The press baroness

...Her own words show she did not...

...Katharine, who was none of these, thought herself awkward and slow...

...The regent—the "bridge," as she describes herself, between her son and her husband— slowly turned into the queen...

...Philip had the larger share, because, as Meyer told his daughter, no man ought to work for his wife...

...He homed in on the sore spots—her looks, her wit, her social compe-tence—that her mother had already rubbed raw...

...why didn't she blame them...

...Her mother, Agnes Meyer—a New Woman, who in her early twenties supported herself in the tough world of journalism—left home frequently to write and travel...

...But this threat to the dynasty jolted her out of a daze...

...The paper that uncovered the news tried to shape news ideologically and even, in one notorious incident, invented it out of whole cloth...

...He could still function brilliantly, in rational moments...

...And what did the "complicated newsweekly process" have to do with the simple act of press bias...

...She then attacked the Post for our reporting, and for hiring 'enemies' of the President...

...Bright as he was, he knew that he was where he was at the whim of the Meyers...

...Kennedy sent a government plane to retrieve Graham from Phoenix, where he had given a rambling speech to a publishers' meeting, in the course of which he had started to undress...

...But the paper was an opportunity, and Philip came to think he could exercise his political ambitions through its voice...

...These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, and overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout most of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past...

...After the speech, I told a friend that Phil Graham had appeared to me in the night, and told me to tell her to "shove it...

...The newspaper world is the only one left where true political power of a very high order is passed down completely by blood...

...He called her "Porky," and gave her the head of a pig as a present...

...She writes: "Phil was the fizz in our lives...

...She says Bush "accurately blamed" the editors...

...I was so unworldly that it was difficult for me to function," Mrs...

...In a long run-up to what is a very short account of the Post's professional life after Watergate, she gives the impression she controlled and averted these dangers...

...The girl who had once wanted to be a labor reporter broke a union in a long and bloody battle...

...Two years later, Meyer devolved his stock on the couple...

...Katharine seemed to sense this, and, at the same time, she helped make it worse by leaving work when their second child was born...

...His wit, always sharp, became even more cutting, seeming to seek out the weakness in people, eager to draw blood...

...Personnel of long standing were summarily fired—then hired again, for non-existent positions...

...Her father, Eugene Meyer, would become the owner of the Washington Post...

...Under his "teasing," she grew more regressive...

...Our interests were aroused in art and politics and books...

...Had her husband, Philip Graham, not committed suicide one bleak afternoon...

...Katharine was the child most like him...

...Graham was to "buy" the stock himself, out of his Post salary...

...But at the same time, their parents found these things more interesting than their children, and often left them very much alone...

...I earnestly tried to explain [to Bush] about the complicated newsweekly process . . . but the issue never really died...

...In them, one sees the patterns by which the great houses of Europe lived...

...Gradually, I ceased talking much at all...

...Sons of the blood are tapped early in youth to accede to great power...

...He began divorce proceedings and hatched a plan to buy Kay's stock from her...

...Graham had said he did not want to work for her family: He wanted a future in politics...

...In June, President Truman asked Meyer to head the World Bank, and, at the tender age of 31, with all of five months in the newspaper business, Philip Graham became publisher...

...We were righteous, but mercifully stupid," she wrote to the paper's editor, Ben Bradlee...

...But increasingly, his actions were deranged...

...The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never going about things correctly," Graham writes...

...They were supposed to be not merely perfect, but interestingly so—eccentric, flamboyant, and dazzling...

...Graham calls Watergate the "transforming event" for herself and her paper...

...Katharine had been paralyzed, unable fully to pity or hate him, as it was never certain what he was doing by choice and what his illness was making him do...

...He had the ideas, the jokes, and the games...

...It is as if she knows, but will not admit, what she has wrought...

...T Noemie Emery is a writer living in Fairfax, Va...

...When it comes to questions of her company's sense of responsibility in her most triumphant years, Graham's recollections seem out of sync with what happened for the first time in the length of this volume...

...Her marriage in 1940 to Philip Graham—who had come from Florida to clerk for Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, and had virtually been adopted by the jurist— made things better and worse...

...The Post is not the only offender in the Graham empire...

...There is not room in Washington for two Graham families...

...We try to keep our opinions confined to the editorial page," she writes...

...From the start, she says, she was aware of the "negative aspects" of the paper's cov-erage—the tendency to "over-involvement," the self-aggrandizing view of the press as romantic hero "defending all virtue against overwhelming odds...

...The dynastic battle never developed...

...The profile of Bush had been fair and complete, but the effect of the word 'wimp' crying out from the cover on newsstands everywhere was hard to overcome," she admits...

...What if it all was a hoax...

...But he did, and she did, and Personal History is their story...

...Everything rotated around him, and I willingly participated in keeping him at the center...

...The Press Baroness The Dynastic Destiny of Katharine Graham By Noemie Emery Katharine Graham's memoir Personal History is about many things: a woman, a marriage, a family, a family business, a family business whose business is politics, Washington, a breathtaking battle with a duplicitous president, a dream marriage turned nightmare, a duckling turned swan...

...Her oldest son was a student in college, years away from maturity...

...Graham traveled the world with his female companion, insisting that others treat her as his consort and introducing her as his future wife...

...Even before his first serious break-down—a paralyzing bout of depression that kept him from work for a year in 1957—the Grahams were a couple in trouble...

...the fun at the dinner table...

...In 1942, nearly three years after the Grahams were married, he decided to settle the paper on them...

...He loved Philip Graham as a son...

...In part due to conduct Katharine Graham presided over, encouraged, and reveled in, the media have squandered the moral authority justly built up by unmasking deception...

