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The paper also wields its influence behind the scenes, helps make the news it reports. In late 1949 Post editors grew concerned over the rising influence of gangsters in U.S. politics. While Star Reporter Eddie Folliard went to New York to do a series on such "tygoons" as Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, Graham conceived a congressional investigation and began scanning the U.S. Senate to cast a likely Senator in the top role. He needed a man who 1) did not come from a state to which the corrupt trail would lead, and 2) could handle himself on TV.
With the help of his longtime friend, Washington Lawyer Ed Wheeler, Graham hit on the virtually unknown junior Senator from Tennessee. But Estes Kefauver was reluctant. Graham gave him a long pep talk, finally exploded: "Damn it, Estes, don't you want to be Vice President?" That was the speech that launched Kefauver into his celebrated investigation and the deeper waters of U.S. politics. Since then, Graham, who shudders at the thought of Kefauver for President, has begun feeling like Frankenstein.
Graham was the first newsman to wrest assurance from Adlai Stevenson that he would accept the Democratic nomination in 1952. Through Reporter Folliard at the convention, the publisher sent Delegate Stevenson a note asking him to telephone. On the phone he got Stevenson to agree that it would be "an act of arrogance" to turn the nomination down. The result: Folliard scored a beat in the Post with a story that Stevenson would accept.
Dream Man. The pattern of Phil Graham's life is the envy of many a politician and looks, indeed, like a quick montage of the American dream. Graham was born in South Dakota in the Black Hills mining town of Terry, near the site where Calamity Jane died. When Phil was six, his father Ernest, an engineer who had tried mining and farming in South Dakota and Michigan with no luck, took the family to the Florida Everglades to launch an ambitious agricultural experiment for a sugar company. After a dozen years of floods, muck fires, hurricanes, frost and insects, the company wrote off the experiment as a loss and let Manager Graham keep as much of the land as he could pay taxes on. He began dairy farming. During the Depression, Phil took a year away from the University of Florida to drive milk trucks for his father. Later the elder Graham helped introduce beef cattle to Florida. Today, at 71, he runs a 7,000-acre empire with 2,500 head of dairy and Angus cattle, smack at the edge of the booming Miami environs, where 162 acres that he gave Phil are now being negotiated for sale at $3,000 an acre, which works out to $486,000.
As a skinny lad nicknamed "Muscle-bound," Phil read omnivorously, graduated from high school at 16, "wittiest" and president of his class. He breezed through college, where he roomed with Florida's Democratic Senator George Smathers. At Harvard Law School he won the prized presidency of the Law Review, graduated tenth in a class of 400 and caught the eye of New Deal Talent Scout Professor Felix Frankfurter. That landed him a job as Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed's law clerk. The next year Graham clerked for Frankfurter himself.