Original subtitles

♪♪

[Bradley] These presses normally turn out

a half million copies

of Washington's only morning newspaper.

But night before last,

according to officials of The Washington Post,

the press men set fires, slashed plates,

removed parts and destroyed equipment just hours

after their contract expired

and The Post was forced to shut down.

A spokesman for the company

that makes the printing and folding machines

said he'd seen damage like this

in other countries due to political unrest,

but never before in the United States.

[crowd chanting indistinctly]

[Katharine] We were stunned

by having the presses so badly damaged,

electrical wiring had been ripped out.

Essential operating parts removed

and newsprint rolls slashed.

[chanting "Boycott The Post!"]

[Katharine] The tensions for all of us were indescribable,

and the strain on me was the worst I have ever experienced.

The uncertainties, the complications,

the violence against the people who were working

were all overwhelming.

♪♪

I didn't really see how we were going to manage.

I felt desperate and secretly wondered

if I might have blown the whole thing and lost the paper.

[Jennings] She is one of the most powerful women

in the country.

She led an important American newspaper

through very important times.

[Brokaw] A woman born to great wealth and privilege,

a woman who then struggled to find her own identity

when she went through a wrenching personal tragedy.

[Walters] From homemaker to the head of a publishing empire.

[Brokaw] The woman is Katharine Graham,

publisher of The Washington Post,

the grand dame of American journalism.

[Male reporter] Much has been made of Katharine Graham's social ties

to the movers and shakers of the world

that have included everyone from LBJ to Warren Buffett.

[Warren] I've had a number of heroes in life,

and Kay Graham was definitely a hero of mine.

[Warren] She was an accidental publisher of what became

the most important paper in the United States

at a crucial time in the history of the country.

[Walters] Your life in many ways is like two separate lives.

How would you describe each life in a nutshell?

Doormat wife.

Working woman.

[Rose] Now she has written a very candid account of her life.

[Brokaw] Her autobiography is a stunningly candid account,

including the affairs, a mental illness,

and the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham.

I really don't suppose

that I meant to just tell everything to everybody.

But once I sat down to write my story,

I just tend to be frank and open.

I told it the best I could.

♪♪

[Newsreel announcer] The newspaper page is made up

within a heavy metal frame called a chase.

Type and pictures are now in the spaces allotted to them

in dummies worked out well in advance.

[Katharine] In June of 1933,

my father bought The Washington Post

at a public auction for $825,000.

None of us could have known then

what a transforming event this would be in all our lives.

[Warren] Eugene Meyer was a huge figure

in Wall Street, in Washington.

He started in Wall Street with a very small sum

and went on to become Chairman of the Fed.

They were the first out of the World Bank.

He was a remarkable man.

[Katharine] From my first visit to the paper in June of 1933,

The Post was constantly part of my life.

I found myself deeply involved with the struggle

to improve the paper.

I read The Post daily,

commented, encouraged, and even criticized.

When I left for college a year after the purchase,

my parents and I corresponded constantly

about what was happening.

You graduated from the University of Chicago

and had your stint out at the San Francisco News.

That sounds like a great summer you spent out there,

and indeed you were covering

as a young labor reporter trainee.

I mean, the San Francisco waterfront is a great site.

[Katharine] I covered a longshoreman's labor dispute.

It was a lockout,

and I got to know the negotiator for the unions

and the head of the Warehouse Men's Union.

Although it isn't correct these days,

I socialized with them at night

and we went up and down the waterfront,

drinking what is known as boilermakers.

And they were whiskey -- whiskey and beer mixed.

And you could get a third one free

if you paid 25 cents for the first two.

You know, there was always a piano player in every bar,

and it was a really wonderfully romantic moment.

I had a great time.

[Lamb] Then you returned to Washington.

Well, my father came out and said,

"I thought you were coming home.

And aren't you coming to work on The Post?"

What did he mean?

And what did I think?

I'm sure that he wasn't talking to my sisters

or even my brother in this way.

I'm equally sure that neither one of us saw me as a manager.

Looking back,

I can only assume that I wanted to be a journalist

and that he had a newspaper.

And so I came and went to work

on the editorial page of The Post,

as the editor of the letters to the editor.

And I wrote occasional editorials,

the kind that tell you not to walk on the grass.

[laughter]

♪♪

I grew up in the days when women --

you were mentally kind of cast is not as bright as men

and not as capable of learning.

The assumption at the time was that men would go on

and have careers, and women would maybe have a job,

but then get married and have children.

[Katharine] You were expected to have a family, run the houses,

and if you had spare time, do good works.

My father and I were growing closer

while my mother and I were growing apart.

Though he lacked the gift of intimacy,

in many ways, his supportive love still came through to me.

He was the present parent, oddly enough.

My mother was very sort of self-absorbed.

She said, "I was a dutiful but hardly a loving mother."

She thought that it was her duty

to have us well brought up,

the right nurses and governesses,

the right schools.

But she didn't have to be there,

and nor did she have to particularly have

a physical affection for us.

♪♪

My mother's effect on us was often contradictory.

She set impossibly high standards for us,

creating tremendous pressures

and undermining our ability to accomplish

whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves.

If I said I loved The Three Musketeers,

she responded by saying I couldn't really

appreciate it unless I'd read the original three volumes

in French as she had.

[Murrow] This has been the Washington home

of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer for 26 years.

It's about 2 miles from the White House.

Good evening, Mrs. Meyer.

Good evening, Edward.

[Katharine] My mother was very strong.

She was extraordinary. She was brilliant.

She wrote very well.

And then she became very interested in the latter part

of her life, in social and welfare and education issues.

You're one of the busiest people I know.

What's the latest project, Mrs. Meyer?

Oh, uh, next week,

many of us are trying to get the White House conference

on education to decide that we need federal aid

for school construction, Edward.

But that's going to be a battle.

Ah, I know it is.

Where is Mr. Meyer?

I'll bet he's in the library as usual, isn't he?

Yes. He's waiting in the library for us.

[Katharine] And she especially, I guess,

propagated these myths about what Meyer girls

were supposed to be.

And that we were supposed to be funny and eccentric

and, you know, popular

and all these things that I knew I wasn't.

Mr. Meyer, I've heard it said that all of Congress

has The Washington Post for breakfast,

making it the most influential newspaper in town.

Well, my satisfaction as a newspaper man

is that the purpose I had in buying it

seems to be in process of being fulfilled

under the management of my son-in-law

as publisher of the paper.

[Katharine] We were married when I was not yet 23

and he was almost 25.

