Katharine Graham was publisher of the Washington Post in its exciting and dangerous glory years, from the 1960s through the 1980s; she approved the publication of the Pentagon Papers and backed her reporters and editors as they investigated and broke the Watergate stories that would lead, ultimately, to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974. What’s striking is not the emotional or confessional nature of any of her narrative—except for the number of occasions she admits to being unready for some crisis or responsibility thrust upon her, Graham is a straightforward rather than a reflective storyteller—but rather the quietly subversive way she must overturn her own assumption that she lacks the agency to choose the right path forward. Yet choose it she nearly invariably does, coaxing herself onto a wider stage and steeling herself to circumstances, like the heroine of a novel confronted with things she thinks beyond her ken but decides she must face up to nonetheless.
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