Adlai Stevenson's Baffling Appeal to Women

One notable exception to the chauvinist tradition was Adlai Stevenson. Women enjoyed Adlai. In the end, my mother, my daughter, and I all had close friendships with him. Clayton Fritchey once told me a story that helps explain Adlai’s appeal—and that contrasts it with what many of us felt about other men in the Kennedy administration, including the president himself. About three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, Clayton saw the president in New York, at a time when Adlai was the ambassador to the United Nations and Clayton was his deputy. The three men were together at a party, and Clayton was helping himself to a drink on the balcony overlooking Central Park when the president came up behind him and said, "We haven’t had a chance to talk much tonight, but we've got a good subject in common," meaning Adlai. The president then told Clayton he didn't understand the hold Adlai had over women, commenting on how much Jackie liked and admired him and confessing that he himself didn’t have the ease with women that Adlai had. "What do you suppose it is?" he asked, adding, "Look, I may not be the best-looking guy out there, but, for God’s sake, Adlai's half bald, he's got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What’s he got that I haven’t got?"

Clayton's response hit on what I think women saw in Adlai and what they shied away from in other men of that era. "Mr. President, I’m happy to say that for once you have asked me a question I’m prepared to answer, one I can answer truthfully and accurately. While you both love women, Adlai also likes them, and women know the difference. They all respond to a kind of message that comes across from him when he talks to them. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they’re saying and what they’ve done, and that’s really very fetching."

The president's response was: "Well, I don’t say you're wrong, but I'm not sure I can go to those lengths."

Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), pp. 190-91.

Fourth-grade reading binge

The summer between fourth and fifth grades I spent almost entirely by myself reading in a room on the third floor of Mount Kisco, where I went through all of Dumas, eight volumes of Louisa May Alcott (starting with Little Women), Treasure Island, and a stirring adventure series by a man named Knipe. I counted up at the end, found that I had read around one hundred books, and wrote my parents that I was "positively floating in books." I couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, this early passion for reading somehow diminished after the fifth grade, until I read only sporadically. A little later on I was concentrating on movie magazines, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan. Later still, I resumed reading, particularly loving Dickens’s Great Expectations and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 

Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 50.

Serious reading, even when sick

I was allowed out of bed only four hours each day [when I had tuberculosis]. Lally used to come into my room after school every afternoon in her little green jumper, the Madeira School uniform, and have a snack while we visited. One day early in my forced hibernation, she found me reading a mystery, promptly removed it from my hands, and substituted Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. She was right that I shouldn’t waste this valuable time in bed reading trash or light, amusing books. All I needed was her gentle push and I finished all seven volumes.

Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p.284.