Everybody who knew him really was captivated by him.

He was so entertaining. He was so interesting.

And really, people sometimes met him for 10 minutes

and succumbed to his charm.

[Don] Phil Graham was just a magnificent man.

He was deeply sympathetic with whoever he was talking to,

had a quick, emotional understanding of his audience.

My father was fantastic. He was charming.

He was funny. He was tremendously charismatic.

All my friends loved him.

He really lit up a room.

"Incandescent" is just the right word.

[Katharine] My father loved Phil.

It was very, very wonderful relationship.

And so he persuaded Phil to come to The Post.

He wanted to make sure that, um, he had a successor in place.

And so my father named Phil publisher.

He became publisher when he was not quite 31.

[Don] My grandfather, Eugene Meyer,

asked my dad to become publisher of The Post

and said if he wouldn't do that,

he thought he would have to sell the paper

because his one son didn't want to run The Post

and he didn't think about his daughters.

[Katharine] I owned one third and he owned two thirds

of the controlling shares.

My father had arranged this because he said to me

that no man should work for his wife.

Phil had run it very, very well and made the paper much better.

Newsweek was for sale and Phil had bought it.

He was tall, he was handsome, he was charismatic,

and he was just a wonderful publisher of the paper.

[Katharine] Phil and I had a very happy time.

I grew up considerably in those years, mostly thanks to him.

But always it was he who decided, and I responded.

Yet, though I was thoroughly fascinated and charmed by Phil,

I was also slightly resentful when I thought about it

and feeling such complete dependence

on another individual, I seemed, perversely,

to enjoy the role of doormat wife.

[Weymouth] He mingled with everybody,

all the senators, all the congressmen.

They came over to our house. It was fun.

In those days, Washington was much more casual.

People would come over to the house.

There was no Secret Service hovering around.

So even as kids, it was fun.

[Katharine] I feel very privileged to have known

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson before they were president.

Kennedy. He was really charming.

He teased. He was interested in you.

He concentrated on whoever it was he was talking to.

And it was the first time

we had known a president who was our age.

Of course, Phil was related to them somewhat differently

because he got involved in politics with them.

In 1957, he had become involved

with the then majority leader,

Lyndon Johnson, in passing the 1957 civil rights law.

He had become involved

in the desegregation of the Little Rock school,

and he wanted to prevent Eisenhower sending

the troops in there.

And when it failed,

I think it threw him into his first depression.

He was subject to manic-depressive illness

before lithium was being used.

So he essentially suffered from untreated manic depression.

I thought that Phil literally created me.

I mean, I'd grown so under him.

My interests were better. I was sure of myself.

But there was just this subtle thing that at the same time

he was building me up, in a way,

he too, was undermining my self-confidence.

If I went on too long about a story, he'd sort of look at me.

And it was that kind of thing that really made me think,

"Gee, I must be boring."

And I guess led to my silence.

Then you found out he was having an affair?

Yes. That was the last year.

In 1963.

Yes.

He was on the phone with this young woman, and I had no idea.

I guess I must have been dense,

but anyway, I didn't.

And I went in and said, "Is this true?"

And he said, "Yes,"

and he said everything that was the matter with him

was my fault and that he wanted a divorce.

[Remnick] He'd become so erratic that, at one point,

I believe President Kennedy had to send a government plane

out west to retrieve Phil Graham,

who was misbehaving in some way, to bring him back to Washington.

[Katharine] I'd been married to Phil Graham for 23 years.

I was trying to keep the children's lives as normal

as possible and the outside world unsuspecting.

As a result of all this,

I came close to the breaking point myself.

He said he was going to go off with this young woman,

and he was going to take the paper with him.

But I cared so much about the paper and the company

that I couldn't deal with that.

And I was going to dig in at that point

and that I was going to fight.

Phil Graham comes home

after being in an institution.

He'd only been there six weeks,

but he -- he seemed very, very much better.

And he got a day off from the -- from the mental hospital.

And he said he wanted to go to our farm.

And I thought -- I was worried about it,

but the -- the doctors all had a fight about

whether he -- he should go or not,

but he was very manipulative and he got them to let him go.

And he deceived me into thinking he was better than he was.

And he went down there and he killed himself.

And you found him?

Yes.

[Don] She was taking a nap,

and my dad took out a shotgun and went in

and -- and shot himself.

And it was awful for all four of us, each in our own way.

I was 18,

I was between my first and second years in college.

And, uh, there's an awful lot of people in the --

in the world who live with the suicide in the family

and -- and, uh, it -- you think about it

for the rest of your life.

♪♪

When my dad died, she had to decide,

"Am I going to sell the company?"

Which I think most people would have expected her to do.

"Or will I somehow try to run it myself?"

Although no woman was running a business of that size,

I think, in the United States.

[Harris] She decided to run it herself,

and it's prospered.

I wondered how this decision to return tycoon

had affected her as the mother of four children.

Uh, I think that it's the problems of any working mother.

Uh, there's always a tear between home and -- and job.

Um, the boys were very understanding

and -- and very good about this,

and it seems to me they've survived quite well.

And so have I.

I was determined to keep the paper.

I viewed it as a sort of holding place

until my son grew up.

Katharine Graham suddenly becomes the publisher.

Her entire board are White men.

Just a giant circle of White men,

all of whom have a kind of condescending,

wary attitude toward her.

She just had nobody on her side,

and everybody that was talking to her had an angle.

[Weymouth] She had no idea how to write a speech,

and she was tremendously nervous about it.

She was rehearsing over and over and over again.

She said, "There are going to be a lot of rumors around

about this company being for sale,

and I want to assure you all that it is not for sale

and no part of it is for sale.

This is a family company

and there's another generation coming along."

[Katharine] It was really hard

because I didn't know anything about being in business.

I didn't know anything about management.

I didn't know anything about complicated editorial issues.

I didn't know how to use a secretary.

[Don] She was...beyond... unsure of herself.

She was as self-doubting as any human being has ever been.

[Weymouth] It was daunting to her,

and she would rehearse her Christmas speeches

in our bedrooms like, you know,

"Welcome to the Christmas party.

You know, I'm so happy that you're here."

I remained totally silent for about a year,

and it took a great deal of courage the first time

I asked a question at an editorial lunch.

I was so scared.

♪♪

At a little past one, Kay Graham came for me

and we went down to the park

right off of Constitution Avenue

to open the art fair,

which is being sponsored by The Washington Post.

Kay made a really excellent little speech,

shaking all the while,

surprising that a woman of her poise and accomplishments

should be really frightened.

