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Eugene Meyer, owner of The Washington Post, had a daughter named Katharine. Katharine married Phil Graham in 1940 and six years later Phil took control of the paper, transforming it from a sputtering local paper into a nationally respected publication. When Phil died in 1963, Katharine took the helm, and made one of the most critical world-changing decisions a decade later: exposing Watergate when other papers chose to ignore it.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 3, 1963--
Phil Graham had bipolar disorder and died by suicide on August 3, 1963 at the age of 48. He’d been running the Post for17 years, which was totally fine with Katharine. At the time Phil took over the paper, he was 31, and Katharine was 29. Katharine asserted she was “pleased” that her father chose her husband to run the paper rather than her.
But the marriage had not been a happy one. In addition to his mental illness, Phil was an alcoholic who verbally abused Katharine. She discovered he was having an affair in 1962 and Phil said he wanted to divorce Katharine, but before that happened, he had a breakdown and was placed in a psychiatric facility. After Phil took his life, Katharine found herself running the Post.
There weren’t any women running major newspapers; Katharine had no role models and wasn’t taken seriously by her male colleagues. At first, she lacked confidence in her ability to run the paper, but as the women’s rights movement grew, she decided to hell with these misogynistic fucknuts and implemented gender equality policies at her paper.
Then, she brought down a president. A corrupt and evil president. Not Trump-level evil, but still really fucking shitty.
While few other publications gave a shit about Watergate—the 1972 break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters—Katharine Graham supported investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their efforts to uncover the story of President Nixon’s involvement in the scandal. The Post was going to publish that John Mitchell, who had been Nixon’s attorney general, was in charge of a secret fund slated for spying on the Democratic party, and Bernstein called Mitchell for a comment in September 1972. Mitchell replied that “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” The Post published the story and the quote, removing “her tit” from it.
Under Graham’s leadership and support, Woodward and Bernstein continued to publish stories about the Watergatescandal, while other papers either ignored it or even accused the Post of shoddy journalism. The Los Angeles Times was one paper that made an erroneous attempt to discredit the Post’s Watergate coverage.
Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in November of 1972, but the Watergate trials began the following year, and the Postcontinued to lead the reporting on the story. The coverage contributed to the launch of impeachment proceedings, which resulted in the corrupt president’s resignation on August 8, 1974.
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