King Leopold's Soliloquy - Book Review

King Leopold's Soliloquy by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If Leopold lived today, he'd probably tweet like Trump did. Or at least that's how Twain's imagining of him seems.

Published in 1905 in the middle of one of the first human rights campaigns of the modern world, Twain's format here reminds me of Sarah Cooper's lip syncing of actual things Trump said; comedy plumbed from the tragedy of reality.

Twain's Leopold is a master of narcissistic self-pity combined with subterfuge combined with throwing blame around in all directions and at all walls, hoping some of it will stick well enough that people will forget the original sin.

Brilliant satire. Combined with excellent reportage, as Twain includes excerpts of some of the written and pictorial evidence of the atrocities, placing them artfully as as fodder designed to elicit a continuation of Leopold's rant but structurally educating the reader as to the realities of the horror in the Congo.

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King Leopold's Ghost - Book Review

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Victorian Era, most Europeans and Americans only knew of the Africa depicted by Henry Morton Stanley (of "Livingston, I presume" fame). Stanley was an influencer. The term might not have existed then but the concept most certainly did and Stanley was an effective practitioner. The tools he used were different than the multiple tools available today; he only had dispatches of his adventures sent to newspapers by wire rather than artfully-composed photos on Instagram and 140-character tweet-storms, but the concept is the same. Stanley created Africa for those who had never been there. His expert voice defined the place and its people. Much of what he created has more to do with fictional embellishment than truth, of course, but worse than his elaborations and embroideries is Stanley's attitude towards the native peoples; he was the hunter and they were the hunted. They were game. Pack animals. His dismissal of their humanity was such an ingrained part of his Victorian psyche that he approached descriptions of the people he encountered without seeming awareness that they were of the same taxonomic species as he was. That was the story he told Europeans. A story they believed. Because it was the only one being told.

"For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials--human bodies and elephant tusks."

Joseph Conrad's portrait of Africa, Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, is based on Conrad's experience on the crew of the Roi des Belges, a Congo river steamer, in the early 1890s. It details the horrors visited upon the native peoples of the Congo. But Conrad still approached the horrors through a similar lens to Stanley. Granted, the lens was beginning to fog up and crack, but there's still enough of European supremacy in Conrad's telling that the novel has become controversial. It has been dissected and analyzed and lauded and excoriated. Is it a critique of colonialism? Or simply an example of it?

And those are the two stories we've historically had of European colonization in Africa.

Most people have never heard of Edmund Morel, Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, and William H. Sheppard. These are the voices that Hochschild's book amplifies. Hochschild also amplifies the few African voices that can be found from the era; many of those voices had never been heard or published (including an interesting bit of trivia from the Commission of Inquiry that Leopold set up in 1890 to "investigate" the reports of abuse; he had stacked the commission so that the report would be favorable but the overwhelming atrocity of the stories his three commissioners heard caused them to issue a scathing rebuke of human rights violations in the Congo. But the report did not quote any of the African voices from the thousands of witnesses detailing the parade of horror; it expressed the abuse and murder in generalities, effectively taking much of the bite out of the rebuke. The witness testimony was sealed and hidden away in a closed section of the state archive in Belgium, not to be released again until the 1980s).

The atrocities were horrendous. The European colonizers were violently abusive to the African natives. However the native tribes of the Congo weren't innocent naifs. As Hochschild writes, "Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and ritual cannibalism and were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part of Africa, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere."

The inherent violent nature of all humanity was used at the time as an excuse for the terrors of colonization.

"Leopold's will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic of European industry. To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom."

But this same thought progress is still used today in the philosophy of neocolonialism, as well as in the current wrestling match of what we do about the complex, non-heroic parts of Euro-centric history. An underlying theme, then and today, is 'if the Europeans hadn't abused the native peoples, the native peoples would have abused one other; with European colonization, they got railroads at least. Right?'

The politics of forgetting are powerful. And, as Hochschild points out, "the politics of empathy are fickle."

That's why books like this one are so important. Culture changes slowly. Soooo slowly. This book was written in 1998. Reading it in 2021, during BLM movements in the US, I see how far we've come but mourn how far we yet have left to go.

