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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1997, Katharine Graham published her autobiography, "Personal History," a book that succeeded on several levels. Mrs. Graham, who was the publisher of the Washington Post and then chairman of the company, knew a lot of interesting people and wrote about them well; and she was herself an enormously sympathetic person. Readers of her memoir, which won a Pulitzer Prize, rooted for her as they would for any modern heroine, even if her story was by then familiar: despite a sheltered life, she took charge of the family-owned newspaper after the death of her husband, hired Ben Bradlee as its editor, and saw it through its most important stories, the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal. The Post, once a provincial daily, became a great newspaper with national ambitions, and Mrs. Graham became a great publisher.
Much of what has been said about Katharine Graham is true enough: she was tough, vulnerable, smart, funny, shy, loyal, self-doubting, and brave. She was also, it turns out, pulling together material for an anthology about her home town, entitled "Katharine Graham's Washington" (Knopf; $30), which carries with it the enthusiastic subtitle "A huge, rich gathering of articles, memoirs, humor, and history, chosen by Mrs. Graham, that brings to life her beloved city." The description is only partly accurate. The anthology is indeed huge--more than eight hundred pages--and it includes charming, instructive essays by some of my former Post colleagues, and some happy surprises, such as selections from the journals of Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of a long-forgotten congressman. But readers will find themselves going through this compilation with growing dread, and perhaps a kind of wonderment at what has been written, admired, and now republished about the nation's capital.
Katharine Graham died in the summer of 2001, at the age of eighty-four, and an editor's note reveals that the project was left unfinished. Mrs. Graham had written introductions...
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