The movie The Post arrives at a perfect cultural moment. As women today forcefully assert their presence, Katharine Graham is finally getting the spotlight she has always deserved. Notably, her glaring omission from All the President’s Men has now been rectified.
The iconic Washington Post publisher didn’t plan to run the newspaper her father, Eugene Meyer, had purchased in 1933. But after her husband’s death in 1963, responsibility for running the family business landed on her doorstep. It was a tectonic change, since her entire life had been spent as a dutiful wife who, as she wrote in her memoir, “accepted my role as a kind of second-class citizen. I think this definition of roles deepened as time went on and I became increasingly unsure of myself.”
Her emergence from such uncertainty was the core theme of a 2010 exhibition I curated at the National Portrait Gallery—“One Life: Katharine Graham.” As I researched her life, I grew increasingly fascinated by her story—especially by her own transformation from wife/hostess to a central figure in American media history. I organized the exhibition chronologically to give her life context. She had grown up in a family of great wealth that lacked any embracing structure. She admired her father enormously, but her artsy mother Agnes was unloving and thoughtless, always making it clear that the tall, awkward Katharine was not the gorgeous daughter of her dreams. Katharine’s marriage to the exuberant and brilliant Phil Graham scripted her future life as wife, mother, and hostess. Along with other cave-dwellers like Pamela Harriman and Susan Mary Alsop, Katharine Graham became an influential hostess in days when Georgetown dinner parties brought key policy-makers together over food, drink, and cigars.
After Phil’s suicide, she continued her social role. Truman Capote threw his 1967 “Black and White Ball” for her (as well as for himself), and she was a regular on the dinner party circuit. It was at one dinner party that she began to see herself more as “a personage.” In a 1997 NPR interview, she explained that her transformation was gradual as she began to realize “I was going to be conspicuous because I had the job I had.” One turning point for her came at a Georgetown dinner party: It was then a given that men and women parted company after dinner—the women to chatter, the men to talk about issues—but Graham insisted on staying with the men. She did, and the rules suddenly changed.
To organize the exhibition about her life, I spent Saturday mornings for months working with Liz Hylton, Graham’s long-time executive assistant (played in the movie by Jennifer Dundas). We worked in the Post’s Executive Conference room, making our way through boxes of papers and family photographs. The most fun was that Liz had the key to a storage closet in the executive women’s restroom. Inside were treasures I would borrow for the exhibition, including Graham’s Pulitzer Prize (awarded for her 1998 memoir, Personal History), and a washtub wringer presented to her by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. As the Watergate investigation wore down, Bernstein had called Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell to tell him that they had evidence documenting Nixon’s campaign involvement; Mitchell shouted, “Katie Graham will have her tit caught in a wringer” if she persisted in publishing the mounting evidence about Nixon’s attempt to subvert the Constitution. Woodward and Bernstein’s wringer gift would always have a special place in her Post office.
Liz also introduced me to Ben Bradlee. Then in his late ’80s, he still radiated abundant charm. In the movie The Post, Tom Hanks plays Bradlee and is terrific, but I couldn’t shake the memory of Ben Bradlee’s glow-in-the-dark dazzle.
Meryl Streep nails her character—snagging wonderfully how Katharine Graham looked, sounded, moved, and gestured. The one dissonant chord I felt was how her character is portrayed in 1971 when the Post first became entangled with the Pentagon Papers crisis. Graham by then had been publisher for eight years, and I think she had grown beyond the hesitant and deferential person depicted early in the movie. She hired Bradlee in 1965, and the paper had steadily moved toward being a national paper competitive with the New York Times. By 1971, Graham was certainly not the woman she had described in her memoir as “not capable of governing, leading, or managing anything but our homes and children.”
The movie telescopes Katharine Graham’s transformation quickly during the Pentagon Papers crisis, depicting her telling Bradlee at a critical point, “Yes, let’s go, let’s publish.” This scene shows that she has gathered the strength and leadership that will be crucial during the coming Watergate crisis, where it would be her decision to allow Woodward and Bernstein to proceed with the investigation that brought down a president.
In her centennial year, The Post is finally giving Katharine Graham the recognition she deserves. Three cheers!
Amy Henderson is Historian Emerita of the National Portrait Gallery, and writes frequently on media and culture.
