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In the June number of The New Criterion, I mentioned some doubts expressed by Peter Oborne in the London Spectator about the great wallow of press coverage that accompanied the deaths of two prominent British journalists earlier this year. It seemed to me then that the self-absorption and self-importance of the American journalistic "community" outdid anything yet seen on the other side of the Atlantic, but I was as unprepared as anyone else for the extraordinary gush of sentiment that greeted the death of Katherine Graham - and especially the shameless sycophancy from the writers and editors of The Washington Post, a newspaper that you might not be surprised to learn she owned, and that therefore might have been expected to show a little tasteful restraint.
"From the high-impact names who supped at her Georgetown home to those who met her only in the pages of her prize-winning autobiography," wrote Steve Twomey in Katherine Graham's newspaper, "Katherine Graham's death yesterday brought not just remembrance, but also a sense that a historic presence was gone." Statesmen, diplomats, industrialists, Washington Post reporters and other important people rub shoulders in his article with Mrs. Graham's driver, Lloyd Butler. "Unlike so many of the rich and famous, Mrs. Graham did not ride in the back seat, Butler said. She sat next to him. 'She was my co-pilot,' he said. Nor would she allow her car to be black, another symbol often used by the noted. Her car was green: 'It was a pleasure and it was an honor to drive her,' Butler said. 'I'm going to miss her.'"
Likewise, Jim Hoagland began his column by writing, very sensibly, that "Any journalist writing about a boss, colleague or friend is properly suspect" - and then he adds that Mrs. Graham "was as close to destiny in human form as I ever expect to touch my life." How can a man who presumably wishes to be considered a serious analyst of world politics and affairs allow his name to be placed above such hyperbolical nonsense? And it gets worse. "Somehow, in a life of privilege and influence," Hoagland continues. "Graham had come to a conclusion similar to one that I formed on a small, remote farm outside Rock Hill, S.C. Underneath all the trappings of power, of fashion or of money, people were essentially the same flawed, mortal and unpredictable beings - some capable of heroism and others of chicanery, or at times both."
It is some journalistic trick to manage to be patronizing to "destiny in human form," but Hoagland, like other Post reporters, is up to the task. Best of all such cringe-making moments, perhaps, was Sally Quinn's congratulation of Mrs. Graham for being a rival connoisseur of the wonderfulness of her, Miss Quinn's, husband, a former editor called Ben Bradlee. She "could actually appreciate Ben's daredevil quality more than even I did," writes Mrs. Bradlee, and tells of how "a few months ago, we gave her a ride to a dinner party in Chevy Chase on a sleeting, freezing night. Ben, irritated at the valet parkers, turned the car around and drove the wrong way down a one-way drive, nearly, in my recollection, mowing down several people. I was terrified, hiding my eyes to avoid seeing the carnage. Not Kay. She was shrieking with delight, egging him on, clapping her hands, with "Oh, Ben, you're so outrageous!"
But then "Kay" was the idol of so many of the little people that I suppose she could well afford to let Ben mow a few of them down. Mr. Twomey's account of her funeral proceeds from an account of the billionaires, statesmen, and world leaders who attended to note that "many of the mourners were people without title. There were men and women in business suits who waited for admission near the church steps, beside casually dressed mothers with babies in strollers. Washington interns sat beside afternoon joggers; tourists holding cameras stood beside neighborhood residents, also holding cameras." Such attempts at stressing the great woman's "common touch" naturally shade into an account of her saintly attentions to those from, as Ann Gerhart's tribute to her boss puts it, "the poorest Zip codes" of the capital.
These, says Ms. Gerhart, were "often unheralded," even though "no measure can be taken of the money Mrs. Graham personally bestowed to help the city's most deprived, and there is no telling how many 'anonymous donor' placards may shield her identity." Not surprisingly, there was no sense of irony about the triumphalism with which this identity was now being asserted in the Post's wall-to-wall coverage of her demise. Now, clearly was the time to trumpet even the smallest of her virtues, including, as Albert Hunt put it in The Wall Street Journal, the way in which,"whether with fellow publishers on the beach of the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii or among friends on the deck of her Martha's Vineyard home, she talked often and frankly about her self doubts and difficulties." Truly, in Ben Bradlee's phrase, "a spectacular dame."
Even the "self-doubts and difficulties" she bravely wrestled with on Martha's Vineyard were part of her story because, more or less by accident, she took a central role in the master narrative of America's twentieth-century history according to the journalistic profession. Ancient Rome had its imperial epic in The Aeneid, and it inspired the nation-builders of Europe for nearly two thousand years with its heroic account of destiny at work in history to produce the imperial state. Nowadays, of course, the imperial state has fallen into some disrepute, but we have its equivalent, at least so far as the epic poets and poetasters and sycophants and toadying litterateurs are concerned, in what has come to be called "the journalistic community."
