|
Remembering Katharine Graham
With David Halberstam
Author, "The Powers That Be"
Tuesday, July 17, 2001; 3 p.m. EDT
Katharine Graham, 84, chairman of the executive committee of The Washington Post Company, died today at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, after suffering head injuries in a fall Saturday.
David Halberstam was online Tuesday, July 17 to talk about Graham's influence on The Post, journalism and history. Halberstam is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Powers That Be," a chronicle of the rise of The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and CBS, and portraits of the men and women who built them and made them run. He is also author of several other books, including the soon-to-be-published "War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton & the Generals"; "The Best & the Brightest"; "The Children"; "October 1964"; and "The Fifties."
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
washingtonpost.com:
Good afternoon, Mr. Halberstam, and welcome. Can you talk a bit about Mrs. Graham and the impact she had on both business and journalism?
David Halberstam: I think she's a heroic figure, because she created a great paper out of a rather ordinary one at a time of personal tragedy. She had not expected to be publisher. She had not been raised to be publisher. She had been raised to marry a man who would become the publisher of her family's paper. But Phil Graham became what we call today bi-polar. His life swung out of control. The last two years of their marriage were extremely dark and painful for them and those who loved them in their immediate family. And when he took his life, she had to step forward. She believed that because she admired his brilliance so much, that he published a great paper, and was stunned to find that the people she most admired in journalism, like Scotty Reston, the [N.Y.] Times bureau chief and most distinguished journalist of that era, did not think the paper very good. She offered it first to Reston, which was a very good choice; he would have been a marvelous editor. And he was too much of a man of the Times to switch brands. And then she made a tenstrike when she offered it to Ben Bradlee. That's an important decision, because not only did she get the perfect editor of the paper, but it was a symbol of what was to come: the bigger the decision, the better she made it.
Typically, she went on to find sources of strength within herself that she never knew she had, and she became one of the great publishers of the second half of the 20th Century. That's why I think of her as a heroic figure.
I once told her she was a gamer, and she was a quite puzzled. I told her that a gamer was someone who played in the big games, and late in the big games, than earlier. The bigger the decision, the better she behaved. I think she left a great monument. She took an OK paper and made it a great paper. She extended her family's control of two important national publications into four more decades. She modernized the economic structure of those publications while keeping them within the family. She was smart, strong, curious and a terrific listener. She always knew what she didn't know, and listened accordingly.
Dallas, Tex.:
David, did Mrs. Graham have any regrets over decisions she made as publisher? Any second thoughts? Thanks.
David Halberstam: I'm someone who knows her somewhat at a distance. I'm not a Washington Post insider, I'm not a Washington insider, and I'm not part of her inner circle. But on the large decisions, I don't think so. There was a lot of pain and tragedy in her life. I think she took the hand she was dealt, which had a good deal of pain in it, and played it very strongly. I don't think she was a woman with any regrets about anything she had control over. I don't think on any major decision she looked back and doubted herself.
New York, N.Y.:
How would Mrs. Graham's career as publisher of the Post have been different if it had begun in 2001, instead of 1963?
David Halberstam: That's a good question, because she would have been raised to have been a publisher, not to have married a publisher. She'd have probably been more self assured. But the properties might have been more vulnerable. She took over those two main properties in 1963 at the height of their economic strength at a very different era for print journalism. Print journalism is much more endangered [now]. The pressure in the current society on print properties is immense, and the economic underpinnings are significantly more vulnerable. And we ought to note that because she had not been raised to do it, because she had self-doubt, it made her a great listener. Some of the weaknesses that she seemingly brought turned out not to be deficits, because she was such a good listener.
Alexandria, Va.:
From her fabulous book, I know that Mrs. Graham's mother had an enormous (and not always positive) impact on her self-esteem. Mrs. Graham's candor helped many women deal with their own self doubt in their lives and careers. Did you know her well enough to comment on this more fully, i.e., her relationship with her mother?
David Halberstam: I think her mother was what you'd call today an abusive mother. I think she systematically undercut Katharine's confidence -- was always putting her down. Her father adored her in the way that very successful men who had roots in the Victorian age adored their daughters, but who did not think that they should strike out on their own and be publisher. And I think her mother really did undermine her confidence for a very a long time. Gaining the kind of confidence necessary, despite that upbringing, was an enormous victory for her.
New York, N.Y.:
How did her actions/decisions concerning the Pentagon Papers and Watergate impact the history of this country?
David Halberstam: On big calls, they're 2 for 2. On the Pentagon Papers, it was the government's own record of the deceptions practiced by the government during a tragic period, and a war that resulted from epic miscalculations. And the publication of them symbolized the right of independent newspapers, in the search for truth, to stand up to the government -- that the government did not control truth. And the decision to do that, which was being made at the same time by the New York Times, was a historic one in validating a free press. Otherwise, you might be able to tell only small truths, and to kneel on larger issues before the government.
Watergate is an extension of that. These were crimes committed against citizens not by fellow citizens, but by the president of the United States and his officials, including the chief law enforcement official, John Mitchell. It took great courage to pursue the story. And the reaction by the government was ugly and personal -- they threatened her properties, particularly her television stations, and the attorney general talked about her in a coarse and ugly way, saying that she would get "her tit caught in the wringer." We may remember John Mitchell more for saying things like that than for anything else.
Montana:
What qualified Ms Graham for the job of publishing the Post?
David Halberstam: What qualified her was honor -- an obligation that had been handed down to her by her father -- that you were supposed to do things well and with honor. That there was a sense in that family -- as with the Sulzburger family [of the New York Times] -- that this was public domain capitalism. This is a public trust. That there was a larger responsibility that went along with it; that it wasn't just about maximizing profit.
