Special Kay

In Steven Spielberg’s The Post, Meryl Streep portrays the extraordinary Katharine Graham, a woman who changed history by breaking the Watergate scandal.

- Kati Marton 

Right now, America is in the midst of an exhilarating newspaper war the likes of which has not been seen since the Watergate scandal. Reporters such as The New York Times’s Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Glenn Thrush and The Washington Post’s Greg Miller, Philip Rucker, and Adam Entous—to name some of the most relentless—have been alternating scoops about the embattled Trump White House like tennis champions trading powerful ground strokes. “As in the last part of the twentieth century, so now,” says Carl Bernstein, who, with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate story in The Washington Post in the early seventies. “The Times and the Post are doing magnificently, and it’s Katharine Graham’s courage and example that both papers are following.”

If she were here to see it, Graham, the fabled publisher and owner of The Washington Post, who died in 2001, would be having a hell of a time. And that is exactly how she would have put it. Mrs. Graham, first woman Fortune 500 CEO, doyenne of D.C. society, loved to shock with profanities. It was a particular thrill to hear her occasional finishing school– accented f-bomb. “I didn’t travel all the way here,” she’s said to have once scolded a Washington Post correspondent who had expended titanic effort to get a hot-air balloon for Graham to view Kenya’s breathtaking Masai Mara region, “to be a fucking tourist.”