How well Kay Graham is taking over

after the tragic death of Phil.

I think she's pushed herself into being a really live part

of a business empire, and in doing so,

as having a more interesting life.

She is an appealing woman.

But unfortunately, when you know and like somebody,

it makes it all the more painful

when that paper takes you apart unfairly.

[Man] I think we're gonna have to work

on Mrs. Graham.

[Pres. Johnson] Mrs. Graham, she claims

she's the best friend I got, and they murder me every day.

Johnson, to my mind, was tough and bullied and bargained,

but he was terribly able.

[Warren] With Johnson, he knew how to press her buttons,

but The Post really was independent.

[Pres. Johnson] Hello. [Katharine] Hello, Mr. President.

Hello, my sweetheart. How are you?

Well, I'm fine. Are you?

You know, only one thing I dislike about this job

is that I'm married

and I can't ever get to see you.

I just hear that sweet voice,

and, uh, that's always on the telephone.

And I'd like to break out of here and be

like one of these young animals down on my ranch.

Jump a fence.

[ Laughing ]

That's gonna set me up for the month.

[Warren] He would clearly try and romance her,

but she was very, very smart

and she read people well.

[Pres. Johnson] When Phil was here,

he'd sit down and write in longhand in 30 minutes

what we're going to do, and if you just go up to heaven,

get him, bring him back where he can sit in

and advise with me awhile.

[Katharine] You can be friends with people in the government,

but they remember and you remember, the paper comes first.

Has that choice that you made in 1963

to go into the business and run it

had any effect on you personally,

on your personality?

Oh, very much. It's extraordinary how, to me,

how what you do all day alters what you are.

Uh, in a sense, this is what women's liberation,

which a lot of people laugh about,

are talking about a lot over here,

but I think they've got a very important point,

which is changes of attitudes toward women working.

[Steinem] When I first met Kay,

I was surprised by how shy she was.

People might have been surprised that she and I were friends

because she came from a very powerful family.

I had come from a kind of a working-class neighborhood

in Toledo, but I think a lot of us

who were her friends came to understand

that Kay was a way more universal person,

but it always seemed to me she suffered from the idea

that women supported men who acted,

but women did not act on their own,

and that that was an idea of her own mother

in addition to the world.

[Katharine] There are situations

when you're on an equal basis with men

in a committee meeting or something like that, uh,

in which you feel they don't have much regard for your view.

I've also become aware in the last two or three years

that a lot of men really don't like working for a woman.

Almost no man knew anyone

who worked for a woman as their boss.

And if men had any insecurities, this situation brought them out.

[Katharine] For 10 years,

I learned about management at The Post,

and I went up to Newsweek,

and I just kept trying to learn the issues from the men

who were running things.

And of course, they were all men.

[Don] She thought The Post needs to be better,

and she wanted someone at a different phase of their career,

somebody who was full of energy,

somebody who wanted to be there all the time,

somebody who would get the place moving.

And Ben Bradlee was

the Washington bureau chief at Newsweek.

My mother told me

that she was thinking of making him the editor of The Post.

I knew what a crucial choice this was

for The Post and for her.

[Katharine] I asked him, "What are your interests?"

And Ben -- Ben said, "Well, now that you asked me,

he said, "I'd give my left one

to be managing editor of The Post."

Within days she was telling me,

"I know this guy's gonna be great."

She was very quick to figure out who he was,

and he was very quick to figure out who she was.

[Katharine] We had a very, very small staff,

and we built up both the size and the quality of the staff

under Ben Bradlee.

[Bernstein] I think that Ben's recognition

of what Katharine had been through with Phil Graham

was profound,

and he probably got as good or better look

at her transition into being a publisher

and a world figure.

[Katharine] I'm the president of The Washington Post Company,

which has three divisions.

It owns The Washington Post paper,

it has a television division with four television stations

and two radio stations, and it owns Newsweek magazine.

[Povich] In November of '66, I started at Newsweek.

If you were coming into Newsweek as a woman,

you were actually first put on the mail desk

where you delivered mail to all of the writers.

And then you were moved up to researcher,

which is essentially a fact checker.

[Steinem] That was a hard and fast rule.

Even on Newsweek, even though it was owned by Kay.

[Quarles] Today, most women

are still at the same tedious jobs,

and they earn only half of what men earn.

[Povich] It's illegal to segregate jobs by gender.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed that.

This was 1969, and that's when we began to organize.

And so I, as a young reporter in the Life and Leisure section,

started covering stories about the women's movement.

Newsweek decided it was going to do a cover story

on the women's movement,

and that really galvanized the women

to actually file our complaint with the EEOC

and to publicly announce it the day

that Newsweek appeared on its stands

with a cover story called "Women in Revolt."

And we wanted to let Katharine Graham know

that we were filing this suit.

We felt that since she was the woman owner of Newsweek,

that we should give her a heads-up

that we were filing this suit.

She should not find it out on the news.

I'm sure it was hard on Kay,

because, after all, she was the owner.

And yet her heart and sympathies

were probably with the women who were striking against her.

They told her that the women had filed this complaint,

and she said, "Which side am I supposed to be on?"

You know, she already had a sense of being a woman herself

in a profession where she was not taken seriously.

She was not respected,

and yet her company was also being sued essentially

for the same kind of discrimination.

[Steinem] In the end, women became able

not just to research, but also to write.

[Katharine] The women's movement occurred in the late '60s.

I'd gone to work in '63,

and so I essentially experienced it

while I was at the top of a company.

You know, she had to go through her own transition.

She was also a person of her generation,

which is previous to our generation.

And so I think that this period was one of transition for her.

I have to confess that I suppose

due to the totally private life I led, uh,

and led with three very strong individuals in the form

of both my parents and then my husband,

who was a very brilliant and very...

predominant figure,

that there really weren't room for any more predominance.

Put it that way.

[Steinem] One of our first meetings came about

because she wanted the editorial board of The Washington Post

to support the Equal Rights Amendment editorially,

and they were not doing so.

She felt she couldn't order them to.

So she asked me to come address an editorial meeting.

I'm not sure I convinced them.

And of course, we still don't have the Equal Rights Amendment.

[Women] Equal pay for equal work.

[Male reporter] These women want equal job opportunities,

equal pay with men for the same jobs.

This is where they're at.

A lot of women working, nearly 30 million of them,

but very few in executive positions.

[Steinem] It was part of the women's movement

to help overcome the assigned inferior role

that society has given groups of people.

And Kay, you know, had this doubly in a way,

because she had it not only from society but from her own family.

