Four stories converge to make the Pulitzer prize-winning memoirs of Katharine Graham both ‘personal’ and ‘history’. Her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the Washington Post in 1933 at an auction; her mother, Agnes Ernst, wrote for it, a political and social force. In 1940, Kay Graham married Harvard Law School graduate Philip Graham, and in 1945 her father asked him to take over the Post . She looked after their four children. Mrs. Graham had worked at the paper till 1945, and returned to run the show after her husband’s death in 1963. She writes the story of the Post , its many struggles on the path to success, especially over the publication of the Pentagon Papers and during Watergate. Interwoven with family and public stories is her own, and how she steered the ship after her husband’s suicide and through the dust-ups with the Nixon White House.
Pentagon Papers
I n her extraordinary life, two events stand out for the impact they had on press freedom, a primer on how to hold those in power to account. In 1967, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, unknown to President Lyndon Johnson, commissioned a study on America’s Vietnam policy. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published articles from the study saying the American people had been misled on the war. The 4,400 pages came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. “Ben Bradlee [executive editor] anguished over being scooped… Ben, mortified but unbowed, set to work to get the Papers for the Post ,” she recalls. The government asked the Times to suspend publication.
The Post got hold of the papers, thanks to their national editor Ben Bagdikian who guessed Daniel Ellsburg (a military analyst) was the source of the Times stories and called him incessantly, till he was asked to go to Boston with an empty suitcase to carry the pages. A bigger headache awaited — the Washington Post Company was about to go public and the lawyers pushed strongly for not publishing. Bradlee and the other editors fiercely advocated the need to publish — “The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish.” Finally, it came upon her to decide. She listened to both sides, and “frightened and tense,” gave the nod.
The Supreme Court would validate the decision in a 6-3 vote, ruling that the government had not met the “justification” for restraining further publication of the Pentagon Papers as endangering national security. This would prepare the Post for Watergate and their investigation that brought down Nixon. It’s a fascinating read, and holds a mirror to past and present authoritarian regimes and their ways.
The writer looks back at one classic each week .
