Word: grahamism
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...course, could not have known how important the newspaper would later be to their daughter--or she to it. When Eugene Meyer retired, he passed control of the paper to Kay's husband Philip Graham, who ran it until his suicide in 1963. Only then did Kay Graham, at age 46, come out of the shadow of the men in her life and gradually transform herself into a near legendary figure: the "iron lady" who built the Post into one of the nation's great papers, stood up to the Nixon Administration during Watergate and hobnobbed with the rich...
...grew up in privilege. Her father was a well-connected Jewish financier who made millions on Wall Street and was an adviser to Presidents. Her mother, a writer and socialite, counted among her friends the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the novelist Thomas Mann. In 1940 Kay married Phil Graham, a charismatic protege of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and later something of a golden boy of the postwar liberal establishment. It was quite a family...
...that time, his behavior was becoming more erratic, the result of a manic-depressive disorder that was treated by a psychiatrist who "did more harm than good," she says, recommending existentialist philosophy in lieu of drugs. Finally, on the day he returned home after a stay in the hospital, Graham said he wanted to take a nap, went into a bathroom and shot himself to death...
...Graham made many smart moves as well. She saw that the Post needed to be improved editorially and hired the right man, Ben Bradlee, to do it. (The meeting in which she put out the first feelers to him was the first time she had ever taken a man to lunch.) She gave the crucial go-ahead to publish the Pentagon Papers, after a federal judge had halted publication of them in the New York Times. And, of course, she stood tall during the paper's groundbreaking Watergate coverage, backing her reporters in the face of enormous pressure from...
BOOKS . . . PERSONAL HISTORY: In her disarmingly candid and immensely readable autobiography (Knopf; 642 pages; $29.95), Katharine Graham not only chronicles her personal transformation from wife to the "iron lady" who built the Washington Post into one of the nation's great papers; she also provides an invaluable inside glimpse of some of the most critical turning points in American journalism, says TIME's Richard Zoglin. Graham is especially revealing about the insecurities that plagued her when she took over the Post after husband Phil's suicide: "I still had little idea of how to relate to people in a business...