We have really never known what to do with our first ladies and that is particularly true in more recent times. On the one hand they are expecting to have causes. We can imagine a first lady been without a cause. On the other hand those causes are not permitted to intrude upon lawmaking or an official capacity. So its always been a tightrope and seeing how each of these women walk that tightrope tells you would not tells you a lot not only about them but about the institution and about society. The Washington Post company agreed monday to sell its flagship newspaper to amazon. Com founder and chief executive jeffrey these those. Ownership of the paper after four generations. Next week at back at former Washington Post owner the late Katharine Graham discussing her biography, personal history. Cspan author personal history did your children learn anything from this book about you . Guest thats a hard question. Im sure they probably did but i couldnt tell you exact a wife. Cspan all of the stuff in here about your early life and your husband about that, did you talk that out . Guest yes, i think they understand that he was ill. The oldest one was 20 and the youngest one was 11 so they had to deal with it then and always. Cspan the question i had after i read the book was why do you want us to know all of this . Guest i really dont suppose that i meant to tell everything to everybody but once i sat down to write my story i just tend to be frank and open and i wanted to be very truthful and i wrote it the way i saw it. I told it the best i could. Cspan when did you start it . Guest about six and a half years ago i started to do the research for this book. I actually had the idea even longer ago than that. Cspan you addressed early in the book that he wrote it yourself. Guest i did but i also had very good assistance from researcher evelyn swan. Cspan how did you go about it . Guest for about two years we did research because i had no diaries. So, we looked up all the letters and luckily i grew up in the day where we all wrote letters all the time. So we had a lot of those and we had memos from the post. We had a lot of papers that i didnt know we had and that helped a lot. And then we did 250 more or less interviews with my contemporary starting with schoolmates and working to politicians and judges and other people that we dealt with. That helped fill in the record. Cspan what year did your father by the book . Guest in 1933. He had just gotten out of the governmengovernmen t had been out for three weeks. He started the reconstruction under hoover and he stayed as Federal Reserve chairman for a little while and the roosevelt. He didnt like the monetary policies and went to mt. Kisco. The post came up three weeks later for an auction on the steps of the building and he bought it anonymously. Cspan what did he bid on it . Guest 825,000. Host . Cspan how many newspapers were in washington . Guest there were five and the was fifth in the field of five so it had a circulation of 50,000. So he started in and he was the businessman in the david knew how to turn around this mrs. But he never had any newspaper experience and he encountered the most tremendous difficulties in finding his way up. He really did a terrific job starting with nothing. Cspan where is mt. Kisco . Guest mt. Kisco where they lived in the summer was about 50 miles from new york city and Westchester County and we went there every summer. They have till this large house there thinking that my father was going to live there when he was on wall street and he was going to commute to wall street but it just got built when we moved to washington, when they moved to washington. Cspan when did your father made your mother . Guest in 1912. They met in a museum in new york city and my father picked up a friend and i were driving downtown and an old car that he had called the stanley steamer. He picked up his friend whom he didnt know very well or like very much and he said he would like to give him a ride but he was going to stop off at a japanese print show. They did that and they saw my mother Walking Around at the show. My father said to his friend, that is the woman i am going to marry. And so the friend said, well then you have to speak to her. My father said no, no that would spoil everything. One of us is going to meet her and whoever meets her first will call the other one. About two weeks later the friend called my father and said guess what . And he said you have met the girl. He said, i have and i have arranged that we are all going to have dinner. That was on lincolns birthday and they were married two years later. Cspan what impact did it have on his life that he was jewish and she was guest neither one of them i have to say we are very religious. My mother may be a little more than my father. He had at the age of 14 studied for a bar mitzvah and then he decided, he said i believe some of that but not all of that and im not going to do that. He was very very ethical, very driven, very immoral but he wasnt formally religious. Neither was she buys but her family was and his family was. And so she took us to church, but not very formally. Cspan issue grew older from time to time he seen the book were antisemitism came into life. How often . Guest almost not at all strangely when i was young. A couple of times. One was when i was in school and somebody was casting the merchant of venice sunset maybe i should pay playing shylock because i was jewish and i didnt have any idea that i was or there was such a thing and i knew nothing about it. But some other point they said my father was a millionaire and i didnt know what either one of them had met. I went home and asked my mother what it meant to be jewish and what it meant to be a millionaire. I dont think i got any explanation for either one at that point. But then later in college it came up with this at coors was more of an issue. I had spent my whole youth bizarrely unaware of the issues or of antisemitism or of anything. I should have known a lot more about it actually ,com,com ma known