Katharine Graham, 1917-2001
We mark the death Tuesday of Katharine Meyer Graham, one of the most influential people in the world.
As the owner of The Washington Post and Newsweek, to mention only the flagships of the Graham media empire, Kay Graham shaped the news, deciding what would be covered, how and when.
She shaped the view of the American public and controlled the political and media elites' understanding of their role in her world. Curiously, for one who built her own fortune at the head of a media empire, she shunned media examination of her own life, politics and corporate decision-making.
Fame came to The Post for its role in the Watergate scandal investigation and its mysterious ``Deep Throat'' source, and the paper continued to nose out embarrassing material to undermine any conservative policy. In the Clinton years, the paper stridently defended the president.
Born in New York City, the daughter of multimillionaire Eugene Meyer, she grew up privileged. In keeping with her father's fortune, she graduated from Vassar College, where she was involved with the leftist trends of the day through the American Student Union, then did graduate work at the University of Chicago and worked for a time as a reporter in San Francisco with a sympathetic view of Harry Bridges' red dock workers.
She married Felix Frankfurter's brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher.
Kay Graham saw The Washington Post as her inheritance from her father. She cultivated presidents, their wives and their senior advisers who, whether Democrats or Republicans, often heeded her subtle directives.
She truly was one of a kind.
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