Katharine Graham
Katharine Meyer Graham (June 16, 1917 – July 17, 2001) was the head of The Washington Post newspaper for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that helped bring down President Richard Nixon. She has been widely described as one of the most powerful American women of the 20th century.
Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalism history. It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."
Early life
Graham's father, Eugene Meyer, was a millionaire financier and, subsequently, a government executive, who bought The Washington Post in 1933 at a bankruptcy auction. Her mother, Agnes Ernst, was a bohemian intellect, art lover and political activist in the Democratic Party, who shared friendships with people as diverse as Rodin, Marie Curie, Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and worked as a newspaper reporter at a time when journalism was an uncommon profession for women.
Graham lived a privileged childhood. Her parents owned several homes across the country, but primarily lived between a veritable 'castle' in Mount Kisco, NY, and a smaller home in Washington, D.C. Graham often did not see much of her parents during her childhood, as both traveled and socialized extensively, and was raised in part by nannies, governesses and tutors. As a young adult, Graham felt she had been sheltered by such privilege.
Graham was an alumna of The Madeira School and attended Vassar before transferring to the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became quite interested in labor issues and shared friendships with people from walks of life very different from her own. After graduation, she worked for a short period at a San Francisco newspaper where, among other things, she helped cover a major strike by wharf workers. Graham began working for the Post in 1938.
Marriage
After a short romance, on June 5, 1940, she married Philip Graham, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a clerk for Stanley Reed and later Felix Frankfurter, both of the U.S. Supreme Court. The couple decided that they would not live off her great wealth, but rather would both work and live off of their own salaries - however meager. He worked as a law clerk and she at the Post; the couple enjoyed an active social life with Washington's governmental and journalistic elite. The couple enjoyed a blissful period in their lives at this time.
During World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a private (1942), rising to the rank of major. She followed him on military assignments to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania up until 1945, when he went to the Pacific theatre as an intelligence officer of the Far East Air Force. Although Phil Graham believed in the war effort, as did his wife, being separated from one another during this period of time brought strain and hardship to both lives.
Children
Their first baby died at birth; she also had a miscarriage. Four children followed: Elizabeth ('Lally') Morris Graham, now Weymouth, born on July 3, 1943; Donald Edward Graham, April 22, 1945; William Welsh Graham (1948), and Stephen Meyer Graham (1952).
Graham left the Post in 1945, with the birth of Donald, her second child, to raise her family.
Ownership of The Washington Post
Graham's husband became publisher of the Post in 1946, and continued in that position and then as the head of the Washington Post Company as it expanded into television and purchased Newsweek magazine. During this time, he hobnobbed with top Washington politicians and bigshots - such as John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger oftentimes unofficially advising their campaigns.
After several years of erratic behavior - sullen, depressed and introverted times a as well as magnanimous, hard-working, brilliant times, later diagnosed as bipolar disorder - Philip Graham suffered a nervous breakdown. Also around this time, Katharine discovered her husband had been cheating on her with Robin Webb, an Australian stringer for Newsweek. Her husband declared that he would divorce Katharine for Robin and he made motions to divide up the couple's assets.
Philip Graham suffered a very public nervous breakdown at a newspaper conference in Phoenix; he was take to the private Chesnut Lodge psychiatric facility near Washington D.C. He was released after a short stay; subsequently suffered a major depression; and then voluntarily returned to the facilty. In 1963, during a weekend release from Chestnut Lodge, while at the couple's Glen Welby home, he committed suicide.
Katharine thus had to abruptly take over the newspaper and the company. She assumed control despite it being widely assumed that her lack of management experience would lead her to sell or hand over control to a more experienced proxy. Graham was de facto publisher of the newspaper from 1963 onward, formally assuming the title in 1979, and chairman of the board from 1973 to 1991.
As the only woman to be in such a high position of a publishing company, she had no female role models and had difficulty being taken seriously by a many of her male colleagues and employees. First and foremost, she lacked confidence in herself. At first, she was no feminist but the women's movement of the late 1960s and 1970s slowly helped her to realize that all her life, misogyny had made her feel as if she was not as intelligent, articulate, or capable as the men around her. Though lukewarm to the women's movement at first, she eventually helped promote gender equality within her company.
She hired Benjamin Bradlee as editor and cultivated Warren Buffett for his financial advice; he became a major shareholder and something of an eminence grise in the company. Her son, Donald Graham, was publisher from 1979 to 2000.
Other
Graham is the sister-in-law of Bob Graham, who was Governor of Florida and a long-time U.S. Senator.
Her daughter Lally Weymouth is a prominent conservative journalist.
In 1997, Graham published her memoirs, Personal History. The book, praised for its honest portrayal of Philip Graham's mental illness as well as her struggles to cope in a male-dominated business world, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Graham died in Boise, Idaho at the age of eighty-four following a very bad fall, and her funeral took place at the Washington National Cathedral.
Close ties to power
Despite its Watergate work and publication of the Pentagon Papers, which damaged the credibility of the Nixon administration, the Post often followed an establishment line. In her 1997 autobiography, Graham comments at many points about how close her husband was to politicians of his day (he was instrumental, for example, in getting Lyndon Johnson to be the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee in 1960), and how such personal closeness with politicians later became unacceptable in journalism. She was quoted several times as saying that her personal political views were considerably more conservative than was widely thought as a result of her firm support of the Post's role in the Watergate story and the publication of the "Pentagon Papers"; she was, indeed, a close friend of Nancy Reagan and discouraged a similar role for the Post with respect to the Iran-Contra scandal during President Reagan's second term.
In 1988, Graham gave a speech at the CIA's Langley, Virginia headquarters, and told agency leaders:
- We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. (source: Regardie's Magazine1/90) [1]
References
- Graham, Katharine, Personal History, 1997
- Bradlee, Benjamin, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995
- Gerber, Robin, Graham: The Leadership Journey to an American Icon, 2005