Appreciation: Katharine Graham   

A Great Newspaper Owner

In the outpouring of commentary about Katharine Graham after her sudden death July 17 at the age of 84, among the terms employed to describe her influence on journalism and national and international life were: Powerful (usually expanded to "the most powerful woman in the world"), Gutsy, Imperious, Admired, Wealthy, Feared, even Hated.

That last characterization came, naturally, from the dank recesses of the right-wing conspiratorial world, a paranoiac place in which Mrs. Graham and her Washington Post were viewed, ridiculously, as the embodiment of a biased, "liberal" national media out to trample American values, destroy conservative patriots and further the spread of immorality that supposedly afflicts contemporary American culture. Indeed, in the most loathsome representation of that extremist world, Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review suggested Mrs. Graham had assumed ultimate control of the Post and its media empire by engineering the death of her husband, Philip Graham, a suicide in 1963.

To all these seemingly contradictory characterizations of Mrs. Graham, she was also said, and not inaccurately at the time, to have been Shy, Awkward, Vulnerable and Insecure.

I would add another word that I believe captures a dominant feeling about Kay Graham: Beloved. It is this feeling that helps explain the extraordinary display of emotion that marked both her passing and her public funeral.

By the time of her death, and largely through her remarkably candid Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, "Personal History," Kay Graham had become an example for women of all ages and stations. As her son Don said at her funeral, "The story of Katharine Graham is reasonably well known." So it is now, thanks to her memoir, and it is an Everywoman story that transcends even the national role she came to exercise when controlling the Post. I wonder if she herself realized how powerfully that account of her personal struggle to emerge from a world of great wealth, but a man's world in which women were relegated to a secondary place and expected to remain there, affected women everywhere.

The essential elements are universal: a remote, admired, dominant father, the conservative Republican banker, Eugene Meyer; a difficult, talented and often absent mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer, whom I have heard Kay describe as "the Viking"; a brilliant, much-loved husband's long slide into manic depression and suicide. Kay, a mother of four, suddenly was forced to assume the vast family business and confront numerous male executives within and without who hungered to take over the property. Her ultimate triumph in the face of so many blows is one with which all women can identify.

I was in China, nearing the end of a three-week trip throughout that compellingly contradictory country, when I learned, belatedly, of her death after she fell on a sidewalk during a media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Despite our interconnected electronic world, the news about the circumstances of her death was frustratingly fragmentary. It wasn't until I arrived back in Washington, just in time for her funeral at the National Cathedral, that I caught up with the outpouring of tributes. What struck me most strongly was not the unusually passionate and personal nature of them; it was the way women whom I do not know stopped me on the street, even in a juror's room where I had been called for duty the day after the funeral, and, recognizing me as someone who had worked for Mrs. Graham, expressed their sorrow at her passing.

Her personal triumph over adversity cannot--and should not--be separated from her professional ones.

In journalism history, only a few great names stand out of those who established, for better or worse, the news business we know. Most of them are 19th-century figures, and virtually all from New York: James Gordon Bennett of the Herald; Horace Greeley of the Tribune; Charles A. Dana of the Sun; Joseph Pulitzer of the World; William Randolph Hearst of the Journal; and, most influential of all in terms of establishing the highest journalistic standards and practices, Adolph S. Ochs of the Times. Ochs' influence, of course, extended long into the 20th century until his death in 1935.

Now Katharine Graham joins, perhaps even eclipses, that select company. In the last half of the 20th century, no other news executive displayed greater courage and independence in the face of unremitting pressure from the highest governmental offices, none was more willing to risk losing her entire enterprise because she believed she was acting to fulfill the highest principles of a free press.

As usual, Ben Bradlee drew the lesson best. While his words at her funeral understandably did not address the current sorry state of the news business in this day of mass media mergers, bottom-line mentality, cheapness and playing to the lowest common denominator, of gossip and scandal-mongering, implicitly they spoke to that condition. "Maybe not all of you understand what it takes to make a great newspaper," Bradlee said. "It takes a great owner. Period. An owner who commits herself with passion and the highest standards and principles to a simple search for truth. With fervor, not favor. With fairness and courage.... That is what Kay Graham brought to the table, plus so much more."