[Katharine] The worst handicap women work under

is the self-inflicted one

that if you've grown up thinking of yourself

as a second-class citizen,

that you tend always to put yourself down.

♪♪

However slow I was to learn,

I finally became increasingly aware and involved.

Most important to me was not the central message

of the movement that women were equal,

but that women had a right

to choose which lifestyle suited them.

We all had a right to a frame of reference.

Other than that, we were put on earth to catch a man,

hold him and please him.

[Remnick] She changed.

She did gain a greater sense of who she was

and what she had accomplished.

[Osberg] She didn't want a label of being a feminist,

but she was on the forefront of everything.

I can see how the women's movement

brought her into herself.

I mean, it's what she lived through.

Only she was way ahead of her time in trying to do it.

[Chanting "Stop the war in Vietnam"]

♪♪

[Steinem] The country was going through a major sea change

because it was engaged in a war in Vietnam,

which was not supported by the majority of Americans.

The Nixon administration was very clearly on the wrong side,

and that made a very thorny set

of reporting circumstances for Kay and The Washington Post.

[Don] A reporter on The Times had received a copy

of what is now called the Pentagon Papers

from Daniel Ellsberg,

a historian who had been working in the Pentagon

undertaking a history of how the United States

got into the war in Vietnam.

[Secretary] General Haig, sir. Ready.

The Justice Department went to court in New York today

and got a temporary order restraining The Times

from publishing the next and last two installments.

[Don] The federal government had never gotten

a newspaper to stop printing a story.

Ellsberg called an editor on The Washington Post,

whom he knew, eager to see the rest of the story printed.

[Kaiser] It comes at this absolutely critical moment,

because Katharine Graham is taking

The Washington Post public at precisely this moment.

Everybody's terrified

that Nixon is going to somehow screw this up.

So Kay had to make this decision on

whether to print the Pentagon Papers.

The government had made it stand clear that, "No,

you shouldn't print it.

It's classified. It's top secret."

Kay received a message saying,

"We want you to know that a company convicted of a felony,

for example, violating the Espionage Act,

cannot own television stations."

The message really threatened us with criminal prosecution.

And it went on to point out that papers with, um, criminal,

um, decisions against them

obviously could not own television stations.

[Weymouth] Our TV stations provided the revenue

to prop up The Washington Post,

which was not a money earner in those days.

And so the businessmen were saying, you know,

"Think twice about this."

She knew that her lawyers were saying,

"Do not print these stories.

It's going to put the paper in grave danger."

And Kay came to the understanding

that she would have to make the decision.

[Katharine] The editors were all on the phone pleading to go ahead.

And I thought that we could risk it,

although it was really dangerous.

She trusted Ben,

and ultimately she preferred his judgment,

which was that it was crucial to the future of The Post

to get the story in the paper that day.

No delay. Right then.

[Katharine] And so I said, "Let's go. Let's publish."

And I hung up because I was so freaked out

by having had to make that decision so fast.

[Don] And off they went,

and they printed the story in the paper the next day.

Well, this morning The Washington Post moved

into the breach and began publishing

other parts of those same Pentagon Papers.

Here in Washington,

the Justice Department went to court

to try to stop The Post from continuing to publish them.

We didn't publish those papers for two weeks

while we were going through the courts.

The Supreme Court said no to the government

and yes to the newspaper,

voting 6-3 to let The New York Times

and The Washington Post print the rest of the Pentagon Papers.

We are extremely gratified,

not only from the point of newspapers,

which is not the least of our concerns,

but gratified from the point of view of the public

and the public's right to know,

which is what we were concerned with.

♪♪

[Cohen] Publishing the Pentagon Papers meant

that this was a dangerous newspaper now.

Dangerous if you were a lying politician.

Dangerous if you were a corrupt person.

This put us in the same situation as The New York Times.

And people began to say The New York Times

and The Washington Post for the first time.

Two major-league papers. Yes.

It forged a confidence in the paper

that we had amongst ourselves,

a great sense that we had in Katharine Graham somewhat,

who would be on the ramparts with us under any conditions.

[Warren] The right person controlled

The Washington Post Company at that time.

There were very few people who would have behaved as she did.

[Katharine] It prepared us for Watergate,

for the tough decisions

and the difficulties with the government

that we would have to make in the Watergate reporting.

♪♪

It was sort of a farce.

Five men discovered in the Watergate

with surgical gloves on, breaking into something.

You couldn't tell why or what.

[Woodward] The judge asked the lead burglar, James McCord,

"Where did you work?"

And McCord said, "CIA."

And in the front row, I kind of blurted out,

hopefully under my breath, "Holy shit."

Mr. McCoy's been released on bail.

[Female reporter] Why weren't the others?

[Woodward] James McCord had been head of security for the CIA

and was head of security for the Nixon reelection committee.

The next day, Woodward and I were told

to come in to the office and continue work on the story.

[Don] They're finding little bits of additional information

and sometimes big bits of additional information

that are driving the story in a very uncomfortable direction.

[Katharine] In no time, it became our story.

And of course,

the administration's reactions to it grew,

and they became very intense.

[Pres. Nixon] Alright.

♪♪

[Katharine] We ran these stories and nobody picked them up.

They go out on the wire and nobody would run them.

Other papers didn't believe us.

[whistle blows]

Usually somebody does a big story, it goes everywhere.

And, um, it wasn't going everywhere.

It really was The Washington Post versus Richard Nixon.

The Nixon people wanted it to be seen

as a Washington Post story.

As long as it was a Washington Post story,

it was containable.

[Weymouth] No one's picking up the story,

and so she was really worried.

And she's like, "If it's such a great story,

where is everybody on this great story?"

[Cohen] We all had doubts.

Katharine did, and it was being mocked.

[Katharine] People who were essentially friends said,

you know, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?

Are you crazy?"

[Hoagland] I was dealing with ambassadors,

with American diplomats.

There was a general sense

Washington Post is giving the president a hard time.

"Why are you guys doing that?"

[Katharine] Readers, too, were writing me,

accusing The Post of ulterior motives,

bad journalism, lack of patriotism.

As an anonymous White House aide told Time magazine,

"To screw The Washington Post."

[Warren] At The Washington Post,

they had editorial lunches.

Clare Boothe Luce was invited.

Henry Luce started Time magazine.

Her husband had died in 1967.

Henry Luce, who everybody called Harry,

probably had more influence on the American public

than anybody except the president of the United States.

And Clare was a very, very strong personality.

And she became a very, very, very staunch Republican.