both of their heritage is and what it meant to be jewish and what it meant to be lutheran but it simply wasnt mentioned. Either way im sure they were not ashamed or worried about it. Its just that nothing intimate was talked about in my family. Righto how many other kids in the family . Guest there are five of us in all and i was the fourth. Cspan how many are still alive . Guest i have two sisters, my sister Rosa Florence and one younger. She was four years younger than me and there were two years between the rest of us. Cspan you grow up where . Guest well we spent our first years in new york and that is the strange part of the story because my family had moved to washington. They were there for almost four years before they moved us to washington so we were living mostly with governessgoverness s and music teachers and things like that in a new york apartment. They would come up in between and visit us and occasionally my sisters would get around to washington. But i was a baby. When i was four we all moved to washington. Cspan where did you go to college . Guest i went for two years to the universiuniversi ty of chicago. I changed. Cspan and a fellow named Mortimer Adler i see taught you. Guest well it was of course Mortimer Adler and Albert Hutchens together the president of the university. Great ideas in the western world. They thought hutchens had a theory that i think started at st. Johns college in annapolis. If you learned the great ideas of the western world, but that would be your education. So this course started with aristotle and went all the way up to through saint st. Thomas aquinas and to freud and marx. They drilled you. It was a socratic method and you have to kind of stand up for yourself and defend your ideas to them. It was very rigorous training and i really liked it but it was very hard. Cspan who became your favorite philosopher out of them . Guest i think i liked the greeks. I liked aristotle who talked about happiness and it ends up like him i was really interested in that. Cspan after college what . Guest well, i had proudly gone off and got myself a job at the university of chicago. I mean i used my Labor Relations professor paul douglas who later became a senator knew the publisher of the thin chicago times the afternoon tabloid and i went down there and asked him for a job and he said he would take me but if i wasnt any good then i shouldnt think he was going to keep me. I said i would like to try it. I went home and my father asked me to go to San Francisco on a train because he was going to the reserve. I said fine. I had never seen San Francisco and i stayed there while he was at the bohemian grove. He came back and i said i love this town. I will swallow my pride and give up my job in chicago if you help me find a job. He did. Cspan you met harry bridges. Guest i covered along shermans neighbor a lockout on the whole waterfront, everybody working in the warehouses. It was two years after they buried bloody wellknown along shermans strike. I was asked by the labor reporter to do the legwork on this. I went up and down the waterfront and got to know the negotiator for the union sam kegel and the head of the warehousers union and occasionally harry bridges and i have to say although it was incorrect these days i socialize with them at night. We went up and down the waterfront in what is known as euler makers. Cspan and they were, whether makers . Guest guest whiskey beer and mixed any to get a third one free if you pay 25 cents for the first two. Cspan you say my political outlooks developed further as a committed liberal primarily passionate antifascists and sympathetic for the labor movement. Still there . Guest honestly, no. I want to do with organized labor and we do but i think then they were just getting organized and the industrial were all new, the steel and the miners were unorganized. They were just getting organized and so they would situate their Labor Conditions were quite bad. Right now, some of the unions are fine just the way they are and many businesses i feel have gotten into the practices that are not particularly constructive and they have to be rethought. Like featherbedding when its not needed. Cspan after all of these ears what is your old philosophy today . How would you define yourself . Guest i am about where i was. I am centrist probably more democratic than not but i am independent and i voted for republicans as well as democrats but i feel strongly about issues of Racial Justice and poverty in cities and i feel strongly that there has to be something done within the context of the way this country is. And i am obviously committed to all the values such as freedom of speech and the things that i feel enlightened the semiliberals. Cspan do you think people would be surprised you voted for george bush in 1980 . Guest i suppose so because i think the most surprised person would probably be president bush. Write to what what you think youd be surprised . Guest well i think most president s get sensitive about the post and newsweek as well and he had his issues with us but i think any president does. But i suspect he would not think i voted for him. Cspan give us a thumbnail sketch of the post today. How many newspapers and television stations . How big is said and what is the revenue on a yearly basis . Guest we are about ad 1. 6 million in annual revenues and the Company Holds mainly the Washington Post and we have a small newspaper the herald and half of the International Herald tribune and may have newsweek and Six Television stations and 1. 