For the week of July 18 - July 24, 2001

Knowing Kay Graham up close and admiringly

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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She was elegant and stylish in her grooming, cultivated in speech, and unimaginably shy.

But Katharine Graham had other qualities for which those who value freedom of speech and press should be eternally thankful.

She was gutsy as any man I’ve known and fearless when threatened for exercising her First Amendment rights.

When Kay Graham died Tuesday in a coma in Boise at 84, it was an unfitting end for a fighter of her caliber. She deserved to keel over at her desk in her beloved Washington Post.

Somewhere a few vengeful right-wingers will delight in her passing: they considered her a dragon lady of U.S. liberalism for running President Richard Nixon out of office with the Post’s Watergate reporting.

What Kay Graham did, however, was far larger than bringing down a dishonest president.

She stared down the most fearsome threats of government retribution by Nixon’s hack attorney general, John Mitchell, if reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein continued sniffing into Nixon’s abuse of power.

She and the Post forged ahead, exposing the most rancid presidential corruption in U.S. history, driving Nixon from office while reaffirming our constitutional freedoms.

Her grittiness was tireless. The Post went to court to print the Pentagon Papers, winning a landmark Supreme Court test with The New York Times that shored up press freedom and revealed government collusion in concealing misconduct in the Vietnam War.

All this from a once-obscure homemaker who was thrust unwittingly into a publishing career when her husband, Philip, committed suicide in 1963. She not only transformed the mediocre Post into one of the world’s most influential newspapers, but built a prosperous publishing, broadcasting and cable media empire, and won a personal Pulitzer Prize for her 1998 book, "Personal History."

Late in my newspaper career, I came to know and admire Kay Graham up close. In March 1987, I was invited to lecture on press freedom at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria — along with Kay Graham and a handful of others. For 10 days, we were in close quarters with 50 journalists and activists from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Kay Graham let her hair down. I remember her drinking beer, sitting in her stocking feet in the cellar of the huge castle where the seminar was held (the castle used in the film, "The Sound of Music"), fully talkative with this eclectic group and sharing her views on the critical need for a free press.

I also escorted Kay for two days in Phoenix when she came to accept Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite award for journalism excellence, and to spend hours with admiring young ASU journalism students, inspiring them to selfless careers as news reporters.

Finally, Kay Graham was big enough to give the devil his due.

Sitting across from her at a luncheon meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association in San Francisco, and listening to the ousted Richard Nixon make a comeback speech lecture on world politics to 500 publishers and guests, I heard her say, "That’s the most brilliant explanation of world conditions I’ve ever heard."

Later, she approached Nixon and chatted amiably.

That showed character seen in few people these days.

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