Her husband, the brilliant and extraordinarily charismatic Phil Graham, President of the company and Chair of the Board, had killed himself with a shotgun three days earlier.

Ms. Graham had to step out from behind this looming shadow, and her traditional housewife’s role, for the first time. She was incredibly nervous, but, 46 when her husband died, she was determined to take control of the company, if only to keep it in family hands until her sons could run it.

 “In those days, that’s how I thought,” she writes, matter-of-fact. Katharine Graham had a daughter as well as three sons. She also thought herself the last person who could run the company. When a close friend suggests she taking the reigns herself, “Me?” she exclaims. “That’s impossible. I couldn’t possibly do it. You don’t know how hard and complicated it is. There’s no way I could do it.”

But Ms. Graham not only stepped out from behind her husband to take the reigns, she moved past a lifetime of conditioning about women’s lack of fitness for the job. 

Any job.

This excellent memoir offers an intimate history of the 20th century in America — a different era. It is filled with letters, and phones are constantly ringing. The details of events and characters across a lifetime come from what now might seem an old fashioned, and precious, habit: of keeping careful notes, in diaries, memoranda, and social calendars. The narrative also draws from official documents — memos sent to President Johnson, now stored in archives — and from, of course, the pages of newspapers.

Personal History begins at the beginning, with Ms. Graham’s grandparents and parents, only after about 150 pages coming to the story of Katharine’s own childhood, education, and marriage — to the captivating and deeply narcissistic Phil Graham.

If Katharine was launched, it was in very traditional ways. Her fledgling career as a journalist had to be given up. When it came to it, she did not even blink when her father, to whom she was very close, handed the Post to his son-in-law: “In those days, of course, the only possible heir would have been a male; my father naturally thought of Phil. In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper.”

Instead, she was a daughter, a wife, and a mother, and, eventually, steward of two very large and very comfortable houses, one in Washington’s Georgetown and another, even more sprawling estate, Glen Welby, in Virginia. Phil Graham took over the running of the Post from Katharine’s equally brilliant father, Eugene Meyer, at age 31. That led to a growing and spectacular social circle. Graham chronicles the major political events and personalities of the century — the battle for Black civil rights in the 1950s, the Kennedys. The principal characters of America’s first families are threaded throughout.

Most arresting, though, is the way this becomes a completely different story after Phil Graham’s death. When Katharine Graham steps into the role of publisher of the Washington Post, she also steps, for the first time, into her own life.

Written in the 1990s, at the end of Ms. Graham’s 30-year career, the memoir reflects the vantage point of the skills and abilities cultivated in this position, abilities, of course, either not identified, denied, or suppressed throughout the first half of her life.

If Ms. Graham’s prominent social position meant she was always a member of the inner circles, in this very personal history, of a privileged, well-educated white woman, she was confined to a very limited sphere of action. One might call it a representative history: the book will resonate with everyone who reads it as a chronicle of women’s belittlement.

Throughout, Graham’s distinctive voice embodies the editorial standards she cultivated for the newspaper. If she faults Mr. Graham for anything, it is blurring the lines between journalism and politics. She is clear that while journalists must make judgments, these must be informed and fair — as objective as possible. These values make for a strikingly candid series of self-recognitions.

A Study in Contrasts

Against all this, Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film could not offer a better study in contrasts — if you’ve read the memoir, seeing the film is like a crash course in the demands of formula and genre. Spielberg’s version  of the Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers imposes a traditional narrative arc, and gender roles, on Graham’s revelations. You would never know from watching this film that Katharine Graham was an active and hands-on publisher, working directly alongside Ben Bradlee and a host of other managing editors and writers at the office every day.

In fact, the film pretty much ignores the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir on which it is ostensibly based to position Tom Hanks’s Ben Bradlee in the centre of the action, stranding the Post’s female publisher on the sidelines. Throughout, Bradlee is on the newsroom floor, in the midst of a ring of male reporters and editors. Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham is for the most part confined to a sumptuous living room where she takes calls. This is doubly unfortunate: it does a disservice both to Graham and to Streep. It’s also illuminating: the film is a great example of precisely the kind of narrative that held Katharine Graham in her place for so long.

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