Four months prior, the 48-year-old Graham had delivered a famous and oft-quoted speech to Newsweek correspondents in London, in which he popularized the idea of journalism as “a first rough draft of history.” (Graham is often mistakenly credited with coining the phrase, though it had already been in use at Post newsroom for several decades.)

The year leading up to Graham’s death was a turbulent one for him and his family. In 1962, he began an affair with Australian journalist Robin Webb, for whom he would later threaten to divorce his wife Katharine Meyer Graham. With Webb, he traveled to a publishing convention in Phoenix and caused a stir when, taking the microphone in a manic state, he started talking about the alleged affairs of John F. Kennedy, with whom he had been closely associated for some time.

Post vice president James Truitt arranged with Kennedy to send Air Force 2 to retrieve Graham, who checked in for the first of two brief stays at Chestnut Lodge, then a leading psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Md., that has since burned down. There he was diagnosed with manic depression, a condition today known as bipolar disorder. On Aug. 3, having apparently made noticeable improvements, he convinced doctors to let him take a retreat to the Virginia farmhouse. He committed suicide that day.

Truitt, an intimate of the Grahams whom Ben Bradlee would later force to resign, committed suicide himself in 1981, still despondent over his treatment at the newspaper after Philip’s death.

Katharine Graham revealed in her 1997 autobiography Personal History (which her biographer Deborah Davis reviewed for Washington City Paper) that she felt her husband received inadequate treatment at Chestnut Lodge, going so far as to say that his condition required electroshock therapy. For her part, Katharine would go on to helm the Post, becoming its de facto publisher during the famed Watergate era and, in 1979, becoming the first woman to hold the title officially.

A South Dakota native, Philip Graham graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to two Supreme Court justices. In 1940, he married Katharine, daughter of millionaire Post owner Eugene Meyer, who made Graham publisher in 1946. Two years later, the Grahams took control of the Post Company stock.

During his time in D.C., Graham rubbed shoulders with a group of like-minded politicos known as the Georgetown Set, and came to know both Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, Graham played a significant role in convincing JFK to appoint Johnson to the vice presidency instead of Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. Graham also had a hand in the appointments of no less than three more friends to the Kennedy administration, including then-Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon.

For the impossibly scrutable print platform of Washington City Paper, I wrote this week about Dan Snyder's pinching the good name of Robert F. Kennedy.

OK, just the guy's good initials. But still. Snyder named the new party deck at FedExField the "RFK Standing Stomping Club" but never asked permission from the Kennedys or RFK Stadium's owners. Pick up a copy, read the column, pray for a bumper crop of dirty Craigslistesque personals to return to our pages, commit a random act.

Snyder is a trademark obsessive. He won't let anybody use the marks he owns, and he loves trying to claim ownership of all sorts of words and phrases to make money off them. When he first bought the Redskins in 1999, he immediately began banning the use of the team's name in any marketing scheme, publication title, or TV news segment unless he got paid for that use. That's his right. As pointed out in the piece, during his disastrous run atop the board of directors at Six Flags, he tried to register the phrase "You Are Here" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

"You Are Here"? Really? Really!

(He's also been on the verge of losing federal trademark protections for "Redskins" for years because of its racist undertones. And overtones. And whole tones.)

So it's rather impossible to think Snyder would go ahead and put "RFK" on FedEx's new standing-room-only section, where tickets run a ridiculous $152.50 plus tens of dollars in, um, convenience fees per, without considering that those letters weren't his to play with.

But maybe, in the end, Snyder's within his rights: Since Robert Kennedy is a historical figure and not an entertainer, the legal waters run muddy when it comes to infringement. Had Snyder called the SRO area the Dead Kennedys Standing Stomping Club, he'd've been sued and would've lost.

But, legal or not, "RFK" wasn't the best choice. Forget that the Kennedys are pissed about Bobby's initials going on the Standing Stomping Grounds. Given that the new sections are supposed to be all about Hooters girls and budget unconsciousness, shouldn't Snyder have named the place after Teddy Kennedy?

