Personal History (22 page)

My mother returned from her trip a few evenings later and joined the family in time for dinner. She was describing her trip when my father interrupted her to say, “We are having champagne for dinner.” “Fine,” she replied, and went on talking. “Don’t you want to know why we are having champagne for dinner?” my father persevered. Without a moment’s pause, she looked up and asked excitedly, “Cissy’s gone out of business?”

“No,” said my father. “Kay’s engaged to be married.”

“Oh,” said my stunned mother, “to whom?”

This whole whirlwind romance had essentially occurred while she was gone. Typically, I had told her nothing about Phil. Equally interesting, my father hadn’t picked up the phone and called her. She had met Phil only in large crowds of young people and didn’t remember him, so we had another “look-me-over” lunch with my mother, after which I saw Flo in New York. She asked, “Who is this guy you are marrying? Mother says he has a fine jawline.”

One important thing didn’t happen. There had been a lot of parental disapproval of both my older sisters’ suitors at various stages. I felt hopeful that my parents would like Phil, but it never occurred to me to be
influenced by what they thought, whereas both Flo and Bis had been dissuaded from marrying people they loved.

W
HO WAS
this young man who had so suddenly entered all our lives? Where had he come from? His father, Ernest Graham, was born in Croswell, a small town in northern Michigan. He was the heart of integrity and cando earthiness—a man with a gruff, appealing quality, hardworking and determined, interested in public issues and politics. And he was shy, hiding his emotions beneath a stern exterior.

Phil’s mother, Florence Morris, was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and had been a schoolteacher in South Dakota, despite not being a college graduate. “Floss,” as she was called, was by all accounts an extraordinarily charming, strong, intelligent, and sensitive partner who stood up to Ernie even at the cost of angry rows that ensued when she did so. These affected Phil strongly; he couldn’t bear anger or arguments or confrontations. His father had once, he told me, thrown a lamp at his mother in the course of a battle. In one of the first quarrels we ever had, during which I slammed a door, he said he couldn’t deal with that kind of scene, because of ones he had witnessed as a child, and pleaded that we never fight like that, so I didn’t. This wasn’t a good idea and led to many unresolved issues. Having a “no-fight” rule meant that I didn’t bring up things that disturbed me, and neither did Phil—an unhealthy situation in which things that upset one or the other of us didn’t get aired.

Floss was loved and admired by all who knew her. She made friends, always reaching out to the world, even in the impoverished and almost pioneering circumstances in which the Grahams lived during the depths of the Depression in Florida. It was very much to his mother that Phil related and to whom he felt most close. Phil was in some ways a mother’s boy. He was nurtured and enriched by Floss—she was the cultured one, the reader, as well as the social, friendly one.

Phil was born in 1915, in Terry, South Dakota, where his father was then working as a gold-mining engineer. He was the second child born to Ernie and Floss, two years after his sister, Mary. The Grahams lived in a house on the side of a mountain in the Black Hills until Ernie went into the army in 1917. The war had caused the price of gold to drop until the mine was no longer profitable to operate, so when Ernie got out of the army, he returned to Croswell and operated a couple of dairy farms there for two years. Through a friend, Ernie heard about an attempt by the Pennsylvania Sugar Company to grow sugar cane in the Everglades. George Earle, Sr., the company’s owner, had gone to Florida after the war and bought several hundred thousand acres of land in or around the Everglades
from outside Miami to Lake Okeechobee, envisioning draining the swamps and ending up with rich usable soil. He wanted his company, Pennsuco, to grow sugar cane on it for its refinery in Philadelphia. The Florida project was costing a lot and producing nothing; this friend of the Grahams, who was the general manager of Pennsuco, wanted someone with an agricultural and engineering background to come down and look it over, and he asked Ernie to take the job. Ernie went to Florida and was asked to stay on the plantation as the resident manager. So in 1921 the Graham family moved to the Everglades, about fifty miles outside Miami. The area was still a wilderness, with no houses and only a few shacks. The only other inhabitants were Seminole Indians.

