Bill Clinton
I always looked forward to our summer visits in Martha’s Vineyard. I am grateful for her remarkable life and for the courage and kindness for which she lived and wrote about it.
Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor, The Washington Post
“She and I and Howard Simons [then managing editor of The Washington Post] were at lunch. It was 1973. She asked me, ‘Who was Deep Throat?’ I was about to tell her. Then she laughed, put her hand on my arm and said, ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to carry that burden.’ … She was reassured…. She also asked me [during the lunch], ‘Will the truth ever come out about Nixon?’ I told her, ‘No, I don’t think so.’”
Carl Bernstein, Watergate reporter, The Washington Post
“She had an almost girlish sense of humor. When we wrote the story that [former Attorney General] John Mitchell controlled the funds that were used for the Watergate burglary, I called Mitchell and his comment was: ‘All that crap, it’s all been denied. If you print that, Katie Graham will get her tit caught in a wringer.’ I told Bradlee, and he said, ‘Run the whole quote except for the word “tit”.’ The next morning, Mrs. Graham came into the newsroom, and she asked me, ‘Carl, do you have any more messages for me?’”
Elsa Walsh, writer, New Yorker
“We were at her house just a few weeks ago for a small dinner party in honor of her birthday. It was a hot summer night. Ben [Bradlee] and Sally [Quinn] were there. Bob [Woodward] and I, Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell, Jim Wolfensohn and his wife … Don [Graham] got up and gave a toast about how brave ‘Mom’ was during the Pentagon Papers … and about how great she had been as a journalistic leader. Ben gave a toast, also about the Pentagon Papers. Then Mrs. Graham got up. ‘When you live alone like I do, you’re married to your friends,’ she said. ‘You’re my friends and I love you all very much.’ Everybody was silent. It was sweet, but also bittersweet-and very moving.”
Charlie Peters, founder and editor in chief of the Washington Monthly
“She always responded flexibly, if I can put it that way, when I irritated her with something we wrote in the magazine about The Post-and I irritated her constantly. She would get mad and stay mad, and ‘frost’ me when I would next see her-and then she would call me again in a few weeks for another lunch. She had a patience with people that I learned to truly love. I don’t always rise to that level myself.
“I met her first at a party at her house and then, through a lot of mutual friends, arranged a more formal introduction at The Post in 1968. I wanted her to invest in the magazine I was starting. She agreed to see me and when I walked into her office at The Post she told me, ‘Oh, Mr. Peters, I’m so sorry. I should have called and told you not to come. I’m not interested.’
“Then she saw that I was absolutely stricken by her statement, and she said ‘Well now, do sit down and tell me all about it.’ And I did. But she never did give me any money!
“She started inviting me to lunch about once a month after 1988. I spoke to the newspaper publishers in Chicago, and she liked what I said. Over the course of the years after that we would have lunch. We would agree and disagree. She came to our party on the 20th anniversary of the magazine, and she held a dinner at her home for the 25th.
“Last May, I was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame, and she did the presentation. She went on and on in glowing terms, and then she said: “Sometimes he can be really, really irritating. She said it in that regal way. I later wrote her a note. ‘No one ever said anything with more total conviction.’”
Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board between 1979 and 1987
“It was amazing that this woman who was so shy became this great force in Washington. You had to be invited to Kay Graham’s to know that you’d arrived-and that included presidents. I remember one of the little lunches that she used to have at the Post, for reporters and editors. She said that her father had once been chairman of the Federal Reserve. And I said, ‘Well, maybe someday-like your father-I could buy the Post.’ She said, ‘What’s the price?’ I thought that was pretty quick.”
Robert Strauss, Washington lawyer and former U.S. ambassador to Russia
“I went to the Middle East once [several years ago] with Kay and Pamela Harriman. I bet Pamela that she [Pamela] wouldn’t ride on a camel. Kay said to me, ‘Are you out of your mind? She’s going to do it, win the bet and probably kill herself in the process.’ The last dinner that Reagan had in Washington was at her home. There was a large group of people there but she sat me at the table with Reagan. She was there sitting next to Reagan. I was one person removed from him. The interaction between them was good. I saw her with presidents, heads of state, heads of government, and she was always Kay Graham. People thought The Washington Post made Kay Graham. It was just the opposite. Kay Graham made The Washington Post.”