But when an exclusive investigation by Cheap Seats Daily's one-man I-Team (slogan: "There is an 'I" in 'I-Team'"!) uncovered the shocking truth about his Cowboys non-career, Vaughn first blamed the bogosity on his "webmaster," then told reporters following up on the incorrectitudes that he'd also played for the New Orleans Saints and the New Jersey Generals.

There is just as much evidence that he played for those teams as there is that he played for the Cowboys.

In other, um, word: None.

But voters in the 24th District, a jurisdiction that includes FedExField, the Home of the Washington Redskins, didn't hold the 0-3 record with football boasts against Vaughn.

On Democratic Party Primary Day, Vaughn got 20.52 percent of the vote, good for second place in the field of 10 wannabe delegates. The top three votegetters in the primary move on to the bonus round on Election Day in November. Given the heavy Dem concentration in the district, qualifying for the general election means Vaughn is all but assured of retaining his seat.

"My credibility is all I have," Vaughn told the Gazette newspapers after the I-Team investigation. Well, your credibility AND your 3-year run with the Dallas Cowboys.

The Washington Redskins now make a point of letting folks know they don't belong to Washington. The team puts "Loudoun County" as the dateline on all its press releases. That's an odd practice —datelines are usually reserved for cities, and the team's offices at Redskins Park are located in Ashburn, Va.

But, Dan Snyder had his flacks start adding the county dateline last year after supervisors way out there (Mapquest tells me Ashburn's more than 40 miles from midtown) agreed to pay him $250,000 for the right to call the county the "Corporate Home of the Washington Redskins." And since his boss took the Virginia taxpayers' money, Redskins mouthpiece Larry Michael manages to work the phrase "in the heart of Loudoun County" into his broadcasts about the team again and again.

D.C. has no such business deal with the Redskins. Yet Adrian Fenty of late has done a lot of catering to the team that left the city in a huff after the 1996 season. He declared this week "Beat Dallas Week" at Redskins GM Bruce Allen's behest, and then the Mayor appeared at a team-organized pep rally at Powell Elementary School.

I'm particularly intrigued by Fenty's allegiances to the Redskins this week, because I spent a lot of time lately looking at his very dysfunctional relationship with a sports franchise that still plays in the city, in fact right where the Skins used to play: D.C. United. The soccer team, of course, has been wanting to leave the city ever since the mayor failed to follow through on a pledge to build United a stadium. The D.C.-based franchise and its fans wish the D.C. mayor would show the real home team the same sort of love that he shows the team based in the Corporate Home of the Washington Redskins..

Guess there's an election...

I want Snyder to get an at-bat, for crissakes. Hell, for my sakes.

I wrote a column about Snyder 11 years ago. He was 12 years old, and already a superstar all over his Centreville neighborhood. I'd just seen him hit a game winning home run in the last inning of the Southwestern Youth Association's Major League Championship, the local Little League. That was his 19th homer of the year in 21 games for his SYA squad, the Rockies. Little League games last just six innings. Translated into a big league schedule of 162 nine-inning games, that comes out to a 219-homer season. Snyder also batted .796 for his last year of kiddie ball.

"I can see Brandon going all the way to the majors," a kid with braces announced outside the Rockies dugout after that 1999 championship game, while Snyder swapped Pokemon cards with teammates. I was right there with the kid.

While following Snyder through a great career at nearby Westfield High, where he earned Washington Post player of the year honors, to his being taken by the O's with the 13th pick in the first round of the 2005 MLB draft and given a $1.6 million dollar deal to skip college, I remained certain that my original scouting report on the 12-year-old Snyder would pan out: He was going to make it to the bigs.

But then Snyder started getting hurt again and again, and even when he was healthy he found pitchers in the pros were harder to hit than when he batted .796 for the Rockies. Each spring, he's gotten closer to being labeled a bust and further away from the sure-thing tag he wore when he was drafted. But, because he's worked hard and the organization has so much money invested in him, Snyder was moved up to the Triple A level last season, and spent all of 2010 there until Wednesday, when he was one of three Norfolk players called up by the Orioles for the traditional September roster expansion.