Omaha, Neb.:
I think that one of the things that made Ms. Graham such a fascinating lady is the fact that even though she came from money, she was such a hard worker and would do whatever it took to be a success, especially in a time when women didn't typically flourish in the publishing world.
David Halberstam: I think her ascension, as I said, was created by a series of tragedies in her own family -- it was not something she intended to do or wanted to do. But there had always been qualities in there of strength and intelligence, so in a way it wasn't surprising that she did well.
On the question of working hard with wealth, that's typically American. It's what separates us from the old world. In the old world, if you have wealth, you have it forever, and you live off it as part of a de facto oligarchy or aristocracy. In this country, everybody's supposed to work hard. We're a meritocracy. And if you come into wealth, the obligation is to show that you're worthy of that. And you can't sit around and clip coupons, because no one in this country who you'd want to spend time with would do that. It's a very fast league. You either work or get out. I think in her family, in the Sulzburgers as well, there's a sense that to those to whom is given, even more is expected. I think that's very much part of the culture of The Washington Post and the New York Times.
Edinburgh, UK:
What will be the main effects of her passing on The Washington Post?
Keith MacDonald
David Halberstam: I don't think major effect -- for one thing, the changeover took place almost a decade ago. I don't think there's going to be any immediate change, because the economic formation has been stabilized, and the properties have already passed to the younger generation.
Boston, Mass.:
Mr. Halberstam, did you interview Ms. Graham personally in writing "The Powers That Be?" If so, which of her characteristics would you say were most important in making the Washington Post a great paper?
David Halberstam: Yes. I think her straightness, her intelligence and her sense of honor. She was very nervous about me when I was doing it, and she knew I'd spent a lot of time informing myself about Phil and she knew that I'd done a lot of interviews on Phil. She knew as well that I was underwhelmed by what I was hearing. So she had some abivalent feelings. She knew she'd have to do an interview, she knew I had some credentials. This was a moment when the family's personal tragedy was very directly connected to its public roles. She was very nervous about it, and was really quite tentative at first. Then she sat down and did it, and was terrific. She understood that someone was going to write about it sooner or later, and someone was going to lance the bubble. And she realized that it was better to have someone like me, rather than someone who came from the house of tabloid. Once she decided to do it, she really did it -- she was straight, open, surprisingly candid, and from a very tentative relationship at the beginning, we became very fond of each other. I'd set out to do a serious book, and eventually we became semi-pals. If we saw each other at a party, we talked to each other -- there was an element of light flirt, which amused my wife, in any case. I think she sort of saw me as a sort of Peck's bad boy.
The last time we were together at any length was 1993, when it was the summer of the Clintons on the Vineyard. She invited us over to one of the parties, and to be her houseguests. And the great fun was really not so much the party as it was breakfast the next day talking about it with her. And my wife and I agreed that ever the reporter, what she had decided to do with Clinton, who had only been in office five or six months and about whom she had considerable doubts, was to look at him through my eyes. He did not seem adequately presidential to her at that time. She liked that I wasn't part of Washington, sort of a contemporary historian, and wanted my take on it.
That was the last time we spent together.
Kansas City, Mo.:
Why do you think such a private person such as Mrs. Graham was wrote such a personal and very public book? Was she pleased with its tremendous success?
David Halberstam: I think when she set out to tell her story, she felt she had to tell the truth. By then there had been a number of other accounts of what had happened, and she understood that as the publisher of The Washington Post, she could not whitewash it. She wasn't going to write a book and be dishonest; people knew the story. I think there's a therapeutic quality, if you have a tragedy like this, and probably the most human instinct is to think that this is shameful, this shows that I'm not a good person. But then you do it and it's not shameful, and I'm sure she found it rather liberating.
And I think she was very pleased with the success of the book -- she really wrote it herself, by the way -- it wasn't a ghost-written book. I think she was quite pleased to have won the Pulitzer Prize.
Washington, D.C.:
Ms. Graham once said it was sexist to consider her the most powerful woman in the world. Do you think she was aware of the role she played in the lives of other women or of her influence on people around her and society in general?
David Halberstam: Katharine Graham's a very smart, knowledgeable person. I think she thought of herself as having influence rather than power. And I think she was certainly wise enough to understand that the influence that existed, to the degree that she did the right thing and hired the right people -- i.e., the better The Post and Newsweek were, the more influential she was -- but the idea that she was powerful, sitting up there, making decisions of life and death on her own, was something that she would have pulled back from. I think she also understood that this was a fluke of DNA -- that she had been born into a family that had acquired these properties, and that she was essentially the caretaker of them.
On the relationship with women as a role model, it's not something she flaunted, but it was something she was aware of. And I think she took a kind of pleasure to know that her own personal story gave strength and courage to a generation of women younger than she. She had a pretty good fix on who she was, what she had done, what her strengths were, what her weaknesses were and her place in history. I think she was a woman with a very low index of bull***t, and I think that's why people liked her.
She would want to be thought of as a woman who hired the best people imaginable, and in conjunction with them made the right decisions, even though those decisions, such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, were in the short run very painful. I'm sure at the beginning of Watergate, even though she agreed with Ben, I'm sure there was a tiny part of her that wished that Nixon had run a tidier, more honorable White House and that the plumbers had never been sent to the Democratic National Committee. But as the story evolved, I'm also sure she saw no way to go but to follow the trail that her editors and reporters had to go down.
washintonpost.com:
That was our last question today. Thanks so much to Mr. Halberstam, and to everyone who joined us.
The Post's Howard Kurtz is currently live discussing the legacy of Katharine Graham.
Automatically Update Page
|
Get New Responses
|
Submit Question
© Copyright 2001 The Washington Post Company |
