Personal History by Katharine Graham Read Free Book Online

am sure you would do so—if you happened to think of it. Thinking after all is what counts.
    Her last full week of what turned out to be more than two months in Europe she spent with the Steichens in their simple house in Voulangis, where he was growing and breeding delphiniums, a lifelong passion. With little to do, she wrote my father that she had grown “uneasy about you, the kids, the cook, the strawberries that weren’t being preserved.…”
    She sailed for home on a Dutch steamer on July 31, as promised, and luckily, too, since it was one of the last boats to leave Europe before World War I erupted two weeks later. Steichen’s house was near to what became the front as the Germans threatened to break through at the first Battle of the Marne. Ignorant of his extreme danger, Steichen cabled my father asking what he ought to do. “Suggest immediate orderly retreat,” was my father’s firm reply. The Steichens were just able to leave for America and took refuge at Mount Kisco with my parents.
    On her way home, my mother had a nightmare in which she saw herself as her father, irresponsible and self-absorbed to the extent of ruining his family’s life and hers. She made up her mind not to be like that. And, in fact, the time away, despite the stormy exchanges, seems to have helped. She returned with a new commitment to this difficult relationship, determined to make it work. In a letter she had mentioned resting up before enduring more of “the baby business.” I suppose her assumption was that she would have one every two years—and, indeed, she had my brother Bill a year later. And two years after that, on June 16, 1917, I was born.

— Chapter Two —
    I N LINE WITH my father’s “map of life,” the time was right for him to turn his attention to public service. In the immediate years before my birth, he had begun to play a semipublic role in New York. In 1913, he had been elected to the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange and had worked hard to effect the kinds of changes and reforms he had been espousing in financial circles. He was active in helping manage the various panics that hit the stock exchange as the threat of war in Europe loomed larger, and then later, as the likelihood grew of America’s involvement in the war.
    By the fall of 1914, for example, the war in Europe threatened the textile industry, largely because the German dye cartel at that time supplied at least 90 percent of our dyes. My father loaned Dr. William Gerard Beckers, a German-trained chemist, the money for plant facilities and a much-needed laboratory to continue his experimentation with manufacturing dyes. In 1916, Beckers’s company merged with two other corporations to create the National Aniline and Chemical Company, and a few years after the war, my father negotiated a merger of National Aniline with four older companies. The integrated company thus created, the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, never missed a dividend throughout the Depression. By 1931, his holdings were worth $43 million, and the dividends were later to help cover losses suffered by
The Washington Post
.
    Despite several financial setbacks, and even before the huge success of Allied Chemical, my father’s wealth was considerable. By 1915, his fortune was estimated at around $40–60 million. But making money, satisfactory as it was, was never his primary objective. As he did throughout his life, he looked for ways to make his money work for the public good. He had become engaged in many welfare organizations. He was also president of Mount Sinai Hospital, and his interest in mental health was already evident in his support for building clinics. He had set up a fund at his alma mater, Yale, to train young men for public service. At the same time, hewas beginning to hanker for some opportunity to serve the government himself. Being Republican, and having contributed to Republican campaigns and causes, he could see no immediate