Graham, Katharine

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GRAHAM, Katharine

Born 16 June 1917, New York, New York

Daughter of Eugene and Agnes Ernst Meyer; married Philip L.Graham, 1940 (died 1963); children: Elizabeth, Donald, William, Stephen

As a reporter for the San Francisco News, Katharine Graham's first serious assignment was to lure delegates attending the convention of the Women's Christian Temperance Union to a bar with the simple proposition that they visit the scene of the crimes they railed against. They agreed and she got her story. Years later, as publisher of the Washington Post, she was instrumental in enabling other reporters to get the story of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

Graham's father, Eugene Meyer, came from a distinguished Jewish family with roots going back many generations in Alsace-Lorraine, France, while her mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, came from a long line of Lutheran ministers. From each parent Graham received a passion for learning, ideas, strength, and leadership. Her father was a millionaire investor and her mother an intellectual and writer. Graham received an elite education. She attended Madeira, a private high school for girls in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where her family resided. She went on to Vassar College and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1938.

Rather than starting right away at the Washington Post, which her father bought in 1933 for $825,000, Graham worked in San Francisco for a year. In 1939 she returned to Washington and began her tenure with the Post as an editorial-page employee. As the most junior member of the editorial team, Graham's assignments were on the least important issues of the day—so-called light editorials. The titles themselves revealed just how light: "On Being a Horse," "Brains and Beauty," "Mixed Drinks," and "Spotted Fever." But work at the Post brought her into contact with experienced reporters. Through these developing friendships, Graham became involved in an increasingly lively social life with women and men whose life experience and backgrounds were quite different from her own. A pivotal introduction was to Philip Graham, who was then a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk for Felix Frankfurter the following year. Phil Graham had been editor of the Harvard Law Review and was seen as brilliant, charismatic, and fascinating by this extended circle of determined young people. After a brief and intense courtship, Katharine and Phil married on 5 June 1940.

From the start, Phil Graham was apprehensive about his father-in-law's enormous wealth. He was determined that he and his new wife would live on his salary. Eugene Meyer was eager to have his bright and capable son-in-law employed at the Post and finally convinced him to come on board as associate publisher in 1946. After a few months, Meyer promoted him to publisher. In 1948 Meyer sold the paper to Katharine and Phil for a token sum. But believing a man should not be his wife's employee, Meyer gave Phil Graham three times the amount of Post stock held by Katharine. The newly formed Washington Post Company, with Philip as its president, began to enlarge in circulation and influence. Katharine's role during these years was behind the scenes and clearly subservient to Phil's leadership and direction. Her life changed dramatically when Phil began suffering from mental illness and committed suicide in August of 1963.

Fresh from this tragedy, Graham became president of the Post 's parent company. She felt unprepared for the challenge. "It's hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was," she related in her memoir Personal History (1997). "I was also uneducated in even the basics of the working world." Nevertheless, she was knowledgeable enough to surround herself with a capable staff. She built the Post into a competitor of the New York Times. She named Benjamin C. Bradlee as managing editor in 1965, and he was instrumental in luring talented journalists away from other papers.

As publisher and chairperson of the board during these years, Graham was instrumental in guiding the decisions that determined the role the Post assumed. Two years after she became the paper's publisher; the Post became involved in the fight to publish the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times had been ordered by the U.S. government to refrain from publishing any more of the documents. Despite the risk of a restraining order on themselves as well as a violation of the injunction that had restricted the Times, Graham and the Post decided to publish the papers. Graham later pointed out: "The decision had to be made quickly. There had never before been prior restraint of the press. Weighing all factors, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I still feel the same." The Post did go to court for its action, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the two newspapers and their right to publish.

Graham and the Post regained national attention with coverage of the Watergate scandal. Two Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, were the foremost investigators of the crimes of the Nixon administration. Despite threats from the White House and warnings and criticism from her friend Henry Kissinger, Graham supported the reporters throughout. In 1973 the Post received a Pulitzer Prize for public service in uncovering the Watergate conspiracy.

Graham turned her journalistic skills to her own life in her autobiography Personal History. In a volume described as "disarmingly candid and immensely readable," she chronicles her personal transformation. She also provides an invaluable inside glimpse of some of the most critical turning points in American journalism. Graham describes her personal and professional growth with charm, intelligence, and grace, much the same way she lived her life. Personal History received a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1998.

Bibliography:

Davis, D., Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (1979). Felsenthal, C., Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story (1993).