Donna Shalala, former secretary of Health and Human Services
“Kay had a kind of respect for our country and its institutions that is not always easy to find these days. I remember one time she had invited me to play tennis on a Saturday afternoon. That morning, President Clinton called and asked if I’d like to play golf with him. ‘Sorry,’ I told him, ‘I have a tennis date.’ When I saw Kay I teased her, ‘You know, I turned down a golf game with the president to play tennis with you.’ She was mortified. ‘When the president of the United States asks you to do something, even if it’s just to play golf, you do it,’ she said. ‘People in this town will understand.’ She always treated the presidency and whoever was in that office with great respect and expected everyone else to do the same. Even when her newspaper was attacking a president, such as Richard Nixon, she never changed her attitude about the presidency. I believe it was a quiet kind of patriotism.”
Ted Koppel, ABC News
“I was at a cocktail party recently with Mrs. Graham and she and I were standing in the corner. I suggested she sit down. I told her if she did, everyone else would, and they did. We were talking about the difficulty of being a presidential candidate and how very hard it is these days. I asked what she would have done if [her son] Don had come to [her] and said, ‘Mom, I want to run for president.’ She told me that ‘if it was the right thing to do, if it were in the best interest of the country, of course, I would have wanted him to.’ It would have never occurred to her to say don’t do it because it was too dangerous or difficult.”
Rupert Murdoch, international media mogul
“I was talking with her [at the investment conference in Idaho] only an hour before she [fell]…We had two or three jolly chats…She was curious about the world of journalism and the media. She arrived a little late but sat in a reserved seat in the first row listening to Bill Gates. She still had a curious mind and was taking a lot of it in.
“It would be presumptuous of me to say I was a close friend. [But] I knew her before I came to live here [in the United States]. I entertained her in Australia. She was a most generous hostess and showed me around Washington and introduced me to Lyndon Johnson…She gave wonderful parties full of interesting people.
“What stands out to me is her fierce determination to protect her family heritage against all threats to her family and the company…She was always wary of other power figures and was very quick to see through phonies and bulls–ers.
“[Many years ago] we bought New York magazine and I had gambled on my friendship with [magazine founder] Clay Felker seeing me through. But he turned on me and went to her to buy it. [Murdoch already owned 51 percent, so he held onto the company but there was a brief confrontation between the corporate blocs]. But there was never a cross word between us. She was there out of her loyalty to Clay.”
Jack Valenti, president and CEO, Motion Picture Association of America
“I just got off the phone with Ben Bradlee and I’ve been sitting here weeping. I was with her in Sun Valley for five days, sat with her at the sessions. It’s so sad. She was frail, but she attended everything, starting with the breakfasts at 7 a.m., with Don.
“I knew her for 38 years. She was one of the first people I met with President Johnson. He was always working on her in one way or another. I remember the day he literally kidnapped her-and she reacted with her usual good humor. She was with the press corps at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. Johnson picked her out of the crowd and told her: ‘Come with me to Texas-now.’ She said, ‘Oh Jack, what do I do?’ and I said, ‘Well, the president wants you to come with us.’ So she went straight to Andrews [Air Force Base] with us. Someone went and fetched a suitcase for her and she came down to the ranch and had a wonderful time.
“Then there was the time that President Johnson came to her home and talked about her late husband. This would have been in 1964. She saw that some of her children were there-Don and Lally and one of the others-and the president insisted on sitting down with them in the library and telling them about their father. The president thought that Phil Graham was one of the greatest men he had ever known. Johnson spent 45 minutes talking to the kids-they were teenagers-while Kay stood there, tears welling in her eyes.
“She knew that the president would always push me to call her when he was upset about something in The Post. ‘He would say, ‘That story is wrong and I want you to call Kay Graham right now!’ So I would call, and say ‘Well Kay, you know the president told me to call you,’ and I would pass along the complaint and we would have a little laugh. Because we both knew that I could then go back and tell the president, ‘Well I’ve spoken to her….’
“There was one incident involving NEWSWEEK along those lines. Johnson and I saw the pope, and after the visit, Newsweek published a story that was just 180 degrees off. I knew it was off. Johnson went absolutely berserk and demanded that I call Kay. I did and she said, ‘You’ve got to talk to the editor, Oz Elliott.’ Which I did. He stood by the story-which I knew was wrong. I went back to Kay, she said there was nothing she could do. ‘What can I do?’ she said. ‘We can’t go back on it now.’ And I think the president knew and respected the fact that she was right to protect her people. He valued loyalty and he knew that Kay was never one to cut and run.