But O's manager Buck Showalter hasn't yet penciled Snyder in. Yesterday, Snyder, as he has every game since the call up, sat on the bench and watched as the O's beat the Yankees in New York. Yes, that means he's made it from a dugout in Centreville to a dugout in Yankee Stadium. That's an amazing journey, no question. But still. Just let Snyder bat, skip!

The games mean nothing to the O's now. It would mean everything to Snyder. And me. I can say I called it.

Let other folks repeat the feel-good portions of the Natalie Randolph story. There's a whole lot about the hiring of America's only woman football coach that's suspect.

On paper, Randolph is laughably underqualified to take over a DCIAA program, where the football programs routinely crank out NCAA scholarship athletes. Her football coaching experience amounted to two years as a receivers coach at H.D. Woodson high school, and she didn't coach football at all last year, according to the version she's been telling the press for months. But don't blame her for being hired: She wasn't even looking to become a coach when she was recruited for the top job at Coolidge, she told Parade. Randolph's hiring was handled by some outsider funky education reform group called the Friends of Bedford, which now runs the long-troubled Coolidge, located in Takoma.

Since being handed the job, Randolph and her players have been followed around by an ESPN crew. According to the Parade story, one of many national profiles of Randolph that's run recently, she and her players made a trip to the NFL Draft in New York a few months ago.

Color me cynical, but: Really? Aren't there more pressing needs at Coolidge where that sort of money could have been spent. If footage of that New York excursion shows up on ESPN, an investigation of the whole shebang is in order. The entire Randolph saga so far stinks of a publicity stunt, like a real-life remaking of "Wildcats," the Goldie Hawn feature film where a petite pretty woman takes over an inner city football program.

But the stinkiest thing about the Randolph hiring is that all the attention it's generating masks some incredibly serious problems with the athletic programs at Coolidge, specifically, and throughout Rhee's DCPS. Randolph or no, female students at the school and all over this city have criminally few athletic opportunities compared to girls at D.C.'s private schools or public schools in surrounding jurisdictions. If it weren't for volleyball, in fact, at Coolidge the girls would have just about no athletic opportunities this fall. Randolph, who grew up in the area, went to a private high school a couple miles south of Coolidge when she was a kid. That school has varsity and JV soccer teams, field hockey teams, lacrosse teams, and cross country teams for girls. Coolidge has none of those.

But, Coolidge has a woman football coach. So all's square, right, Michelle Rhee?

(And, sorry, DCPS, cheerleading IS NOT a sport in the eyes of the law.)

The reality show that is Randolph's Coolidge experience makes its national television debut tonight, as ESPN broadcasts the season opening game with Carroll. Kickoff is at 7 p.m. at Coolidge.

Clint Didier

Didier, who was backed by Sarah Palin and Tea Party types, looked like an angry and confused buffoon throughout the campaign. The hypocrisy of his anti-government rants, which he even delivered while attending a recent gathering of Redskins alumni, was exposed early in the Senate run, when it came out that he'd accepted federal dollars in the form of farm subsidies in the low six figures.

Didier and his pals could play some football, tho. That 1988 Super Bowl win over John Elway and the Denver Broncos ranks as the greatest day of my life as a sports fan. For Redskins rooters who watched that game, nothing in life will ever top the goings on in the second quarter, bliss-wise. Nothing. Didier caught an 8-yard pass from Doug Williams for the last of five TDs the Skins scored in the quarter.

So, thanks for the memories anyway, you phony bastard.

Apparently he'll need to work his magic again today; this morning's storms brought bad news to the Kurtz household once again. A plaintive cry issued forth from the Postie on Twitter once again: "No power for 5 days, go on vacation, come back, it rains, no power again. Thanks, Pepco."

Keep checking back here throughout the day for more updates on City Desk—your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news!

Photo via CNN

Which made the subject line on today's edition of Politico's Playbook a little surprising. "POLITICO Playbook, presented by Washington's NewsChannel 8—Obama links higher ed. to economy in speech at UT—Petraeus plans three-week network blitz—Justice makes deal with BP—Dan Reilly to Hoyer—TBD launches—Burton is 3-3," the morning tipsheet by Mike Allen announced. The e-mail had, apparently, been sponsored by a TV station, owned by Politico's owners, that no longer existed—as the e-mail itself went on to proclaim.