The Grahams built houseboats on a couple of barges moored to the sides of one of the main canals that laced the Everglades. They lived on one and used the other as a guest house, and there they stayed until 1924, when Phil’s brother, Bill, was born. Bill was actually born on the houseboat, but Floss had said that if she was going to have a baby she needed a house, so about six months later the family moved to a solidly built rock farmhouse.

Phil’s memories of his early childhood were romantic. He described alligators sunning themselves on the ropes that anchored the houseboat, and portrayed himself and his friends as jumping overboard to swim in the canal. His best friend was Charlie Tigertail, a Seminole Indian whose brother was killed by a white man. The Indians would often take Mary and Phil in their dugout canoes up and down the canal. Charlie and other Seminoles taught Phil to hunt and fish—two passions that remained with him throughout his life. Years later, at our farm in Virginia, he would go fishing late and early and sometimes even all night. He had quail patches and bird dogs, and relentlessly pursued groundhogs with rifles that had telescopic sites.

There in the Everglades the Grahams hung on and eventually triumphed over the wilderness, the hurricanes that then regularly swept through, and the 1929 Crash. First, however, it was discovered that the experiment with the sugar cane was not working. After a hurricane struck in 1926 and flooded the entire area, the company gave up on sugar and, under the name Pennsuco Farming Company, took up large-scale truck farming, investing millions of dollars over the next few years, before Mr. Earle got discouraged and retreated completely, leaving Ernie with some of the land as a sort of severance.

Ernie looked around for a way to earn his living and decided to develop the small dairy that had been set up on the place to serve the Pennsuco employees. By early 1932, the Grahams were delivering two loads of milk a day to a friend with a small chain of grocery stores. Ernie had made a deal to supply milk for two cents a quart under the home-delivery
price. From that he began to build some routes, and the dairy grew. His trucks went into Miami every day to buy and bring back blocks of ice, and Phil was taken to school by the ice trucks—if the ice house moved, Phil moved too, to a school nearby. Because of his precocity, he had started school in the third grade in Hialeah. When the teacher found out he couldn’t read and was going to put him back a grade, his mother taught him to read so quickly he was able to stay on. Phil was always the youngest and smallest in his class, and therefore socially behind the others. Mrs. Graham worried about his friends when he was young. One was the son of a wealthy Cadillac dealer and had too much money, while another was the son of a “decoy,” a lady who sat on the back of a rumrunner knitting, to make it look like a pleasure boat or yacht.

Mainly, the Grahams were poor and had a difficult struggle. The Depression had hit Florida particularly hard. At Christmas, Phil’s mother saw that every child in the area got at least one present. She would go to a local store and spend a dime for each present; these gifts were all that many of those children had. Phil recalled that it was a good week when his family saved a quarter for the Saturday-night movie. His brother Bill remembers that the common wages they paid were twenty cents an hour for a ten-hour day. Until World War II, “we worked a seven-day week in the dairy. No days off and no vacations. We’d feed the cows early on Sunday so we’d get off early Sunday afternoon.” Eventually, the farm employed about fifty young single men, but even with the low wages and endless work, there were all kinds of people working there—including one Rhodes Scholar and several other college graduates.

With the farm operating fairly successfully, Ernie got involved in politics and spent years in public life, first on the State Road Board, later as state senator—years in which he campaigned for taxing the racetracks and using the funds to subsidize aid for older citizens. He wound up running for governor in 1943–44, suffering a narrow defeat. No one had ever been elected to state office from Dade County, which includes Miami and was unpopular with the rest of the rural state. Ernie almost beat the odds.

From school in Hialeah, Phil went on to high school in Miami. Years later he told me he had developed his wit and humor as a way to deal with his younger-boy social and athletic disadvantages and compete with boys in his class who were older and more sophisticated. His high-school yearbook notes his selection as the wittiest in the class. Toward the end of his life, he acknowledged to me that he used humor as a weapon with which to keep people at a distance.

Phil went from Miami High School to the University of Florida, where the boys with whom he roomed were athletes and politicians, including George Smathers, who later became a U.S. senator. In college Phil enjoyed fraternity life, and girls, and he drank a good deal of bathtub
gin before Prohibition was repealed. He ran Graham’s Dairy in the summers, when his family went on vacations to Michigan, which Ernie still thought of as home.

