Katharine Graham and the Rise of the Washington Post
KATHARINE “KAY” GRAHAM was the daughter of Eugene Meyer, who bought the Washington Post in 1933. Kay was a shy, self-conscious young woman, but tough — and the only one of the Meyer children deeply interested in journalism.
Kay grew up in the shadow of her powerhouse mother, Agnes Meyer. Agnes loathed Herbert Hoover because Hoover clinked the change in his pockets when Agnes invited him to the Meyer house to hear Beethoven quartets. Kay wondered, ‘Why does my mother have to act like that?’
Relating to her father was easier for Kay; he was a good man and Kay was his favorite child. But even her father made Kay feel, “We were never quite going about things correctly.”
In 1940, she married Phil Graham whom she loved dearly. It didn’t occur to Kay that she should inherit her father’s job as the Post’s publisher. She wanted PHIL to be the paper’s publisher, and Eugene Meyer gave Phil that position in 1945 when Phil was just 30 years old. Phil Graham was in most ways a model newspaper publisher. He charmed and exasperated people with his brains, wit, gall and daring.
On August 3, 1963, Phil and Kay were napping together at their country house. Phil grew restless and said he was going to sleep in another room. Then Kay heard “an ear-splitting noise” — a shotgun fired in the house. She jumped off the bed, ran looking for Phil, and found him dead in the downstairs bathroom where he’d shot himself.
Phil was a 48-year-old manic depressive who’d been very sick for 18 months. Brilliant, often gracious and sweet, endlessly creative, he’d also grown increasingly erratic and angry. There were pointless blow-ups at subordinates. Phil Graham lived in a swirling secret world and held off his doctors, even as the darkness was rising.
Phil was cruel to Kay in his last year, carrying on a quite public affair with a young woman from Newsweek magazine, which Kay’s family also owned. Kay had spent 1962 and early ’63, trying to accept that her husband had left her, while also trying to look after his mental health. It was an impossible mess, yet Phil was known for doing the impossible, and she felt she owed it to him, and to their children, to try to do the same. Now this amazingly vital man was lying dead in the bathroom.
In the next hours and days, Kay had so many people to deal with: the local police; veteran Post colleagues and employees devoted to Phil; and family. A reporter from the rival paper, the Washington Star, strolled into Kay’s home and announced he was writing a story about Phil Graham’s death. The man was intruding on her privacy but Kay was in the newspaper business and didn’t feel she could throw a reporter out of the house. She just stared at the man, until another reporter pulled him away.
Hardest to break the news to, of course, were her four children: Lally and Don, of college age, and Bill and Steve, still at home. They had adored their father — and resented and feared him more than a little toward the end, a brutal stew of feelings with which to grieve.
There was no suicide note. The very articulate Phil Graham, who loved to write notes, who explored his feelings through writing, and revealed himself beautifully on paper, left no suicide note to help Kay understand his reasons.
As the circle of sorrow spread, as the telegrams, condolence calls and floral arrangements kept arriving, Kay guessed that Phil had concluded that manic depression would shadow him the rest of his life, and make him a second-rate publisher, husband and father. He preferred death.
Phil’s brother Bill arrived and was a great help to Kay and her children, but she was still mourning and feeling empty when she got word — politely, they hated to bother her — from top people at the Post, that she should come down to the paper’s headquarters and address the board of directors.
She knew these people at the Post were right; she DID need to talk to the board but it was agonizing because it was the kind of thing Phil had been so good at — the informal speech, both serious and funny, that truly reached people yet was delivered offhand. She cringed at the thought of what the Post’s board would think of HER.
She made the speech to the Post’s board on the day before Phil’s funeral. The entire board was male, and as she peered out at them, every one of them looked devastated. Her speech wasn’t great oratory, but she got across what she needed to: ‘I’M NOT SELLING THIS PAPER. And we will get through this together.’
Then the next day, Phil’s funeral, in the National Cathedral, one of the great buildings of the United States, a structure both massive and light, and never more dignified than during a funeral. President Kennedy attended the ceremony, and Jackie Kennedy wrote a condolence note that pierced Kay’s heart. Phil’s cruelties were all forgiven, part of a much larger glory and mystery.
Kay kept thinking two things: ‘I want to be a quietly effective instrument at the Post.’ And also, ‘I haven’t done enough to help my children. They’ve just lost their father.’
People kept coming up to her, telling her how marvelous Phil was, how much they missed him. They intended their words to be kind, but it was hard enough for Kay to compare herself to Phil as he was; to compare herself to these idealized images of Phil was dreadful.
Neither Kay nor the men she was dealing with understood how deeply ingrained sexism was in journalism, and there were any number of perceived slights and awkward encounters between Kay and various male journalists.
She brought Ted Sorensen, who’d been John Kennedy’s chief speech writer, to lunch at the Post, eager to see if he’d join the editorial staff or perhaps write a column. Sorensen listened glumly for a while, then said, “The only job I really want is yours. Why don’t you move over and let me run the company for you?”
Kay was shaken when Chip Bohlen, an old family friend, and normally a wise man, told her “You’re not going to work, are you? You mustn’t — you’re young and attractive and you’ll get remarried.”
She found herself prickly, saying defiantly, ‘I WILL work. I’ll be the publisher of the Post at least until one of my sons is ready to take over from me.’ She thought of herself as a “bridge” to the next generation, staying in power as long as she was needed.