"In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the population of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in--its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence--is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful event we try to forget."

"An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a 'hue and cry.' But we live in a world of corpses and only about some of them is there a hue and cry."

"What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.'"

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The River of Doubt - Book Review

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The level of research it took to create this account astounds me. So much stuffed into this book; history, geology, anthropology, botany, ecology, plate tectonics, evolution. Biography is secondary. Or even tertiary.

I spent most of this book in disbelief that people would launch themselves into the Amazon rainforest so woefully unprepared. TAKE THE CANOES, DAMMIT!

And almost as an aside, Millard tells the history of the Cinta Larga, which the footnotes cite as coming from "author's interview." Like she just marched into the Amazon to talk to them. I want a book that tells THAT story next, please.

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Book Review: The Imperial Cruise

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James D. Bradley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Was this a retelling of the cruise? That would have made a good book.
Was this a balanced re-evaluation of Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy? That would have made a good book too.

But it was neither. And both.

It retold the cruise but not in enough detail to make it interesting.

It re-evaluated Roosevelt but lacked the sophistication to make the re-evaluation impactful.

It was like reading high school IB student's IA; full of heady ideas that are over-footnoted but not scholarly. Also full of that idealism one often finds in young people who have not yet come to terms with the idea that there is no black and white in history; there is only gray.

I dog-eared a lot of pages, though. But that's because I was either checking up on his facts (often inaccurate) or tagging Bradley's immature prose (things like calling Roosevelt "Teddy" or Taft "Big Bill" when he was attempting to excoriate them which, of course, weakened the power of his argument)

Bradley's implied thesis is valid; Roosevelt was racist and his ideas about other ethnicities informed his foreign policy.

But Bradley's stated thesis is a stretch; Roosevelt is responsible for World War II in the Pacific because he gave Japan permission to become an imperial power then didn't follow through with supporting them after the Russo-Japanese war.

Yes, Japan was frustrated that they won the war but failed to get reparations from Russia, a sting that reminded them of when they won the first Sin0-Japanese war and then Russia, France, and Germany took away the land they gained.

Yes, Roosevelt was part of the negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese war (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize) but to lay the entire blame of World War II in the Pacific on that moment is high-school-level folly. Again, history is not black and white; it's gray. Certainly, Roosevelt's interactions with the Japanese in the early 1900s contributed to the Japan's growth into a militaristic and hungry imperial power, but that is only one swath of black contributing to the gray of the whole story.

The main problem with this book is that Bradley started with his mind already made up and an agenda to prove.

In his afterword he writes;
"Theodore Roosevelt wrote, 'Peace may only come through war.' In my lifetime the United States has benevolently spent trillions of dollars trying to prove that erroneous notion. In the twentieth century, America extended its military to Asia. Now it's time to work on the human links between cultures. For the past ten years, the James Bradley Peace Foundation and Youth For Understanding have sent American students to live with families overseas. Perhaps in the future when we debate whether to fight it out or talk it out, one of these Americans might make a difference."

Scholarly historians should not have an agenda, however laudable that agenda may be.

And it's a shame, because a scholarly re-evaluation of Roosevelt and the racial attitudes of his generation is sorely needed in our 21st century world.

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Book Review - A History of the World in 6 Glasses

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I would have enjoyed this book much more if I didn't already have some knowledge of much of the history it relates. This book is what I call a pop history. And I don't use this term derogatorily; I love pop history. Pop history makes history palatable. Interesting. Like gossip. It is usually lighter on deeper themes and academic prowess but it's readable and entertaining, and usually teaches me a little something. Sometimes I get interested enough in a topic or a person that I look in the bibliography for dour historical tomes to learn more.

But this pop history covers ground I've already covered in the dour historical tomes, so it was less a-ha! and more, oh, yeah, that.

So, really, it's probably a five star book if you don't already know the greatest hits of ancient history (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome), early modern European history (Enlightenment), Chinese history (mostly as it relates to Britain and the opium wars), and American imperialism/isolation/path-to-superpower.