“At Sun Valley she asked to me fly back with her on her plane. She was originally going to go to Nebraska with Warren but decided to go back to Washington. She invited me and my wife to go, but I had to go back a day early.”
Robert McNamara, former Defense secretary and World Bank president
“She was really one of the greatest citizens of this country of the last 50 years….I was the last person other than a member of the family to talk to [her husband] Phil [Graham] before he died….She was totally unprepared to take over the management of the Post….She knew she had no management experience. So she had to draw very able people around her. Ben Bradlee, Meg Greenfield, attorney George Gillespie. She [didn’t] hesitate to take risks, even when the future of the country was at stake.”
Former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler
“She was a great lady in every sense of the term and a true profile in courage, especially about Watergate and when she stepped up to the plate after the Times was enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers. I was fortunate enough to have had a small dinner with her the week before she died. There were a number of friends there, including [Washington Post columnist] Richard Cohen, who was making her throw her head back in laughter with his funny stories. I have never seen her so animated and enjoying herself so much as she was listening to Cohen-and it was just a week before she died.”
Lloyd Grove, The Reliable Source columnist for The Washington Post
“She loved gossip. When I started this column, she gave me lunch in her private dining room and we talked about her views of what a Washington gossip column should be like…She would also call me up with tips. Not too long ago, she called me from her car and said, ‘Lloyd, this is Kay Graham. I just want to make sure you heard the rumor that the Clintons might be selling their house in Chappaqua. I just heard it from my driver.’ So I went out and backstopped and satisfied myself that it wasn’t true. She also had a lot of good tips, but I’m not going to talk about those….Clearly, a lot of stuff I wrote, and my predecessors wrote, were painful and distressing, not only to her friends but to her as well. But we never heard a peep from her. She would never intervene or interfere. She wouldn’t think of it. It was against her religion.”
Richard Holbrooke, former United States ambassador to the United Nations
“She had a very good, caustic sense of humor. One of the things about Kay that astonished all of us who knew her and loved her was the way she kept growing…
“I remember her during the Vietnam War, agonizing over whether the newspapers should start to raise questions about the war… It was a very tough period for her. [Then-Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara was her best friend, and she was a loyal citizen to the best generation. I remember her saying that her children were divided, and this put added pressure on her.”
Frank Wisner, former United States ambassador to India and the son of one of Graham’s oldest friends
“[She] really cared about the people she cared about. She cared about me and my brothers. She wondered how we were going to grow up, she took us places. She was constantly at our side. She had a marvelous capacity for nurturing.
“[In one of my last conversations with her] she came over one Sunday to see my mother [Polly] in Washington. We were sitting on the terrace. I said, ‘Kay, I just finished reading your terrific introduction to Meg [Greenfield’s] book.’ I said ‘I ’m really going to disagree with Meg on one point in that terrific chapter on women, in that some women in my youth were hugely significant people. They defined the culture of Washington: they selected the good from the bad, right from wrong, the acceptable from the unacceptable. They created the context within which that city functioned. I just can’t write them off.’ She said, ‘Frankie, I couldn’t disagree with you more.’ It was sort of sad. She downplays [that part of her] in the books, but it was just as powerful [an] indication of who she later became…”
Franklin D. Raines, chairman and CEO of financial-services company Fannie Mae
“I really got to know her best in her period when she’d stepped back from actively running the Post, in her post-Post period. The thing I was most impressed with were how many things she was actively interested in and actively working on very quietly. Several years ago, when we were trying to help revive the District of Columbia and trying to attract major foundations, Kay held a reception at her house to talk to people about the District and to try to restore the faith that good things could happen in the city….
“I was lobbying her as recently as six weeks ago, trying to get her to write another book, to write her stories of contemporary Washington and the people she’d met. She said she’d been thinking about it, but that the prospect of getting up every day and writing just seemed so painful. I thought that given all the people she’d seen in Washington, and the nice touch that she showed in her book and the balance that she showed in describing her own life, I thought would have been terrific in describing the various people she’s interacted with over time. The second-to-last time I saw her was when she hosted the dinner for President [George W.] Bush at her house. At [that] stage of her life, the president of the United States [was] still looking to Kay Graham to help him become introduced to the nation’s capital.
