Katharine Graham

• 1. Introduction

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  Katharine Graham was running The Washington Post in 1972 when the attorney general of the United States threatened her through a reporter. John Mitchell, who served under President Richard Nixon, spoke to the Post reporter Carl Bernstein about an article that was about to appear. He warned that Graham would get caught in a "big fat wringer" if it ran. The remark, crude and personal, became one of the best-known threats in the history of American journalism. It was aimed at a woman who, by her own later account, doubted her own knowledge. What kind of person ends up on the receiving end of a warning like that? And what made a wealthy daughter of a financier the person responsible for a newspaper at the center of a presidential crisis? The answers start in a household where the children saw surprisingly little of their parents.

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• 2. Daughter of Money

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  Auguste Rodin, Marie Curie, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein were all friends of Agnes Meyer. She was a bohemian intellectual, an art lover and an activist in the Republican Party. Her friends also included Eleanor Roosevelt, the philosopher John Dewey and the organizer Saul Alinsky. Her daughter Katharine was born on the 16th of June 1917 in New York City.

  Katharine's father, Eugene Meyer, was a financier. From 1930 to 1933 he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 1933 he bought The Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction. Eugene was of Alsatian Jewish descent, while Agnes was a Lutheran whose parents had emigrated from Germany. The five Meyer children were baptized as Lutherans but attended an Episcopal church. Katharine's siblings were Florence, Eugene III, who was known as Bill, Ruth and Elizabeth, known as Biss.

  The family owned several homes. They lived mostly between a mansion in Washington, D.C., and a large estate in Westchester County, New York, which Donald Trump later owned. Both parents traveled and entertained so often that Katharine saw little of them. Nannies, governesses and tutors helped raise her.

  Her relationship with her mother was strained. In her memoir, she describes Agnes as negative and condescending, and says this damaged her self-confidence.

  The wider family was just as colorful. Her sister Florence became a successful photographer and married the actor Oscar Homolka. Her father's sister, Florence Meyer Blumenthal, founded the Prix Blumenthal. Her father's brother Edgar, a mechanical engineer and vice president of the Braden Copper Company, died when the Titanic sank in April 1912.

  Katharine began at a Montessori school and moved to The Potomac School in the fourth grade. She then attended The Madeira School, where her father had donated land for a new campus in Virginia. After that came Vassar College, and then a transfer to the University of Chicago. There she joined a circle of friends who argued about politics and ideas. Fascism was spreading in Germany and Italy, and she grew sympathetic to the American labor movement.

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• 3. The Post Passes to Philip

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  A strike by wharf workers in San Francisco gave Katharine Meyer her first taste of reporting. After graduating, she worked briefly at a newspaper in that city and helped cover the walkout. In 1938 she began working for the Post, her father's paper.

  On the 5th of June 1940 she married Philip Graham. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School and a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. The couple had a daughter, Lally Morris Weymouth, who lived from 1943 to 2025. They also had three sons: Donald Edward, born in 1945, William Welsh, who lived from 1948 to 2017, and Stephen Meyer, born in 1952.

  In 1946, Eugene Meyer handed the newspaper to his son-in-law, and Philip became publisher. Katharine's daughter-in-law-era readers might expect resentment. Her memoir, Personal History, says otherwise. She wrote: "Far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper."

  Eugene Meyer went on to head the World Bank, but he left that post after only six months. He remained Chairman of the Washington Post Company until he died in 1959. Philip took over that chairmanship, and the company grew. It bought television stations and Newsweek magazine.

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• 4. Washington Circles

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  John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan all counted the Grahams as friends. The couple were fixtures of the Washington social scene. Katharine belonged to the Georgetown Set, an informal but influential circle of Cold War liberals.

  That closeness to power runs through her 1997 autobiography. Philip, she noted, was instrumental in persuading Johnson to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1960. She also reflected that this kind of personal intimacy between publishers and politicians later became unacceptable in journalism.

  She took part in politics herself. In 1967 she tried to push the lawyer Edward Bennett Williams into the role of Washington's first commissioner mayor. The job instead went to Walter Washington, a lawyer educated at Howard University.

  Her views on secrecy were more guarded than her reputation might suggest. On the 16th of November 1988, she spoke to a packed auditorium at CIA headquarters. The talk, "Secrecy and the Press," was part of a guest speaker series run by the agency's Office of Training and Education. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world," she said. "There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't." She added that democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

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• 5. Sudden Command

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  On Christmas Eve in 1962, Katharine Graham learned that her husband was having an affair with Robin Webb, an Australian stringer for Newsweek. Philip had struggled with alcoholism and mental illness throughout the marriage. He had mood swings and often belittled his wife. Now he announced that he would divorce her for Webb and began to divide the couple's assets.