In 1934, when Phil was nineteen, his mother died of cancer—one of the great tragedies of his life. He was devastated; he had loved her deeply and was dependent on her love of him. He was so reluctant to talk about her that it was years before I realized this. He later confessed that he had cried himself to sleep night after night in college after she died.

Phil was kept out of school to work on the farm the year his mother was dying, and this year driving milk trucks, plus the summers running the farm, undoubtedly taught him how to get along with all kinds of people, those who worked for him and with him as well as the customers whom he had to please. He was also influenced by the battles that resulted from the differences between him—with his pleasure-loving gaiety and tendency to drink—and his hard-driving, teetotaler father.

Another great influence on Phil was an older man, a friend of his parents—one of several mentors in Phil’s life. W. I. Evans was a lawyer who was also involved in politics, and during her final illness, Phil’s mother had discussed with Mr. Evans, who was also the Grahams’ lawyer, her desire that Phil go to law school. In response to Floss’s question about the “best” law school, he said it was Harvard, so her dying wish, expressed to Phil and, more important, to Ernie, was that Phil go there.

When the time came, his father said he couldn’t afford to send Phil to
any
law school. But at the last minute he changed his mind. Since it was so late in the school year, Phil tried for the University of Michigan Law School, which turned him down. His father then turned to Claude Pepper, already in Florida politics and a graduate of Harvard Law, and Pepper succeeded in getting Phil admitted. It was easier in those days, when Harvard had a simple method of winnowing out its students: it took one-third more than it had room for and dropped the lowest third around Thanksgiving. In fact, when the new first-year students arrived, the faculty and administrators said to the freshman class assembled, “Look to the right of you and look to the left of you, because by Thanksgiving one of you won’t be here.” A young man named Philip Norton, later a friend of Phil’s, said he turned to the left of him and saw this young guy in a badly cut country suit, looking as though he had straw hanging out of his rather large ears, and decided that Phil was the one who wouldn’t be there.

Harvard Law School was a unique institution at that time. The boys there—and they were all boys then, with one or two exceptions—were either the brightest brains from the Ivy League or the brightest from CCNY, the New York City public college that had graduated Felix Frankfurter. Phil fell into neither category, but his unusual qualities and brains continued to serve him well. He always had an astonishing memory, an
ability to read quickly and remember what he’d read, and he used all that to good advantage. Phil never changed his basic ways—he went on hanging out at the races and in bars. Even so, he did well and thrived in the new environment. At the end of the first year, he was afraid that the all-important final exams had done him in. He told his father he had let him down after his sacrifice in sending him to law school: he thought he might have flunked. When his marks arrived, his father said, “I guess you didn’t flunk. It says here you were third in your class.”

From that position Phil made the
Law Review
and, at the end of his second year, became its president. This was undoubtedly one of those crucial events that make all the difference in a person’s life. It brought him a new intellectual stimulus, it taught him a lot, it raised his profile from fairly invisible to very visible, and it introduced him to Felix Frankfurter, one of the great influences on his life.

Two young men were ahead of Phil as potential presidents of the
Review
. Their rivalry succeeded in defeating both of them and creating a deadlock, so in the small hours of the morning the editors turned to Phil, who was relatively unknown and belonged neither to the grinds nor to the Ivy League elite. Prich later said they went and hauled Phil out of a bar and made him president of the
Law Review
.

Soon after this, Ed Huddleson, the previous year’s president, told Phil he had to meet Felix. As they were leaving for the meeting, Phil was puzzled to see Huddleson racing through the pages of
The New York Times
and asked what he was doing. Ed said he was preparing himself to reply to “all the questions the little so-and-so will want to discuss.”

So much of Phil’s life flowed from the year as president of the
Law Review
and from his relationship with Felix Frankfurter. Felix adopted Phil as one of his “boys” before he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court in January 1939, the middle of Phil’s last year in law school. It was with Felix and with new friends from the
Review
that Phil entered the world of great minds, ideas, and books, stimulating conversation, and above all an interest in current events. Phil had always loved politics and had spent years campaigning with his father, so he had developed an interest in public issues, but now he’d met a man obsessed with the national and international scene, with the uses of power and ideas, with people and politics and political theory.