“Besides Kay, there isn’t someone in Washington who is a natural convenor of people. I think the city is going to miss that. She was taking the president around and introducing him to all these people, showing him the house and how they’d remodeled. Though it was a big group, she tried to make it into more of a gathering of friends. A lot of the Republicans, they thought they were going into sort of hostile territory, but there was none of that that night. She was making them feel at home in her home.”
Judy Woodruff, CNN anchor and senior correspondent
“Katharine Graham was far more supportive of younger women, and of younger women journalists, in particular, than anyone realized. She made countless speeches before groups of women; telling her own story, especially after her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography came out. She did not sugarcoat life; but she encouraged women to be strong and to be persistent. I think she was herself surprised at just how much her words resonated with younger women. She was unfailingly supportive of me; always asking about my work and my life. I had a hard time believing someone so accomplished would be so interested in my life, but she was! I think she evolved, over her life, and probably late in her life, into a feminist. She might not describe herself that way, but she did believe in fair treatment of women and equal opportunity for women. I feel so lucky to have known her and to have had lunch with her, just one month before her death. She leaves a big hole in many hearts.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, lieutenant governor of Maryland
“Kay Graham was a dear friend of mine and my family for as long as I can remember. Kay was one of the most extraordinary people that I ever met. From the time I was a young girl, I felt fortunate that there was such a closeness between the Kennedys and Graham families. In the early 1980s when I began writing articles for The Washington Monthly, I asked the editor, Charlie Peters, how he ever thought of asking me to write for him. “Katharine Graham told me about your work,” he replied. And that was Kay Graham in a nutshell: a nurturing mentor and a good friend who was always willing to help and always there to challenge me as well. She was a great mentor.
“In 1998, Kay was the keynote speaker at a national summit that I convened on work-family policies. As one of the leading businesswomen of the 20th century, and as a devoted mother, she was able to share an enormous amount of wisdom and experience with women from across the country. Kay was truly an extraordinary businesswoman. She made the The Washington Post Company one of the dominant media companies in the world, and she was one of the first women to head a Fortune 500 company. Under Kay’s determined leadership, the Post broke some of the biggest stories of our times, including the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
“In addition to her work, Kay had a real love of politics. Whenever we talked or had supper together, she not only asked me about my husband and children, she asked about politics in Maryland and about my role as a woman executive.
“Through it all, Kay remained a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. That is, perhaps, her greatest legacy of all. And to think that she did it all with such humility. This is truly a huge loss.”
Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former Republican senator from Kansas
“I looked up to Kay as a mentor and as a friend. She was always willing and interested in helping others along the way-that was true in journalism and in politics. I admired her loyalty and desire to encourage women to be engaged, to participate. It wasn’t always easy for her to do that, but she did it with enormous sincerity. She invited me to the dinner party she held for Ronald Reagan shortly before he was sworn in. I was absolutely starry-eyed…. She was gracious, introducing me to everyone…. Her parents were friends of my father’s. When she was at the University of Chicago in 1936, my father was the Republican nominee for president. Kay’s mother said that if she could just give my dad speech lessons, she thought she could get him elected…. Kay leaves a legacy of sincerity, courage and leadership that will always be a model for me.”
Pat Wingert, Newsweek’s Washington Bureau
“In 1987, soon after I started work at NEWSWEEK as an education reporter, I gave birth to a very premature baby boy-he was born 16 weeks early and weighed just over a pound. The doctors said there was virtually no hope for survival-even as he hung on, day after day, hooked to a jumble of tubes and wires in his intensive-care incubator. During those first harrowing days, Mrs. Graham personally called my best friend and said the company stood ready to help in any way. I was very touched and grateful-but even more amazed when a few weeks later, I was invited to lunch with Mrs. Graham in her personal dining room. Here I was, this junior staffer who had met the publisher only in passing. And here she was, one of the most powerful women in the country. And yet, she blocked out a couple of hours in her busy schedule to sit and talk to me, mother to mother, about my preemie son’s ongoing struggle. She was as sympathetic and supportive as anyone could be, and it meant a lot to me at that very difficult time. It’s now 14 years later, that baby is now a teenager, and the memory of that lunch remains one I treasure. Mrs. Graham was a fascinating and complicated woman. She was also extraordinarily kind.”