...the consort overshadowed both her dead father and her dead husband...

...Alas, she is right...

...We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself, but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it...

...Meyer's motives, his daughter tells us, were wholly dynastic: "He saw his whole endeavor as useless unless he could project a future for the Post in the family...

...He joined the Post in January 1946, becoming its deputy publisher...

...Kay," James Reston told her, "you have got to fight for this paper...

...The dynastic crisis was at hand...

...She was not his sole target—he would later taunt presidents—but she was the first and the most frequent...

...The final phase of his long illness had begun...

...Graham writes, telling us how she arrived at Vassar in 1934, in some ways a social illiterate, unsure how one bought, or even cared for, one's clothes...

...But he could manage this only after his wife volunteered to pay their living expenses and her mother had given him $75,000 as a gift...

...Her husband was dead...

...And their problems were no longer personal matters, but of national, even worldwide, concern...

...The succession devolved on a traumatized 46-year-old widow, bludgeoned by scandal, bred to think herself inadequate...

...Your father created this paper...

...At one point, she had been assailed by Clare Boothe Luce...

...The woman who cringed when seated next to the president for fear she would bore him took on the power of the American government...

...As Nicholas Coleridge tells us in Paper Tigers, Arthur Sulzberger paper...

...What if the reporters made some silly error...

...For the next eight months, Katharine was a terrified witness to his deterioration before an international audience...

...Phil Graham came home, dismissed the young woman, and killed himself at the first opportunity, unable to face what he had done to himself and to others, much less the possibility he might do it again...

...The girl uncertain as to her own attractive qualities married the man everyone longed to be close to...

...in part for this reason, Bush spent a year struggling against an unjust newsmagazine headline...

...We were indeed lucky," she writes of herself and her siblings...

...The girl who thought she had disappointed her parents married a man who surpassed their expectations...

...This manic mood crashed...

...We had parents with solid values...

...The final crisis began for Katharine Graham late in December 1962, when she learned of Phil's affair with a young Newsweek staffer (Newsweek, then and now, being part of the Washington Post Co...

...Katharine Graham was untrained for newspapering or any other business...

...The press, as always, is the last to know...

...The girl uncertain of her social skills married a man who seemed born with all of them...

...Had I said the right thing...

...And in the people, most of them famous, their parents' position brought into their lives...

...If the story was big, why didn't others report it...

...Socially isolated in palatial settings, the children had to guess their way through a maze of commonplace protocols that they found intimidating and unfathomable...

...Nor should it have...

...But what, then, of Newsweek's decision to run a cover story on the "Wimp Factor" the week in 1987 that George Bush launched his national campaign...

...At the same time, her parents— her mother, especially—made huge demands on the five Meyer children while giving them little instruction and even less emotional support...

...In 1933, Eugene Meyer had purchased the Washington Post for something under $1 million...

...A hereditary scion of this type may be intelligent, well trained, and hardworking, but if he is not, it hardly matters...

...sons-in-law, like William of Orange, reach the seats of great kingdoms through the blood of their wives...

...dowagers exercise beside-the-throne influence...

...Graham had begun to edge into manic depression, which was indistinguishable at first from his volatile temperament...

...Katharine Graham would not have become the most influencing liberal proprietor of the age...

...But politicians' children are forced at some point to achieve their own legitimacy in the eyes of voters, and other industries have only indirect bearing on national policy...

...Both Meyers left Westchester for Washington in 1918, leaving their children behind in a Mt...

...But there was something different in his tone as early as 1947, when he suggested that Katharine start a weekly column to "make me a little less stupid and domestic than I have been of late...

...The hereditary principle lives on in other industries, and has been present in national politics from the beginning, when John Adams and his son each became president, to 1992, when half of each national ticket went to the son of a senator...

...It could not have been projected that a self-doubting young woman, given to reliving the smallest of errors, could have stood up to the years of Watergate...

...In the beginning, he had helped her, drawing her out into the world of people and politics...

...Kisco mansion to rattle around with their servants and bring themselves up...

...There were abusive tirades to an understanding John Kennedy, but Lyndon Johnson dropped him after one act of harassment too many...

...When we were with friends, and I was talking, he would look at me in such a way that I felt I was . . . boring people...

...By now, she was cheerfully dissing her critics, with much of her late husband's flair...

...We had vast privileges...

...Was I attractive...

...As Graham writes, In a major address to the Newspaper Publishers Association Convention, she said . . . the spirit of her late husband, Henry Luce, came to her and told her to tell the truth about Watergate...

...These subjects are brought together to explore something more subtle: the peculiar workings of dynasties, of which the newspaper barons of North America are the only pure surviving form...

...And she rose to the challenge...

...as she grew dimmer, his "jokes" became crueler...

...This sort of accession to power through marriage was not unknown in the newspaper industry: It was a given at the New York Times...

...Her father was dead...

...Well, who would have counted on that...

...Despite Eugene Meyer's machinations to make it seem otherwise, Philip Graham worked for his wife...

...It does not belong to Phil Graham...

...Had his young brother-in-law, Orvil E. Dry-foos, not died of a heart attack, Punch Sulzberger would never have taken over the world's most sought after he central fact of Katharine Graham's life is that circumstances have repeatedly asked great things of her while systematically acting to break down her confidence that she could do even simple things well...

...Had I the right clothes...

...But it troubled Graham—too much...

...What is interesting is the almost arbitrary way that many of the great newspapers have changed hands," Coleridge writes...

...in 1963 was no one's idea of a proper publisher for the New York Times— not even that of his parents, who bypassed him for his sister's husband...