ALL THE BILLIONAIRE'S MEN

Is Jeff Bezos selling out the Washington Post?

- BY CLARE MALONE

"Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post," Donald Trump has said, "and that wasn't happening before."

On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, was hosting a screening party for “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a new documentary celebrating the career of the Washington Post's legendary publisher. Guests included Bill Gates, Bill Murray, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, and Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the stories of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that came to define the paper's golden age.

I had passed the Watergate Hotel on my way to the party. It sits alongside the Kennedy Center, on the bank of the Potomac River. The pair of buildings, each a cream-colored behemoth, were completed in the early nineteen-seventies, a fabled era in the capital, when Presidents feared journalists and the bi-partisan élite dined together on lobster bisque and gossip. Katharine Graham, quiet, wry, and patrician, was then one of the most powerful women in America. She not only ran the Post's business operations—following in the footsteps of her father, Eugene Meyer, and her husband, Phil Graham—but convened members of the Washington establishment around her dinner table in Georgetown, that “tiny kingdom,” as Phil Graham once called it.