Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post since 1963, is not only one of the most successful female business figures of the twentieth century – she is also one of the most prominent women ever in public life in America.
Her influence is due to two great achievements: the fact that she forged a career path in journalism and publishing during a period in which few women were employed in either industry and the pioneering investigative work carried out by the Post during her reign – mainly the paper’s revelations regarding the Watergate scandal.
Her decision to publish the infamous ‘Pentagon Papers’ – sensitive information on the beginning of the Vietnam war – in the face of legal advice to the contrary and government pressure is why she is often credited with being the major force behind the downfall of notorious US president Richard Nixon.
However, being female was possibly the only disadvantage she was born with. Her father, Eugene Meyer, was a millionaire who bought the Washington Post in 1933 at a bankruptcy auction. Her mother, a political activist and intellectual, counted Albert Einstein and Augustus Rodin among her friends.
But her parents’ careers meant she spent little time with them during her childhood.
It was at university in Chicago, and subsequently in San Francisco, that she became interested in journalism – mainly as a result of her sudden exposure to the problems faced by people born without her privileges. When she married lawyer Philip Graham in 1940, they decided to live on their own salaries, abdicating her inherited fortune.
They both worked at the Post, with Graham taking over as publisher when her husband – in that role since 1945 – committed suicide in 1963 after a prolonged mental illness and an affair.
Graham eventually took the reins at the group, which by then also owned Newsweek magazine. Contrary to assumptions that she would sell to a more experienced manager, she persevered in a very sexist business culture. Her struggle to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world is recounted in her memoirs, Personal History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
She died in 2001 after a severe fall at her home in Idaho, having been influential at the newspaper into her eighties.
