. It's just a vendor vendetta. And so the Post and Catherine Graham and all the lawyers decided to subvert their tactic. The notes are actually owned by the paper, not by the individual reporters. So you're going to have to try to get them from the paper and from Ms. Graham specifically. And they called it only in house, the gray haired little widow defense. Yes, like the suffragettes of old, they decided, and so did Katherine, that if they wanted to play that game, she would play that game too. And I quote a lawyer. And if the judge wants to send anyone to jail, he's going to have to send Mrs. Graham. And by God, the lady says she'll go. And then the judge can have that on his conscience. Can't you just see the pictures of her limousine pulling up to the women's detention center and out gets our gal going to jail to uphold the First Amendment. Well, that's a picture that would run in every newspaper in the world. There might in fact be a revolution. Yes, ma'am. Yes, Gloria. For giving her the courage.
- [107:28]
A
Yeah, no kidding. No Kidding. Kidding.
- [107:29]
B
So perhaps she was quote a little lady. But she was a little lady with an iron spine. She was very salty. She had a surprising potty mouth. Surprise. I also have a will of iron. Well after the tapes were played and the extent of Nixon's corruptions were proven, the Post and Katherine Graham were vindicated. I am a person who shows how they feel about their friends and relations by seeking out gifts that I think they will enjoy. And you know people often don't spend money on themselves. They don't treat themselves. And so that's why I like going to quints because you can get luxury gifts, gifts at a non luxury price.
- [108:25]
A
You can get them for everybody on your gift list. There's men's clothes, women's clothes, children's clothes. There's luggage, there's jewelry. Quint has a very large selection of basic mix and match keep for years items like Mongolian cashmere sweaters. You get a cashmere sweater, you're going to have it for a very long time.
- [108:47]
B
I'm particularly fond of a cashmere sweater silk skirt combo. Yeah, it's like you're wrapped in a little blanket of fanciness.
- [108:58]
A
Yeah, I could see and comfortable too. I realized that I have a little collection growing cotton modal scoop neck T shirts. It's the perfect sleeve length, the perfect neckline, the perfect fit. Not too baggy, not too tight. I have them in five colors and I reach for them all the time because they're really nice base later.
- [109:19]
B
So Quint is on the nice list. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices. That is very important to me. Give luxury this holiday season without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.com chicks for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order.
- [109:40]
A
That's Quince Q u I n c.com to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
- [109:49]
B
Quince.com chicks On August 9th, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned as President. The only US President to do so. And Catherine wrote, I turned on the television and heard a voice referring to President F. Ford. Then and only then did I experience pure relief. I actually felt a weight leave my shoulders. It was over. Nixon was gone. Ford was president and indeed our long national nightmare was over. The relief came from having a nice open, honest and non threatening precedent. The paper won a Pulitzer prize for its Watergate coverage and Catherine always downplayed her involvement. But. But if she hadn't held firm through those turbulent years and backed her staff up, if there hadn't been an air of mutual trust and respect. At the Post in the first place, those investigations would have fallen apart. There were many points where she specifically had to be brave and make the tough calls. It was a giant gamble, a gamble with her reputation and a gamble with her company. And she. She wrote to Woodward and Bernstein. Maybe one of the things it's easy to Forget here in 1974 is the answer was we are not all right. We were righteous, but mercifully we were stupid. We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself, but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it. Well, who could have counted on that? And I saw a video where literally Woodward and Bernstein were asked what she said to them after, after this was all over. She was very concerned, like before, that people were feeling their adrenaline and everyone was running around looking for scoops, looking for to be the next Woodward and Bernstein and forgetting that, like, school board meetings exist, boring highway projects exist. We can't all be, like, spicy and sexy. You know what I mean?
- [111:57]
A
Right.
- [111:57]
B
And they said in this interview that she. She grabbed ahold of this legal pad, like something that she just had sitting around and dashed off a note to them. And she wrote, beware the demon pomposity. That's what she wrote to them.
- [112:12]
A
Oh, wait, that's gotta go on my wall. Where's my Post Its. I think Katherine Graham's story is good for people who wonder what their second act is gonna look like. You know, that wonder, am I too old to start these things after she had been on the job only 10 years, which seems like a lot, but there's a lot for her to learn. Learn. She was 52 years old, and upon the death of the chairman of the Washington Post Company, she was named CEO and chairman of the Board of directors. Because of her leadership in the Washington Post Company, this move made her the very first woman to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And this is a woman who thought of herself as a doormat 10 years before. Before.
