Graham’s Tell-All Tickles Washington

WASHINGTON — Brutally revealing. Remarkably candid. Honest as hell.

The early word on Katharine Graham’s memoir is trickling out in Washington, and it seems that no one may be more nervous about its revelations than Graham.

“Personal History,” arriving in bookstores next month, recounts with grace, pain and humility Graham’s journey from affection-starved rich kid to compliant wife to sure-footed publisher of the Washington Post.

Capital power brokers need not fear nasty disclosures about themselves in its 650 pages, her publisher says, but Graham worries whether she bares too much of herself.

“Perhaps I went a bit too far,” she mused in a pre-publication interview with Washingtonian magazine.

To Vogue, she wondered “whether I told too much about the end or not,” referring to her husband Philip’s suicide in 1963, which left her suddenly in charge at the Post and wholly unprepared.

“What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the ledge,” she writes. “The surprise was that I landed on my feet.”

The book’s release by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. appears likely to be one of Washington’s publishing events of the year. Its pages are filled with big people and big events--the Pentagon papers, Watergate, LBJ, to name a few--coupled with extraordinary insights from one woman’s struggle to define herself.

“Kay’s life is harnessed to history in a way that few other Americans are,” said Knopf Vice President Paul Bogaards, who added that the clamor for interviews with her has been greater than for any other author he’s handled.

She’s in line to do ABC’s “20/20” with Barbara Walters, CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and even a turn on the radio with the irreverent Don Imus. Excerpts will run in the Washington Post Magazine, Newsweek and Vogue, and The New Yorker fills nine pages with its review.

“The real sort of whisper around town is that this is a big, important book,” says Chuck Conconi, Washingtonian’s editor at large and an alumnus of the Post staff. “She was always kind of the grand duchess over there, an imperious woman, but there is a side of her that is brutally honest.”

Ben Bradlee, who was her executive editor at the Post, praises Graham’s candor in recounting her transformation from self-described “doormat wife” to media giant in a man’s world.

“You cannot imagine the book being written by a man,” he says.

Now 79, Graham has long since turned control of the Post over to her son, Donald, although she remains chairman of the Washington Post Co.’s executive committee. She wrote her memoirs, she says, because too many others had gotten it all wrong.

Graham tells Washingtonian that she began six years ago to conduct interviews and research, then sat down in her study and wrote. Longhand, on yellow legal pads, twice as much as eventually got published.

“Almost every morning, from 9 to 12, and sometimes all day long,” she said.

She chronicles her childhood with a preoccupied mother and distant father, and the next phase of her life as a “drudge” and “second-class citizen” to her husband, who had taken over the newspaper that her father bought at auction.

“I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite--and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality,” she writes.

She does not flinch from writing about her husband’s affair with a researcher in Newsweek’s Paris bureau, his put-down references to her as “Porky” after four children, his tendency to look at her in a way that suggested “I was going on too long and boring people.”

That all came to a halt when Philip Graham, mentally ill, shot himself at their Virginia farmhouse in 1963 while she napped upstairs.

At age 46, Graham stepped into the gap at the Washington Post, seeing herself as no more than a place-holder until her children could take over.

Despite such modest expectations and “carrying inadequacy as baggage,” Graham grew into the confident and decisive publisher who went against government protests and her lawyer’s counsel to publish the Pentagon papers in 1971, telling Bradlee, “Let’s go. Let’s publish.”

Other historical landmarks are chronicled as well, as Graham recounts a life in which her childhood fantasy was to become famous.

“The strange thing is,” she writes, “after Watergate, to some small extent the fantasy became true.”