Few people have had such a profound impact on the American political and journalistic consciousness as Katharine Graham. Her major role was leading the Washington Post from 1963 until 1991. David Huff explains.
Katharine Graham in 1975, available here.
Overview
Born Katharine Meyer in 1917 in New York City, she was the daughter of Eugene Meyer, who was an American businessman and publisher of the Washington Post newspaper, which he acquired in 1933. After attending Vassar College, she transferred to the University of Chicago, where she received her B.A. degree in 1938. After college, she worked for a year as a reporter for the San Francisco News. After briefly employed in San Francisco, she joined the editorial staff of The Washington Post. In 1940, she married Philip Graham, who was a graduate of Harvard Law School.
In 1946, Philip Graham assumed the position of publisher of the Post. He served as publisher and later co-owner of The Washington Post and its parent company, The Washington Post Company. During his years with the Post Company, Graham helped The Washington Post grow from a fledgling local paper to a national publication and the Post Company expand to own other newspapers as well as radio and television stations. Tragically, however, Phillip Graham committed suicide in August 1963 after suffering from manic depression. As a result, Katharine Graham was transformed from a reticent widow to publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post. Strong-minded, gifted and engaging, Ms. Graham recognized the extraordinary talent of other outstanding individuals in the publishing community. She hired Benjamin Bradlee first as managing editor and then as executive editor to handle the newsroom operations of the growing and well-respected newspaper. Under their tutelage, the Post confronted major crises—the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate Crisis—that no one could have foreseen. Yet, Graham and Bradlee both possessed strong instincts and judgment, a tenacious and unequaled work ethic, and outstanding interpersonal skills that enabled them to survive these political tribulations.
The Pentagon Papers Controversy
In 1967, former Secretary of State Robert McNamara commissioned a study known as The Pentagon Papers, which was the history of the Vietnam War and the decisions made therein by American foreign policy makers from 1945–1967. As the Vietnam War escalated, with more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg—who had worked on the project—came to oppose the war, and decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers should be available to the American public. In March 1971, he gave a copy of the report to The New York Times, which then published a series of shocking articles based on the report’s most appalling secrets. In sum, the papers revealed that the United States government had broadened the initial war in Vietnam into Southeast Asia with the military bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks. At that time, these seminal events were not reported by the American press.
On June 13, 1971, the Times began to publish a series of articles based on the information contained in the Pentagon Papers. After several published pieces, the Justice Department issued a temporary restraining order against further release of the material, arguing that it was harmful to the country's national security. In the landmark Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), the Times and The Washington Post joined forces to fight for the right to publish, and on June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the government had failed to prove harm to national security and that publication of the papers was justified under the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press.
Due to the favorable Supreme Court ruling, The Washington Post's reputation was enhanced by Graham's defiance of a restraining order by pursuing publication of the Pentagon Papers. To her credit, Graham fought U.S. government efforts to censor the material, which, in turn, upheld the First Amendment right of the free press against prior restraint by the government.
The Watergate Crisis
A year later, on June 17, 1972, a break-in at the Democratic National Committee ("DNC") headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. triggered a political earthquake that shook the foundation of America's democratic institutions. The subsequent cover-up by people who worked for or with the White House, and by Nixon himself, created a constitutional crisis that not only threatened America's "checks and balances" in its democratic representative system, but also called into question the presidency itself.
During the crisis, Katharine Graham faced the full wrath of the Nixon administration as the paper's reporters—Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—sought to piece together the story of the Watergate burglary. Throughout the Watergate Crisis, Woodward and Bernstein were fed leaks by a deep-background source they referred to as "Deep Throat," who was later revealed to be FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt, Sr. They kept up a constant stream of leads demonstrating not only the direct involvement of Nixon officials in Watergate activities, but also that the Watergate wiretapping and break-in had been financed through illegally laundered 1972 campaign contributions. In a shocking cover-page article, The Washington Post reported on October 10, 1972 that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a "massive, nationwide campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the president's re-election committee officials.”(1)
"The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief would have been hard enough under the best of circumstances, but it was made much harder given the unveiled threats and major and minor harassments by a president and his administration,”(2) she wrote in an excerpt from her 1997 memoir, Personal History. At the end of 1972, Republican businessmen challenged the licenses of two Florida TV stations owned by The Washington Post Company, causing the company's stock price to drop by more than 50 percent.(3) "Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain, of the pressures of living with an administration so completely at odds with us and determined to harm us.”(4)
Graham described her own role in the unfolding story as "a kind of devil's advocate, asking questions all along the way -- questions about whether we were being fair, factual, and accurate.”(5) She downplayed the notion that she had shown courage by standing by her reporters and editors, saying she had no choice. "By the time the story had grown to the point where the size of it dawned on us, we had already waded deeply into its stream.”(6) "Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back.”(7)
After months of painstaking investigation by Woodward and Bernstein and U.S. Congressional hearings, coupled with the discovery of President Richard Nixon's secret tape recordings, the United States Supreme Court stepped into the unfolding political drama. On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), the Court ruled in a unanimous decision against President Richard Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court. On July 30, 1974, Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes to the American people. Nine days later, on August 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon delivered a nationally televised address in which he announced his decision to resign the presidency, effective at noon on August 9, 1974. At that time, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the nation's 38th President of the United States.
Watergate had a profound impact on the American system. It provided the impetus for pernicious cynicism and collective alienation toward the American political process. The intrinsic values and institutions that many people held as sacred-honesty, trust, company loyalty, and faith in a benevolent government-had been tainted and corrupted during the crisis. As a result, many Americans lost faith in the federal government and the reputation of the presidency was greatly damaged. Furthermore, many Americans were astounded that their democratically elected officials were culpable of such undemocratic and criminal behavior. Moreover, from an historical perspective, the Watergate Crisis served to deepen the political disenchantment and growing cynicism that commenced after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the bloody quagmire in Vietnam.
Legacy
Katharine Graham faced many tribulations, but she rose above them, created a name for herself and, in my opinion, forever changed the face of journalism. Graham, who became America's first female Fortune 500 CEO, was a mover and a shaker whose breadth of knowledge and depth of character touched a deep and resonating chord in American society. Her life gave meaning to the phrase that adversity builds character. Through tragedy and disappointment, Ms. Graham's sense of moral clarity enabled her to adapt, to endure, to develop a will of iron in order to bear the burdens that fate dealt her with uncommon grace. Rather than retreat into isolation and self-pity, she rose to the occasion to summon and cultivate political and journalistic impulses that existed within her and in turn, utilized them to strengthen America's democratic institutions.
Conclusion
Finally, despite Ms. Graham's continual political tribulations during the Nixon presidency, she maintained not only a firm and steadfast loyalty, but also a strong and unswerving commitment to her brave, passionate and determined counterparts at the Post. Ms. Graham's unparalleled support for her reporters as well as her editors led to landmark journalism, which reverberated through the highest levels of our government and culture. She helped to create one of the world's great newspapers, and her legacy lives on through the quality of reporting and editorial writing that Americans have come to expect from the Post and written media at large.
In essence, what the American people should gain from Ms. Graham's telling experience is that our political system is tilted more toward personal aggrandizement than to individuals willing and able to make a real contribution. Graham's story underscores the reality that a person's loyalty and experience - though important attributes - are often sacrificed for political expediency.
Ultimately, her success is directly related to those superb professional skills but, as with all great people, it is the result of the priceless qualities of depth of personality and strength of character. It is those latter traits, which America needs more than ever, that make her truly irreplaceable and will cause her to live forever.
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Now read David’s article on Jackie Kennedy’s influence on the arts here.
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