I learned about bappir, "beer bread" (unleavened bread containing the ingredients kept in government store houses and crumbled into the brewers vat) created just so beer ingredients could be stored for longer periods of time without rotting.

I learned that ancient depictions of beer drinking show one large vessel and many people around it with straws. Communal. Standage interpolates that the tradition of "clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid" is a nod to the ancient practice of drinking out of the same bowl.

Alcoholic beverages are intrinsically linked to climate; beer where grains grow, wine where grapes grow, rum where sugar grows. What is so abundant that we don't need to eat it all to survive so we can ferment some of it to get drunk?

Beer gets its reputation as barbaric because wine was the drink of the Roman empire because grapes grow in the Mediterranean climate and grains mostly grew in the north, which had to be conquered and "civilized" by Rome. When Rome fell, beer should have taken over again, as those northern Visigoths and Vandals came from the barbaric beer-drinking north to sack the empire, but Visigoths and Vandals liked wine, too, and passed laws making destroying vineyards illegal.

Wine is also central to Christianity, which, along with its connection to the Roman empire, contributes to its association with civilized humanity.

And why don't Muslims drink wine? Muhammed apparently preached abstention from alcohol because it clouds the mind (though he was known to enjoy lightly fermented date wine), but it could also be because the Islamic culture was trying to erase the Roman culture and Islam was trying to erase Christianity; erasing wine kills many birds with one stone.

And what is distilling? It makes fermented alcohol more-so. The boiling point of alcohol is lower than the boiling point of water, so the vapor collected in the distilling process produces a liquid with a much higher alcohol content than fermented beverages. So distilled wine is brandy. Distilled beer is whiskey.

And sugar and slaves. The Greek and Roman empire enslaved much of its population, but since the empire's fall, slavery in Europe was not as common. The spread of Christianity, which forbids the enslavement of one Christian by another Christian, contributed to the decrease of slavery. But then, in the race for empire and control of sugar, labor was needed. To get labor AND protect profit margin, slaves were needed. So theologians declared that Black Africans were not fully human, therefore they could not be converted to Christianity, therefore they could be enslaved.

Rum is distilled from the left-overs of the sugar trade. The stuff they were throwing away; it was made out of trash and didn't rot, so it kept easily on ships and in hot weather. Therefore, it became the drink of choice in the new world. It gets its name from the the southern England slang word "Rumbullion," meaning a brawl or violent commotion. Admiral Edward Vernon, trying to make the rum supply last longer, mixed it with water and lime and sugar; a primitive cocktail. This drink came to be called "grog" (Vernon's nickname was Old Grogram) and it also prevented scurvy, a bonus.

Did you know the Molasses Act caused the American Revolution? Well, maybe not, but Standage makes a convincing case. Molasses, the byproduct of the sugar industry which is distilled into rum, came mostly from the French colonies in the Caribbean. The British crown passed a law that their colonies in the Americas could only buy molasses from British islands. But the British sugar islands did not produce nearly enough molasses to supply the rum needs of the British colonies in the Americas. So the colonists ignored the law and the crown didn't enforce it. "Henceforth," Standage writes, "the colonists felt entitled to defy other laws that imposed seemingly unreasonable duties on items shipped to and from the colonies. As a result, the widespread defiance of the Molasses Act was an early step along the road to American independence." John Adams wrote at the time, "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes."

And coffee and the Enlightenment. For many years I have taught my history students that throughout much of history, water wasn't safe to drink, so fermented beverages were consumed instead. Coffee and tea, bringing water to a boiling point before ingesting it, makes water safe, too. Once these beverages were popularized of course people got new ideas; they weren't constantly besotted. They were hopped up on caffeine. Ergo, coffee caused the Enlightenment. Standage's chapters on coffee agree with my thesis. The coffee houses of 17th century London were the driving force of not only science and philosophy, but also business and commerce. "The period of rapid innovation in public and private finance, with the floating of joint stock companies, the buying and selling of shares, the development of insurance schemes, and the public financing of government debt, all of which culminated in London's eventual displacement of Amsterdam as the world's financial center, is known today as the Financial Revolution. The need for colonial wars made it necessary, and the fertile intellectual environment and speculative spirit of the coffeehouses made it possible." Standage goes further to interpolate that Seattle is home of Starbucks AND Microsoft...coffee, innovation, networking--just like 17th century London.

