The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [220]
In 1963, in the midst of her battle to keep the paper, Phil Graham suffered a spectacular public breakdown, was diagnosed with manic depression, and committed himself to a mental institution. Six weeks later, he talked his way out of the hospital for a weekend leave. He came home to Glen Welby, the Grahams’ sprawling rural Virginia farm retreat. On Saturday, after eating lunch with Kay, he shot himself in a downstairs bathroom while she was upstairs taking a nap. He was forty-eight.
His suicide left Kay with the paper, no longer threatened with its loss. She dreaded being in charge, but even though some suggested that she sell, she was absolutely determined to keep it; she saw her stewardship as a holding action until the next generation was ready to take over. “I didn’t know anything about management,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about complicated editorial issues. I didn’t know how to use a secretary. I didn’t know big things and small things and, worse still, I couldn’t tell them apart.”17
While Graham could project a determined confidence at times, at work she began to rely on other people as she constantly rethought and questioned her own decisions. “I just kept trying to learn the issues from the men who were running things,” she wrote. “And of course, they were all men.” She never trusted them or anyone else—but, of course, no one close to her had ever treated her in a trustworthy way. She would tentatively extend her confidence to someone, then second-guess herself and pull back. Alternately enthused, then disenchanted with her executives, she gained a fearsome reputation in the office. And all the while, she never stopped seeking advice.
“As decisions would come along in the course of a day where she was very uncertain how to proceed,” says her son Don, “she was literally reinventing the wheel. She would be called upon to be a top manager of a company when she’d never been a bottom manager of a company. She hadn’t watched people who were CEOs, except the way you watch your husband or your dad.
“And so she had the great habit, when she faced what she thought of as a difficult decision—it usually was a difficult decision—she would call directors, she would call friends whom she thought might have a relevant experience. It was partly getting advice to help her handle the problem. And it was partly trying out the friends as advisers to see who seemed to make sense and whom she’d call the next time.”18
Early on, Graham began to lean on Fritz Beebe, a lawyer and the chairman of the Washington Post Company, finding him a strong source of support as she struggled with her new job.19 By then, the Post was the smallest of three remaining Washington newspapers, with $85 million in yearly revenues and $4 million in profits.
Gradually she grew into her role. She and her managing editor, Ben Bradlee, had a vision of a national paper that would set a standard to rival the New York Times. Bradlee, born the WASPiest of Boston WASPs, a Harvard graduate whose Brahman of a first wife was the daughter of a U.S. Senator, had worked closely with intelligence agencies before turning to journalism. He was funny, brilliant, had an unexpected saltiness that belied his background, brought out the best in Graham—and encouraged reporters to thrive in an informal atmosphere of ambition and competition. Before long, the Post had developed a reputation for solid journalism. Three years after taking over the paper, Graham made Bradlee executive editor.
In 1970 Kay was freed from the tyranny of her mother, Agnes, who died in bed while Kay was visiting Mount Kisco on Labor Day weekend. Kay went up to her mother’s bedroom to check on her after the maid told her that Agnes had not rung for her breakfast, and found her in bed, “weirdly inert and already cold,” Graham wrote in her memoir. She did not cry; while superficial books and movies could turn her into “a weeper” and she sometimes cried when