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When he went to Washington in 1939, Graham joined a group of eligible bachelors in a pillared Arlington mansion called Hockley Hall. Slim, attractive Kay Meyer, then 22, who attended Hockley Hall parties, invited all the residents to a coming-out party for her sister Ruth at the Eugene Meyer mansion on Washington's Crescent Place. There Graham met Kay, a $25-a-week editorial assistant on her father's paper. A University of Chicago graduate (and ex-student of Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas), she was as keen a New Deal supporter as Graham himself. After two more encounters and a single date, they became engaged. They were married in June 1940.
"Look into Gas." After his year with Frankfurter, Graham saw the New Deal fading into the defense effort. He followed, landing with one foot in the Lend-Lease Administration and the other in the Office for Emergency Management. As an ''expediter,'' Graham bowled through bottlenecks and red tape with highhanded ease, won kudos for his role in boosting high octane gas output and lending $8 billion in V-Loans to get defense plants humming. When he lacked the right to check on lagging gasoline procurement, he had OEM's Chief Wayne Coy put a slip of paper on the President's desk reading: "Look into high octane gas." F.D.R.'s initials turned it into a badge of authority.
In July 1942 Graham enlisted in the Army Air Forces as a private—but he went right on operating in uniform. He wound up as an intelligence officer on the staff of Far Eastern Air Commander General George C. Kenney. Learning that General Douglas MacArthur's staff was holding out information on Kenney, he set up a short-cut system of getting it to the air general. When Kenney, on a mission to Washington for MacArthur, was barred by the Pentagon from seeing Roosevelt, Graham fixed up a White House visit out of channels.
After the war (he was discharged as a major), Graham felt tempted to return to Florida and enter politics. He also felt the pull of Washington—and an offer from aging Post Publisher Meyer, whose only son, Dr. Eugene Meyer III, now 40, had staked out an interest in medicine. Graham brooded, finally chose Washington. The publisher pondered whether to break Graham in at the bottom, then decided to skip the red tape. On Jan. 1, 1946 he went to work as associate publisher. Six months later, Graham became publisher of the Washington Post.
"Can We Buy a Pitcher?" When he brought in an amateur at the top, Yaleman Eugene Meyer was following his own pattern. He had never dipped a pen into journalism until he was 57. By then he had succeeded in two other careers. As a financier, he multiplied the real estate and banking fortune built by his father, who came to the U.S. from Alsace. As a Government administrator—governor of the Federal Reserve Board, first chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corp., etc.—he served under every President from Wilson to F.D.R. He wanted the Post not only for the role it would give him in Washington's life, but to perform another kind of public service.