Katharine Meyer Graham (1917–2001) was an American media publisher and socialite. She was the owner and publisher of The Washington Post newspaper, Newsweek magazine, and other American news publications.
Graham was born Katharine Meyer in New York to a multi-millionaire family of Jewish- and German-decent. After studying at the University of Chicago, Katherine worked as a reporter for the San Francisco News and as an editor of The Washington Post, which her father, the banker Eugene Meyer, had purchased at a bankruptcy sale.
When Katharine wedded Philip Graham, a talented but erratic lawyer, Katharine’s father chose to hand over the Post to his son-in-law and not his daughter, since he believed that no man should work for his wife. As an introverted housewife, Katharine Graham devoted herself to the couple’s four children.
Following the 1963 suicide of her manic-depressive husband, Katharine Graham took charge of The Washington Post. Under Graham’s leadership, the newspaper became known for its aggressive investigative reporting and went on to become the most powerful newspaper in the world. Graham made the decisive decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, a history of the Vietnam War that the U.S. government wanted to keep secret. It also embarked on wide-ranging investigative reporting that uncovered the role of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate political corruption scandal that led to his resignation from the presidency in 1974. By the time she stepped down as chairperson of the Washington Post Company, she had turned the company into a $1.85 billion empire whose assets included Newsweek magazine and cable television stations around the country.
In 1998, Graham won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling memoirs, Personal History (1997.) The Meryl Streep– and Tom Hanks-starring The Post (2017) depicted Graham’s historic—and risky—legal battle to publish the Pentagon Papers.
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Bromidic though it may sound, some questions don’t have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.
—Katharine Graham
A mistake is simply another way of doing things.
—Katharine Graham
Topics: Mistakes
To love what you do and feel that it matters — how could anything be more fun?
—Katharine Graham
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