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| Manufacturer | - |
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| Brand | Katharine Graham |
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| Product Id | 1985974 |
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| User Reviews and Ratings | 3 (1 ratings) 3 out of 5 stars |
| UPC | 463449499468 |
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Personal History : A Memoir (Paperback)
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Never have a I read a more honest, genuflective and intriguing autobiography. Graham is as open and frank about her life, especially her early years and her marriage to her bipolar disorder-suffering and eventually suicidal husband, as she could possibly be.
An awesome autobiography by an awesome woman who grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth but with little understanding of how the world worked. Yet when she was put in the position of running her company, The Washington Post, she did admirably well. Not that she was without anxiety much of the time but she made good judgments and performed and brought the company to new heights. I admire her and am so glad that I read the book which was a page turner.
The BEST biography I've read -- ever. Easy to forget it is an AUTObiography and not written by an impartial observer. I read biographies of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley about the same time I read this one and they were absolutely lightweight compared to hers. An amazing book by an amazing woman -- easy to see why it won a Pulitzer Prize.
This may be the best autobiography I've ever read. Graham was charming, brilliant, tough as hell, and a lady all the way through. Her description of the legal wrangling regarding publishing the Pentagon Papers is as hold your breath tense as any thriller.
One of the best autobiographies I have ever read. The political and historical details are covered extremely well but above all it is the honest and deeply moving account of Ms Graham's personal and family life against the backdrop of these events which made it so compelling. She was a worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
She took a chance. She made it work. A tale of one woman's journey into publishing. Interesting anecdotes about her relationships with Warren Buffet, Truman Capote, JFK, and LBJ, and her experiences as she learned the ropes of running a communications empire. She pushed herself through various struggles in some very difficult years, but then she was very wealthy too so I guess "struggle" becomes rather relative. Nevertheless, it makes for a fascinating read.
Even though I categorized this as an autobiography it is not a traditional "my life" story. Instead, it is Katharine Graham's personal history with The Washington Post first and foremost. She begins with a brief overview of how her parents met, when and where she was born, and her college years. This sets the stage for her increased involvement with the paper. From the time she was 16 years old, when her father bought the failing Washington Post at auction, until the end of her role as chairman of the board in 1991, 58 years of Graham's life was immersed in making the paper a success. Raised without a strong mother-figure or adolescent role models Katharine Graham was a trendsetter for women in business. For her era, her rise to power was nothing short of remarkable. But, in addition what makes Personal History such a fascinating read is Graham's unflinching view of her world. She does not hide the fact she had a strained and difficult relationship with her absentee mother. Her voice drips with contempt when she recounts her mother's failed attempts at guidance in life. Graham addresses her husband's mental illness and subsequent suicide in a matter of fact manner. She does not sugar coat the difficulties she faced being a woman of influence in a world traditionally reserved for the man of the house. Despite being born into privilege Graham exemplified the meaning of hard work and perseverance.
I read it mostly because of my morbid fascination with the more miserable aspects of the 1970s, like Watergate, but it's a very engaging book beginning to end. (To cover some of the same ground I also recommend Ben Bradlee's A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (1995).) So you might think that the most interesting bits would be about the inheriting the Washington Post upon her husband's suicide, or the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate. But no, the best part was about her knock-down, drag-out labor fight with the craft trade unions that were strangling her paper. “Knock-down, drag-out fight” is not hyperbole. They were negotiating with the press operators up to the day the contract was set to expire at midnight. Negotiators gave each other assurances that so long as the parties continued to negotiate in good faith, they'd continue working and paying status quo. Management was nervous, so they stayed in their offices until after midnight and just keep an eye on things for a while. Everything with the print run for the next morning's paper was proceeding normally, so at about 2:00 a.m. management went home. At about 4:00 a.m., the pressmen destroyed three presses, set fires, flooded the building, beat the shop foreman nearly to death, and went on strike. Fourteen of the saboteurs were criminally convicted. The union's precondition for negotiation was that all fourteen be re-hired with the rest. Graham refused and broke them. She reached deals with all of the other craft unions, but to this day the paper's presses are run by non-union pressmen. The pressmen's union was uniformly white, and most of the replacement workers hired were black.
As someone who lived in a suburb of Washington, DC; at times, worked in the city; and spent three decades working with the press, I should probably have read this book a long time ago, but now seems like a very good moment, as the late Katharine Graham wrote down her entire life story, not just what she did and didn't do at the Washington Post, and it is a tale of her awakening to her own abilities over decades of an extraordinary life. Her chapters on the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the pressman's strike give an inside look at those crises, but the strength of this book is indeed Graham's personal story as she emerges from the shadow of her parents and then her husband, the talented but tortured Phil Graham.
An interesting perspective on the management of the Post, from her husband (who wasn't shy to use the paper to promote his politics) to herself. Graham herself grows quite a lot as she assumes responsibility for the paper. There's also lots of history, and I liked seeing these familiar events described concatenated and from a single perspective. The book gets substantially worse in the last third. After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, we are treated to a blow-by-blow of a printers' strike (which is actually more interesting than it sounds), but then the story just turns into a weirdly impersonal business story. She doesn't seem to want to talk more about herself or her relationships, except that with Warren Buffett. Her privileged perspective sticks out from the beginning, when she has a tête-à-tête with her best friend with only three servants in attendance, to the end, when she is flying around the world on her private jet and hosting parties for hundreds of her closest friends, while she puts down a printer who commits suicide after she breaks the strike. > I can't say I think Mother genuinely loved us. Toward the end of her life, I was a success in her eyes, and perhaps that is what she loved. Yet, with all her complexity, I felt closer throughout my early childhood to my mother than to the very distant and rather difficult figure of my father. > In those days, the people in Washington often found out what was happening at the ballpark by watching the big scoreboard in front of the Post's E Street building, where the scores were posted in chalk. Occasionally my father himself carried the scores from the telegraph man to the man at the scoreboard. Once, when Goose Goslin hit a home run to win a big game, he asked that the scores not be posted until he could get there and see the pleasure of the large crowds that always gathered to watch.