Tea. Spread through the Asian continent along with Buddhism (Taoist monks found it an invaluable aid to meditation, enhancing concentration and banishing fatigue). Then became an integral part of Chinese culture. Then adopted by Britain and edited into the height of their culture.

It also made people healthier in England. It made water safer. It had antibacterial antioxidants that passed into breastmilk and helped to reduce infant mortality. Tea helped keep people alive so they could live tightly packed in the cities and run the machines of the Industrial Revolution. It made Wedgewood and Twining household names. And it caused some horrific behavior in the colonies, government-sanctioned illegal drug smuggling, the Opium Wars. All for tea. And profit.

Standage's final beverage is Coca-Cola, which started as a snake oil cure and through serendipity and luck and war became a symbol not only of globalization but of the United States' power and prowess in driving the culture and economics of the entire world. It traveled with the military in two world wars (and was sanctioned and financially supported by the US government; the military built bottling plants for Coca-Cola AND allowed them a pass on sugar rations, all because Coke helped keep morale high).

My favorite anecdote, one I'd never heard before, was Coke as a Cold War weapon;
"Perhaps the most unlikely convert to Coca-Cola was General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, the Soviet Union's greatest military leader, who successfully defended Russia from German attack and later led his forces into Berlin to end the war in Europe. Zhukov was one of the few people who dared to disagree with Joseph Stalin, the brutal Soviet leader, who could not do away with Zhukov because of his popularity and heroic stature. During post-war negotiations over the division of Germany, Zhukov was introduced to Coca-Cola by Eisenhower and took a strong liking to the drink. But he was reluctant to be seen enjoying something so closely identified with American values, particularly as the rivalry between the two superpowers intensified. So Zhukov made an unusual request: Was it possible to make Coca-Cola without coloring, so that it resembled vodka, the traditional Russian drink? His request was passed to the Coca-Cola Company, which duly obliged and, with the endorsement of President Harry Truman, devised a colorless version. It was shipped to Zhukov in special cylindrical bottles, sealed with a white cap and labeled with a red Soviet star."

Pepsi, the also-ran, tried to disrupt Coca-Cola's world-wide dominance, mostly by attempting to capitalize in markets where Coke was hated because it was so categorically American ("When we think of Communists, we think of the Iron Curtain. When they think of democracy, they think of Coca-Cola," read a placard at the 1948 Coca-Cola Company annual meeting). In places where America began to be hated (France, the Middle East, the Soviet Union) Pepsi tried to move in. In 1959, Nixon and Kruschev were photographed drinking Pepsi at a Moscow trade-fair of American products. Nixon, after losing the election for the governor of California, joined Pepsi's law firm and became Pepsi's ambassador overseas. Pepsi, not tainted by anti-communist propaganda, started to move into those markets, led by Nixon, the creator of much anti-communist propaganda. Is this irony?

Standage closes with an epilogue predicting that water will be the beverage driving history and politics in the 21st century. Water. Without which none of these other beverages could exist. Full circle.





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Book Review: Katharine Graham - A Personal History

A Personal History by Katharine Graham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this book and then put it down for two months while I re-read the Harry Potter books for fun. Kay Graham stared up at me from my nightstand every night, her expression a combination of imperiousness, judgment, and cajoling.

When I finally picked her back up again and read the part where she was bedridden with tuberculosis, I understood her annoyance with me. Her daughter, Lally, had ripped a mystery out of her hand and given her Proust. "She was right," writes Graham. "I shouldn't waste this valuable time reading trash or light, amusing books. All I needed was her gentle push and I finished all seven volumes."

And that kind of summarizes Katharine Graham. Titan of the industry yet continuously unsure of herself. Looking for advice in the most unlikely of places and allowing herself to be led along by others who she perceives smarter. Or more experienced. Or more male.

The book is basically divided into three sections of Graham's life; her childhood and young adulthood, under the thumb of her distant but spottily brilliant parents, her marriage, under the thumb of her spottily brilliant but borderline abusive husband Phil, and her season of growth into the publishing icon she became after Phil's death.

