Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire [Paperback ed.] 1631681583, 9781631681585

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Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire [Paperback ed.]
1631681583, 9781631681585

Author / Uploaded
Deborah Davis

Citation preview

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KATHARINE THE GREAT On June

17,

1972, five

men were arrested

for a burglary at the

Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. From this event grew the major political scandal of our times, a scandal that might have gone undiscovered and unreported except for the WASHINGTON POST, published by Katharine

Graham. Although she powerful

is

surely one of the most

women in the United States, few

Americans are aware of her far-reaching influence.

the

first

KATHARIITE THE GREAT

is

full-len^h biography of Kath-

arine, a woman born into wealth and power. The second daughter of multi-

millionaire Eugene Meyer and Agnes Ernst, she grew up among the rich and the elite; her mother's friends included Brancusi, Rodin, and Thomas Mann.

Katharine was sent to Vassar and then to the University of Chicago; after a brief stay on the West Coast she returned to the East, where her father had just purchased the washincon post. When Katharine married, her husband, the brilliant, mercurial Philip Graham, be-

came publisher. I

Katharine then settled down to two decades of housewifery while Philip ran the POST. But by the early 1960s Phil was battling manic depi-ession; the marriage to sputter- Phil had to stop work-

began

ing full-time. In August 1963, on the anniversary of the formation of the Washington Post Company, he put a fifth

shotgun to his head. Katharine hei'self took over the

post.

Middle-aged, inexperienced, the owner's

daughter, she had to fight for respect, for control of the '>aper. She won; together with Ben Brr.Jlee, she made the post a successful paper. And an important one; in 1970, she published the Pentagon Papers to international repercussions. Then came 1972, the year of Uixon's reelection and the- Watergate break-iTL The WASHINGTON post's investigation of this ofcc^r-y, the insistent probing of the reports ers Woodward and Bernstein, not only uncovered the actual significance of the event but itself became a news-making story. But what was the motivation behind this intensive coverage? Freedom of the press? Journalistic integrity? Or other motives? Through an

analysis of "mediapolitics"— the inseparable relationship between the media and the government— Deborah Davis provides a new perspective on why

Watergate was perpetrated and, above all, why Katharine Graham's post reported the stories as it did For, at this time, everything that Katharine Graham did, she did through the post, and it affected every American in the 1970s.

From the M