Katharine Graham was a typical 1960s pre-feminist Washington D.C. homemaker, a self described “doormat wife” and deeply shy, who carried out the duties of her time and social rank, raising four young children while her husband Phil ran the influential Washington Post. She came from a family of financiers and industrialists but had little clue as to what they did. George and Teddy Kunhardt’s documentary Becoming Katharine Graham follows her “accidental” next life phase following the suicide of her husband; she became publisher of the Post, the first woman to hold a powerful corporate position in the US. “Kay” was ignored by the all-white male Board and didn’t speak in meetings for a year.
In time she found her voice and will and became a warrior for freedom of the press and women. She published segments of the Pentagon Papers against warnings. They were an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War” detailing illegal US aggressions, the scope and barbarity of the US attack and lies and coverups by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
The publication inspired Nixon to send five “plumbers” into the Watergate Hotel to steal democratic election office documents and carried out “burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping” to discredit Dems. They were caught and The Post covered it like a rug. Audio tapes were released of frantic calls between President Richard Nixon, Alexander Haig and others vowing to “break the bitch”, threatening Graham with physical harm for her bravery in publishing the truth. What a woman! What a story! Provocative and revealing archival interviews with Graham who died in 2001, and present-day interviews with Buffett, Gloria Steinem, Don Graham, daughter Lally Weymouth, David Remnick, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Richard Cohen, Lynn Povich, Susie Buffett, Sharon Osberg etc. make this an important film, but I wonder why it took so long for such a film to be made on this hero?