Introduction

 

Society Divas

Katharine Graham

Katharine Meyer - a Jewish socialite - was destined as a woman of her class and age to be little more than a pampered house-wife. Life surprised her. As Katharine Graham, she would become the doyenne of the American press and a pillar of the country's liberal establishment. The friend of presidents and the most influential people in the US, whom she entertained at her Georgetown mansion-- the house on R Street being second in importance only to the house on Pennsylvania Avenue-- she had what the Americans call considerable clout. As president of The Washington Post from 1963 to 1993 she, together with the paper's editor Ben Bradlee, was responsible for some of the greatest scoops of all time.

Her dry wit was terrifying, her charm undeniable, her manner almost monarchical. But in a strange way, her aristocratic origins proved helpful in running a newspaper. She combined the role of proprietor with that of socialite. The most legendary New York party of the twentieth century - Truman Capote's Black and White Ball - was thrown in Graham's honor. So it was no surprise that Graham later bonded so strongly with another aristocrat thrown into public life and forced to cope - Diana, Princess of Wales. But in some respects, Graham's true British equivalent was Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, of course, won her office on her own merits, not by inheritance. But both women had the same attitude toward feminism. Although Graham was far more eager to be viewed as a role model for working women than Thatcher, both simply assumed that there was no reason a talented woman couldn't do the jobs men had been screwing up for centuries. Graham brooked no special pleading. Yet her undemonstrative success and steely resolve destroyed more stereotypes than any feminist rally.

Katharine Graham was born in New York on 16 June 1917 to Eugene and Agnes Ernst Meyer. Katharine had a privileged, if emotionally constrained childhood in the Washington suburbs. Though Jewish on her father's side, she was baptized and raised as a Lutheran, like her mother. Even so, the young Katharine Graham experienced the insidious anti-Semitism which then clouded American life: as a student at the University of Chicago, certain clubs were closed to her. Later, she was unable to live in a "restricted" area of Washington.

Her father, who had headed the US central bank, the Federal Reserve and would become the first president of the World Bank, had extensive and highly profitable business interests in copper, cars and chemicals. In 1933 he bought the ailing Washington Post at auction for $825,000. The paper's parlous situation was such that it would be another quarter of a century before it could afford to hire its first foreign correspondent. Katharine joined the paper in 1939 working in the editorial and circulation departments after a short spell as a reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle.

A gangling figure who, initially, suffered from a paralyzing lack of self-confidence, in 1940 she married Philip L. Graham, a brilliant, if unstable, Harvard Law graduate who would in 1946, by the age of 31, take over as publisher of the ailing The Washington Post, a sleepy paper in a very sleepy and provincial town.

Katharine ended her own short-lived writing career to concentrate on the family’s home life. The next few years she focused on raising their four children-- Elizabeth Weymouth and Donald, William and Stephen Graham-- and entertaining in their Georgetown home. But, in 1963, everything changed when her husband's manic depression led him to commit suicide killing himself with a shotgun, in one of his lowest moments. She found him in the bathroom. The savage depression and then the suicide of her husband left a chill upon her days (she lived across the street from Oak Hill Cemetery, almost in full view of the grave inscribed "Graham"). Widowhood came suddenly, as did the professional challenges. Surprising even herself, the socialite wife in her late 40’s stepped into her husband’s role at the Post, first cautiously, then with more assurance. Forced by her husband’s death to overcome her massive insecurities and extreme shyness, Graham, eventually known as "Lady Pub" by her troops, spent her years at the head of the Washington Post Co. as a clear-headed, if occasionally wary, advocate for even-handed, tough journalism steering the paper to a period that most people still believe was its finest hour. This is surely the essence of her appeal. Despite massive privilege and vast power, she still managed to present herself as an ingénue, who came from nothing to help pull the strings in the most influential city on earth. "When my husband died, I had three choices," she once said. "I could sell the paper. I could find somebody else to run it. Or I could go to work. And that was no choice at all." Work she did. She had the touch of all good newspaper proprietors. She trusted her editors, never betrayed them, and never gave in. Her left-liberalism, the conventional creed for her class in her generation, dictated the editorial stance, but she left the news alone. She would later recall, "What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the ledge. The surprise was that I landed on my feet." She sought to rejuvenate the paper's journalism and brought in the feisty Ben Bradlee as its editor. The following years would should just how good a decision that was. In 1971, the New York Times came into possession of a vast number of documents illegally smuggled out of the Pentagon by a former government analyst, Daniel Ellsberg. The documents, the Pentagon Papers, detailed the full extent of US involvement in Indo-China right back to the Truman administration of the late 1940s, an involvement far greater than any imagined by the American public. After the government obtained a judicial order preventing The New York Times from publishing the documents the Post, which also had copies of the papers, thought long and hard about publishing them, thereby committing an illegal act. Taking what she later described as "a big gulp", Graham decided to publish. At moments of intense crisis like this Graham was unflappable. Talking about her decision to publish the Pentagon Papers and similar undaunted choices, Bradlee said, "Her instinct of what is right and what is wrong was finely tuned." Quinn added that Graham had the "guts of a burglar," and "She enjoyed the high wire act - she never flinched." The government blinked and the restraining order was lifted. Graham and the Times had won a landmark victory for press freedom but, in doing so, had made an enemy of Richard Nixon. This enmity would have startling consequences.

