[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 10]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 14072]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 14072]]

                     IN TRIBUTE TO KATHARINE GRAHAM

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, July 19, 2001

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, our nation has lost one of the true giants of 
American journalism. Katharine Graham, 84, the former chairman and 
chief executive officer of The Post Co. and former publisher of The 
Washington Post, died on July 17 from head injuries she sustained in a 
fall while on a business trip in Idaho.
  Mrs. Graham was a remarkable woman of courage, grace and integrity 
who lead the Post through what has been called two of the most 
celebrated episodes in American journalism: the publication in 1971 of 
the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal. She is credited with 
transforming the Post into one of the nation's leading newspapers.
  Mr. Speaker, to our colleagues who spend so much time in Washington, 
D.C., The Washington Post is required daily reading if we want to stay 
on top of the news of the nation and world. To the handful of us who 
are privileged to represent congressional districts in the Washington 
metropolitan region, The Washington Post is our hometown newspaper and 
we today share in the loss of its legendary leader.
  I would like to share with our colleagues the July 18 editorial from 
The Washington Post in tribute to Katharine Graham.

               [From the Washington Post, July 18, 2001]

                       Katharine Graham 1917-2001

       It's one of the wonderful mysteries of journalism that, 
     though a thousand people's labor may be necessary to produce 
     each day's issue, every newspaper takes on an identity of its 
     own. That character is shaped by people you may have heard 
     of--the top editor, an advice columnist, a chief political 
     correspondent, your county's school reporter--and by many 
     whose names you probably don't know: the copy editors, the ad 
     sellers, the press operators and distributors. Few of those 
     who work here, though, would dispute that at The Post a 
     single person is responsible first and foremost for making 
     our newspaper what it is today. That person is Katharine 
     Graham, who died yesterday at the age of 84.
       Mrs. Graham's imprint was the product both of her values, 
     which suffused the paper, and of the crucial decisions she 
     made about its leadership and direction. At The Post and 
     Newsweek, she chose great editors, such as The Post's 
     Benjamin Bradlee, and then gave them the independence and 
     resources they needed to produce strong journalism. She also 
     supported them at crucial moments, when their work was 
     doubted or under attack by powerful forces in and outside of 
     government. Two of those cases helped define her career, and 
     The Post: her refusal to bow to the government's efforts to 
     block publication of the Pentagon Papers and her backing of 
     the paper's coverage of the Watergate scandal.
       Her decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon's secret 
     history of the Vietnam War, after a federal court already had 
     blocked the New York Times from doing so, was even harder 
     than it appears in retrospect. There was nothing harmful to 
     national security in the papers, but the Nixon administration 
     claimed otherwise, and its henchmen were not above 
     threatening The Washington Post Co.'s television licenses. 
     Mrs. Graham's lawyers advised against publication; they said 
     the entire business could be ruined. But after listening to 
     the arguments on both sides, Mrs. Graham said, ``Let's go. 
     Let's publish.'' In those circumstances, she didn't believe 
     that the government ought to be telling a newspaper what it 
     could not print.
       She proved that again the following year, when The Post 
     again came under enormous government pressure as it pursued, 
     almost alone, the story behind the Watergate break-in. The 
     White House insisted that The Post's reporting was false, and 
     launched a series of public and private attacks against the 
     newspaper--and, on occasion, against Mrs. Graham. Such 
     pressure would have caused many publishers to rein in their 
     newsrooms, but Mrs. Graham did not; instead, she strongly 
     backed Mr. Bradlee and his team. Some two years later, partly 
     because of the paper's persistence, Mr. Nixon was forced to 
     resign.
       No less important to the paper's success was the fact that 
     Mrs. Graham was a tough-minded businesswoman who never lost 
     sight of the fact that high-quality journalism depended on 
     running a newspaper that turned a profit. She concentrated on 
     the business success of the newspaper, leading it through a 
     difficult strike by pressmen in the mid-'70s, even as she 
     oversaw the diversification and expansion of The Post Co., 
     which added new broadcast television stations and cable 
     networks under her leadership.
       All those decisions would have been lonely and frightening 
     for any chief executive; given Mrs. Graham's unusual 
     position, they were all the more so. It's hard now to recall 
     how extraordinary it was for a woman to occupy her job, but 
     for years she was the only female head of a Fortune 500 
     corporation. You get a sense of how anomalous this was when 
     you realize that she was a brainy University of Chicago 
     graduate with journalism experience, both at this paper and 
     elsewhere; and yet when the time came for her father to 
     bequeath The Post to the next generation, it was her husband, 
     Philip Graham, who took over. No one, least of all Katharine, 
     found this strange. Only when her husband died did Mrs. 
     Graham take over the paper; her insecurities in doing so are 
     well documented in her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, 
     ``Personal History.''
       One of Mrs. Graham's public faces over time became that of 
     the society figure. Both in Georgetown and in her summer home 
     in Martha's Vineyard, she hosted presidents (including the 
     incumbent) and generals and secretaries of state. She liked 
     doing these things--Mrs. Graham knew the pleasures of gossip, 
     and she believed, among other things, that Washington should 
     be fun--but there was a serious aspect to them too. Beneath 
     the high-society vener was an old-fashioned patrotism: a 
     belief that liberals and conservatives, Republicans and 
     Democrats, even politicians and journalists, shared a purpose 
     higher than their differences and ought to be able to break 
     bread together. Her credentials for bringing people together 
     were strenghtened by her scrupulous refusal to use her 
     position (not to mention this editorial page) to advance her 
     personal or corporate financial interests; she gave 
     generously to many institutions and causes in and outside of 
     Washington, yet sought little credit for it.
       In what she amusingly called retirement, Mrs. Graham seemed 
     only to become more active. With the publication of her 
     autobiography, so astonishingly honest and unsentimental 
     about herself, the well-known publisher became an even 
     better-known author. And yet, as public a figure as she was, 
     we here at The Post flattered ourselves to think that we saw 
     an essential side of her that others did not. We were the 
     beneficiaries of her investment, year after year, in a 
     superior product: in new sections, new local, domestic and 
     foreign bureaus, new and diverse talent. We were the 
     beneficiaries of her gradual and graceful passing of the 
     baton to the next generation, a transition that she made seem 
     easy but that--as the experience of other great newspaper 
     families shows--can work only with the greatest of care. We 
     got to hear her brutally frank assessments of puffed-up 
     Washington celebrities, delivered in salty language that 
     forever altered the pearls-and-Georgetown image for anyone 
     who heard them. Most of all, we got to see the respect she 
     brought, and the high expectations she held, day in and day 
     out, for fair-minded journalism. The respect was more than 
     reciprocated. We will miss her very much.

     

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