Katharine Graham: Publisher, Watergate, and Women's History

Introduction

As the first female publisher of a major U.S. newspaper — The Washington Post — Katharine 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 it through coverage of one of the most controversial moments in U.S. history: Watergate. Graham's story would later be told on film by Steven Spielberg, with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks starring in the Academy Award-nominated film The Post. It was Graham's refusal to bow to pressure from the highest office in the land 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 that made her such an indomitable spirit in an era when those in power 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 essence of Katharine Graham. This paper provides a biography of Katharine Graham in order to show why her place in American history is owed to her commitment to setting the record straight.

Early Life and Childhood

From the very beginning, Graham was different from others. Her father was Jewish, his family from Alsace-Lorraine — that oft-contested 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 World War I, as Katherine "Kay" Meyer, she was baptized in the Lutheran church and raised as an Episcopalian. Her life was unlike that of most Americans — what is often called Main Street America. Her family owned several homes, and her father had succeeded as a financier and a familiar face on Wall Street. He purchased The Washington Post in 1933, when Graham was just sixteen years old. He had no intention at the time of handing it off to her, nor did she ever expect it to happen (Graham, 1998).

As a child, Graham was often left in the care of a governess while her parents traveled and socialized among the American elite. She attended the Madeira School, then Vassar, and finally the University of Chicago. At college, she developed a strong interest in activist causes such as labor rights. There she cultivated a sense of right and wrong in the real world — meeting people from other walks of life, learning their struggles, and understanding the obstacles they faced daily. Her first job in journalism came with the San Francisco News (Falcone, 2018), where she worked for a year before the paper folded. Armed with these experiences, at twenty-one years of age Graham began working for her father's paper, The Post.

Beginning Career

Katharine married Philip Graham in 1940, and her husband took over as publisher of The Post in 1946 when her father stepped down. 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 across the United States — and having developed a deep interest in the lives of everyday Americans and everyday issues, Graham was not about to give up the opportunity to reflect those struggles in a major newspaper.

The newspaper business was a male-dominated industry, already satirized in the 1940 film His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. While in that film Grant runs the paper and Russell serves as his writer, Graham would pull a role reversal for the first time in the history of American news: 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 the help of their anonymous source known as "Deep Throat," who gave them the inside account of the scandal that rocked the Nixon presidency in the 1970s (Bernstein & Woodward, 1974). Bernstein and Woodward represented the kind of dedication to facts and to the real story that Graham wanted to promote. At The Washington Post, she gave them the chance to tell that story — in spite of the intense pressure she faced from within her very own community.

Conclusion

Katharine Graham set the record straight — not just on the question of Watergate, but also on the woman question. Until she showed that she would not back down in the face of intimidation, few people expected that a woman could run a newspaper in a male-dominated industry. Graham showed them otherwise: she demonstrated determination, grit, and steadfastness in one of the most powerful communities in America, where movers and shakers expected deference to their weight and dominance. Graham pushed back and proved that a woman, too, could wield power, influence, and authority.

As the publisher of The Post, she made the newspaper one of the most influential in the nation — if not the world — by sticking to the facts and letting her reporters actually report. She showed that women did not have to be forever confined to domestic roles, but could head a major publication and change the course of history.

References

Bernstein, C., & Woodward, B. (1974). All the president's men. Simon and Schuster.

Falcone, D. (2018). The real-life woman behind The Post. Retrieved from http://people.com/movies/real-life-katharine-graham-story/

Graham, K. (1998). Personal history. Vintage.

Horowitz, D. (1998). Betty Friedan and the making of The Feminine Mystique. University of Massachusetts Press.