The following year a Post reporter, Bob Woodward (later to be joined by Carl Bernstein), began his investigation into a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington. The name of the building, Watergate, would lend itself to the greatest political scandal in US history. Steeling herself for what appeared to be inevitable political backlash, Graham gave the green light to Woodward and Bernstein’s now-famous series. Their trail led right back to the Oval Office: the paranoia which surrounded Richard Nixon had led his senior aides, in the name of plugging leaks, into authorising burglary against their political opponents. As the evidence against the President and his entourage piled up, Nixon's allies mounted a political campaign against the Post, attempting to prevent the company from renewing its cable television licences. On one occasion Katharine Graham was personally threatened by Attorney General John Mitchell, who would himself be imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal. Her own view on the story was characteristically direct. "The best we could do," she said, "was to keep investigating, to look everywhere for hard evidence, to get the details right, and to report accurately what we found."

Following Nixon's resignation in 1974, Graham saw herself, and the Post, vindicated by the official report into the scandal. The late 1970s saw a bitter strike threaten the Post's very existence. Before the industrial action ended, Katharine Graham found herself answering phones and dealing with the paper's mail. Behind the scenes, Graham continued to take an active interest in making the Washington Post a more diverse workplace, hiring more black and female reporters. More recently, the Post had to weather its own scandal when Janet Cooke, a reporter on the paper, was forced to return a Pulitzer Prize after admitting that she had made up her award-winning story.

Katharine Graham saw her son Donald succeed her as chief executive of the Post in 1991, and of its other companies which included Newsweek magazine and numerous cable television franchises. Nevertheless, she retained a lively interest in the newspaper right up to her death. In 1998, her autobiography "Personal History", which took a decade to write, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book describes the Washington of her early years with a remarkable vivacity and the torment of her marriage with a remarkable generosity. The most affecting passage in that big book, oddly enough, is her description of her poor husband's girlfriend, who "was carried away by Phil and only slowly must have come to understand his illness": "She must be a very decent person. I understand that she married an Australian diplomat and seems to live a quiet life. I hope that she, too, eventually recovered."

Looking back on her time at the Post, Katharine Graham said she had no regrets. "I became absorbed by the challenge", she said. "I was trying to learn all the time. And I loved what I was doing."

The 84-year-old Graham died July 17, 2001. She had been unconscious since the previous Saturday, when she fell and hit her head on a walkway in Sun Valley, Idaho. Her death marks something of a definitive moment in American cultural and political life. What she represented - an authoritative, aristocratic, liberal monopoly on American media - is not dead, but it is surely teetering on the edge of extinction. As long as anyone reads the Washington Post, Kay-- the name she was known to many by-- will be eulogized daily in the most fitting way imaginable.

 

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