Graham Tells the Story Behind the Headlines

The most powerful presence in Katharine Graham’s new book, and the object of her grandest passion, is not human. The Washington Post runs through her life, and through her memoir, like a great river.

Early on, it provides the only bond she has with her father. Later, it becomes the glue in her married life. It dredges up constant supplies of power, fame, friends and fortune. But most of all, it seems to be one of the few things Graham loved that loved her back.

At 46, with no publishing experience, Graham took over her family’s mediocre newspaper, which her husband had run until his death, and led it to journalistic greatness.

Then, with no management background, she fixed the company’s corporate chaos, turning it into a stable media giant. For 13 years, she was CEO, commanding the largest Fortune 500 company ever run by a woman.

Without her go-ahead, the facts of Watergate might never have been uncovered. President Nixon, who tried to stop her, might have finished his term in office. Robert Redford could not have made “All the President’s Men.”

In Los Angeles last week, the 79-year-old media icon played a new role: author on tour. Her “Personal History” is out this month from Alfred A. Knopf.

She smiles, sits, adjusts the jacket of her pale pantsuit, then aligns her neck and back into the swanlike posture she maintains with obvious difficulty. Recent hip replacement surgery requires her to walk with a cane.

Katharine Graham finally speaks. It is, as one former employee recently wrote, “a lockjaw voice that sounded, to us, like money.”

Graham has never been poor. Or even just moderately wealthy. Her father, Eugene Meyer, parlayed a small nest egg into millions before he ever met her mother. As their brood increased (Katharine was the fourth of five children), so did the family’s fortune.

“My life has been fun, fun, fun,” Graham says at one point, almost courting contradiction. Of course, she knows you’ve learned otherwise if you’ve read “Personal History.”

It is a tale written in many layers, as deep as it is long. And Graham is touring the country at a hectic pace to promote it. She has already blitzed New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Next are Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Houston and San Antonio.

But why?

“To sell books, of course.” Case closed.

Graham believes journalists ought to let their interview subjects “hang themselves with their own words.” She is not about to be hung.

Long ago labeled “the most powerful woman in America,” she has enjoyed such social clout that presidents and other potentates dared not decline her invitations to dinner.

President John F. Kennedy cruised up her driveway to a party in a convertible, top down. President Lyndon Johnson summoned her to chat in his White House room, where he suddenly started to undress for bed. (“Turn around,” he commanded, and she did.) Truman Capote hosted his famous Black and White Ball in New York with Graham as guest of honor. This is the fun stuff, the superficial glitter.

Beneath that is the drama of Graham’s struggle to survive in a marriage and a world she didn’t understand, to be accepted. And to retain against great odds what was rightfully hers: her husband and her newspaper, both of whom she loved.

Interlaced with all that is her insider’s story of Washington politics and power plays, of how a newspaper grew to be great, how it influenced government, and how government occasionally influenced it.

After relinquishing management of the Post to her son, Donald, she retreated to her study and wrote in longhand, on yellow legal pads, “just the bare facts of what happened in my life.” She did not desire “to draw conclusions, to achieve any kind of catharsis” from the writing, she says. “I just wanted to tell it like it was.”

That would include her bizarre childhood, so filled with financial privilege and emotional poverty.

Graham contends in the interview that she was “no poor little rich girl,” that her parents were admirable in so many ways. But read 50 pages into her memoir and you have to put it down, shake off the gripping sense of suffocation and isolation into which she has dragged you with her spare prose. But you do not stop reading. Because she has penned an epic saga that captures history as well as her story.

For starters, Graham’s parents left her and her siblings (all toddlers) in New York with servants for four years while they scoped out life in Washington, D.C. Even after the children were moved to Washington, the parents were often absent and always remote.

At one point, young Katharine suggested she make appointments to spend time with her busy, brilliant, self-absorbed mother. The mother laughingly repeated that request to friends, because it was so “quaint.”

Later, Katharine asked about sex. Her mother responded, “Haven’t you seen dogs in the street?” Katharine hadn’t. But she said yes anyway, and conversation ended there.

Katharine never really thought to complain. She held in her anguish, as she continued to do for much of her adult life, never thinking she was deserving of more.

She relates all this in the book. But asked about it face to face, she replies with a chuckle: “There is a statute of limitations on blaming your parents.” In time, she realized that despite her parents’ failings, they were people of integrity and principle. And they gave her far more than they withheld.

Graham also tells nothing but the truth about her lengthy marriage to a man she thought “dazzling” in every way. Until he left her for a younger woman, slid into manic depression and shot himself to death in their bathroom just when Graham had taken him back.

“Don’t forget, 22 years of our 23-year marriage were wonderful,” Graham asserted the other day.

Well, maybe. If you don’t count the fact that, according to the book, her husband continually belittled her, drained every ounce of her confidence and free will. But she was so in love, and so insecure, she didn’t even know he was doing it.

When she learned of his affair with a young Newsweek writer (she accidentally picked up a phone extension and heard the pair talking), she did not throw him out. She asked him if that was what he wanted. But when he later said he also wanted to keep the Washington Post, she drew the line. He would never get it, she vowed.

Her father may have meant well, but he was no prize package. He bought the then-failing Post in 1933. He kept it running with infusions of his own money. He knew that his daughter Katharine loved journalism in general, and the family paper in particular. Yet he gave the major number of shares to Philip Graham instead of to her. That was because “as Dad explained to me, no man should be in the position of working for his wife.”

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It is clear that, for many years, she considered herself a mother, homemaker and “the tail to her husband’s kite.”

How surprised she was, when her husband died, to find she could not only do what he did, but do it much better.

Entering the family business after her husband’s death, she realized there were no other women at even moderately high levels of management, that she was totally surrounded by men. Most condescended to her, even though she signed their checks. At first, she attributed their attitude to her lack of knowledge and experience. Slowly, she realized it was simply because she was female; she was invisible to them.

Socially, too, the barriers were up. In Washington in the ‘60s, it was still the practice at social dinners for men and women to separate after the meal. The men smoked cigars and discussed “serious issues,” while the women were expected to powder their noses and gossip.

One night, she writes, “something snapped.”

Graham had spent the day discussing world affairs with some of the same men who were at the table. She was not about to be dismissed. So she told her host that she would leave the party if the women were asked to leave the room. He relented. Word spread, and soon the antiquated practice was abolished all over Washington.