PERSONAL HISTORY by Katharine Graham

The movie 'The Post' with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks depicted how The Washington Post newspaper won the right of free speech competition with Richard Nixon's government of the early 1970s. This set the scene the scene for arguably the Post's most successful coup ever, the uncovering of the Watergate scandal which resulted in the impeachment of Nixon, retold in the movie 'All the President's Men'.

At the helm of the paper during these turbulent times was Katharine Graham, there really only by virtue of being the daughter of the man who bought the paper way back in 1933, and the wife of the man, Phil Graham,  who took over from his father-in-law. The reins were  inherited by Katharine on her husband's suicide in 1963. She stood down as publisher in 1979, her son, then great niece in charge until 2014 when it was was sold to Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.

There was really nothing remarkable about Katharine, a very privileged, well educated young woman, who had been brought up to believe that a woman's place was in the home, tending to her husband and children, putting her own needs and thoughts etc second to those around her. From time to time she had dabbled in a bit of journalism, writing the odd column for the paper, but certainly no positions of management, leadership or decision making. Being thrust into the top dog role in 1963 at the age of 46, recently widowed in horrible circumstances, four children, was more than a baptism by fire. She had plenty of help of course: this book is riddled with Post staff at all levels of the organisation whose advice, guidance, and decision making probably contributed more to the survival and success of the paper than her own management did, but flourish indeed it did.

This is her story, all 700 pages of it, published in 1997 when she was 80 years old. And what a story it is. It is incredibly long; there are way too many names - harsher critics than me call it name dropping, they also call her a spoiled ineffective figurehead; I skim read much of the management stuff of the paper, her conflicts with editors, managers, labour issues. But as a story of the transformation a woman of her time made from being a wife/mother to being a person of influence and opinion in a very male-dominated world is marvellous, and what's more at a time when the feminist movement was beginning to hit its stride. Yes, there were set backs; yes, she was regularly vilified, parodied and insulted; yes, there were times she wanted to throw it all away. But she didn't and in her quiet, dignified and polite way (as she tells it), she ends up being a stayer. The paper won 10 of its 47 Pulitzer Prizes on her watch.

Much of this book is outdated now, but not only does it tell Mrs Graham's own personal story, it also chronicles much of America's social, economic and political history during the middle section of the last century. Well worth a read, and ties in very nicely with  the two movies 'The Post', and 'All the President's Men'.