So anyway, Clare starts really attacking the newsroom.

And at one point, Clare says,

"Last night in a dream I had, Harry came to me.

And Harry said to me that what The Washington Post is doing

is going to destroy democracy.

And at that point, Kay Graham, who was

sitting across and never said anything,

immediately replied

in that incredibly upper-class diction of hers,

"Well, Clare, that is really strange.

Because last night, Phil came to me in a dream

and he said Harry was full of shit."

[laughs]

[Katharine] I really hate fights and I hate this kind of scene,

but when cornered, then I can fight.

She learned how to intimidate the hell

out of everybody she met.

[Katharine] I obviously grew on the job.

You have to.

I was very anxious,

but I also didn't think we had any choice except to proceed.

♪♪

[Bernstein] There is an incrementalism

to the coverage of the story.

We found out about the secret fund,

and we found out that John N. Mitchell,

former Attorney General of the United States,

and Nixon's former law partner

and manager of his campaign,

that he was among those who controlled that fund.

There has been no indication or no proof

that any funds have been siphoned off of any

of the committees in connection with the Watergate bugging.

[Bernstein] So I had a phone number for Mitchell,

and I called him and he answered the phone

and I told him why I was calling.

There was a story in the next day's paper.

I started to read it to him

and I got as far as John N. Mitchell,

while Attorney General of the United States,

controlled a secret fund.

And Mitchell said, "Jesus Christ, all that crap

you're putting in the paper.

If you print that, Katie Graham is going to get

her tit caught in a big, fat wringer."

And I literally felt a chill, literally.

He hung up the phone.

♪♪

[Katharine] Ben told Carl to use it all

except the specific reference to my tit.

There was a concentration on me

as the personification of the paper,

because I was a woman in this job,

and therefore this was all my doing.

I mean, that was a loud message.

It's easier to go after the women.

You know, it's just easier.

I mean, she was the perfect target, too --

a woman in a man's world.

I think it was hard for men to accept the fact

that women could be more than,

you know, the secretary in the office.

I'm sure Nixon looked at her as, you know,

she came into the job by accident

and was unprepared.

[Katharine] So I think he was a real Jekyll-Hyde character,

because he had all these things

that we keep seeing coming out on the tapes

and this really low-level side to him.

In October, the tempo of the whole story picked up.

I think for the first time, we're starting to see

the general outlines of the whole conspiracy

and the subsequent cover-up.

Watergate required decision making on all kinds of levels,

and that required great collaboration

between Ben and Katharine.

In terms of the pressure

that the publisher was under, it was enormous.

I made a lot of speeches defending us during Watergate.

The suggestion has been made that out of some personal

and let me add, non-existent, hatred for the president,

I personally ordered a campaign

against the Nixon administration.

I was trying to explain

that we weren't after the administration.

It wasn't our intention to do them in.

This is not a charge we can afford to take lightly,

because it goes straight to the central issue

of fairness and objectivity,

as distinct from bias in the reporting of news.

[Secretary] Mr. President, Mr. Colson.

We knew that Watergate was a big bore

to most American people, and Nixon won in a landslide.

[Katharine] President Nixon was re-elected

with 61% of the vote,

evidence of how little impact Watergate had had.

Nixon immediately turned to vengeance

and to strengthening his hold on power.

Unfairness is often in the eyes of the beholder,

especially when he feels some particular interest of his own

has been adversely affected

by what others would term a neutral news report.

We are in business, after all, of describing people

and their activities and their causes and conflicts.

And it is a simple fact that people do not like

to be described by others.

The first job of journalism,

and this is essential, is to put pressure on power,

pressure on power, investigative pressure,

reporting pressure,

intellectual pressure on the ideas being put out by power.

And if a newspaper or a site that's serious isn't doing that,

they're not doing anything.

[Katharine] The performance of the reporters and editors

on the Watergate story speaks for itself,

and in our judgment, it speaks well for American journalism.

For what it really comes down to,

is nothing less than the state of the First Amendment,

our freedom to gather the news and to publish it,

and your freedom to read it.

♪♪

[Pres. Nixon] No reporter from The Washington Post

is ever to be in the White House.

Is that clear? [Ziegler] Absolutely.

No reporter from The Washington Post

is ever to be in the White House again.

And no photographer either.

No photographer. Is that clear? Yes, sir.

None ever to be in. Now, that is a total order.

And if necessary, I'll fire you.

You understand? I do understand.

Okay.

[Katharine] They were really after us.

They were trying to get even,

and they wanted to do as much damage as they could do to us.

The Nixon administration was accused today

of raising the most serious challenge to a free press

in modern history.

Two Florida television stations owned

by The Washington Post Company,

whose newspaper is often critical of the administration,

now are facing license renewal fights.

If people perceive your television licenses,

which are very valuable, as being in danger,

um, your stock falls.

And it did.

The idea that we could lose our television licenses

made the stock dive,

and so the company was worth half what it had been

before Watergate started.

[Warren] It really got dumped.

It went from about 38 to, like, 21.

It was cheap at 38, in relation to the real value,

but it got dumped

and it got dumped by big institutional holders.

So in a very short period of time,

we were able to buy a significant amount

of the "B" shares, which had limited voting power.

They did not represent a threat

to the Graham family for control.

[Katharine] He bought into the company and I didn't know him.

I looked him up and I checked him out,

and I was really scared of his buying in

and worried that he wasn't benevolent.

[Warren] She was trying to size me up

and everybody around her told her,

"Watch out for this guy."

[Don] Warren Buffett was not famous in 1973.

There hadn't been much written about him,

and I didn't know what to make of this.

Nobody had ever done such a thing,

but my mother had often a great ability

to recognize highly talented people.

[Katharine] A lot of people said, "Stiff-arm him.

He's buying too much stock.

He means you no good."

My native instinct,

and I think I learned it from Phil, actually,

was, "Let's take a look, let's see what he's like."

And so I asked to meet him.

[Susie] She was coming out to California.

We were out there at our house in Laguna Beach.

My dad bought a bathing suit and actually pretended

like he went to the beach, which he didn't really do,

but he wanted to act like he was Mr. California

because she was coming and it was this big deal.

It was like the Queen was arriving, according to my dad.

I said, "Mrs. Graham, you control this company

lock, stock and barrel,

but you're still worried about me."

So I said, "What you're doing is you're looking at me

and you're seeing fangs, and I'm telling you,

these are baby teeth, but they always look like fangs to you.

And there's nothing I can do except take them out.

I'm going to just take them all out."

