On the Right - Way to Go, Kay.(Brief Article)(Obituary)

NEW YORK, JULY 20

The death of Katharine Graham has got more attention than the death of anyone else in recent memory. This is so because she became a mythogenic figure in her profession: a woman; a victim of a deranged husband; unworldly heir of a seedling enterprise she superintended with growing authority, knowing almost always when to yield to professional advice from journalists, when to assert her own voice. She did this progressively, even-in the opinion of some-here and there wantonly, as if sending a subordinate to the scaffold every now and then reminded her that she had the power to do so.

The normal things about Mrs. Graham of course attract the most attention. She was a natural star, and her posture was nicely demure. She wrote an autobiography by her own hand and took a kid-author's delight in the reception it got. She was faithful to her friends and attended their parties with a nice combination of amusement and fatalism. She did stray kindnesses (including to me) and she seemed to be hoping it would all go on more or less forever. She was rich, famous, aristocratic, wealthy by lineage but convincingly self-made, the mother of a talented and industrious journalist and of a successful male heir. She had money, a great newspaper, a Pulitzer Prize, and a lustrous court of friends and admirers.

One mourns her death, but this is a matter of form, surely. One (correctly) mourns everyone's death. I certainly did that of my own mother, who'd have been 90 one day later. But it is wise to struggle for perspective in such matters, and Mrs. Graham, patron of investigative thought and journalism, would surely have encouraged this.

"What a terrible way to go," a friend remarked. One nods one's head when things like that are said, but, on deliberation, this surely wasn't so. Mrs. Graham was 84, she tripped and fell over, lost consciousness and never regained it in the two days before her heart stopped beating. There was a touch of the wry there: She had been going off to play bridge with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. One doesn't know about her prowess in bridge, but a playful imagination wonders: If the bridge game had been consummated, would Buffett or ...