"LIFTOFF—TBD—Allbritton’s new cable channel and website covering greater D.C.—went online at 4:15 a.m. and on the air at 5 a.m.," Allen wrote. (Prompting me, I will admit, to put my BlackBerry down and take my coffee back upstairs to my laptop to check it out.) The ad by NewsChannel 8 came later in Playbook:

** A message from Washington's NewsChannel 8: If the Comcast and NBC merger is approved as is, our country risks losing a powerful part of our democracy—locally-owned, independent voices in markets where Comcast/NBC will control both access to the home and multiple channels of news. Dropping the independent news voice won’t serve the consumer—only the cable company which would also own the other news channels. Let’s make sure that any merger approval serves the public interest and protects the local news consumers you represent. **

A Politico spokeswoman, Kim Kingsley, says NewsChannel 8 bought Playbook for the entire week, which reportedly comes with a $15,000 bill. She didn't reply when I asked whether tomorrow's e-mail would be sponsored by TBD TV, the station's new name.

All that raises questions on two fronts. First, the branding. Why buy a high-profile ad under a name you just ditched that very morning? Even if the ad is switched to TBD TV tomorrow, Allbritton still missed a chance to market its new unified field theory of local media on the day it launched. For that matter, why use the ad for an anodyne message against the Comcast/NBC merger, instead of pitching the new TBD venture?

Second, the economics. Allbritton owns TBD, or NewsChannel 8, or whatever you want to call the entity that apparently dumped $15,000 of its marketing budget into sponsoring Playbook this week. Allbritton also owns Politico, which means one arm of the company collected that $15,000 check after another one wrote it. No wonder Allbritton execs say Politico is making a profit.

(Here at Washington City Paper, we're now brainstorming all sorts of new ways for house ads to show up as revenue on our books. Look for results in the next fiscal year!)

My favorite came with Mike Wise’s column on the Hogs, going over the birth of football history's most durable and successful offensive line. I was particularly taken with what the young Skins would bring with them to their Redskins Park post-practice hangout, dubbed The Shed, in the early days.

From the story:

It's where Riggo and friends could down a brew, Russ could chew his Copenhagen and Joe Jacoby could bring back his favorite sandwich from Merino's in Fairfax, two pieces of Sicilian pizza pressed together with chopped beef and white, runny cheese spilling over the sides – the Hog Cheesesteak, named for him.

I'm a product of Northern Virginia, and I'd never heard of Merino's Pizza or the Hog Cheesesteak. But I bet if we jump into the way-back machine, we’d find that Jacoby’s foodstuffs actually came from Marino’s, a carryout outlet in the brief and mostly disastrous attempt to franchise the glorious Mario’s Pizza, the Arlington fixture. (The name was altered during franchising for legal reasons related to too many "Mario's" already being in business, is the story I'd always heard.) And I'd bet the sandwich he describes is Mario's BBQ pizza, where a blob of meat – I've always believed it was pork, but Wise says beef, and I've never had it tested – was thrown on square, but not Sicilian, slices of pizza.

Why is this important? Because Mario's is one of the few institutions in this area that means more to folks than the Redskins. (Full disclosure: My first pizza came from Mario’s, and, my last probably my will, too.) You can still go to the original Mario’s on Wilson Blvd., open all the time, with Lefty Lindsay and Joe Williams serving up subs and square, but not Sicilian, pizza. Last I checked, Lefty and Joe have been there for 45 and 48 years, respectively. Loading up on Mario’s Pizza on Redskins Sundays was a tradition I carried with me after moving into D.C. 24 years ago. I'm not as devoted to either the eatery or the team these days, and that saddens me now that I think about it.

I've never been able to figure out why Mario's franchising was such a debacle. (An outlet in Petworth on Georgia Avenue, the last franchise to open as far as I know, shuttered just months after opening.)