And I said, "I'll sign an agreement

that I'll never buy another share of stock

of Washington Post unless you give me the okay.

You know, I want you happy with me.

I don't want you nervous about me."

[Katharine] He thinks very creatively about business.

And I thought, "Whoa, this guy's really terrific."

And he taught me so much about business.

I felt very lucky when I realized

that he had just arrived on our doorstep unexpectedly.

[Don] She was beyond lucky.

Thank God our stock got so cheap

that it attracted Warren's attention in 1973,

but it was the greatest thing.

In business,

it was the greatest thing that ever happened to Kay Graham.

[Katharine] So I got to know him better and better.

And finally I invited him on the board.

I saw things you wouldn't think you would see

in corporate America, I'll put it that way.

She was getting a lot of baloney from executives

that were excusing poor performance,

telling her that if she understood more about business

they were doing the right things.

Everybody worked on her.

They wanted to be close to her and direct her

as much as they could, and they wanted to play on her fears.

He built up her self-confidence

and he told her, "You can do this.

You're smart. You're doing great."

And she needed to hear that.

He's always been very strongly pro-woman.

You know, he had two sisters, and they're as smart as he is.

And they didn't have the same opportunities.

That's how it was when they were younger.

You know, you were just expected to be the housewife

or maybe a teacher or a nurse or a secretary.

I think my dad learned a lot from my mother.

I grew up in a house

where that wasn't the message I got

as the only girl in the household.

But, you know, I'm sure Mrs. Graham got that message,

and -- and I know that my dad would say his sisters

got the same message.

So he was very helpful to her in that sense.

I think she learned just a ton from him.

[Osberg] I believe from her point of view,

he literally changed her life.

She didn't know numbers. She didn't know finance.

He was her guide and her coach.

He used to come to board meetings

with about 20 annual reports,

and he would take me through these annual reports.

I mean, it was like going to business school

with Warren Buffett.

[Warren] I became her best friend.

♪♪

There was some justification for being worried about what

Nixon might do about TV stations.

She always felt that The Post was more vulnerable

to financial troubles than it was.

[Pres. Nixon] Hello. [Secretary] Mr. President, Mr. Colson.

♪♪

[Katharine] I lay awake many nights worrying.

The very existence of The Post was at stake.

[Don] There were threats.

Henry Kissinger, for one, told her to be very careful.

Ben Bradlee, your editor in chief,

has said that you have the guts of a burglar,

which he meant as a high compliment.

Weren't you frightened?

When Ben said guts of the burglar,

it's a kind of nice expression,

meaning that the management of the paper

was going to back the editorial people up.

And the answer to where we scared is yes.

We had a great deal at stake.

You'd see them in the newsroom together,

and there was an immense closeness.

Not only did they work well together

and with some efficiency and common purpose,

but she stood behind him and not only with her money,

but with her institution and support.

Bradlee understood Katharine Graham.

He gave her confidence and she gave him permission.

She made it a point to take home the research

into all the illegalities of the Nixon administration,

to take home the papers, to safeguard them every night,

so that the research couldn't be seized

by any Nixonian outside forces.

[Bernstein] I got a call from the guard at the desk

saying he had a subpoena for our notes.

Bradlee said, "Hold on a minute.

Just let me get back to you."

And he called Katharine and he said, "Okay,

they're not your notes.

Katherine says they're her notes.

And if anybody is going to go to jail

for withholding their notes and not turning it over,

it's going to be her."

[Milloy] You needed nerve.

You need to be able to withstand stuff.

Kay Graham set the standard, a high bar, for having nerve.

♪♪

[Male reporter] The Watergate scandal broke wide open today.

The two closest men to the president,

H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff,

and John Ehrlichman, his chief domestic adviser, have resigned.

The president's White House legal counsel,

John Dean, has been fired.

[Man] Eventually it's going to come out.

There's just too damn many people involved.

[Pres. Nixon] The whole goddamn story is going to come out.

The whole story is going to come out.

The Senate tonight voted 77 to nothing

to establish a select committee to investigate

alleged political espionage in last year's election campaign.

That includes the Watergate bugging case.

[Ervin] The committee will come to order.

John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel,

turned against Nixon and gave days of detailed testimony

about Nixon's involvement.

[Dean] I'm convinced that the Senate decided

to set up a special select committee

to investigate it. It's because of The Post.

At one point in the conversation,

I recall the president telling me to keep a good list

of the press people giving us trouble

because we'll make life difficult for them

after the election.

[Susie] Every day in front of the TV

with my dad watching the Watergate hearings.

That's what I remember. I mean, it was fascinating.

[Utley] There was a surprise witness at the Watergate hearings today,

and he made a dramatic disclosure.

[Man] Are you aware of the installation

of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?

♪♪

I was aware of listening devices.

Yes, sir.

[Warren] Nixon was a very smart guy in some ways,

and he was, you know, about as paranoid

as you could be, but he self-destructed.

The Senate Watergate Committee learned

of the existence of tape recordings

of President Nixon's conversations.

The committee immediately asked for those tapes.

And today it got its reply -- a formal, official "no."

Things were getting worse and worse and worse.

And you saw that the presidency was coming apart.

The Supreme Court has just ruled

on the tape controversy and here is Carl Stern,

who has that ruling.

It is a unanimous decision, Doug.

8 to 0.

Justice Rehnquist took no part in the decision

ordering the president of the United States

to turn over the tapes.

[Katharine] We were essentially saved by the tapes.

You know, if the tapes hadn't come out,

I don't know where we'd all be.

[Mudd] The president himself admitted

he has lost his impeachment fight in the House.

[Chancellor] It looks as though President Nixon

Is going to resign tonight.

♪♪

[Katharine] I was on vacation on Martha's Vineyard,

and I got on a plane and went right back to the paper

because I thought I wanted to be there.

[applause]

[Woodward] The day Nixon resigned...

Fascinating moment.

His farewell to the staff,

his friends in the East Room of the White House.

Uh, it was a psychiatric hour on live television.

I remember my old man.

I think that... they would've called him

sort of a...

a sort of little man, common man.

My mother was a saint.

She will have no books written about her.

♪♪

But she was a saint.

Now, however, we look to the future.

Always remember, others may hate you,

but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them.

And then you destroy yourself.

He got it.

Hate was the piston that drove him.

Nixon used the presidency

as an instrument of personal revenge.

And that was the poison -- hate.

[Katharine] Nixon hated The Post and us personally

through his dying day.

When he left in the helicopter,

the first time I heard the words "President Ford,"

I just couldn't believe it.

