Personal Touch Ex-Washington Post Chief Reflects On 60 Years In Newspapers In Candid Detail
“Personal History” By Katharine Graham (Knopf, 625 pages, $29.95)
In December 1937, Katharine Graham, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Chicago, wrote her older sister Bis that she wanted to go into the newspaper business to become a labor reporter and maybe someday “working up to political reporting.” Clearly, she had some reservations about her ability to be as she wrote a “GOOD reporter … a gift given by God to very few.”
Graham never realized that dream, but in the course of 30 years at the helm of the Washington Post, she fostered a newsroom environment where hundreds of ambitious, idealistic and determined reporters realized theirs.
In “Personal History,” her 625-page autobiography, she recounts in candid, absorbing and often painful detail the experiences that have molded her life.
The book’s title is fitting, for the story Graham relates is, on one level, deeply personal. She guides us skillfully from the February day in 1908 that her father first saw her mother at an exhibition of Japanese prints in New York; to her ambivalent feelings about her mother, Agnes, who set impossibly high standards of achievement for her four children; to her courtship by Phil Graham, a charming and brilliant law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; to the disintegration of their marriage, propelled by Phil’s dark and debilitating depressions and his suicide in August 1963.
On another level, Graham’s book is the well-told story of the Post’s transformation - from a bankrupt business with a meager 18 pages of news and advertising in June 1933 to one of America’s great newspapers. Just as deftly as she navigates the turbulent waters of her family life, Graham retells the events leading up to the Post’s securing the Pentagon Papers in June 1971 while the New York Times, its major competitor for national stature, was enjoined from publishing after three days of blockbuster articles. It was Graham herself, ignoring strong advice from Post lawyers, who made the call. As she tells it, “Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.’ “
We also learn about Watergate from inside the newsroom that broke the story, pursued it courageously despite denials and denunciations from the Nixon White House and initial skepticism by other major news organizations, only to be vindicated with Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.
As she is throughout this book, Graham is refreshingly frank about her feelings. As the story gained momentum, she admits having doubts about the importance of the Post’s revelations. “If this were such a hell of a story,” she wrote, “where is everybody else?”
Other events - inside the Post - also tested her mettle. In October 1975, striking pressmen disabled the Post’s nine presses, set fire to one and assaulted the pressroom foreman. In less than three weeks, relying at first on remote printing plants and helicopters to transport the newspapers, the Post was publishing a 206-page Sunday paper. By early 1976, the Post had hired 107 people to replace the strikers, 15 of whom eventually pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
Another highlight of Graham’s story is the parade of historic figures - beginning with her parents - who promenade across her big screen. Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post at a bankruptcy auction, had already amassed in the early 1930s a fortune of $43 million in holdings of the Allied Chemical and Dye Corp. Meyer was a remarkably enlightened capitalist, who encouraged his children to learn about public issues and, then, to give something back to society in public service. Graham’s mother, Agnes Ernst, a Barnard graduate, also had newspapering in her blood: She was a free-lance reporter for the New York Sun in 1908 when women journalists were very rare.
Graham also presents intimate glimpses of our presidents. There’s John F. Kennedy, arriving at the Grahams’ R Street house on the night of his inauguration with “snowflakes in his hair and a smile on his handsome face.” And Lyndon Johnson, angrily scolding Graham in his bedroom while changing into his pajamas.
As for Nixon, the Post’s most persistent and dangerous antagonist, Graham had harsh words. Writing to Post editor Ben Bradlee at the end of 1974, she said Nixon saved the newspaper from destruction because he was “mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it.”
These days, Graham, who is 79, is still chairwoman of the Washington Post Co.’s executive committee, and she still adheres to the best of what her parents taught her. Just recently, she helped start an early childhood education program in two Washington housing projects. Now that “Personal History” is out of her system, she has pledged in writing to “live in the present, looking forward to the future.”
MEMO: William K. Marimow is managing editor of The Sun.