Authors: Katharine Graham
I worked for the
Post
as early as the summer of 1934—between high school and college. I was mainly a copy girl or messenger in the women’s
department, but I became friends with those two fine newswomen, Malvina Lindsay and Mary Haworth. From then on, I had occasional summer jobs at the
Post
.
When I went to college a year after the purchase, my parents and I corresponded constantly about what was happening. I read the
Post
daily, commented, encouraged, and even criticized, while my parents, particularly my father, told me in great detail about what was going on. I found myself deeply involved with the struggle to improve the paper. Somewhat to my surprise, given that I thought of myself during this period as unsophisticated, unworldly, and fairly unopinionated, I seem to have been full of independent appraisals of the paper and what it was printing. For instance, at the age of seventeen I wrote my parents:
Have been reading the Post faithfully. I think it really is getting very good. The “human interest” that was jammed down its throat at first and looked so awkward, seems to be getting underneath the news now. I find myself unconsciously picking it up before my New York paper.… I think you slipped up once when you put the over pathetic community chest advertisement depicting the children on the streets opposite the page showing society at a dance. It might have made people give or it might have been unintentional but the effect was rather startling—especially I should think to the unemployed. However, that is a minor detail. I should think you would be encouraged as a whole.
Much later, the depth of my caring was pointed out to me by Phil’s psychiatrist, who told me that Phil and I both had a problem: we cared too much about the
Post
. I told him, in one of the great understatements of my life, that I feared there was little he could do about that.
I
N THE FALL
of 1934, I left for Vassar, which I had chosen by a process of non-thought; that is, next to no thinking went into my decision to go there. It simply was the “in” place at the time. Most Madeira seniors went there, as had Bis, whom I always wished to emulate. At the time I arrived on campus for my freshman year, Bis and Bill were in London living together in a small flat. Bill was taking his junior year abroad at the London School of Economics, where my parents had sent him out of discouragement with his Yale career. He had been on the diving team and was an accomplished athlete; however, he was on probation academically. In London he was to study with my father’s friend Harold Laski, that brilliant, erratic, left-wing professor and intellectual.
Bis had spent her junior year abroad in Munich, where she had cut her usual glamorous swath, studied some, gone on with her violin, and enjoyed life with at least one or two heavy beaux in different countries. Instead of returning to Vassar, she had gone to work for Alexander Korda, the British movie producer, working with her friend the playwright Sam Behrman on
The Scarlet Pimpernel
.
Flo was dancing—with a Greek partner at least a foot shorter than she. One of her first appearances occurred at a party given by my mother at Crescent Place. Mother wrote me a characteristic letter in May of 1935, describing the event:
Wish you had been here for my big dinner. Mme. Peter [wife of the Swiss ambassador] said it was the best party she had seen at Washington. Flo danced on a platform on the terrace because we recognized at last moment that drawing room was much too small. As it was drizzling we had to toss huge awning over everything. Jules [the butler] went to hospital the day before with kidney stones and Robert [the other butler] had just had his appendix
out. But I just ignored difficulties and we came through with the Meyer social colors flying higher than ever.
While my older sisters and brother were thus venturing into the real world, I was so unworldly that it was difficult for me to function. My new circle of friends and range of activities all looked appropriate and right, but I found them confusing and felt lost. I had a particularly hard time concentrating on my work and reading. My mind constantly wandered to where I was going and what I was doing—to the problem of how not to be lonely. In addition, I was coping with difficulties stemming from my protected and waited-on background, which I had always taken for granted. Not being very conscious of fashion, I had only the few elegant made-to-order dresses chosen by my mother and nothing for everyday. Before college began, I had set forth to buy clothes with no idea where to go or what I would need, and I somehow outfitted myself with skirts and sweaters. But I wore one yellow cardigan through the first weeks of school until Thanksgiving, when someone finally suggested it should be washed. I had noticed girls’ sweaters stretched out on towels but had no idea either that I should be following their example or even
how
to. At home, someone had always removed dirty and discarded clothes, which later reappeared in my drawers. I resolved that problem by sending the yellow sweater out to a cleaner, and never did learn how to wash one.
This ignorance of practical matters applied to every aspect of daily life, whether it was cooking or cleaning or decorating or buying my clothes or knowing how much I could spend or how much others spent. I had to learn from life, from bumping up against reality or from my friends. Even so, I muddled through and learned a great deal my freshman year. In particular, I became aware of the issues surrounding the Roosevelt administration. The New Deal became a reality for the first time, and I began to be interested in it in a less-than-abstract way. The atmosphere at home was so anti-Roosevelt—Dad in a rational, measured way, Mother more emotionally—that I had never really heard a pro–New Deal position. Between the professors, the radical girls on the Vassar newspaper, which I went out for, and a new good friend, Connie Dimock, who gradually turned extremely left-wing, I became converted to the goals of the New Deal. In fact, the three middle Meyer children all became New Dealers, our views resulting in wild and vociferous political arguments with both parents, but mostly my mother.
Perhaps because of my conservative temperament, I slowly developed ideas that have remained fairly consistent throughout my life, with variations now and then. I believed—and believe—that capitalism works best for a freedom-loving society, that it brings more prosperity to more people than any other social-economic system, but that somehow we have to
take care of people. These ideas converted me into an ardent Roosevelt advocate at that time and for all three of his re-election campaigns.
I was taking freshman German and became a great devotee of Thomas Mann, particularly of his novella
Tonio Kröger
. In it Mann talks about the ambivalence and conflict within Tonio caused by the natural rift between his Prussian father and his warm-blooded, emotional South German mother. The splintering caused by the pulls of these two opposites makes him feel different from others, and he longs to be like everyone else. That may or may not be an accurate reading of this lovely story, but that’s how it struck me. I was so carried away and personally involved with the theme that I picked up an English translation and galloped through it, unwilling and unable to struggle with my beginning German.
