'Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story'
by Carol Felsenthal
Putnam, $29.95
"There's one word that brings us all together here tonight," Art Buchwald announced at Katharine Graham's 70th birthday party in 1987, "and that word is `fear.' "
A pithy statement, but an apt salute to the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, Newsweek, and several other newspapers and television stations. Often described as the most powerful woman in America, Graham is the subject of a competent, occasionally compelling, new biography by Carol Felsenthal.
She was the daughter of Wall Street millionaire Eugene Meyer, who ran the Federal Reserve and World Bank and later purchased and ran The Post. Meyer never intended, however, that his daughter run the newspaper: her husband, Philip, was the heir apparent. A former president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Phil Graham was called by some the most outstanding man of his generation.
He also was tortured by manic depression, and when he committed suicide in 1963, Kay Graham replaced him at The Post. Uncertain and lacking self-confidence at first, Graham soon emerged from the shadows of her husband and father and in the next two decades built The Post into a newspaper of international stature.
At the same time, her power has not been limited to the newspaper. Along with good friend Meg Greenfield, The Post's editorial-page editor, Graham brought an end to a longstanding Washington dinner-party tradition of the men retiring for cigars, brandy and old-boy networking, leaving the women to entertain themselves. After Graham and Greenfield stomped out of one such gathering, the tradition has rarely been repeated in the capital's circles of power.
The inside story of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, at precisely the same time as The Washington Post's initial public offering of its stock, reminds the reader of Graham's guts in pursuing the story. The subsequent exposure of the Nixon administration and its fall during the Watergate investigation confirmed the newspaper's power.
Although Felsenthal's biography is well-written and the story she tells is fascinating, it also is incomplete, leaving out some of the more interesting episodes in recent Post history. In the 1980s, for example, the newspaper suffered a million-dollar libel verdict, and although The Post ultimately was vindicated on First Amendment grounds, it took nothing less than Edward Bennett Williams' last appearance before the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict. But you won't learn that story from this book.
Even with such omissions, the book remains a worthy portrait of a talented woman who has learned how to exercise power and privilege, even fear.