The first section bored me. And annoyed me, frankly. She dropped names and described in tedious detail how she flitted about without a plan, cushioned by her money. Oooh, look, I wandered over to Chicago and got a job then I wandered out to California and got a job and then I wandered back to Washington and got a job!

I am, of course, being too hard on her. How can I possibly understand the times she was living in and the life she was reared to live? A life that she eventually bucked completely while wringing her hands the whole time wondering if she had done the right thing.

She was reared to revere newspapers; her father, in a letter to Graham and her husband Phil, wrote this about newspapers; "The citizens of a free country have to depend on a free press for the information necessary to the intelligent discharge of their duties of citizenship. That is why the Constitution gives newspapers express protection from Government interference...It is also possible for the public interest to be defeated by the way a newspaper is conducted since the principal restraint upon a newspaper owner is self-restraint."

Phil Graham didn't quite listen to this wisdom; he used his position as publisher not to create strong journalism but more to be a kingmaker. He wined and dined (well, Kay wined and dined at Phil's direction) and threw around his influence, and the paper's influence, in ways that are now not considered kosher. Kay Graham admits this, often dismissing it with what seems like flippancy, with various phrases that basically say 'it seems suspect now but back then it was just what one did.'

Except she's right. It was what one did. The Grahams donated to many politicians (giving a brief nod to journalistic ethics by making sure that Kay wrote the check, not Phil) and Phil was instrumental in getting presidents elected and peopling presidential cabinets.

So Kay Graham ran about in the upper echelons, not only of wealth, but of political power. While Phil was alive, despite her part-ownership fo the paper, she was only a housewife and hostess, consistently ridiculed and belittled by Phil, but still hearing the stories and listening to the ideas of those around her.

And those around her were mostly men. Chauvinistic men.

She doesn't seem bitter about the chauvinism, though. To her, the men, like her, were a product of her time.

Take this story she heard about JFK, relayed to her by Clayton Fritchey (whoever that is; Graham is often dropping names like we should know who these people are; this book really needs a character list with short bios, like a crappy Agatha Christie mystery that is less worth reading than Proust)

"About three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, Clayton saw the president in New York, at a time when Adlai [Stevenson] was the ambassador to the United Nations and Clayton was his deputy. The three men were together at a party, and Clayton was helping himself to a drink on the balcony overlooking Central Park when the president came up behind him and said, 'We haven't had a chance to talk much tonight, but we've got a good subject in common,' meaning Adlai. The president then said he didn't understand the hold Adlai had over women, commenting on how much Jackie liked and admired him and confessing that he himself didn't have the ease with women Adlai had. 'What do you suppose it is?' he asked, adding, 'Look, I may not be the best-looking guy out there, but, for God's sake, Adlai's half bald, he's got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What's he got that I haven't got?' Clayton's response hit on what I think women saw in Adlai and what they shied away from in other men of that era. 'Mr. President, I'm happy to say that for once you have asked me a question I am prepared to answer truthfully and accurately. While you both love women, Adlai also likes them, and women know the difference. They all respond to a kind of message that comes across from him when he talks to them. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they're saying and what they've done, and that's really very fetching.' The president's response was: 'Well, I don't say you're wrong, but I'm not sure I can go to those lengths.'"

Don't just love women. Like them.

After Phil's suicide, Kay Graham's life was a battle for that status among the men surrounding her. Like me. Respect me. Don't just love me.

She is an unlikely feminist. She spent much of her life tethered to her parents, then to Phil Graham, who is revered as a genius but, despite my certainty that Kay Graham softened her portrayal of him, I think Phil Graham was an entitled punkass. Take this moment;

"He [Phil] began his remarks by describing the company, saying, 'I have been responsible for its affairs for 17 years--and for the last 15 years, since it became a corporation in 1948, I have been controlling owner of its voting shares.' There was no mention of my father or how this came to be or the existence of me as minority owner, of course."

Of course. As she expected. Because why would he? And why would she expect it?

