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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