- [112:56]
B
And she said there were two parts to the paper. Profitability and integrity. Well, integrity you've got down. And now she turned her eyes to the profitability and she found a new mentor, a new person to teach her the part of life that she felt like she was a little substandard in. And she encountered a man named Warren Buffett who became an investor in the company and really helped her to understand the vagaries of the stock market and prices and labor costs and all that kind of thing. And it was a great partnership that lasted the rest of her life.
- [113:34]
A
You know what's astonishing to me about this is this required a degree of bravery on her part because nobody knew who Warren Buffett was. He was just this investor from Omaha. Can you find it on a map? And she's wondering, why is he buying up all this Post? Is he trying to take over the company? And she kind of had a meeting with him and said, you know, are your intentions honorable? And he said, yeah, absolutely. I want this to be a success for all of us. So much so that I will let your son Donald do the voting on my behalf. She said, okay, I believe you now. So they had a great relationship.
- [114:10]
B
She became the first woman director of the Associated Press in 1974. And the post empire grew exponential. It was worth $500 million at this point, and there were 5,000 employees. Now, it wasn't all roses. There was a pressman's union strike for five months during the winter of 74, 75. And everyone that was exempt from what they called guild membership, union membership, was drafted in to continue to put out the paper. Believe it or not, they pulled things from the apy. Catherine herself was taking information from the classified ads on the phone setting type. I mean, everyone. Luckily, they had all come from an era where people had often worked their way up, you know, so it's not like now where you kind of draft in at level seven and like, well, I don't know what level three does. I have no idea. They all kind of knew. Hilariously, this guy was trying to sell his cars, and she's taking the information, and he goes, I hope you don't mind, but you sound overqualified to be taking my information. She had an aristocratic voice people said sounded like money.
- [115:20]
A
Yeah.
- [115:21]
B
Someone else said it sounded like dirty money. Because she really did have a. Have a mouth of. Of tartness sometimes, but not relate.
- [115:30]
A
You don't? I do.
- [115:31]
B
No, I don't. I don't know why you. Looking at both of us, you would think it would be me, but it's not.
- [115:36]
A
Yeah, definitely it's not.
- [115:37]
B
Well, anyway, during that strike, there was a comment that, like, Katherine Graham comes down here in her 300 dresses to set tight. But I do admire her for doing it.
- [115:47]
A
Yeah.
- [115:47]
B
Yeah. A lot of that was. And I will say it's a reaction to technical innovations. They were. They were putting whole trades out of work in many industries, you know, and like the. The Luddites in the 1800s, the textile workers that revolted against the textile mills and broke them up, or flash forward Here to AI. There's always thorny ethical questions when new processes get invented.
- [116:14]
A
Mm.
- [116:15]
B
I don't understand. This may be me being a Luddite. Merry Christmas. L U D D I T E if you want to look up that movement. Or we can provide you a link. I don't understand why the machines get to do the fun parts though. I know it seems backwards.
- [116:30]
A
I know, I know. And as a writer with my information out on the Internet, you know, I just feel vulnerable. Speaking of making brave moves during a strike, she decided she'd had enough of it after four and a half months and started replacing all of those union employees. Included in that group were more women and more minorities than the press room had ever seen. And ultimately a seven person union crew was replaced by crews of nine people that she had hired.
- [117:04]
B
So as someone whose dad was the president of the musicians union for a long time, I don't know how I feel about that, really.
- [117:11]
A
I know. I also am torn. I mean, she was very. Unions were a big thorn in her side because it was one of those things that she had to learn really fast when she started the job.
- [117:23]
B
And then she had this whole background of having in her youth hobnobbed with the labor movement specifically and sort of reporting on their side of the conflict.
- [117:37]
A
So yeah, it must have been one of those working both sides of your brain's decisions, you know. Oh, and you had mentioned that, you know, they were of the working your way up era at this point. Her son Donald began to work for the Washington Post and he started as a reporter. So he's going to work his way up. He's the heir apparent. She knows it. She's not going to throw him out there at the last minute for somebody else. But she's starting him out as a reporter so he learns the business.
