Katharine Graham

By Tom Kirvan

Thrust into the job as president of The Washington Post Co. after the death of her husband in 1963, Katharine Graham suddenly became the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

“What I essentially did was put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and stepped off the ledge,” Graham said of her early days as head of the media empire. “The surprise was that I landed on my feet.”

For those who knew the 1938 University of Chicago alumna, it was no surprise that she succeeded in her leadership role at The Post, which also included Newsweek magazine and several radio and television stations. After all, she began her career as a reporter for The San Francisco News before joining the staff of The Post, which her father had bought in 1933 during the Great Depression.

Her upbringing in the newspaper business, in fact, endeared her to those she led as publisher of The Post, according to staff writer Robert Kaiser. In a tribute to Graham after her death in July 2001, Kaiser labeled her “the ideal boss,” a title she earned for giving her employees “the ultimate journalistic gift: absolute independence.”

Katharine Graham*

Wrote Kaiser: “She may have turned the paper over to her hired hands, but Mrs. Graham never lost interest in its contents. That experience as a labor writer in San Francisco was the real thing: She adored chasing a good story. You couldn’t be the ideal boss unless you loved, and understood, what the troops were doing.”

And at The Post, her staff was doing plenty, particularly in uncovering the Watergate scandal that cost a president and many of his political underlings their jobs.

“To me, working is a form of sustenance, like food or water, and nearly as essential,” said Graham, who was born June 16, 1917 in New York.

A gifted writer, Graham received further recognition of that in 1998 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her autobiography, “Personal History,” a candid memoir detailing her life, her rise to power, and her experiences navigating the male-dominated media world.

“We’re our own worst enemies,” Graham said of her gender. “We grew up thinking that only men could do the big, important jobs. We always worry that we’re not good enough. Do you think there is even one man out there who is worrying about what he just wrote? Not one. We’re our own hardest critics.”

* File:Katharine Graham 927-9432 (cropped).jpg: Unknown / Anefoderivative work: Der Angemeldete, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons