Katherine Graham And The Washington Post Essay

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Introduction

As the first female publisher of a major U.S. newspaper—The Washington Post—Katherine Graham made her mark in American history, not only for being at the helm of one of the nation’s most prominent papers but also for leading the paper through its coverage of one of the most controversial moments in U.S. history—Watergate. Graham’s story would go on to be told in film by Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the Academy Award nominated film The Post. It was Graham’s refusal to bow to pressure from the highest office in the land, the White House, that earned her the legacy she has achieved. Known as a stalwart, a fighter for free press, and—at the end of the day—a true reporter, Graham displays all of these qualities in her memoir Personal History, where she explicitly acknowledges the characteristic about her that made her such an indomitable spirit in an era when the powers that be were crushing everything they could: “This project has renewed my appreciation for the value of archival material. I have spent innumerable hours poring over old letters and memos from and between my parents, my husband, and myself, as well as communications involving Post and Newsweek executives and editors” (Graham, 1998, p. viii). Emanating from that dedication to getting the facts straight, to “poring over old letters” in order to tell the story truthfully, is the story—the essence—of Katherine Graham. This paper will provide a biography of Katherine Graham in order to show why her place in American history is owed to her commitment to setting the record straight.

Early Life/Childhood



From the very beginning, Graham was different from others. Her father was Jewish—his family from Alsace-Loraine (that oft-fought over stretch of land between France and Germany that was the cause of so many conflicts and wars). Her mother was German Lutheran. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, as Katherine “Kay” Meyer, she was baptized in the Lutheran church and raised as an Episcopalian. Her life was unlike those who made up the majority of American life—Main Street America, as it is called. Her family owned several homes. Graham’s father had succeeded very well for himself in America...
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He purchased The Washington Post in 1933 when Graham was just 16 years old. He had no intention at the time of handing it off to her when she grew up, nor did she ever think it to happen (Graham, 1998). As a child, Graham was often left in the care of a governess, her parents often traveling or socializing among the American elite. Graham attended the Madeira School, Vassar and then the University of Chicago. At college, she began to take a strong interest in activist issues, such as labor. Here she developed a sense of right and wrong in the real world—meeting other people from other walks of life, learning their struggles, and understanding the obstacles they faced in daily life. Her first job in journalism came with the San Francisco News (Falcone, 2018), where she worked a year before the paper folded. With this background and these new experiences, at 21 years of age, Graham began working for her father’s paper The Post.

Beginning Career



Katherine married Philip Graham in 1940 and her husband took over as publisher of The Post in 1946 when her father gave up his role as head of the paper. When Phil died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1963, the consensus opinion among Washington elites was that Graham would sell the paper. She did not. She wanted to run it. It was the 1960s: life was changing dramatically all across the U.S.—and having developed an interest in the lives of everyday Americans, everyday issues, and now having the opportunity to reflect those issues and struggles in a major newspaper, Graham was not going to give it up.

The newspaper business was a male dominated industry, already lampooned by Howard Hawks, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the 1940 film His Girl Friday. While in that film, Grant runs the paper and Russell acts as his writer, Graham would pull a role reversal for the first time in American history in the news industry: she would run the paper and her writers would be men like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—the journalists who broke the Watergate story wide open with their Deepthroat contact, who gave them the inside scoop on the scandal that rocked the Nixon presidency in the 1970s (Bernstein & Woodward, 1974). They represented the kind of dedication to the…

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