- [118:07]
B
Now, I did read Just an Illusion. I don't have any more information than this. That firstborn daughter Lally objected to her brother being tapped as the heir. The other two boys were like, yeah, I got my own stuff going on, blah, blah, it's no big deal. But like, I wish that I had found more information on that because if Lally and Dawn were equally qualified and she chose the second born son over her daughter, that would have been interesting to me.
- [118:37]
A
Yeah, I heard an interview with both of them because they're both still alive.
- [118:41]
B
Right.
- [118:41]
A
So, you know, if they want to call in and tell us how they felt, Lolly, we'll be happy to record it.
- [118:47]
B
Absolutely.
- [118:48]
A
Even though we don't do interviews, that's one I would take.
- [118:51]
B
Right. So stay tuned for that. When Catherine was 62, she thought it was time to begin a measured transition to the next generation. And she began by naming her son Don as publisher, remaining herself as the CEO and chairman of the overall company. And she spent her time traveling on behalf of the company, interviews, giving them, performing the interviews, not being the subject of them acquisitions, speeches. She was also very famous for her dinner parties, which somebody called power chautauquas. I think that's a great, great terminology. A hub of influencers, you know. And then lovely second mention of Loli in a couple of minutes. Her daughter Lolly held a grand 70th birthday party for her to which she wore a white dress. It's kind of a bookend to that Truman Capote black and white ball.
- [119:48]
A
Right.
- [119:49]
B
Maybe. There was a speech given during that party that I thought was very funny. A guest that was giving a speech said to the room of power influencers, if there's one thing that brings us all together here tonight, it is the fear that if you are not here, you will never be forgiven. So I love that. Like, this girl holds a grudge.
- [120:07]
A
Yeah.
- [120:08]
B
Just before her 74th birthday, Catherine @ last stepped down from her position as CEO. And in her time at the Post, the stock value had a gain of over 3,300% from its original price, in contrast to somewhere around a 200% gain for the General General Stock Exchange. So spectacular performance. I would say no notes, but I don't have the knowledge to give any notes if I had them, so hooray. Sounds good.
- [120:38]
A
As an example of how much power she was wielding at the time, in 1979, there was a biography written about her by an established biographer who cited all her facts. And it was going to press, and Catherine heard about it and she contacted the publisher and said the whole theme of the book is so fanciful, it defies serious discussion. And the publisher pulled it. Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Graham. Of course, Mrs. Graham. And the biographer was left like it was on the shelf yesterday, and now it's not. There was a whole lawsuit because the biographer, that's her reputation that's on the line. And it was just pulled out from under her. She's ended up looking like a quack biographer. So she double triple checked her facts. She was wrong on a couple of. She cited who Deep Throat was incorrectly.
- [121:31]
B
Many people did that.
- [121:32]
A
Absolutely, absolutely. And the main complaint that Catherine had is that she took issue that the book said Philip had been a CIA operative. And again, this was Documentation that the author had the book called Catherine the Great. You can get it now. It was published by another publisher, but I think it just shows, you know, she just wrote this, you know, how's it going? I saw your wife, blah, blah, blah, blah, hey, pull that book. And they did.
- [121:59]
B
Hmm.
- [122:00]
A
So for the next seven years, she decided she was going to write her.
- [122:06]
B
Own autobiography with pen and paper like we do. Long hand. Still, in this day and age. AI existing. We are pen and paper enthusiasts.
- [122:17]
A
Yes. Yeah, yeah. The reason being, and we've said it before, if you hand write something, it sticks in your brain more than if you type it. And I tested that theory for probably three years because I'm like, there's no way. I type this up all the time. And sure enough, it's absolutely true.
- [122:35]
B
I always feel like it goes in better, and then maybe it goes in less threateningly. And all the other brain cells are like, oh, hey, what's up? Come join us. Instead of like, no, put up your armor. There's some crockpot coming in here at full speed.
- [122:49]
A
Right, right, right. And you know that you have to get it down accurately because you can go back. I mean, both of our notes are written with arrows and circles and go back to this page and look at that. But, you know, and if you were typing it, you could just move things around. And it was a pretty document. Unlike our handwritten notes. When her autobiography was published in 1997 at the age of 80. We've talked about this book before. It is a massive tone home. It earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a.
