Katharine Graham

American publisher

• Born: June 16, 1917
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 17, 2001
• Place of death: Boise, Idaho

The only woman to serve as publisher of a major American newspaper during the twentieth century, Graham built The Washington Post into a national institution and helped end the presidency of Richard M. Nixon after the newspaper’s reportage of the Watergate scandal.

Early Life

Katharine Graham (GRAY-uhm) was born into a family with wealth, financial power, social privilege, and public notoriety. The fourth child of Eugene Meyer and Agnes Ernst Meyer, Graham had almost limitless options when she graduated from the University of Chicago in 1938. By numerous accounts, her father was one of the more remarkable Americans of his time, who consciously chose to marry a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) so his children would not have to fight the anti-Semitism that stung him at an early age. He had amassed a fortune of more than $50 million through careers in merchandising and investment by 1917, when he liquidated his holdings to embark on government service. He had successfully pursued more than a half-dozen different careers by 1933, when at fifty-seven years old, and almost as a hobby, he purchased at a bankruptcy sale a discredited newspaper, The Washington Post .

As her father pursued the task of bringing The Washington Post to a level of journalistic respectability, Graham alone among the Meyer children chose journalism as a career, working initially as a reporter with the San Francisco News for a year before joining The Washington Post in 1939. According to Carol Felsenthal’s 1993 biography of Graham, her father had mailed her daily issues of The Washington Post throughout her stay at the University of Chicago, where she had gone to pursue her interest in journalism after two less-than-challenging years at Vassar College. Her year on the West Coast served as something of a first and last apprenticeship before joining her father’s paper.

Although Graham’s entry in Who’s Who in America indicates that she served on the editorial staff of The Washington Post from 1939 to 1945 when she retired to devote herself to raising her family and although she did throw herself wholeheartedly into that job upon her initial arrival there, Felsenthal maintains that Graham’s interest in a career in journalism ended the moment she met her future husband, Philip L. Graham. He was one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors, endowed with a commanding presence and one who could be engagingly charming. They married on June 5, 1940, within six months of their first meeting. Graham had found a mainline WASP to marry. More important, in Philip Graham, a former editor of The Harvard Law Review, she had also found the person whom her father would turn to manage The Washington Post.

Graham’s marriage lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, but few of those years appear to have been easy. Her husband allegedly thought of her and his father-in-law in terms of vile ethnic slurs even as he loved the one and respected the success of the other. Over time, he became a philanderer and separated from Graham, only to return to her later. In the meantime, he took over The Washington Post as its publisher in 1946, when Meyer temporarily left it for a six-month stint as head of the World Bank. Upon Meyer’s return, Philip assumed responsibility as chair for the paper’s day-to-day operations, significantly expanding its operations over time; in 1957 he opened its overseas bureaus. The son of a political father and the brother of a future U.S. senator, Philip also threw himself into national politics as an undisguised booster of Lyndon B. Johnson in the latter’s struggle with John F. Kennedy for the Democratic Party’s 1960 presidential nomination. At the same time, bouts of depression and self-doubt, coupled with his mania, became so severe that he sought institutionalized treatment for what was subsequently diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

For her part, Graham concentrated on retiring from the paper and entering into private life, hosting parties of Washington’s elite for her husband and, above all, rearing their four children: daughter Elizabeth and sons Donald, William, and Stephen. On August 3, 1963, Philip checked out of the Chestnut Lodge treatment center, spent the day with Graham, and then killed himself while she napped. With her husband’s death, Graham assumed the role of publisher of The Washington Post.

Life’s Work

Graham ran The Washington Post for most of the next thirty years. In addition to publisher, she was its president (1963-1973, 1977), board chair (1973-1993), and chief executive officer (1973-1991). During those decades, she continued and improved upon the efforts of her father and her husband to build The Washington Post into a great journalistic institution and, eventually, into a profitable Fortune 500 company.

Kenneth Berents, a respected newspaper analyst, wrote in The New York Times (September 10, 1993) while covering Graham’s formal retirement as The Washington Post’s board chair, that Graham often spoke of herself as “an oddity [in a world dominated by men], and looked upon as such.” Breaking down gender bias took time and diligence; however, as time passed, she gained confidence both in her ability to manage the newspaper and in the people she chose to run it. By the time she began cutting back on her involvement in the operations of The Washington Post and turned the publisher and chief executive responsibilities over to her son Donald (in 1979 and 1991, respectively), The Washington Post had become not only a world-class newspaper but also the centerpiece in a respected media conglomerate including the International Herald Tribune (on which Graham served as cochair), Newsweek magazine, and cable and broadcast television properties. Not surprisingly, during those years in Berents’s words Graham came to be viewed as “one of the industry’s great ladies.” Indeed, she had become the only woman to head a major American newspaper, and her autobiography Personal History (1997) would win a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Just as Graham broke new ground as a woman heading a media empire, so her newspaper constantly broke new ground in covering the news under her steadying influence, her care in selecting The Washington Post’s management team, and her willingness to support her staff even when pressured to do otherwise.