If certain people thought Kay should be a figurehead, leaving the big decisions to prominent men at the Post, Newsweek and the TV stations her family owned… Kay did not. She was determined to master her insecurities. She’d been around the Post all her life, she knew personally many of the reporters and editors and had an idea of what Phil had thought of their work.
Still, there was so much more to learn. How does the Post get printed? What’s the process? Same with Newsweek and the TV stations. She started spending two days a week in Manhattan watching Newsweek develop the next week’s issue. She learned how to read the nuances of a balance sheet.
Still that drumbeat echoed in her head: Sell the Post. At least sell Newsweek, a New York magazine which has nothing to do with your Washington newspaper. Newsweek in 1963 was a weak sister to Time magazine. Phil had bought Newsweek in one of his brilliant, manic periods. The joke in Washington was that Phil and Kay had gone up to New York for the weekend. Kay, in bed with a headache, had asked Phil to go out and buy her a magazine, and he bought Newsweek.
Kay’s daughter Lally was very helpful, saying ‘Mom, you can do this. Your interests aren’t as broad as Dad’s, and you need more sleep — but you’re better than Dad was at certain things: getting along with people, gauging the strengths and weaknesses of people around you, and following through on your initiatives.’
Clare Boothe Luce, the congresswoman, advised Kay to always have a male secretary, respond promptly to correspondence, and let people know that you expect the notes and letters you send to draw a written response.
The columnist Walter Lippmann was another of Phil Graham’s expensive investments. Lippmann, a legend in journalism, was getting paid a king’s ransom to write his column for the Post. In fact, after Lippmann died and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard asked Kay to donate money to endow a Lippmann chair, Kay replied that her family had already endowed Walter Lippmann when he was alive.
But in 1963 Kay consulted Lippmann about how to act as publisher. He advised her, ‘There’s no need to read every item in the Post or the New York Times. But find stories in those papers that interest you and call in the reporter on that beat and have him go over the story with you: what’s important about it, and how it was constructed. You’ll learn more about the issues — and get a more nuanced sense of who your best reporters are.’
There were constant aggressive offers to buy the Post, offers from CBS, and also the Times-Mirror, and Sam Newhouse. Roy Thomson, who owned a Canadian newspaper conglomerate, told Kay that he scoured the United States looking for vulnerable papers, often owned by a widow or someone elderly, without an heir.
In 1963 and 1964 were a hectic catalogue of new challenges for her: labor union problems at the Post; public speeches to be made; a Newsweek reporter was jailed in Indonesia and his family wanted him sprung from jail. The White House would call Kay, trying to kill a story, telling her if it ran in the Post, it would hurt the national interest. The wheel was always turning, and there was always tomorrow’s paper to be written.
Suddenly, people wanted to interview Kay “on the record.” For the first time, she realized why so many public speakers sound wooden and embrace cliches — there’s an urgent need, in complicated times, to avoid the controversial.
Kay Graham took Ben Bradlee to lunch to get to know Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. Bradlee said he liked his current job, but “I’d give my left one” to be executive editor of the Washington Post. There seemed no chance of that; the Post’s executive editor, Al Friendly, was an old, dear friend of Kay Graham’s with no interest in retiring. People assumed Kay Graham would make no major changes at the Post for some time.
But Kay was a more observant and ambitious woman than many realized, and she was dissatisfied with the Post. She knew Al Friendly was an honorable man who worked hard. But the Post seemed to her a little too safe and ordinary, and she thought maybe Ben Bradlee could make it better. “I’d give my left one…” — it was exactly the way Phil Graham used to talk. Honest and a little outrageous.
So in 1965 Katharine Graham fired Al Friendly, which ruined their long friendship, and installed Ben Bradlee as the managing editor of the Washington Post. In 1968, she made Bradlee executive editor.
The Washington Star had always been the “paper of record” in town; the Post was a scrappy, erratic also-ran. Phil Graham had vastly improved the paper and now Kay Graham hired Ben Bradlee to make it the best paper in Washington, as good as the New York Times — and better than the Times in its coverage of the Federal government.
Ben Bradlee could make Kay Graham laugh. Much of his success at the Post was just that simple. Kay knew she was smart, hard-working and well-meaning, but Phil Graham, at his best, had also made her feel fresh and funny and pretty, and she was lifted up by his humor, by that outrageous part of Phil. Ben Bradlee was like that, too.
Kay Graham became a superb publisher, steering her paper through tough times, risking jail to publish the Pentagon Papers that revealed U.S. leaders had known very early on that the Vietnam War was likely unwinnable. She learned the power of silence, and to choose her battles carefully, not to be drawn into those of others. She used her power to prick the consciences of those in power.
In 1972, she supported two very young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, when they went after President Richard Nixon and his top aides during the Watergate scandal. She was somewhat amused when Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell famously remarked that if the Post coverage kept up, “Katie Graham gonna get her tit caught in a wringer.”
She became a formidable woman in some of the ways that her mother had been. She had a private dining room at the Post and invited young Post staff to “new people’s” lunches there. John Feinstein was invited to one of these lunches while he was working for the Post on the night police beat. Over dessert, Mrs. Graham asked her new employees how the Post could be better. Complete silence fell over the table.
“Oh, come on, all of you,” said Katherine Graham. “I really want to know… Don’t be intimidated.”
“Well,” said John Feinstein. “We really don’t do a very good job in sports with getting things into the paper at night. The deadlines should be more flexible… and we need to get more box scores into the home delivery edition.”
Katharine Graham looked Feinstein in the eye and said, “John, you need to be a little more intimidated.”