Interview with Katharine Graham

Interview by Marsha Vande Berg

There is an unmistakable moment when an idea matures and insists on its own expression. Katharine Graham, one of America's most powerful people, says she decided to publish her memoirs at age 79 because it was time to record the story of those who shepherded the Washington Post to greatness -- her father, Eugene Meyer; her late husband, Phil Graham; and herself.

Personal History is especially for readers who love media lore. It chronicles U.S. presidential administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to present day, sweeping readers from the Alger Hiss affair to Vietnam; from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to the advent of high technology; from the Post's acquisition of Colonel McCormick's Times Herald in 1954 to the Post's position of dominance, both in size and prestige in the nation's capital.

It was time, Graham said in a recent interview, that she look back at the defining issues in a life well lived, a life which also parallels the evolution of women from "second-class citizenship" to positions of rank and leadership. She had grown up with great wealth, her father having earned millions by the time she enrolled at the University of Chicago. She promised her husband that she would live within his meager means during the early years of their marriage. She emerged, still a member of America's privileged class and vulnerable to the wiles of the workplace but capable beyond even her own expectations of rolling up her shirtsleeves and sweating out the publication of a daily newspaper.

"I worked because my mother brought us up to think we would work, and Phil encouraged me to work a lot more than I wanted to," Graham said. Is work the key to success? "Not necessarily," she answered. "A woman can do other things. The point is that today, a woman can choose."

Graham began work on her memoirs six years ago while still chairman of the Washington Post Company. She worked on and off with researcher Evelyn Small. All totaled, she conducted 250 interviews and combed through piles upon piles of jumbled files.

Her father, the wealthy, influential Washingtonian Eugene Meyer, was one of three men Graham credits with having a major influence on her. The other two are her late husband Phil Graham and financier Warren Buffett. After Phil Graham killed himself in August 1963, Mrs. Graham assumed the job of publisher and eventually president. In 1975, when she faced down the pressmen's union, Local 6, Buffett was a friend and confidant.

Tragedy seemed to hurl her from one job to another, each of which she was unprepared for, she says in her memoir. The most poignant instance, of course, was her husband's flagrant and very public affair with a Newsweek correspondent, his mental illness and subsequent suicide at their country home while she napped upstairs. Time after time, she was obliged to show grace in the face of a challenge about which she felt not only ignorant, but also ambivalent and insecure.

"What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the edge," she writes.

She cultivated a "habit of listening to the men in my life," including renowned Post editor Ben Bradlee, when it came to editorial matters, and to Buffett, a shareholder and director, when it came to business matters. The Midwesterner was especially important to her during the pressmen's wrenching, months-long strike, she writes.

"We were not looking for the strike to happen," Graham said. "When it did, we were embattled, and we just had to keep going. We had no choice. The seminal moment," she continued, "was when the [newspaper's other] unions began coming back," and the Post began hiring replacements for the striking pressmen.

Resolution of the strike "made the industry take me seriously," Graham says.

As for the Post, "I have always considered the daily paper a miracle of sorts," she writes, "but never more so than during the strike." Today, the media in general, but especially print media, again is embattled -- this time by technology's potential to dilute a newspaper's reader and advertising base. "Print is certainly going to change. It's going to have to adapt," she says. "But it's so important. It brings readers the information they need in a democratic society.

"That sounds pious. But society without print would be a different society. It is up to us to keep print alive and going."

But what kind of job is the press doing? "The fact is the press on the whole has improved," she answered. "We are not here to be popular. We are here to be respected and above all, to be believed."

Eugene Meyer described a newspaper as a public trust, intended to serve the public in a democracy. Phil Graham, in a speech to Newsweek overseas correspondents, described journalism as a "first draft of history." Both men were inspired by journalism's noble ideals. Both operated at the very core of the Washington power structure.

Unlike these two men who cast the longest shadows in her life, Katharine Graham seems to achieve her own power from a place within -- that at the beginning, seems as spare as the prose she uses to tell her long story. The irony is that her achievements, in terms of position, power, and wealth, happened in spite of her being a woman. She was thrust into the publisher's chair after her husband died; Watergate was reported on her watch and initially against great odds, by an able team of journalists led by Bradlee; it took a woman publisher to successfully stare down the tough pressmen's union.

Now that her memoir is finished, Graham says that "life is full enough, but I will have to re-think what I do with my time." She recently signed on to the National Campaign to Reduce Teenage Pregnancy and belongs to The Early Childhood Collaborative. She has eight grandchildren -- and retains her "stay in form" title at the Post.

Staying in form means just that. She insisted her son, Donald Graham, now publisher, and Alan Spoon, the company's chief operating officer, keep her posted but remain "totally in charge." One of her final decisions while she was totally in charge was deciding when she would leave the company.

In places, her saga about one of America's finest newspapers borders on humorless reportage. But the sections dealing with her husband's demise and her battle against the unions are riveting. By the time we learn of the inevitable conclusion to her husband's illness, we are reasonably well acquainted with her family and circumstances.

Yet Graham does not invade the privacy of those on the periphery, especially that of her children. Though there could be more reflection in this memoir, Graham nonetheless wins our deep respect and gratitude for having shared a life well lived.

Marsha Vande Berg is a former newspaper editor. She now publishes The Vande Berg World Report at www.elibrary.com. She can be reached at MJVB@aol.com.

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