Some 4,000 friends, relatives and Washington Post Company employees-including Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton, and a host of senators, governors, mayors, Supreme Court justices, former cabinet officials from both parties, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma-packed the National Cathedral to celebrate the life of Katharine Graham, the longtime CEO and chairman of The Washington Post and a powerful fixture in the capital for 40 years.
Graham died Tuesday from head injuries after falling on a sidewalk in Sun Valley, Idaho, at an annual conference of media and business leaders. She was 84.
There were tears, of course, but also many laughs and a deep sense of pride in the woman most of the mourners called “Kay” or, out of respect, “Mrs. Graham.”
Graham’s daughter, NEWSWEEK contributing editor Lally Weymouth, read from her mother’s will: “Death is as much a reality as birth, growth, maturity and old age. It is the one certainty. I do not fear death.”
In an emotional and sometimes humorous send-off, former Post editor Ben Bradlee spoke directly to his close friend and comrade in the century’s most celebrated journalistic wars. “Well Mums, what a way to go,” Bradlee told the woman who, with no preparation, inherited The Post and NEWSWEEK-after the tragic suicide of her husband, Philip Graham, in 1963-and transformed The Post Company into one of the most formidable and well-respected media conglomerates in the world. In doing so, she also transformed herself from a shy and insecure housewife into a symbol for ambitious women everywhere.
“Lunch with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson on that last day” said Bradlee. “Bridge with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates the day before. Dinner the night before that with moguls galore, plus the new president of Mexico. And now [a performance by] Yo-Yo Ma to send you on your storied way. Not bad for the widowed mother of four who started her career at the top 38 years ago in great tragedy and great trepidation. Not bad at all.”
Noted Bradlee: “Maybe not all of you understand what it takes to make a great newspaper. It takes a great owner, period. An owner who commits herself with passion and the highest standards and principles to a simple search for the truth.” To illustrate his point, Bradlee recalled his boss leaping out of the shower in a towel and rummaging around for paper and pen so she could argue about a national defense story with President Ronald Reagan. “She was a spectacular dame, and I loved her very much.”
Three of Graham’s children also spoke about their mother during the roughly two-hour service, along with Henry Kissinger, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and former senator John Danforth, who, as an Episcopal priest, delivered the homily. Graham’s pallbearers included former Defense secretary Robert McNamara, broadcast boss Barry Diller, superlawyer Vernon Jordan and Sen. Bob Graham, her brother-in-law. Among the ushers were business tycoons Buffet and Gates, film director Mike Nichols, financier Herbert Allen and journalist Barbara Walters.
As she did in life at her legendary Georgetown mansion, Graham managed once more to bridge divisive partisan differences, bringing together in one room people from all extremes of the political spectrum: New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, Senators Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Orrin Hatch, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer, Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Kissinger.
Kissinger recalled that even as The Post was pummeling the Nixon administration (in which he served,) Graham would call him at difficult moments. “You need some rest,” she’d say. “Let’s go to the movies.”
Schlesinger drew loud laughter when he told the mourners that The Post’s pursuit of the Watergate scandal was “aided by the mysterious Deep Throat, who may very well be among us this morning.” He talked of Graham’s journey from a painful childhood and flawed marriage to a role as media icon. “In vindicating herself, she was a quiet revolutionary for all women,” Schlesinger said.
Graham’s children described a woman who could be demanding as a mother but who never stopped growing as a person, overcoming her own insecurity by following a simple but keen sense of right and wrong. Don Graham, who succeeded his mother at The Washington Post, used his few minutes on the altar to thank Mrs. Graham’s myriad friends for their devotion, especially in her later years. “There were New York friends, London friends, [Martha’s] Vineyard friends, friends everywhere she went,” he said. “There were literally hundreds of you who invited her over for a visit or a meal, and I want you to know that she critically appraised every one.”
Several of the speakers commented on Graham’s propensity-unusual in Washington-to avoid attention. “Although she was by any definition a public person, my mother couldn’t muster up a public facade,” said her youngest son, Stephen, noting that some who met her thought she seemed remote or aloof. “She could be herself in public under some circumstances, but she could not perform.”
When she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, “Personal History,” he said, “what she did was to talk to her yellow pads for seven years in the same way she talked to her friends at the dinner table.”
Said Danforth: “She was the opposite of what we often see, people elbowing their way to the front. In Washington, people strut. Kay didn’t strut.”
Police shut down parts of Wisconsin Avenue and surrounding streets so that the funeral procession could carry Graham’s casket, draped in white with a gold cross, the mile or so to her final resting place in the Oak Hill Cemetery. She was buried next to her husband, directly across from the R Street house where she cajoled and entertained the members of what Kissinger called “the permanent Washington.”
“Her place in this country will not be filled, nor the void her death leaves in the lives of her friends and her family,” Kissinger said. “Yet in the pain of this moment, none of us would trade places with those whose lives were never touched by Kay Graham.”
