Personal History
Katharine Graham's 1997 memoir of her own life in relation to the great success of the Washington Post is a revealing tale of a wife and mother who takes over her husband's job after his death, to become for many years the only woman in Fortune's 500. Her modesty lends the story a rich tone of honesty and courage.
Katharine's father bought the Washington Post in 1933, while she was still in high school, but she began working there the next summer as a copy girl. After finishing college, she married Phil Graham, an attorney who went to work on the Post and later became publisher.
Phil got along well with both of Katharine's parents. She, however, felt closer to her father, because her mother "...made her daughters feel inferior to her". When her father retired, he chose Phil to take over the paper, and in the years to follow the Washington Post made noticeable progress. Phil and Katharine soon became a part of the Washington D.C. uppercrust and were close friends to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, as well as to Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater, and Robert McNamara.
But Phil's sudden death in 1963 changed Katharine's life greatly. Phil, while suffering from manic-depression, had an affair with another woman, and only returned to Katharine a day before his death. Suddenly she became not only a widow with four children, but also the publisher of the Washington Post.
Katharine Graham's greatest tests while piloting the Post came first with the Pentagon Papers, then Watergate, and finally a series of strikes that crippled the paper for over six months. Since 1963 her liberal and wise leadership of the Post, Newsweek,and a number of TV stations have made her one of the outstanding publishers of the century.
Katharine retired in 1991 and her son Don took over for her. She was as mentally alert as ever then, but claimed that "...old age is no barrel of laughs." In her mid-seventies, she began to write her personal memoir, which became a bestseller and in 1998 won her the Pulitzer prize for biography.