To write of these developments is to relive the America covered by The Washington Post during Graham’s leadership. The 1960’s was a turbulent decade for the United States, with Washington, D.C., serving as center stage in a changing America. Just months after Graham’s husband committed suicide, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Then came the Lyndon B. Johnson-Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 and the buildup of U.S. military forces in Vietnam the following year. There followed a decline in civil rights marches but the rise of antiwar protests and the cities began to explode with antiwar anger. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam in early 1968 persuaded President Johnson not to seek reelection, and Robert F. Kennedy, the former president’s brother, was assassinated in June in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Also, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and the Washington riots that followed his death provided The Washington Post with a fast-breaking story, literally on its doorsteps and complete with photo opportunities of machine-guns on the steps of the Capitol. The paper’s coverage of the event was perhaps the key moment in the emergence of The Washington Post among the elite national newspapers in the United States.

The Washington Post continued its newfound publishing status with its openly critical coverage of both the Johnson and Nixon administrations and their respective conduct concerning the Vietnam War. In June of 1971, The Washington Post published secret Pentagon Papers , despite being advised not to do so by its own lawyers. In fact, and much to the annoyance of Ben Bradlee, Graham’s hand-picked editor, The New York Times broke the story two days before The Washington Post obtained its own copy of the documents chronicling the role of the U.S. government in choreographing its own entry into the Vietnam War. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court to test the government’s ability to squelch the publication of the documents on the grounds of national security, The Washington Post had become an equal party to the action.

Graham’s greatest impact on the newspaper and in the realm of public affairs, however, was still to come in The Washington Post’s investigative coverage of what was initially considered a minor break-in during the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post would stay with that story long after other news organizations and newspapers had abandoned it. Requests to drop the story would come from important persons such as Graham’s sometime moviegoing companion, Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s national security adviser and later secretary of state. Veiled and not-so-veiled threats of action against The Washington Post and its media empire came from the offices of Nixon’s special counsel, Charles Colson, and from former Attorney GeneralJohn Mitchell, who threatened to revoke The Washington Post’s television station licenses. Nonetheless, with the same determination she would later show in facing down strikers at her newspaper, Graham never wavered in her support of her staff, and she refused to cower to the threats.

Graham went ahead with the story, and the trail led from Watergate to the White House. The reportage of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein cemented The Washington Post’s growing reputation for journalistic respectability and independence, and it set a standard for investigative journalism. It also made celebrities of Graham, Bradlee, and Woodward and Bernstein. President Nixon resigned from office in disgrace, and The Washington Post received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its work.

Significance

The highwater mark for not only The Washington Post but also Graham’s career was the paper’s coverage of the Watergate affair. Watergate, however, did not mark the end of Graham’s affiliation with the newspaper and its growing communications empire. She remained its chief executive officer for another twenty years, during which time the value of a share of stock in The Washington Post increased more than 3,000 percent, ten times the growth rate of the Dow Jones average during the same period.

Graham turned over the principal executive duties to son Donald Graham in 1991, but she remained the chair of its executive committee until her death on July 17, 2001, in Boise, Idaho. She died shortly after suffering a fall while attending an annual gathering of communications and Web and Internet professionals in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. 2d ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. No study of Graham and The Washington Post would be complete without this now-classic rendition of the Watergate affair, first published in 1974. Crucial decisions at the newspaper were not made by Graham directly but by the executives she trusted and supported.

Bradlee, Benjamin C. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Well worth reading in its entirety. Includes an especially interesting commentary on the publisher of The Washington Post from the paper’s former editor.

Davis, Deborah. Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her “Washington Post” Empire. 3d ed. New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991. Originally published in 1979, this book was updated to cover Graham’s years in semiretirement that followed her 1979 decision to turn over publishing duties to her son Donald.

Felsenthal, Carol. Power, Privilege, and the “Post”: The Katharine Graham Story. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993. Something of an unauthorized biography of Graham. Reputedly written without interviews of Graham (who was working on her memoirs), this work was published shortly before her official retirement from The Washington Post.

Gerber, Robin. The Leadership Journey of an American Icon. New York: Portfolio, 2005. An interesting study of Graham that uses leadership theory to argue that Graham always possessed innate leadership qualities.

Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York: Knopf, 1997. The starting point for any research on Graham and her tenure with The Washington Post. Personal History won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Liebovich, Louis W. Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Drawing from newly available sources that help shed new light on the Nixon administration’s role in Watergate, this book reexamines the scandal and demonstrates how the administration attempted to battle and manipulate the press.

Ware, Susan. Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. A collection of individual studies. Places Graham’s influence on publishing on the same plateau as the influence exerted by Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and Babe Didrikson Zaharias in their respective careers.

The Washington Post Staff. The Fall of a President. New York: Delacorte Press, 1974. An excellent collection of The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate affair, from its early, limited reporting on the Watergate break-in to the House of Representatives’ consideration of Articles of Impeachment against Nixon.