Personal History
by Katharine Graham
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 656
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0375701044
Publisher: Vintage
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are
intended to enhance your group's reading of Katharine Graham's Personal
History. We hope that they will aid your discussion of this autobiography
by one of America's most remarkable and accomplished women. Graham recounts
her sheltered girlhood as the daughter of a self-made millionaire and
his formidable, egotistical wife; her education at Vassar at the University
of Chicago; her early work at a San Francisco newspaper; and her marriage
to the brilliant and politically ambitious Philip Graham, at the time
a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. After her husband's
suicide, which followed his harrowing descent into manic-depressive illness,
Katharine Graham stepped abruptly out of her supporting role as wife and
mother to take over as publisher of The Washington Post.
This is the story of a woman's life framed against, and actively involved in, Washington's changing political
culture over four decades. It is also the story of The Washington Post,
an ailing newspaper acquired by Katharine Graham's father at public auction
in 1933 and brought, under her own stewardship, to national prominence
with such epoch-making media events as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
Told with striking honesty, intelligence, and level-headedness, Personal
History is the account of an extraordinary life.
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1. Graham spent her childhood
and adolescence in a household that revolved around the needs of the
parents rather than those of the children. It wasn't until she was two
and a half that she was first mentioned, in passing, in her mother's
diary--"The babes (Bill and K) take some of my time this week" [p. 27]--and
when her parents moved from New York to Washington, the children remained
behind with a nursemaid and governess for the first four years. What
long-term effects, if any, did this parental neglect have upon Graham's
life?
2. Of her father's passing
the Post to his son-in-law rather than to his daughter, Graham
notes, "Far from troubling me personally that my father thought of my
husband and not me, it pleased me" [p. 149]. Why did Graham and many
other women of her generation have this point of view? At the time,
her father explained that "no man should be in the position of working
for his wife" [p. 181]; how would the marriage have been affected if
Katharine Graham had been chosen to run the Post?
3. Eugene Meyer believed that
social responsibility accompanied the privileges of wealth. Does the
sense of public duty that Eugene Meyer passed on to his daughter strike
you as unusual? He also believed that a newspaper's first duty was to
serve the public interest, not the political ends of its owner. How
closely did Philip Graham, and later his wife, adhere to these precepts
while at the helm of the Post?
4. Hardly a conventional woman
in her own day, Agnes Meyer was ambitious, politically involved, intellectually
driven, and not at all "nurturing" of her children. In what ways did
her mother shape the person Katharine Graham was to become?
5. What does Graham's description
of the heated political argument that delayed her wedding ceremony indicate
about the role of politics in her married life? What impression do you
gain from the narrative of Philip Graham's political agenda and his
influence upon Presidents Johnson and Kennedy? What impresses you about
how Katharine Graham handled herself in friendships and business dealings
with men in power? Do you think that Katharine Graham would have made
a good political figure herself?
6. Graham writes of her relationship
with her husband, "I literally believed that he had created me, that
I was totally dependent on him, and I didn't see the downside at all"
[p. 309]. Was this a happy marriage up until the time when Philip Graham's
illness became obvious? Or do you agree with her friend's assessment
that it was "good" for her that he left [p. 309]?. Was her continued
loyalty to him, even after he left her for another woman, misplaced?
How would you characterize Graham's account of their separation and
her portrayal of her husband's mistress?
7. Three major crises punctuate
Graham's account of her years at The Washington Post: the decision
to publish the Pentagon Papers, the handling of the revelations of the
Watergate affair, and her dealings with the pressmen's strike. How do
these three events show the quality of her leadership? Her ability to
react under extreme pressure? Is there anything in her handling of these
situations that you disagree with? In the pressmens' strike, she was
blamed for the suicide of one of the workers. Is there any justification
for this?
8. The reader will not learn
much from Katharine Graham about what it's like to live with millions
of dollars at one's personal disposal. What role does Graham's inherited--and
later earned--wealth play in this narrative?
9. Does the couple's attempt
to conceal Philip Graham's breakdown strike you as indicative of a social
stigma attending mental illness that our society has since outgrown?