And I really did feel relieved.

♪♪

[Male reporter] No other paper kept after the Watergate story

the way The Washington Post did.

It could not have happened

unless Mrs. Graham had wanted it.

[Katharine] People have occasionally said

that we brought down a president,

and I want to emphasize that did not happen.

[Warren] She backed Ben Bradlee at a time

when politicians were opposing her,

other news organizations were not picking up on it.

The Washington Post was out there all by itself.

And that piece of journalism changed the world.

[Katharine] I didn't take any personal pleasure in this.

We were pleased at having our reporting vindicated,

but I don't think that anybody wanted to bring him down

or thought that President of the United States

having to resign because he would be impeached

was a great event for the country.

We didn't.

♪♪

[Man] For her relentless pursuit of the truth

and for her courage in using the media

to uphold the principle of the people's right to know,

Katharine Graham.

[applause]

I'm proud to accept this award

for everyone at The Post who contributed

to our Watergate coverage, especially.

My husband, Philip Graham,

once described the job of the press

as providing a first rough draft of history

that will never be fully completed,

about a world we can never completely understand.

For its investigative reporting

of the Watergate scandal,

The Washington Post today won the Pulitzer Prize

for Distinguished Public Service.

That's not surprising news,

since The Post did better work on that story

than any other institution in American journalism.

The press in this country,

under a constitutional democracy,

is set up to be the critic of the government.

And it's very important

that they do that with a lot of responsibility.

We were proud of the part we had played.

The pressures on us up to that point, however,

when nothing to those that followed.

Just as I thought things had calmed down,

we went through a very violent pressmen strike.

[Reasoner] Publication of The Washington Post

has been suspended because of a strike by the men

who run the paper's printing presses.

[Katharine] There was mass picketing.

There were fire trucks. Smoke. Television cameras.

Lights.

And it was just an unbelievable scene.

They all saw me coming,

and I had to walk through the mass picket line...

...which was a little scary.

[Warren] She was terrified.

But she was more afraid during the strike

that the whole place would come crashing down

and that what her father had bought in 1933

that she would be responsible for destroying.

[Katharine] The only way I can describe

the extent of my anxiety

is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.

Yet, despite my inner turmoil,

I had to appear calm and determined

and to come across as optimistic in order

to convey that attitude to others.

We announced that there would be no paper the next day

and had no guess as to

when we would be able to resume publication.

This is not an isolated instance here

The Post has created.

This follows a chain of activity

within the newspaper field in this country.

This is not the first place

where we've been forced out on the street on strike.

She was not anti-labor. I mean, you know,

there are plenty of newspaper publishers in the country

it was a matter of religion to break unions

and all that sort of thing.

Kay did not feel that way in the least.

I mean, she was working on the West Coast.

I mean, she -- she knew the labor leaders out there,

and she -- she was in no way doctrinaire

about being anti-union.

[Katharine] I cared a great deal about the company

and about The Post, which that struggle for its existence

had been part of my whole life.

The strikers plainly thought,

"If you hit Katharine Graham hard enough, she'll give up.

She'll give us what we want."

[Katharine] Someone had previously been in touch

with several small, non-union suburban papers

about printing parts of the paper in the event of a strike.

Meanwhile, Roger Parkinson set to work trying to find a way

to get the pages from our building

to the outside small plants for printing.

The Washington Post, its presses

crippled in a violent strike by press operators,

said today that nonetheless,

tomorrow morning's editions will come out.

The Post said out-of-town presses will be used.

[Katharine] Having been in a Green Beret unit in Vietnam,

Roger thought of helicopters

and had the wit to look under "H" in the Yellow Pages,

where he found a company

willing to contract for the flights.

The parking lot was dismissed as being too close

to the picketers.

The roof was chosen as being safer.

John Waits of production ran up the stairs to the roof

with the film, handing it to Roger,

who in turn handed it over to the pilot.

We all cheered as the helicopter took off.

I was on the roof watching an amazement.

♪♪

And in my great excitement, realizing that this would work,

I hugged everyone in sight.

♪♪

[Mudd] The Post today put out a limited edition,

using the facilities of at least six newspapers

within a 150-mile radius of Washington.

One of the purposes of a newspaper

is to be the conscience of the community.

They monitor the government. They monitor industry.

They monitor the entire community.

The problem we have with The Washington Post is

since they're everybody else's conscience,

they've set themselves up where no one can look at what they do.

This is not a strike for money, it's a strike for dignity.

They can take their final offer and shove it.

We are not going back.

[cheers and applause]

[Katharine] After the overwhelming turn-down

of our final offer by the union,

it was a question of when, not if, to announce

that we would start hiring replacement workers.

[Male reporter] For years, The Washington Post

has been viewed as a bastion

of liberalism among American newspapers.

But now The Post is finding itself accused of union busting

by some of its liberal backers.

I think she did way more than many other publishers

would have to try to settle this,

but she wasn't going to hire back the people who had,

uh, assaulted somebody,

the press room superintendent, and set fire to the building.

[chanting "Boycott The Post!"]

[Don] In that march,

one of the leaders of the Press Men's Union

carried a sign that said, "Phil shot the wrong Graham,"

meaning he should have shot my mother.

Indescribable.

I mean, I knew the guy who was carrying that sign,

and so did she.

And in that same march,

the burning of an effigy of Katharine Graham,

knowing that she was in the building watching.

♪♪

It -- It certainly made it easy to understand, uh,

what was at stake.

♪♪

[Warren] She empathized enormously with the families

of the strikers and everything.

But with Kay, the newspaper totally came first.

I mean, that was a sacred trust.

[Remnick] There's something profound here about the Graham family

and The Washington Post. Their bond with it is deep.

And think what you will about the strike,

it's very complicated.

And you can easily be critical of the ownership of the paper

in this -- in this really ugly labor dispute.

But Katharine Graham was terrified of losing the paper,

and she could have.

[Katharine] By January 6th,

we had hired 107 people as permanent replacements

for the pressroom.

With the pressmen refusing The Post's final contract offer

and with non-union workers inside the plant

doing the pressmen's work,

this already bitter strike is expected to become even more so.

Tonight in Washington, the world premiere

of All the President's Men.

[Male reporter] Instead of searchlights,

there were pickets outside marching within view

of the Watergate a block away.

The protesters are pressmen on strike

against The Washington Post.

[Male reporter 2] There was one celebrity moment

in the finest tradition of a Hollywood opening,

when the stars came through.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman,

trailed by their real-life counterparts,

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,

who wanted to see how Hollywood would show them at work.

