U.S. President Donald Trump may have declared “a running war” with the media, but he is not the first hostile President in the White House. A book that records a particularly difficult time the American media had with the presidency is Katharine Graham’s Personal History (1997), which won the Pulitzer prize in 1998. While writing of her extraordinary life as daughter, mother, wife, and owner of the venerable The Washington Post , Graham narrates her most dramatic moments, especially overseeing coverage of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers. The great names of The Washington Post — executive editor Ben Bradlee and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — along with a stellar cast of characters feature in the book.
In 1971, The New York Times and Post published the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam war and how the U.S. lied about the nature of its involvement. The newspapers had to fight it out with the government in the Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of publication.
The next year, Graham backed Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation of the Watergate scandal, against the advice of her lawyers, but not before many threats came her way. As Woodward and Bernstein connected the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex with the Committee to Re-elect the President (Nixon was seeking his second term in office) and found out that there was a “secret fund at CRP controlled by five people, one of whom was then attorney-general John Mitchell”, pressure mounted on her.
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There’s another interesting tale she narrates of the Watergate days. As she was getting increasingly anxious about the coverage, she decided to meet the reporters. “Woodward told me he had told no one the name of his secret source... dubbed Deep Throat. ‘Tell me,’ I said quickly, and then, as he froze, I laughed... and said that I was only kidding.” Deep Throat’s identity was made public in 2005 by the man himself, Mark Felt, No.2 in the FBI when Nixon was president.
Read together with Ben Bradlee’s A Good Life: Newspapering and other Adventures (1995) and All the President’s Men (1974) by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, Personal History becomes both a personal memoir and history of how the media conducted itself when the White House was not exactly a friend. Graham’s Post did what the present editor of the publication, Martin Baron, likes to say: “We are not at war with the administration, we are at work.”