Personal History

This is Katharine Graham's own account of becoming, almost by accident, one of the most powerful newspaper publishers in America. Graham describes a childhood of real privilege shadowed by real neglect, the daughter of financier and Federal Reserve chairman Eugene Meyer, who bought the Washington Post in 1933, raised in homes in Washington and Westchester County by parents who traveled constantly and left her, by her own account, with a mother she found cold and diminishing rather than warm. She describes her father passing control of the paper to her husband, Philip Graham, in 1946 rather than to her, a decision she recalls accepting without visible resentment even as it set the terms for the rest of her adult life.

The memoir's hardest passages cover Philip's mental illness: his growing depression and bipolar episodes, an affair she discovered on Christmas Eve 1962, his hospitalization at Chestnut Lodge, and his death by suicide at their Virginia farm in August 1963, which left Graham, with no experience running a company, suddenly in charge of the paper. She writes candidly about her own lack of confidence stepping into a newsroom and boardroom built almost entirely around men, and about the slow process of learning to trust her own judgment enough to back the reporters and editors, chiefly Ben Bradlee, whom she hired as executive editor.

The book's late chapters cover the decisions that made her name, publishing the Pentagon Papers over the threat of federal prosecution and standing behind the Post's Watergate reporting through direct intimidation from the Nixon administration. Reading the memoir means following an unusually honest account of imposter feeling turning slowly into real authority, and it suits a reader interested less in a dramatic transformation than in the quiet, uncertain steps that actually got Graham there.