By MARILYN BERGER

Katharine Graham, who transformed The Washington Post from a mediocre newspaper into an American institution and, in the process, transformed herself from a shy widow into a publishing legend, died yesterday after suffering head injuries in a fall on a sidewalk on Saturday in Idaho. She was 84. ...

Mrs. Graham was one of the most powerful figures in American journalism and, for the last decades of her life, at the pinnacle of Washington's political and social establishments ...

It was only after she succeeded her father and her husband as president and later publisher of The Washington Post, a newspaper with a modest circulation and more modest reputation, that it moved into the front rank of American newspapers, reaching new heights when its unrelenting reporting of the Watergate scandal contributed to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. ...

Mrs. Graham would have been the first to say the single greatest decision of her professional career was not in publishing the Pentagon Papers nor in exposing the Watergate scandal but in hiring Benjamin C. Bradlee to be her editor. With her support he forged a staff of reporters and editors that made The Washington Post a force in the capital and in the world of journalism.

Mrs. Graham capped her career when she was 80 years old in 1998 by winning a Pulitzer Prize for [auto]biography for her often painful reminiscence, "Personal History" (Alfred A. Knopf). Nora Ephron, in her review of the best-selling memoir in The New York Times Book Review, wrote of Mrs. Graham, "The story of her journey from daughter to wife to widow to woman parallels to a surprising degree the history of women in this century."

Mrs. Graham was a socialite mother of four when her husband, Philip L. Graham, committed suicide in 1963....Mrs. Graham saw herself at best as only as an interim caretaker who would try to hold on to The Post for her children. She became something quite different - the effective steward of a multimillion-dollar communications empire. ...

Mrs. Graham remembered a lonely childhood in palatial houses in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and in Washington. Her father was often away working, her mother traveling and writing letters home about her social conquests. ... She spent two years at Vassar before transferring to the University of Chicago. Neither of her parents attended her graduation in 1938.

When Katharine was 16, no one thought to tell her that her father had bid $825,000 at public auction to buy the bankrupt Washington Post ... Later, with yearnings of her own to get into journalism, she took a job at The San Francisco News before going to The Post to work on the editorial page and handle letters to the editor. "If it doesn't work, we'll get rid of her," her father said.

[in 1939, Katharine "Kay" Meyer married Phil Graham, a brilliant lawyer, whom she adored. But clearly, he was a difficult man, who overshadowed and belittled her and who eventually was diagnosed as a manic-depressive. Kay's father had given him control of the Post shortly after their marriage. Years later, when she discovered he was planning to buy her out, she fought back; in 1963 he committed suicide.]...

As she mourned, the 46-year-old widow sought ways to hold on to The Post until her sons were old enough to run it. (Her daughter was not a candidate in her plan.) Mrs. Graham wrote that she was startled when her friend Luvie Pearson, the wife of the columnist Drew Pearson, told her to run the paper herself. "Don't be silly, dear. You can do it," Mrs. Pearson told her. "You've got all those genes. . . . You've just been pushed down so far you don't recognize what you can do." ...

As Mrs. Graham struggled to take hold at The Post, she slowly started putting her personal life together. Truman Capote gave what could only be called a coming-out party for her, the Black and White Ball at the Plaza in New York, which was not only the social event of the 1966 season, but also a masked ball of such glamour that it is considered one of the legendary parties of the 20th century.

She wrote, "For one magic night I was transformed." ...

With the help of the women's movement, and particularly through discussions with Gloria Steinem, Mrs. Graham said she became more cognizant of the causes of her own insecurities and more aware of the problems of working women. She played a signal role in changing Washington mores when it became widely known that on one evening after dinner, she had refused to join the ladies upstairs while the men discussed world affairs over brandy and cigars. And more women were added to the staffs of both The Post and Newsweek, partly because Mrs. Graham came to understand it was necessary, partly as a result of lawsuits, and partly because of a new climate throughout the country..

[In the end] she seemed comfortable with herself. "Worry, if not gone altogether, no longer haunts you in the middle of the night," she wrote. "And you are free ‹ or freer ‹ to turn down the things that bore you and spend time on matters and with people you enjoy."

And she did, till the end. Just two weeks ago she was surrounded by friends at the annual party her daughter gave for her in Southampton, N.Y., and last week was in Idaho for a conference of media executives where she saw more friends and colleagues. She was on her way to a bridge game when she fell.

Katharine Graham's life ended the way she said she wanted it to: "The only thing I think any of us want," she once said, "is to last as long as we're any good. And then not."

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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
[Note: The comments in brackets, above, are my own comments/additions to the original NYT article]

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