Katharine Graham

Katharine Meyer Graham (June 16, 1917 – July 17, 2001) was an American newspaper publisher.

Katharine Meyer was born in 1917 into a wealthy family in New York City, to Agnes Elizabeth (née Ernst) and Eugene Meyer.

During her childhood, she also lived in Alameda, California.

Her father was a financier and, later, Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Her grandfather was Marc Eugene Meyer, and her great-grandfather was rabbi Joseph Newmark.

Her father bought The Washington Post in 1933 at a bankruptcy auction.

Her mother was a bohemian intellectual, art lover, and political activist in the Republican Party, who shared friendships with people as diverse as Auguste Rodin, Marie Curie, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Dewey and Saul Alinsky.

Her father was of Alsatian Jewish descent, and her mother was a Lutheran whose parents were German immigrants.

Along with her four siblings, Katharine was baptized as a Lutheran but attended an Episcopal church.

Her siblings included Florence, Eugene III (Bill), Ruth and Elizabeth (Biss) Meyer.

Meyer's parents owned several homes across the country, but primarily lived between a mansion in Washington, D.C., and a large estate (later owned by Donald Trump) in Westchester County, New York.

Meyer often did not see much of her parents during her childhood, as both traveled and socialized extensively; she was raised in part by nannies, governesses and tutors.

Katharine endured a strained relationship with her mother.

In her memoir, Katharine reports that Agnes could be negative and condescending towards her, which had a negative impact on Meyer's self-confidence.

Her older sister Florence Meyer was a successful photographer and wife of actor Oscar Homolka.

Her father's sister, Florence Meyer Blumenthal, founded the Prix Blumenthal.

As a child, Meyer attended a Montessori school until the fourth grade when she enrolled at The Potomac School.

She attended high school at The Madeira School (to which her father donated land for its new Virginia campus), then Vassar College before transferring to the University of Chicago.

In Chicago, she became quite interested in labor issues and shared friendships with people from walks of life very different from her own.

After graduation, Meyer worked for a short period at a San Francisco newspaper where, among other things, she helped cover a major strike by wharf workers.

Meyer began working for the Post in 1938.

On June 5, 1940, Meyer was married to Philip Graham, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

They had a daughter, Lally Morris Weymouth, and three sons: Donald Edward Graham (born 1945), William Welsh Graham (1948-2017) and Stephen Meyer Graham (born 1952).

She was affiliated as a Lutheran.

Philip Graham became publisher of the Post in 1946, when Eugene Meyer handed over the newspaper to his son-in-law.

Katharine recounts in her autobiography, Personal History, how she did not feel slighted by the fact her father gave the Post to Philip rather than her: "Far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper."

Her father, Eugene Meyer, went on to become the head of the World Bank, but left that position only six months later.

He was Chairman of the Washington Post Company until his death in 1959, when Philip Graham took that position and the company expanded with the purchases of television stations and Newsweek magazine.

The Grahams were important members of the Washington social scene, becoming friends with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and Nancy Reagan among many others.

She led her family's newspaper, The Washington Post, from 1963 to 1991.

Graham presided over the paper as it reported on the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

She was the first 20th century female publisher of a major American newspaper and the first woman elected to the board of the Associated Press.

She tried to push lawyer Edward Bennett Williams into the role of Washington D.C.'s first commissioner mayor in 1967.

The position went to Howard University-educated lawyer Walter Washington.

Graham was also known for a long-time friendship with Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owned a substantial stake in the Post.

Philip Graham dealt with alcoholism and mental illness throughout his marriage to Katharine.

In her 1997 autobiography, Graham comments several times about how close her husband was to politicians of his day (he was instrumental, for example, in getting Johnson to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1960), and how such personal closeness with politicians later became unacceptable in journalism.

Graham's memoir, Personal History, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

William Graham died at 69 on December 20, 2017, in his Los Angeles home.

Like his father, Phil Graham, he died by suicide.