Personal History

Two messages came to me from President Kennedy. The one I received on the day of the funeral quoted Prime Minister Macmillan saying that when Phil called on him that summer he had found him particularly attractive and interesting. The president then said, ""I thought the service today was appropriate and moving--especially the last hymn. Phil was so helpful to me in so many ways since I have come here. We shall all miss him greatly and I send you and the children my deepest sympathy.'' Jackie Kennedy wrote me an eight-page letter, one of the most understanding and comforting of any I received. Just a few days after Phil's funeral, Jackie gave birth to the baby boy who died.

These days--from Phil's death through the funeral--that we all endured are as hazy to me now as they were then. If there is one regret I feel, one enormous failing, it's that I was so overwhelmed that I wasn't thoughtful enough or helpful enough with the children, whose trauma was even worse than mine. Phil was the bright, shining light in their lives. Each of the four had been through the months of his absence, only to get him back and then to lose him again.

Lally and Luvie [Pearson, wife of columnist Drew] at some point began insisting that what I needed was to get away from everything. They pressured me to go back to Europe with them, as did my mother by cable. I felt it would be impossible--even apart from the children, there was much too much to do, given the will, the estate, the company. Their rejoinder was that they had already packed for me and had my passport, and that I was going. I finally agreed to the plan. Bill and Steve bravely returned to their summer camps. Don stayed at his job with Scotty [Reston of The New York Times], living at home and spending a lot of time at the [Alfred] Friendlys' [managing editor of The Washington Post]. I took off with Luvie and Lally the day after the funeral to join my mother's chartered yacht at Istanbul.

That decision may have been right for me, but it was so wrong for Bill and Steve and even for Don--so wrong that I wonder how I could have made it. Would my younger boys have been better off going too? Would it have been better if I'd stayed home for them? This is, for me, the most painful thing to look back on. It's hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink nondecisions. Sometimes you don't really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did--moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.

Mrs. Graham returned to take over her legacy--The Washington Post, NEWSWEEK and two TV stations. Neither the newspaper nor the magazine was as powerful or as profitable as they later became. Mrs. Graham writes of the difficulty of her first years on the job:

I HAD VERY LITTLE IDEA OF WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO be doing, so I set out to learn. It's hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was. I knew neither the substance of the business and journalistic worlds in which I was moving nor the processes through which these worlds operated. I knew next to nothing about business and absolutely nothing about accounting. I couldn't read or understand a balance sheet. I remember my complete befuddlement and inability in the beginning to follow technical financial discussions. The mere mention of terms like ""liquidity'' made my eyes glaze over.