ON one of her world tours as publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham visited a village in Abidjan West Africa where she was welcomed by the local chief as "the 17th most important person in the world".
She was amused that he must have picked this up from a poll in US News and World Report. Now at age 79 she has written her memoirs which go a long way to explain how her fame has spread to West African villages.
This would never have happened if her husband, Phil Graham, had not shot himself in the bathroom of their country home in Virginia in 1963, leaving her the heir to a medium sized publishing empire which included the Post, Newsweek and some regional TV stations. The sound of the gun and the finding of Phil's shattered body are memories that she can never forget, but she gradually emerged from this trauma to undergo a transformation from a middle aged, insecure wife and mother to one of America's most admired and famous women.
But also a feared and powerful woman - after the Post's investigative journalism in the Watergate affair brought down President Nixon in 1974. Three years earlier, Graham had braved Nixon's threats to publish the "Pentagon Papers", a top secret account of, how the US got involved in Vietnam, leaked from the Pentagon by Daniel Ellsberg.
While editor Ben Bradlee played his role in these battles with a paranoiac White House determined to destroy the Post, it was Graham who gave him the indispensable backing. Yet she describes her early days as publisher as "wandering around in a fog, trying to grasp the rudiments ... It is hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was. I knew neither the substance of the business and journalistic worlds in which I was moving nor the processes through which these worlds operated."
She would learn the hard way. As Woodward and Bernstein got closer to the Nixon role in the Watergate scandal, his attorney general, John Mitchell, warned Bernstein: "Katie Graham's going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."
The offending article was published with the Mitchell reaction but leaving out the anatomical reference. The story got around and a dentist sent her a miniature gold wringer which she wore around her neck. The humorist, Art Buchwald, who writes a column for the Post, then got a jeweller to make a small silver breast to scale, which she also wore until Bradlee warned that it would get into the tabloids.
A real, old fashioned wooden wringer presented by Woodward after Nixon resigned is now a prized item in her office. It also reminds her that she has been through the wringer many times in a life that started out conventionally as the daughter of a wealthy Jewish financier, Eugene Meyer, proceeded through the best schools and colleges, and followed by marriage to the brilliant and witty Phil Graham.
Meyer, who had bought the Post in 1933 for less than $1 million, made his son in law publisher in 1946 and gave him a majority shareholding. Katharine was content to bear their children and be hostess for the Georgetown dinner parties.
Only after his death did she see what was really happening. It wasn't until years later that I looked at the downside of all this and realised that, perversely, I had seemed to enjoy the role of doormat wife ... Phil gave directions and put the fun in my life and the children's.
"Gradually, I became the drudge and, what's more, accepted my role as a kind of second class citizen. I think this definition of roles deepened as time went on and I became increasingly unsure of myself."
But Washington life was good in other ways, especially in the fleeting Camelot years when the Grahams were welcome guests of the Kennedys in the White House, where Phil once split his trousers dancing the twist. She found that while the president's charm was "powerful", the Kennedy men "were also unabashed chauvinists ... they liked other bright men, and they liked girls, but they didn't know how to relate to middle aged women, in whom they didn't have a whole lot of interest." Meaning herself obviously.
Bobby Kennedy once "reduced her to tears" when he berated her for the Post running a piece about Jackie. "You have lost your husband too. You should know better," he told her.
When Lyndon Johnson succeeded as president, Kay Graham had become the timorous newspaper publisher whom he fascinated but also frightened with his mood swings. Once at a White House dinner, LBJ retired early to bed leaving the guests. Suddenly the double doors of his bedroom were flung open and he shouted "Come here" to Graham. In she went to endure a diatribe about a story in the early edition of the Post.
As he was yelling at me, he started to undress, flinging his clothes off onto a chair and the floor - his coat, his tie, his shirt. Finally he was down to his pants. I was frozen with dismay and baffled about what to do." Buy the book to find out.
But she was learning the trade. The Pentagon Papers was a watershed for her and the paper. "From my point of view, the Post and I had been hurled onto the national scene almost unwittingly . . . Eyes were on us. What we did mattered to the press and to the country. To some degree, I gained a measure of self assurance."
This was "my first serious visibility on the national scene, I was very publicly exposed, written about, photographed and interviewed, which both seared me and to some extent fed my ego.
Watergate was also "a transforming event" in the life of the Post. "Anything, as big as Watergate changes you, and I believe it changed not only the Post and me but journalism as a whole."
When the film, All The President's Men, with Robert Redford came to be made, Graham joked that she would be played by Raquel Welch "assuming our measurements jibe". But she was wary with Redford who described her later as "gracious but tense".
"There was a definite tight jawed, blue blood quality to Graham that cannot be covered by any amount of association with Ben Bradlee or other street types," Redford noted. And she was left out of the film.
But Graham gradually learned to be less tense and to start enjoying life again, even with all her responsibilities.
Pamela Berry, wife of the owner of the Daily Telegraph and a good friend, advised her to be "female and free and frivolous from time to time. It will be terribly good for you in every sort of way.
Graham took the advice and had "a passing flirtation with an attractive Italian journalist". Gossip columnists linked her romantically with Ted Heath when he was prime minister. US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, had a crush on her and appeared one night in her bedroom in the US embassy in London but she gently repulsed him and he dropped dead the next day from a heart attack.
Jean Monnet, one of the "fathers of Europe", had been a friend of the Grahams from wartime Washington. She kept up occasional contact in later years. The thrill for me of being with him never disappeared as long as he lived. He was energetic and interesting and I can testify to his virility," Graham writes bluntly.
Friends encouraged her to marry again but she was enjoying her new liberty, and the nightmare of Phil's last years, as he plunged deeper into manic depression and humiliated her by parading a young mistress around the world, had left deep scars. She was also devoted to her children and continues to feel guilt about how she left them after the suicide to cruise in the Mediterranean.
She was befriended by Truman Capote, much to her surprise. He insisted on throwing a masked ball "to cheer me up" and it turned out to be the biggest social occasion in New York for years as the glitterati vied to get invitations. Graham wondered why Capote was doing it.
"Truman knew I didn't lead the glamorous kind of life that many of
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