Word: phil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...controversies like this, however, that Madalyn O'Hair lived for. "I love a good fight," she said. "I guess fighting God and God's spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn't it?" She fought them at colleges, was the star of the first episode of Phil Donahue's pioneering talk show, and continued to file lawsuits, all at a near pathological level of pugnacity, for 32 years. Not all atheists feel the need to criticize, let alone mock, religion. But O'Hair reputedly toppled bingo tables in churches. Watching a female orangutan on television, she snipped, "The Virgin just...
...grew up in privilege. Her father was a well-connected Jewish financier who made millions on Wall Street and was an adviser to Presidents. Her mother, a writer and socialite, counted among her friends the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the novelist Thomas Mann. In 1940 Kay married Phil Graham, a charismatic protege of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and later something of a golden boy of the postwar liberal establishment. It was quite a family...
...oppressive, particularly the subtle ways in which Phil--she realizes in retrospect--condescended to her, damaged her self-esteem, made her content to be "the tail to his kite." She never wavered in her devotion to him, however, even when he had an affair with a young Newsweek stringer in the early '60s. By that time, his behavior was becoming more erratic, the result of a manic-depressive disorder that was treated by a psychiatrist who "did more harm than good," she says, recommending existentialist philosophy in lieu of drugs. Finally, on the day he returned home after a stay...
...especially revealing about the insecurities that plagued her when she took over the Post after Phil's death. "I still had little idea of how to relate to people in a business environment," she says, "and no idea how closely I was being watched by everyone." She also had to unlearn a few of Phil's bad habits. He had thought nothing of mingling politics with journalism: a close friend and adviser to Lyndon Johnson, for instance, the Post publisher was instrumental in persuading John Kennedy to pick L.B.J. as his running mate in 1960. After becoming President, Johnson cultivated...
...into one of the nation's great papers; she also provides an invaluable inside glimpse of some of the most critical turning points in American journalism, says TIME's Richard Zoglin. Graham is especially revealing about the insecurities that plagued her when she took over the Post after husband Phil's suicide: "I still had little idea of how to relate to people in a business environment" she says, "and no idea how closely I was being watched by everyone." Graham made many smart moves. She saw that the Post needed to be improved editorially and hired the right...