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Journalists as Generalists. Publisher Graham has made himself the pillar of the Post. He calls the turn on editorial policy (and, a skillful writer, occasionally drafts an editorial himself), keeps his hand on newsroom salaries, hiring, new features and on such decisions as how many reporters will cover the political conventions (eight), and whether the paper should hold open for late Wisconsin primary returns (it did). Staffers like his flair for an old soldier's easy profanity, his first-name familiarity and quickness to bestow praise.
From the start Graham meshed well with father-in-law Meyer, who has gradually moved to a back seat, where he now watches the Post editorialize for low tariffs instead of the high ones long dear to his heart. Graham has also won the admiration of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Agnes Meyer, 69, longtime reporter and sometime Post contributor—though he refused to run her latest story, a piece attacking segregation, because he thought it overstepped the paper's gradualist line. In 1948 he became proprietor as well as publisher when Meyer turned over all the voting stock to him and Kay Graham. To keep the paper on the public-service track, Meyer also set up a self-perpetuating board with veto power on any buyer.
In his grey-curtained office, puffing a Parliament (40 a day) with his long legs stretched over the desk, Graham keeps communications lively between top-layer Washington and the Post on two softly ding-donging telephones. Often he has a Senator, an ambassador or a Cabinet officer to his luncheon anteroom, where he also holds executive conferences regularly. He manages to get to dinner only three or four nights a week with Kay and their four children (Elizabeth, 12; Donald, 10; William, 7; Stephen. 3) at his eight-bedroom Georgetown mansion.
The expanding Post and Times-Herald plans next year to more than double its five-year-old quarters with a $5,500,000 building addition. But as a newspaper it has more vital needs. Its local staff is still undermanned and stretched thin; its seven-man national bureau (one-third the size of the New York Times bureau) does a spotty job; it has never had its own foreign correspondents. Phil Graham is aware of these problems. "Until two years ago," he says, "we did not know if we would survive. I'm a non-rushing fellow. I hope to expand everywhere in a patient, planned, overall manner."
Meantime Graham enjoys his work. "The most rewarding thing," he says, "is that journalists are among the very few generalists left in a boringly specialized world. You are in touch with everything from the local grass roots to the most complicated international thing. You rub up against so many things that you have an opportunity to be decent, constructive and half intelligent about some of them."
As the man who comes to breakfast with the most influential people in the world's most influential city, Phil Graham has great power and responsibility. He realizes this, and aims beyond it. He dreams of greatness for his paper. "I want independence and institutionalism," he says. "Before I die, I should like to see the Post like La Prensa of Buenos Aires, the Times of London or the New York Times, with a sense of vocation on the part of the people who write and edit it, and with a continuity of fundamental principle."