  At a newspaper conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Philip apparently suffered a nervous breakdown. He was sedated and flown back to Washington. Doctors placed him in the Chestnut Lodge psychiatric facility in nearby Rockville. On the 3rd of August 1963, he died by suicide with a shotgun at Glen Welby, the couple's estate near Marshall in the Virginia horse country.

  Graham took over the company and the paper. From September 1963 she was president and the de facto publisher. She formally held the title of publisher from 1969 to 1979, and she was chairwoman of the board from 1973 to 1991. In 1972, as CEO of the Washington Post Company, she became the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company.

  She was the only woman at that level of a publishing company. She had no female role models, and many male colleagues and employees struggled to take her seriously. In her memoir she wrote candidly about her lack of confidence and her distrust of her own knowledge. The rise of the women's movement, coinciding with her control of the Post, changed her own attitude. She began promoting gender equality inside her company.

  Two of her choices shaped the paper for decades. She hired Benjamin Bradlee as editor. She also cultivated Warren Buffett for his financial advice, and he became a major shareholder and something of an eminence grise in the company. His firm, Berkshire Hathaway, held a substantial stake in the Post. Her son Donald would serve as publisher from 1979 until 2000.

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• 6. Watergate

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  Before Watergate, there was the Pentagon Papers. Graham and Bradlee first faced serious challenges when the Post published the contents of that material. The test of nerve came again when the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought Bradlee the Watergate story.

  Graham backed their investigation. Bradlee ran stories about the scandal at a time when few other news outlets were reporting on it. The coverage eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.

  The threat from John Mitchell in 1972 showed how personal the pressure became. The Post printed his remark, though Bradlee cut the crude words from it. Graham later noted that it was "especially strange of Mitchell to call me Katie, which no one has ever called me." Her nickname was Kay.

  Graham does not appear in the film adaptation of All the President's Men. Robert Redford, who played Woodward, later revealed that earlier drafts included a scene for her. In it she asked Woodward and Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman, about the story, opening with the line "What are you doing with my paper?"

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• 7. Personal History

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  Nora Ephron, a writer who had once been married to Carl Bernstein, wrote about Graham's autobiography in the New York Times. "Am I making clear how extraordinary this book is?" she asked. She called it an amazing account of how Graham succeeded in an industry dominated by men. In her words, Graham "manages to rewrite the story of her life in such a way that no one will ever be able to boil it down to a sentence."

  The book, Personal History, appeared in 1997. Reviewers praised its honest portrayal of Philip Graham's mental illness. They also admired how it traced her own life and offered a glimpse of how women's roles had changed over her lifetime. In 1998 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

  An unauthorized biography had appeared long before. In 1979, Deborah Davis published Katharine the Great. That same year a set of Supersisters trading cards included one carrying Graham's name and picture.

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• 8. Honors and Last Days

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  In 1966, Truman Capote named Graham the honoree of his Black and White Ball. Recognition for her work followed over the next three decades. In 1973 she received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. In 1974 she became the first woman elected to the board of directors of the Associated Press. In 1975 she received the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen.

  The Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism came to her in 1987. In 1988 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 she received the Freedom medal for her commitment to freedom of speech and expression. On the 30th of January 1998, the Orlando television station WCPX-TV changed its call letters to WKMG-TV in her honor. In 1999 Coretta Scott King presented her with the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2000 the International Press Institute named her one of its 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past 50 years.

  Her ties to the Rockefeller family led to a seat on the council of Rockefeller University. The Museum of Modern Art gave her the David Rockefeller Award for enlightened generosity and advocacy of cultural and civic endeavors.

  On the 14th of July 2001, Graham fell and struck her head while visiting Sun Valley, Idaho. She was taken to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise and died there three days later, aged 84. Her funeral was held at the Washington National Cathedral.

  She is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, across the street from her former home. Honors continued after her death. In 2002 President George W. Bush presented her posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The National Portrait Gallery profiled her in 2010 in One Life: Katharine Graham. In 2017 Meryl Streep played her in Steven Spielberg's film The Post, a role that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. At the University of Chicago, a dormitory in the Max Palevsky Residential Commons bears her name, and students celebrate Graham Day every year on the 2nd of March.

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