How Katharine Graham found the courage to challenge Nixon

July 5, 1991 was one of the most important days of my life. My mom was hosting a get-together at our family’s favorite vacation spot in Hood Canal, WA. One of her friends had invited Warren Buffett, and I immediately hit it off with him, kickstarting a relationship that would, among other things, lead to the creation of the Gates Foundation.

But Warren wasn’t the only legend in the room. I remember him introducing me to his old friend Katharine Graham, one of the most well-respected newspaper publishers in the world. Even after all these years—and after her death in 2001—I still treasure the friendship I began with Kay that day.

Kay is best known for leading the Washington Post through the Watergate crisis, but her remarkable story goes way beyond her fights with the Nixon White House. That story is told in her riveting memoir Personal History, which came out in 1997—just a few years before she passed away—and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Kay’s father purchased the Washington Post and saved it from bankruptcy when she was a teenager. In 1946, he made Kay’s husband, Philip Graham, the publisher of the paper. Although this decision sounds strange today—Why would you hand over the family business to your son-in-law instead of your own child?—the thought of putting a woman in charge was unthinkable in that era. “It never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper,” she writes. Kay was expected to devote her life to being a good wife and mother.

But life with Phil wasn’t easy. He suffered from bipolar disorder at a time when treatments for mental illness were crude and ineffective. The chapters about his mental decline are devastating. Kay describes how Phil had to be sedated after suffering from a manic episode at a publishing conference. A few months later, he dies by suicide during a stay at the family’s country home. Kay is the first person to find his body.

While she was struggling with grief, Kay found herself thrust into a new role: president of the Washington Post Company and the publisher of a major national newspaper. That isn’t an easy job under any circumstances, but several of Kay’s male colleagues made it harder than it needed to be. “I didn’t blame my male colleagues for condescending—I just thought it was due to my being so new,” she writes. “It took the passage of time and the women’s lib years to alert me properly to the real problems of women in the workplace, including my own.”

Still, Kay internalized some of the skepticism, and she is pretty harsh on herself throughout the book. She blames herself for Phil’s suicide and describes her business acumen as “abysmally ignorant” when she takes over the Post. I understand her impulse to be critical of her younger self—I often felt frustrated by how I acted as a kid when I was writing my own memoir, Source Code. But it can be difficult to read at points in Personal History. I wish Kay knew how special she was.

Her story is a powerful reminder that strong leaders don’t always come in the form you expect. What Kay sees as weaknesses end up becoming her strengths. Because she didn’t know much about the newsroom when she took over in 1963, she asked a lot of questions. A more experienced publisher might have come into the job with preconceived notions about how to run things—but Kay listened to her new colleagues, and she took the time to learn how they worked. That trust in her people would pay off years later during the Watergate scandal.

I was a teenager during the Watergate years, and I remember reading about it in the paper. Many people focus on two specific events when they talk about Watergate: the break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, and President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 after secret recordings revealed his administration’s involvement in the burglary and subsequent cover-up. But during the more than two years between those two points, the Washington Post reported relentlessly on the scandal.

Nixon himself tried to bully them into giving up, but Kay stood by her newsroom. She protected their editorial independence, never asking her reporters to censor or soften their reporting. At one point, John Mitchell—the chair of Nixon’s re-election campaign and former Attorney General—told a Post reporter that Kay was going to get a certain part of her anatomy “caught in a big fat ringer.” She read about it in the paper the next day.

Kay risked the company’s reputation and financial health to protect journalistic integrity, even in the face of potential lawsuits and calls to discredit the paper. The Post almost folded at one point when the Nixon administration threatened to pull the broadcasting licenses for several TV stations owned by the Washington Post Company. (Despite being the namesake of the company, the Washington Post itself was not profitable at the time. The business relied on local broadcast stations to stay afloat.)

This is where Warren enters the story. He believed the Washington Post was undervalued, and in 1973, Berkshire Hathaway bought a 10 percent ownership share—enough to keep the company going while making sure that Kay remained in control. He eventually became a trusted advisor and a close friend to Kay, which I saw firsthand years later in Hood Canal.

Warren has always hated that Kay was left out of the movie All the President’s Men, which came out just two years after Nixon resigned and received great critical acclaim. Without her leadership and bravery, the Watergate scandal might have faded into obscurity. Fortunately, the film The Post gave Kay her proper due. Meryl Streep was even nominated for an Oscar for playing her.

There is so much to Kay’s story—including her time with President Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, and the pressmen’s strike—that I cannot mention all of it here. If you want to learn even more about her incredible life, I recommend starting with the new documentary Becoming Katharine Graham before reading Personal History.

Diving deep into Kay's extraordinary life is well worth your time. Her story offers more than just insights into a fascinating chapter of American history—it also reveals valuable lessons about courage, leadership, and finding strength in vulnerability.