Woman of Note: One Life, Katharine Graham
One Life: Katharine Graham at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery
Born into privilege, newspaper publisher Katharine Graham (1917–2001) was catapulted onto the international stage as publisher of The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. From her entrée to the world of journalism to her formidable attainment of power, the National Portrait Gallery’s One Life: Katharine Graham exhibition presents a multifaceted view of the woman whose personal tenacity had the ability to shape the nation. The exhibition of the Portrait Gallery’s continuing One Life series will be on display through May 30, 2011.
Graham was introduced into the newspaper business as a teenager when her father, Eugene Meyer, purchased the Post at a bankruptcy auction in 1933. From that point on journalism guided her career as she took on reporting stints. When she married Philip Graham her father appointed him as publisher of the newspaper. After her husband’s death in 1963, Graham became president of the Washington Post Co. She was involved in a series of events that placed herself and the Post in a position of international influence, including publication of the Pentagon Papers — a history of the US involvement in Vietnam that pushed reporting boundaries — and persistent coverage of both the Watergate scandal and the subsequent 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.“Katharine Graham was one of the most influential leaders in 20th-century America, as well as a confidant and friend to countless American decision-makers,” said Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “Her unstinting support for investigative journalism and freedom of the press made The Washington Post an enormously powerful presence in the nation’s capital.”
“One Life: Katharine Graham” develops a narrative of Graham’s life story through photographs, cartoons, drawings, a newspaper from the time of the Watergate scandal, her handwritten manuscript of her memoir, Personal History (1998), and the Pulitzer Prize she received for the book. It draws heavily from family photographs provided by her estate. A wedding portrait of Katharine and Philip Graham — taken by family friend Edward Steichen — marks the beginning of their tumultuous relationship, ending with his mental illness and suicide. Richard Avedon captures a composed and intent Graham in a photograph from the post-Watergate era.
One Life: Katharine Graham also contains an antique wooden laundry wringer* that was presented to Graham by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to commemorate the close of the Watergate story, the Halston-designed mask from Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball held in her honor and excerpts from a “Living Self-Portrait” interview with Graham and Marc Pachter, former director of the Portrait Gallery. The interview included topics about her role in publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate coverage. It will be available to visitors on a touch-screen video monitor.
*Editor's Note: The gift of the laundry wringer is explained in The Washington Post excerpt from the 1997 book Personal History by Katharine Graham. And The Washington Post article reviewing the exhibit can be read - with a photographic slide show - online.
More Articles
- My Wish List: Where is Aladdin When I Need Him? More Specifically, Where is His Fabled Magic Lamp?
- 100 Years of Pulitzer Fiction Prizes and a New Way to Submit an Entry to the Competition
- Ferida Wolff's Backyard: Garden as Concept & A Golden Time of Year
- A Changing Relationship to Visual Truth
- American Masters: Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee
- Where Has Joy Gone?
- The Murdoch Issue: Resolution 1003 (1993) on the Ethics of Journalism
- The Ultimate Surrealist Object: Two People Inescapably Drawn to Each Other
- Female Foreign Correspondents' Code of Silence, Finally Broken
- The High Art of Photographic Advertising