- [123:17]
B
Pulitzer Prize for her autobiography, and became a bestseller. And of course, this whole time, she spent large sums of money on philanthropy, like her mother, Agnes, whose work on education we can really only allude to here. But let's just say Mama had political influence in education policy. I'm going to leave Mama for another day. But Catherine spent much of her fundraising efforts on charities that benefited women and children, at one point working with Princess Diana. In fact, she had an active, involved life full of people and purpose. And I wish that for us all after the age of 80, you know, no kidding.
- [123:57]
A
There are some things, you know, she has a whole laundry list of accolades and awards, but there was two that just really stuck out to me. The Super Sisters trading car featured her in 1979. And one of their cards. That's a nice honor.
- [124:13]
B
What is that? You'll have to explain it.
- [124:14]
A
It's trading cards for women's. Women's history, you know, women, super sisters. And in 1980, seven. She won the Walter Cronkite Award for excellence in journalism, which is a big deal. Did I ever tell you my Walter Cronkite story? I used to work on Martha's Vineyard in the summer when I was in college and I worked in the town that Walter Cronkite had a house in. And he would come in in his retirement and buy a newspaper the next day, the Wall Street Journal, because it was half price. And he'd always look up with this. He has his tennis whites on and his little goofy gilligan hat. And he'd look at me and he just. He'd just look at me and he'd go, you know that's half price, right? Like, yes, Mr. Cragite, do you want some coffee?
- [125:00]
B
That's awesome. Awesome. At the age of 84, while attending an annual sort of summit of leaders in media in Sun Valley, Idaho, Catherine suddenly fell and hit her head on the sidewalk. After three days in the hospital, which she never regained consciousness, there she died.
- [125:19]
A
Catherine Meyer Graham died on July 14, 2001, at the age of 84 years old. Her funeral was held at Washington's national cathedral. Over 3,000 people paid their respects that day. She's buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, which is right across the street from that beautiful home that she established in Georgetown.
- [125:42]
B
And that will bring us to the end of the life of Katherine Graham. And this is normally the part where we might list some accomplishments. As Susan alluded to earlier, there are really too many to just list, like a long resume. So maybe we can just provide you a list on the website. Also, it is time for media like we do.
- [126:05]
A
I guess the first place we need to start is with her autobiography, which is called Personal History. Like I said, It's 642 pages over 30 hours of audiobook. If your library is like mine and they only had the large print edition, it's 1,216 pages pages.
- [126:23]
B
And then there is power, Privilege, and the post by Carol Fell, which actually is a lot bigger, at least my copy is, than my copy of the autobiography, which was a trade paperback in my case.
- [126:35]
A
So, wow, your font must have been really tiny.
- [126:38]
B
So there's that. Love that book. And also there is a book that is significantly smaller, but will give you a great summary, I think, of everything that's going on and is in pretty well birthed to death format. So Katherine Grah, the Leadership Journey of an American Icon by Robin Gerber.
- [126:58]
A
And another. I thought that this was funner. Funner. This another book which is a little different format is called Katherine Graham's Washington. It's a collection of letters and articles curated by her that kind of span her entire life to give you a view of what's going on in the world and in her world.
- [127:20]
B
And also Woodward and Bernstein wrote a book that was later made into a movie called all the President's Men. And not to jump too soon into the movie category, but a movie was made by Robert Redford of that book. And Katherine Graham's one scene was cut out. She actually specifically asked not to have herself dragged in the mud. She was very concerned more that the Post came out looking good. But then she said she didn't want to be in it. He cut her one scene and then she was actually kind of had her feelings about it. It was very tumultuous time.
- [127:55]
A
There is, of course, that biography that she didn't want published. And I read it. It's got the same information for the most part as the other ones. Catherine the Great Katherine Graham and Her Washington by Deborah Davis.
- [128:08]
B
Read the unauthorized biography.
- [128:11]
A
Right.
- [128:11]
B
Journalism's major student.
- [128:13]
A
Right. Or in my opinion, you can read Power Privilege in the Post, which has basically the same information in it as to movies.
- [128:22]
B
In addition to all the President's Men, we would be remiss if we did not mention the movie the Post starring Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham and Tom Hanks. Oh, two things about Tom Hanks. Number one, we mentioned Forrest Gump before when we were talking about the protest in Washington. Number two, the day before she died, she had dinner with Tom Hanks. I mean, there's no connection, but just Tom Hanks was there. And also Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradley in the Post.