5 million cable connections, and we also have which is our medium of the Washington Post web site. Cspan are you still chairman of the executive committee . Committee. Guest i am. Cspan how long were you chairman of the Washington Post . Guest 30 years. Thats a little bit average. Cspan go back to San Francisco in the to washington. What was your first job at the post . Guest well, actually i worked there summers in college. After school. In 1939 when my father came out and suggested that i come back to San Francisco and work on the post and it was time for me to leave there in many ways and i was happy to do that. Cspan what was your job . Guest it was the low person on the editorial page. I edited letters to the editor. I made up that page and i wrote a few editorials. Cspan when did you meet phil gramm . Guest that year that i came back. I was really surprised because when i left washington to go to college it was still a very republican town and it was kind of stuffy. You know there were parties of my parents age and then our parties were dances and thirdgeneration real estate. When i got back the new deal had come and the town was just full of attractive young men. It was not the town i remembered and i was simply thrilled. Cspan how did you meet him . Guest i met him in a house where i got to know some of the people, two of the people that worked on the posts that were living there and there were 12 bachelors in this house. He was one of the 12 and i didnt meet him until he was going out with some other women, girls. And i actually met him one night when we were all going to a restaurant and we were coming back. They were living at s street and they havent moved to arlington. The tail end of the party was coming in and i unfortunately a screen fell out onto his head and he was startled and looked up. I looked at him and in fact i met a girl that night when i went to the bathroom and she said she went to law school and i said how marvelous. I could never do that. Tell me about it. It. How do he do it . She said i am engaged to phil gramm and he comes by and picks me up and we talk things over and that helps a lot so i just said oh. And then they broke up and he went out with a friend of mine. She said did i know phil . I said no i didnt and she said you should. Hes just the greatest. I said oh. And then about new years my sister gave a party and invited everybody at the house. He was in the party and we first got to know each other that way. This developed rather quick lee because the third time we went out together he discussed marriage. Cspan the third time. Guest the third time. Cspan how much later did you marry . Guest i said this was a little hasty but i was intrigued by the idea. But i said we have to be deliberate and wait a month. I think we hardly did wait a month and we were married that june. He was working for Supreme Court justice and he was going to clerk for justice frankfurter that year so when the court adjourned we were married in 1940. Cspan both just as reagan frankfurter were at the wedding . Was one of them the best men . Guest no. Cspan justice frankfurter was how close to you and your husband . Guest he was a mentor to phil who had gotten to know him when he was still at Harvard Law School and he chose the first five clerks from the Law School Board of which phil was one. And i had known him because my parents were friends of his too that i did not know him well. That year we have really became great friends and he was simply wonderful to us. And he was so funny and so intimate. He liked the boys to argue with him and particularly the law clerks. If they didnt agree with him they would indulge in screaming fights. I was shocked by some of their manners but he liked this confrontation and he liked to discuss issues like that. He was wonderful to me and to us and both he and mrs. Frankfurter who became a friends too were very very close to us. Cspan how many children did you and phil gramm have . Guest i had for and by oldest is a list of those who is a journalist and writes for the post on Foreign Affairs but everythings too. Donald who was chief executive officer of the company. William, called bill who has an Investment Partnership in los angeles but who lives on the vineyard in the summer and is very interested in loves the vineyard. He lives next door to his children and i love that in stephen who is married in new york and is getting a postgraduate degree in literature and teaching but he has been in the theater and has produced and has an experimental theater. Cspan you lost a son. Guest i lost their first baby which was tremendously traumatic, who was born full term but because it was in washington during the beginning of the war and the hospitals were very busy. It was an accidental thing in the hospital that really shouldnt have happened. Phil went into the army army right afterward so its pretty devastating. Cspan what impact did it have on you . Guest well it was just awful. I thought phil was going into the army and it it was fan of everything and we would never have any children something might happen to him. It was a pretty awful moment. Cspan how long could phil graham spend in the army . Guest well he went in and it was two and a half years i think. Cspan when did he go to work for the post . Guest my father talked to him when he was an officer school. He had by this time invested heavily in both Financial Resources and energy in an effort in building up the post matt. It was very discouraging because they were losing money every year and he was making progress of great kinds both in circulation and to some extent advertising. It was just so terribly discouraging and he wanted to make sure that he had a successor in place. My brother was by then a psychiatrist and was interested in madison. He asked bill if he would be interested. We had long talks about it and i said he had to decide and he did finally. He said what did i think . I said i loved washington but he wanted originally to go into law and politics in florida. Cspan this half brother being senator bob graham . Guest he did what his brother aspired to and that is nice. I think hes a great and very fine senator. Host . Cspan how many years was phil graham a publisher . Guest 17 and during that time he became publisher when he was not quite 31 because my father went on the post right after he got back in january of 46. Six months later my father was offered to the president of the world bank by president truman and he said to phil i wont leave if you dont want me to but this is kind of my first