So I
was
learning. But my work was spotty and disorganized. I had come to college unprepared, lacking the kind of self-discipline needed to read with concentration and the skills necessary to assemble research, give it thought, and write an essay. A history paper I had been assigned to write by an unsympathetic and tough professor, Lucy Textor, is a case in point. I wrote my parents about our conflict:
Am still disagreeing violently with my History teacher. Right now perhaps my ideas are too general but I think hers are too specific, i.e., she has taught history ten years too long. We have a long topic to write just now on anything we wish to. I chose the position of women in the Middle Ages tracing the similar customs by races from the Saxons in Germany to England and bringing out the differences in Italy, France, Germany, and England. As they had just begun to obtain rights it seemed interesting to me to do this for this period, and perhaps again at later periods when we study them. I realize what a tremendous job this is but she wanted me to take
one
woman and do her. If I took one woman she would have to be famous therefore she would be an exception which is not what I am after. I am going to try my topic despite what she said. Even if it doesn’t make a good one I will get what I want out of it. All of this will probably result in a bad mark because we dislike each other—I do my history my own way and enjoy it.
The innocence—and arrogance—of youth are evident here, as well as a budding interest in the position of women. The hated Miss Textor and I came to grief over the ill-prepared paper. She suspected, I suppose, what was really the case, which was that I had done only a half-baked job, and said, “So, Miss Meyer, read us your paper.” When I finished reading it she said, “That’s a good introduction. Then what?” Well, it was the end of
what I had done. She gave me a D, which resulted in my being put on probation, an embarrassing failure that I resented even while I recognized it as at least partly deserved.
Instead of being outraged at me, my mother was outraged at the college. She wrote from Miami Beach that she had
… raised an awful row with McCracken [then president of Vassar] because they sent me notice you were on history pro. Dr. McCracken assured me this mark would not stand against you and you may be sure it won’t. In the meantime please work as never before and don’t say a word about my fusillade against this female. I sent my letter to Dean Thompson.… I am furious that they dared send me a report of your being on history pro, and shall shatter the quiet of Vassar if they don’t change things PDQ.
I was embarrassed though somewhat relieved when I got her letter, but mostly I was worried that her scathing tirades to the dean and the president would create pressure on me to follow up with the goods and write a first-rate paper. In the end, I worked off the probation and passed the course.
Midway through my freshman year, I began to feel better about my schoolwork and also to feel that college was growing more interesting and alive. But I had some difficulty with the fact that my mother, it seemed, could outdo my every achievement. Throughout my years of college, it always turned out that she had read all the books assigned to me—read them, assimilated them, critiqued them, dismissed them, even committed them to memory. In a letter to my father in the spring of my freshman year, I wrote that I was reading Tolstoy on the “function of art” and found “that he agrees with Mother in most of his ideas.” How odd that I should have put it this way and not the other way around.
What assuaged my spirits was that by this time Connie and I had become seriously interested in politics. We were opposed to a bill in the New York State Senate providing that every member of state-supported institutions (meaning colleges, too, because they were tax-exempt) swear allegiance to the Constitution. Hearst was a big proponent of this measure and was backed by the American Legion. I wrote my father: “I hear, Dad, that you disagree with me on this subject. This is not a bit of college communism however.… I think it is absurd. You can’t brush out communism by refusing to recognize it.”
I was appointed treasurer of the college political club, and was about to refuse, fearing it was the road to becoming “president of the Oshkosh Women’s Club,” but then, as I wrote my parents:
On the other hand, my friends are good looking, amusing, and nice and I thought it would be amusing to see something of the girls that think of nothing but “p.p.,” present problems, and how to convert America to communism. Most of them are madly radical but some are extremely intelligent about it. My little conservative voice will scarcely be heard above the uproar but it will be fun baiting the bears.
That summer I was planning to visit my Madeira friend Jean Rawlings in San Francisco. I still have her letter of invitation, telling me about the wonderful things we would do—trips to the mountains with boys who were friends of hers, a rodeo, all enticing. However, my dream of going was suddenly blighted one night when my parents reminded me that there was a serious polio epidemic out west and insisted that I could not go. I remember weeping and telling them that the idea of another summer alone at Mount Kisco was almost unendurable.
My parents came up with a solution—a job on one of the chain of suburban Westchester newspapers owned by Noel Macy, later bought by Gannett, and I eagerly grabbed at the idea and went to work on the
Mount Vernon Argus
. Each day I commuted in a Chevrolet convertible, my first car. It was a nonpaying job, but I enjoyed it and enjoyed my associates. I did the menial tasks of telephoning and taking messages, and even wrote a few elementary stories or announcements—including one on women doctors, which was printed with my byline and which I sent off to my father, who wrote back in an encouraging way: “I think it is very well written. It looks quite professional, in fact, to me.” I liked the job because it kept me busy, gave me some time away from the farm, and also gave me a structured life and an idea of what working was like.
I was startled to find that the Newspaper Guild had formally protested my working at the
Argus
for nothing, though individual guild members were personally conciliatory. I had a message from the union head saying:
I wish to explain that we feel no animosity towards you. Those who know you appreciate your efforts to succeed in the field you have chosen. Our action is and will continue to be a protest against any publisher who hires an employee without paying him.… We hope that you can see our point.
At the same time, I had a message from a friend of my mother’s saying that she had “heard about the Guild’s teapot furor over you. It was all that damned little Communist Dotty Loeb, president and agitator-in-chief, who was at the bottom of it, though … some women from Pelham, space
writers, had whined a little.… [T]he Guild seeks to make mountains of any molehill they can find.” It was my introduction to union politics.