The Hogs beer recollections in the story — Coors and Bud Light are said to be the faves way back when — are probably faulty, too. You couldn’t really get Coors beer east of the Mississippi until the mid-1980s. I know this because I used to bring cases home from Lubbock, Texas, and one of the great tragedies of my life came when a portion of my Coors shipment, already spoken for by friends in NoVa, was stolen by baggage handlers at Dulles. Plus, I've seen "Smokey and the Bandit." And, Bud Light didn’t hit the market until 1982, with Lite from Miller remaining the dominant light beer in football for years afterward, with its NFL-centric media campaigns.

But why quibble about food and beer during such a grand tour. Thanks for the memories.

At least Dan Snyder's talking.

But some of Snyder's statements during his binge of recent interviews ring cliched and bogus.

Take, for example, this exchange between the owner and some of his PR staffers about Snyder's most recent big-bang offseason acquisition:

Q:With Donovan McNabb joining the team this year, looking back on your tenure as owner of the Redskins, is this the most confident you’ve been in a Redskins quarterback?

Snyder: “Sure. As owner, yes. As a fan, I was clearly confident in Sonny Jurgensen and the rest of the greats..."

Oh, really? Snyder is hoping these interviews will restore his fanboy bona fides, and every Redskins fan has to pledge allegiance to Sonny. But claiming that he was "confident in Sonny Jurgensen" is a little much.

Snyder is 44 years old. He says in the interview that he went to his first game as a six-year-old. (Snyder's not your typical dude, so let's forget the wackiness of a man in his middle ages recollecting being "clearly confident" in anything at such a young age.) Say he became a Redskins fan at the beginning of the 1971 season, when he was five years old. That means Dan Snyder the fan would never know Jurgensen as really anything more than a second-stringer.

Let's look at his stats: The Jurgensen of Dan Snyder's era of fandom had but 13 total starts from 1971-1974, his last four seasons in the NFL, and no more than four starts in any one of those seasons.

And Sonny threw only 19 TD passes (of a career total of 255) in that span, an average of less than five per year. Not exactly confidence-building numbers.

Then again, maybe Snyder's just trying to cash in on the reputation that Redskins fans have had since Babe Laufenberg for having more faith in the backup QB than the starter.

It may not come as a surprise that the 24-year-old District woman who allegedly stabbed 20-year-old NPR intern Annie Ropeik multiple times and for no particular reason Wednesday morning is mentally ill. Recently filed charging documents say Melodie Anne Brevard has been diagnosed as having Bipolar Type II disorder. Brevard was supposed to be on the psychotropic drug Abilify but hadn't taken it for a month, the documents say.

The description documents provide of the 9:30 a.m. attack in Chinatown is chilling: "Without any provocation, the defendant stabbed the complainant with a knife in the left collarbone, upper back, lower back, and right side. The stab wound to the complainant's right collarbone pierced through the complainant's back."

A  witness told police that after the stabbing occurred the witness yelled: "This lady just stabbed someone" and Brevard replied: " Yes, call the police."

One of the wounds damaged Ropeik's spinal cord. She is "currently paralyzed on the left side of her body below the rib cage." A statement from NPR says Ropeik is in stable condition.

Maryland court records say Brevard has been arrested before. She was arrested in Montgomery County for a second degree assault in 2007 for which she pleaded guilty. Then, in 2009, she was picked up by Prince George's cops for an alleged assault on a police officer. The charges were dismissed.

Also interesting:  Brevard appears to be an aspiring model. A profile on the site ModelMayhem.com seems to belong to the assault-with-intent-to-kill suspect.

"I am using this site for networking, exposure and modeling opportunities," the profile says.  Brevard mentions that she is open to fashion shows and print modeling. Under credits, she lists that she appeared in Jet Magazine in October 2005. The site displays a portfolio.

Brevard's aspirations would seem to be at least temporarily derailed. Things could be far worse for her, given what can happen to the District's mentally ill.

Ropeik is a junior at Boston University and is a classics and philosophy major.

He talked about Albert Haynesworth in the time between.

Wise, the lead sports columnist at the Washington Post when he's off the airwaves, is always talking about Albert Haynesworth. Or writing about Albert Haynesworth. Usually, he's talking or writing about how he doesn't want to talk or write about Albert Haynesworth.

