“To love what you do and feel that it matters how could anything be more fun?”
– Katharine Graham
Award-winning writer and publisher of The Washington Post for over two
decades, Graham, who was born this day in 1917,s is especially remembered for
her newspaper's role in exposing the Watergate Scandal. I loved reading her Pulitzer Prize winning
memoir, simply titled Personal History,
and what a history it was, exuding both her joy of working in media and the fun
she had doing it. She and her editorial
team not only revived a so-so newspaper and made it into a national power, but
also oversaw the Post at the time of
it’s Watergate coverage. That
investigative effort still stands as the benchmark for “how it’s done,” winning
numerous awards and leading President Richard Nixon to resign – the only
President to ever resign the office..
Graham said that she always stood
behind her star reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and her editor Ben
Bradlee, and never wavered in her belief that what they were doing was not only
right, but necessary.
A Republican who led the investigative
reporting of a Republican president, she said that politics should never get in
the way of good reporting. “It matters
not if a person is from one party or another,” she said. “If someone has done something that needs to
be exposed in print, then that’s what a good reporter should do.”
Katharine Graham
By the time she retired, she was
considered one of the most powerful and influential women in America, not only
overseeing The Washington Post and
all its affiliates, but also Newsweek
Magazine in New York. A personal
friend of luminaries like Truman Capote and Adlai Stevenson, who was twice a
candidate for U.S. President and served as the U.N. Ambassador, she was awarded
the Freedom Medal and The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Shortly before her death in 2001, the
International Press Institute named her one of the world’s 50 most influential
and powerful media people of the 20th century.
“Once, power was considered a masculine
attribute,” Graham said when told of the honor.
“In fact, power has no sex.”
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