I've never been to a Hollywood premiere either.

As one reviewer noted, All The President's Men

is the most eagerly awaited motion picture since Jaws.

[Don] Robert Redford plays Woodward

and Dustin Hoffman plays Carl Bernstein.

And there is no Katharine Graham character

in that movie.

And what's odd about that

was that the menace of Watergate

wasn't to Ben Bradlee,

wasn't to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

It was, uniquely, to Kay Graham.

[Man] You tell your publisher, tell Katie Graham

she's gonna get her tit caught in a big wringer

if that's published.

All the President's Men was important as a movie

in many ways, because it helped to expose

what the Nixon administration had been doing.

But Kay actually had been the one person

who was the most key to this process

and had the most courage and took the most punishment.

[Weymouth] I thought it was very unfair that she got left out.

One of the actors came and broke the news to her that,

"Gee, you know, you took all the risks,

but you're not going to be in the movie."

But she didn't take it too well. Secretly. Privately.

[Katharine] By the 1st of June,

the strike was essentially over.

In many ways, the strike broke my heart.

It was certainly the toughest work situation I'd ever faced.

My mother rarely did things tactfully or in a low-key way.

She loved and thrived on strident confrontations.

Perhaps for that reason,

I always ran the other way when it came to a showdown.

♪♪

Left alone, no matter at what age or under what circumstance,

you have to remake your life.

On January 10, 1979,

I turned over the title of publisher of The Post to Don.

While I had always known Don would one day become publisher,

what I hadn't foreseen is that it would be so hard

for me to give it up.

Publisher of The Post is a title

I knew I would miss.

In configuring a new way of life,

I tried to understand what

I needed to retain from my old one.

♪♪

Reorganizing my working life was a necessity,

as was finding a new kind of balance.

[Steinem] Of all the ways

that Kay modeled what journalism should be,

the most intimate was writing her own book.

[Russert] She has now written a remarkable book,

Personal History, by Katharine Graham, and she's here tonight.

It is an amazing book

because you hear your voice throughout it.

It was like an audio cassette for me to read.

I could hear Kay Graham.

[Warren] She spent five years writing her book

and she wanted it accurate.

And she sent me the galleys, and I just called her up and I said,

"You know, you wrote the book I hoped you'd write."

I wanted to tell the story of the development of the paper

and the company, and I wanted to tell a story of people,

three people who were very important to me,

my parents and Phil Graham.

But you knew in reliving it, pain would occur.

Well, I knew that there were tough sides to the story,

as there are in anybody's story.

[Susie] I was staying at her house,

and she had told me that she was reading for books on tape,

and that she'd gotten to the part where Phil shot himself,

and she said, "I've read it and reread it 100 times in my head

as we've been working on the book."

But she said, "I had never read it out loud till today,"

and she said, "I couldn't get the words out of my mouth

for the first few times.

It was so hard."

♪♪

[Katharine] On August 3rd, we drove to the farm.

After a short while,

Phil got up saying he wanted to lie down in a separate bedroom

he sometimes used.

Only a few minutes later,

there was the ear-splitting noise

of a gun going off indoors.

I bolted out of my room

and ran around in a frenzy looking for him.

When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom,

I found him.

It was so profoundly shocking and traumatizing.

He was so obviously dead

and the wounds so ghastly to look at that

that I just ran into the next room

and buried my head in my hands,

trying to absorb that this had really happened.

♪♪

Most of our life together was wonderful,

and he was wonderful,

and I didn't want the bad part at the end

to overshadow the very, very good part.

One of the reasons I wrote this book was to say

how great he was, and my parents were each in their own way.

I thought there were three people

who deserved to be remembered and to be written about.

This was The Washington Post 10 years ago today.

The people who put it together were reporters, not historians.

They put down the news of the day --

the important things, the routine things,

and even the trivia.

But 10 years has turned this issue into a history book.

[Murrow] Mrs. Meyer, tell me, do you have anything

to do with running the paper?

Running the paper? Yes.

Certainly not. I'd be shot at sunrise

if I interfered with The Post.

Mrs. Meyer’s a contributor to the paper, she doesn’t run it.

[laughter]

[Katharine] My father was so shy at expressing emotion,

but he somehow conveyed his belief in me

without ever articulating it.

And that was the single most sustaining thing in my life.

That was what saved me.

[Putney] There were times when,

as a young woman, you needed support

and you found your mother to be competitive?

Well, she would tend to diminish whatever you, uh...

[laughter]

And it was a little bit difficult.

It made you a little bit unsure of yourself.

That's true.

But never mind. I got over it.

I mean, I always think that there's a statute of limitation

on how long you can blame your parents for everything.

[laughter and applause]

I guess I may have come to that conclusion as a parent.

[laughter]

For people who know Kay's story,

she is a touchstone for progress, for revolution,

for the future,

because she was so devoted to principle,

even when it was most difficult for her as a shy person

to put herself into the leadership.

You know what my husband said about the news?

He called it the first rough draft of history.

That's good, isn't it?

That's the story of many, many, many women,

not just of her generation,

but of women now who emerge into leadership roles

and still suffer the same kinds of crippling curbs

on their ability to step forward,

to be aggressive, to be -- to take risks, to lead.

[Remnick] When it came to the Pentagon Papers,

when it came to Watergate,

she did the right thing.

She did the right thing.

And that's the thing you knew most vividly.

It was not just Watergate and the Pentagon Papers,

but she did a great job running the company.

She absolutely proved

that a woman can run a major corporation,

and that was a great thing to prove.

[Katharine] By the late 1980s,

The Washington Post Company was clearly a success.

The stock had skyrocketed beyond my wildest dreams,

reaching $300 per share.

Amazing to me since we had started at $6.50.

It's really hard to imagine the time

when there were really no women in the room.

I mean, it was unbelievable in her day.

Impossible.

You know, so I think she really broke the ceiling.

[Katharine] Looking back on it, of course,

I realized that much of how I was treated

was a factor of my being a woman.

Because people are simply not used to a woman

as the chief executive officer of a company.

[Povich] She might have appreciated the women's movement

for what it did for women

and the consciousness she may have gained personally,

but she wasn't a feminist.

She was a strong business leader with a moral compass.

[Katharine] I don't see myself as being a model,

but I think I helped younger women.

I hung in for 30 years,

and therefore they saw a woman who was the head of a company,

and they knew that that could happen.

And I think that to that extent,

I played the role model to them,

and that gave me great pleasure and satisfaction

when I realized that I mattered to younger women.

♪♪

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