Was the self-imposed isolation that Katharine Graham endured at the
time, as his sole confidante and support during the course of his illness,
worthwhile? When she writes of herself and her children as "enablers"
[p. 331] of her husband's actions, what does she mean?
10. In any memoir, the writer
is faced with looking back at the past and at actions that seem, from
the present venue, regrettable. What is the role of self-criticism in
this memoir? Do you agree with Graham's belief that to have gone on
a cruise after her husband's suicide was the wrong thing to do, since
it meant that her two youngest sons had to deal with the aftermath of
their father's death on their own? What other aspects of her life would
she change, do you suppose, if she had the chance?
11. Are you surprised at how
much social contact there was between the Grahams and such figures as
Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz,
etc.? Is your view of these well-known figures changed at all by seeing
them through Graham's eyes? How well do you think that she dealt with
the wrath of Richard Nixon? How do the revelations in this book change
your preconceptions about the relationship between media and politics
in this country?
12. Philip Graham's suicide
is clearly a turning point in his wife's story. Is she, in a sense,
a different person once she goes to work at the Post? The episode
of his mental illness and its aftermath encapsulates many of the recurrent
themes in the work, especially the competing obligations Graham felt
as a private woman versus a public one. How well does she deal with
the exposure that comes with being in such an elevated position? How
well does she balance the needs of home and of work? Is this a story
of a person who was to find her real fulfillment as a working woman,
but who never would have discovered that if she had remained at home?
13. Although Katharine Graham
did not at first identify with the aims of the feminist movement, throughout
her career she found herself confronting a good deal of gender-based
discrimination and prejudice. For instance, she was characterized as
being a "'house mother and cheerleader'" for the company [p. 432]. What
were the particular challenges facing her that a man in her position
would not have had to confront? Would you consider Graham a feminist?
14. Graham identifies her husband
as the energetic partner in the marriage, the one who was fun to be
around, while she herself was "the foundation, the stability" [p. 250].
Is this situationÑthe mother feels herself to be "boring" and relegated
to the background, but nevertheless is relied upon to manage the family's
lifeÑstill typical of many families? Has the women's movement significantly
affected gender roles in most marriages?
15. Many celebrity books in
this country are ghostwritten, and clearly Katharine Graham did not
have to take on the enormous labor of writing such a lengthy book herself.
Why do you suppose she chose to do so? What does she achieve by having
done so? What stylistic and tonal qualities of her writing contribute
to your sense of Katharine Graham's presence, personality, and character?
16. "I suppose that, without
quite realizing it, I was taking a veil" [p. 339]. How do you interpret
this description of what it meant to Graham to take on her husband's
job after his suicide? Elsewhere, she writes of being married to her
job. Do you think that she would have accomplished what she did had
she married again?
17. Katharine Graham found a
truly productive partnership with Ben Bradlee; in many ways he seems
to have been an integral part of her success at the paper. Why do you
suppose they worked so well together? To what degree is success dependent
upon working with the right people, or learning how to deal with less
sympathetic people? To what degree is successful management determined
by finding the right balance of personalities in a working environment?
18. In any autobiography some
episodes are emphasized while others are muted. What parts of Graham's
life are underplayed in this memoir? Do you sometimes find yourself
wanting to know more about certain aspects of her life? What might explain
or justify these omissions?
19. While the tradition of autobiograpy
by men in public life is well established, that of women is far less
so. If you have read recent examples--those of Colin Powell and Robert
McNamara, for instance--how does Graham's narrative follow the pattern
established by male writers? What does it owe to the emerging tradition
of writing about female experience? What are the differences, if any,
between the two?
20. Though they are nonfiction,
autobiographies can be compared to novels that follow a character's
education, development, life story--novels like Jane Austen's Emma,
George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, or Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations. How does Graham's narrative compare to these or similar
novels you've read? How would you characterize the movements of its
"plot"? What is the effect upon you as a reader of the story as a whole?
21. Graham often mentions the
fact that she lacked confidence, even after having reached a level of
achievement that few people--men or women--ever do. Does she come across
in her writing as a woman lacking in confidence? Is this, at bottom,
a problem shared by most individuals, no matter how successful and no
matter their sex? If not, how is Katharine Graham's lack of confidence
specific to her sex and her generation?
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