A: Yes, he supported Alger Hiss largely because he had been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurt. Frankfurt felt very strongly that Hiss was innocent. Hiss was accused of spying also. But Phil was interested in being a with-it kind of guy, very modern, up to the minute, involved in the thinking of his times. So the thinking of his times was the Cold War and was anti-Soviet and get all the domestic spies. He eventually gave in to this way of thinking, with the majority of his friends and associates thinking if Hiss wasn't a spy himself he should at least be made an example of because there were spies among us.

So he was instrumental in that, but before he did turn around on Hiss, I believe he accused Nixon of excesses in trying to prosecute Hiss. Hiss was one of the case was that Nixon made his reputation on as an anti-Communist and as an important national political figure. He was the one who was running around screaming about Hiss, so Phil Graham criticized Nixon for this.

Nixon takes things like that very personally and he never forgot it. So when he became president a number of years later, Phil Graham was dead, Katharine was the head of the Washington Post and she made her usual overtures to the incumbent president. You know, "Come over, get to know my editors, tell them how you want your stories covered." And Nixon, instead of accepting it, he rejected it because he was still angry about what happened fifteen years ago. So he rejected her overtures and then for her own reasons, I guess she had nothing to lose, went after him.

You see, everybody that was involved in that Watergate investigation was doing it from their own perspective. Woodward was doing it from the Naval Intelligence perspective, Bernstein was doing it from the perspective of being a reporter who finally wanted to do a story that would get him out of his suburban courtroom beat. Katharine Graham wanted to keep Ben Bradlee happy and Bradlee had his own sources of information about, you know, Nixon is going to be brought down and you're going to be the one to do it. And she didn't care because she hated Nixon by that time.

If she had had a close friendship with Nixon, if Nixon hadn't rejected her friendship, she would have protected him the way that she had protected Reagan. Because none of those Reagan scandals ever got pursued by the Post the way the Nixon scandals did. In fact, one of the first things that the Reagan people did when Reagan got into office was to make friends with Katharine Graham and that was precisely for that reason. They decided that Nancy should be best friends with Katharine Graham and they did it. They got her over there, they met her, they had her invited over to the White House, they just did all these things. And nothing bad about Reagan ever got in the Post unless it was somewhere else first They just had to do it to show that they were still a legitimate newspaper. But they never broke any stories on Reagan that were damaging and he sailed through eight years looking as good as she could keep him looking.

Q: Before we get too far from Phil Graham, I'd like to talk a little bit more about his suicide. Getting back to the article that Leary wrote, he seemed to suggest that there was a reason to believe that it could have been something more than suicide, that there's no indication or public record that Graham wasn't done in. And that the "suicide" happened shortly after this public event where Graham was talking about the JFK/Mary Meyer liaison. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

A: Phil died in 1963 and it's now 1992. There's still continuing speculation, 29 years later that he was murdered. In my book, I wrote it as a suicide because that's the way it's been represented and I didn't have any independent knowledge of anything else. If I were doing it today, or if I ever do another edition, I will probably expand on that and spend some time investigating it and finding out whether there is any evidence that it was murder. There were a couple of reasons why it could have been murder. One is the one you mentioned. The people that were protecting Kennedy might have done it because of he was a manic depressive. He was in and out of institutions and he was very mentally unstable. A lot of that probably had to do with the fact that he married into a wealthy family. He married the boss' daughter and they gave him the newspaper, but they were watching every move he made. So he did not react well to the fact that Katharine Graham's father had owned the Washington Post. He may have been killed for that reason, if he was killed.