- [128:47]
A
And that whole movie centers around the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. It's a movie, so there's things that are inaccurate. I don't think at this point she was as wishy washy as she was in that movie when it started. I think that was just to illustrate how far she came in a short period of time to strengthen her spirit. Fine. Yeah, that one is available on. I think I got it on Amazon prime for 4 bucks. Had to rent it. Yeah.
- [129:14]
B
Yep. And then as to links, I have links to recordings from Lyndon Johnson about the Post. Also, you can listen to a lot of the Nixon tapes online, if that is your thing, or just read the transcript sometimes. He is not good. There is an article about that first Newsweek cover called Women in Revolt, Bolt. That was the spark that made the women at the Post strike for gender discrimination. There's also a history of The Equal Rights Amendment that I have. And also that Woodward and Bernstein interview in which they talk about how Katherine Graham warned them not to get too big of heads, frankly, after their great success.
- [130:00]
A
I'm going to link you to some National Archives articles about the Pentagon Page papers and Watergate. For me, the Pentagon Papers is a more linear story. Watergate, even at the time it wasn't getting a lot of press because it's very complicated. So I thought these did a good job of kind of simplifying it.
- [130:19]
B
Isn't it funny that Watergate is the more famous of the two when the Pentagon Papers seem to blow the lid off of decades of nonsense?
- [130:27]
A
Well, Watergate ended dramatic. Pentagon Papers ended with newspaper articles and a Supreme Court win, which didn't affect too many Americans. But every American at the time remembers their former president getting on that helicopter and giving the peace sign. That's embedded in memories. Nora Ephron wrote an article. She was friends with Katherine Graham and.
- [130:54]
B
She was married to Carl Bernard Steam for a while. Yes.
- [130:57]
A
That's why she has lots of really nice things to say about Catherine. For real. I'm not being facetious, but she wrote an article about her book, which I thought was a great synopsis of the book. It like points out a lot of the juicy parts, things we didn't talk about because if we did, it would be a 30 hour podcast.
- [131:16]
B
It's already pretty long.
- [131:17]
A
I know, it's like an audiobook. We didn't really talk about their houses and stuff, but I have a couple artists. The history of Seven Springs Farm. It was the Meijer residence. It looked like a French chateau in the mountains of upstate New York. This article includes references of Yale University, Donald Trump comma, real estate, tax fraud, pollution control and Gaddafi. It could be a movie in and of itself.
- [131:43]
B
At her funeral, under her picture was the quote that so long ago at her high school people had given her those about her from her shall read the Perfect Ways of Honor. She was many things to many people, not the least of which was a leader. And in closing, Catherine Graham was a symbol of triumph over adversity, frankly, against the odds, showing the resilience and determination of the modern woman, as well as being an icon for the belief that a cantankerous, vibrant and free press is absolutely crucial to the functioning of our democracy. Thanks for listening.
- [132:27]
A
Bye.
- [132:28]
B
If you liked what you heard today, please tell a few friends or leave a review for us on Apple podcasts or on your favorite podcatcher. The song at the end is by Brad Sucks and it's called in your face and what I'm imagining is the battle royale with cheese between President Richard Nixon and Katherine Graham and her Post employees. It's not often that I have to bleep an end song, but just fair warning, there are two places that I have placed the lovely, melodious call of a cardinal bird over some objectionable language. Anyway, happy winter. Eat lots of soup. We are going to post our traditional Mrs. Santa episode for Christmas Christmas. And start again in the new year with some fresh biographies. See you next time.
- [133:46]
A
I was barely legal looking for something evil to say and people to be antagonized and you said to me it's not a good strategy, you should grow up, try to act like you're civilized. I explained that I just valued sincerity you should go f yourself and then try to die. You were sick of it and called me an idiot and left town and said are you satisfied? If I had what you had I could get you to pray no I'm not in your face I'm just getting by if I had what you had I could get you pray no I'm not in your face I'm just getting but would not be defeated by angel man who couldn't see I was always right All I said was I don't mean to offend but you're the dumbest mother I say no night though you know you want to know everything I.
- [134:52]
B
Know it's the way I roll you.
- [134:55]
A
Most of my Even if I never think of ever calling you out Am I ready for such.