But in this same blurb Graham goes on to say, "He ended his remarks with some philosophical thoughts, including a phrase about journalism being the first rough draft of history, which is quoted to this day: 'I am insatiably curious about the state of the world. I am constantly intrigued by information of topicality. I revel in the recitation of the daily and weekly grist of journalism. Much of it, of course, is pure chaff. Much of our discussions of how to do it better consist of tedium and detail. But no one yet has been able to produce wheat without chaff. And not even such garrulous romantics as Fidel Castro or such transcendent spirits as Abraham Lincoln can produce a history which does not in large part rest on a foundation of tedium and detail--and even sheer drudgery. So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand...'"

So, yeah, Phil was kind of wise sometimes. But he was still an entitled punkass. His affair with Robin Webb, his mental illness and his refusal of drugs or effective treatment, his expectation that Kay would be waiting for him when he returned from the brink (she was)...Punk. Ass.

And Kay Graham kind of accepts this as the way it is and the way it is supposed to be. Until she doesn't.

"I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Pretty soon this kind of thinking--indeed, this kind of life--took its toll: most of us became somehow inferior...When I first went to work, I was still handicapped with the old assumptions and was operating as though they were written in stone...I truly felt like Samuel Johnson's description of a woman minister--'a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.'"

Graham wakes up to feminism slowly. "As a manager, I was aware of the issues but had no clear idea how to lean on male-chauvinist managers to make changes. Women had accepted the dubious assumptions and myths about themselves for much too long. And men had be be helped to break out of the assumptions of which they, too, were victims."

(see, even in her feminism, she is gentle with her men-folk)

"I worked hard to educate the men around me, to raise their consciousness, even as I myself was in the early stages of consciousness-raising," she says, even as she relates a time when she almost accepted an invitation to a Gridiron dinner while the club was still not allowing female members. "My first reaction was that after all these years of being on the outside I was excited to be invited, and I was all set to accept when I received a letter signed by many of the women on the editorial side of the paper and from other papers, asking me not to go until the club accepted a woman as a member. But there was no opening at the club at this time, and the gesture of an invitation seemed to me a beginning. Besides which, I really wanted to go. However, I asked several of these women to dinner at my house to discuss the issue...They made many valid arguments but the clincher belonged to Sally Quinn, who said, 'If a country club excluded you for being a Jew but said they'd like to have you come for dinner, would you go?' That cemented my decision to regret the invitation, which I did."

The last third of the book focuses on the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressman strike. Graham's retelling can be spotty, expecting the reader to know some of the details, but her side of the story provides insight to the story as a whole; her first draft of history recalled 30 years later.

"I believe Watergate was an unprecedented effort to subvert the political process. It was a pervasive, indiscriminate use of power and authority from an administration with a passion for secrecy and deception and an astounding lack of regard for the normal constraints of democratic politics. To my mind, the whole thing was a very real perversion of the democratic system...As I said in a speech at the time, 'It was a conspiracy not of greed but of arrogance and fear by men who came to equate their own political well-being with the nation's very survival and security.' ... I have often been credited with courage for backing our editors in Watergate. The truth is that I never felt there was much choice. Courage applies when one has a choice. With Watergate, there was never one major decisive moment when I, or anyone, could have suggested that we stop reporting the story. Watergate unfolded gradually. By the time the story had grown to the point where the size of it dawned on us, we had already waded deeply into its stream. Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back."

Kay Graham is an unlikely hero but what makes her a hero is she keeps learning. After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, defining moments that cemented Kay Graham's place as an icon, she was still insecure. She glommed onto Warren Buffet as a mentee, fondly recalling his advice "'Just remember: We're not going to teach you how to keep your knees from knocking. All we're going to do is teach you to talk while your knees knock.'"

And I feel like this biography is just that. It is frank, it is self-deprecating, it belittles the triumphs and highlights the failures. It's just Kay Graham, talking while her knees knock.

"Why dare write a book? What makes any of us think that someone else would be interested in stories from our own past? I recognize the inherent danger of being self-serving and have tried to retain as much detachment as possible, but I wanted to tell what happened just as I saw it. And in the process, I hoped to arrive at some understanding of how people are formed by the way the grow up and further molded by the way they spend their days."

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