It all started a couple months ago, the night before a Redskins minicamp opened, when Wise declared Haynesworth an unworthy story subject and said he was finished with the Haynesworth story.

First, here's what Wise typed on June 15:

"And now that it's clear Albert would rather combust than conform, I'm done. I don't care. He's not worth anyone's time in Ashburn."

Haynesworth has taken up column inches in  every Redskins column Wise has written since swearing off the guy. And dominated most episodes of his talk show.

I know this because I've read the columns and listened to the shows in hopes of more news about Haynesworth.

I support Mike Wise not practicing as Mike Wise preaches. I want to know about Haynesworth more than anything else about the Redskins by a far sight. I can't get enough. I care more about his running times than I ever cared about Usain Bolt's.

Every time I read how much money Dan Snyder guaranteed Haynesworth in hopes of winning the 2009 NFL Offseason Championship, I giggle.

Wise said on his morning show he's going to call in sick this week rather than continue to talk about Haynesworth, then said he's not going to mention his name again until he passes the shuttle test. And Lindsay Lohan told the court she won't drink.

Sure, the league is flying higher than ever now — TV coverage of the NFL draft drew a bigger audience than the NBA playoffs this spring. But mark down July 28, 2010 as the day everything started rolling downhill.

That's the day the reports surfaced that the NFL has brought in Dan Snyder protege/partner-in-debacles Mark Shapiro.

Yesterday, the web site Sports By Brooks told us that Shapiro "is now consulting for the league on television matters – including NFL Network games and studio shows."

Good news for the NFL: The reliability of the Sports By Brooks' report is suspect. When giving Shapiro's bio, we're told, "Shapiro is currently running Six Flags after being lured away from Bristol by Redskins Owner Dan Snyder."

Well, now....As both my readers know well, Shapiro WAS running Six Flags — until he and Snyder ran it straight into the ground. With CEO Shapiro and Chairman of the Board Snyder calling the shots, Six Flags filed for Chapter 11 more than a year ago.

When he was hired by Snyder in 2005, Shapiro said his salary would be tied to the value of Six Flags stock. He and Snyder then took Six Flags stock price from $11.93 per share down to nothingness. So during bankruptcy proceedings, Snyder and Shapiro wrote up an unbelievable golden parachute that gave Shapiro millions upon millions of dollars — one $3 million payment was labeled a "success bonus," though Shapiro and Snyder's only success in four-plus years at the helm of Six Flags came in bankrupting the company –  while stockholders lost everything.

Snyder was bounced brutally from his chairmanship during the reorganization proceedings, while Shapiro got his comeuppance from the newly installed Six Flags board shortly after the company emerged from bankruptcy.

So while, sorry Sports by Brooks, Shapiro isn't running Six Flags, he is still Snyder's partner, and is now president of Dick Clark Productions. That's the company that Snyder bought for $175 million with money from his Red Zebra investment fund, then used the cash of Six Flags stockholders to defray the purchase price by 40 percent.

Like Snyder, Shapiro was conflicted out the wazoo while Six Flags and Dick Clark hammered out deals. Shapiro was Six Flags CEO and president of Dick Clark Productions, which is also a major vendor for Six Flags, at the same time.

That arrangement's shaky enough to register on the Richter Scale, ain't it?

Six Flags isn't the only place that Shapiro showed he's got the Midas Touch...in Opposite Land! On May 9, 2008, Shapiro was elected to the board of directors of the Tribune Company. On the following Dec. 9, that corporation also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Great move, NFL!

The LL blog will be a lot like the LL column and e-mail: you'll find news and commentary on D.C. government and politics (and, every now and then, Maryland and Virginia) and the people behind the scenes. We'll also be debuting some new recurring features on the LL blog and here on City Desk soon. While City Paper's political news will move over to the Loose Lips blog, you can still expect to find good stories about life in the District here on City Desk—and of course, plenty of illuminating photos by Darrow Montgomery and other photographers.

Feel free to leave us your thoughts on the changes, either in the comments on the blog or by e-mailing me at mmadden(AT)washingtoncitypaper.com. Enjoy!