Within this community there are, as in ancient Rome, certain epic battles that are looked back upon and suitably mythologized as landmarks on the way to the great good state. Here, for example, is the fifth paragraph of the Post's lead story, by J. Y. Smith and Noel Epstein - right after the tribute from George W. Bush and right before a capsule summary of the paper's commercial success during the period of her stewardship:
Mrs. Graham guided The Washington Post through two of the most celebrated
episodes in American journalism, the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon
Papers, a secret government history of the war in Vietnam, and the
Watergate scandal, which led to Richard M. Nixon's resignation from the
presidency in 1974 under the threat of impeachment. She and Benjamin C.
Bradlee, the editor she chose to run The Post's newsroom during her years
at the helm, moved the newspaper into the front ranks of American journalism.
The Los Angeles Times obituary puts these events in its lead sentence's identifying clause: "Katharine Graham, the tough-minded media giant who led The Washington Post through the publishing minefields of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers and ultimately became the most powerful woman in American newspapers, died Tuesday." And everywhere else these accomplishments were given great, if not equivalent, prominence.
It is an interesting juxtaposition because there is a nice symmetry in the two episodes illustrating the peculiar arrogance of American journalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the Pentagon Papers case, the mythologizers make the Post and The New York Times the heroes for breaking the law on behalf of what they saw as a higher duty to their readers. In the Watergate case, they make Richard Nixon, the elected president of the country, the villain for breaking the law on behalf of what he saw as a higher duty to the country and its security. Yet nowhere do any of the mythologizers comment on this symmetry, or attempt to justify the asymmetry of their treatment of the two cases. It is meant to be self-evident to us, who now live under their benevolent rule, that journalists are better than the politicians they have conquered and displaced, reducing them to Clinton-Gore-Bush levels of public triviality and banality, and that their sense of morality and duty is more to be trusted.
Along with the epic anti-war story, the journalists' history of the last half century also makes much, not without reason, of their own close association with the various "liberation" movements of the mid-century. Now the Post is so closely identified with the new era of obsession about skin color, sex and sexual "orientation" that even the report on the invitation-only funeral luncheon stressed the "diversity" of the gathering. Most importantly in Mrs. Graham's case was her role as a feminist heroine - one of the things you can tell about her from all that brave discussion of "self-doubts and difficulties."
Let The Los Angeles Times's obituary set the stage as the youthful Katherine Meyer returns home from San Francisco in 1939 to take a job on her father's newspaper - "where, as daughter of the publisher, she was allowed to help with the letters to the editor page and to write 'light' editorials. In those days, well-bred women did not do ' serious' work. They took dilettante jobs to keep themselves busy until their real lives - marriage and motherhood - kicked in." I love the ironic quotation marks around "serious" and wonder if they can possibly have been intended to have the effect they in fact have, namely to suggest that being a feuilletonist for a daily newspaper is actually a considerably less serious life choice than being a wife and mother.
Katherine Graham qua feminist is obviously meant to be seen as saint as well as hero. When Smith and Epstein tell us that Philip Graham was designated as the successor and heir to Eugene Meyer at the Post, they add that "Katharine Graham couldn't have been happier. 'Far from troubling me that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me,' she wrote in her autobiography. 'In fact, it never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an important job at the paper.'" Later they add:
Meyer sold 3,500 of the 5,000 Class A shares of voting stock to his
son-in-law and 1,500 shares to his daughter. The reason for giving
Katharine only a minority interest in the voting stock, Meyer said, was
that "you never want a man working for his wife." Mrs. Graham recalled
that "curiously I not only concurred but was in complete accord with the idea."
Curiously indeed! It is so typical of the Post to pretend to be puzzled that some of its favorite people might once have thought more or less as everyone else thought about the relative positions of men and women before the 1960s brought enlightenment. Nor is this only a bit of obsequiousness on the part of employees toward their boss. Compare the helpful capsule history offered by The Los Angeles Times, which writes that Mrs. Graham's "would have been notable achievements for any man, even one with considerable experience and preparation. But Graham was female, a gender essentially excluded from Washington's halls of political power and from big-city journalism at the time - not to mention corporate boardrooms."
What a long time ago it all seems to the editorialists of the Los Angeles Times! Mrs. Graham herself clearly likes posing as a kind of belated heroine of the feminist "self-esteem" movement:
"I really felt I was put on earth to take care of Phil Graham," she said
many years later [Smith and Epstein tell us]. "He was so glamorous
that I was perfectly happy just to clean up after him. I did all the
scutwork: paid the bills, ran the house, drove the children. I was always
the butt of family jokes. You know, good old Mom, plodding along. And
I accepted it. That's the way I viewed myself."
As Robert Kaiser's tribute to "an ideal boss" put it, "she battled for years with her intuitive sense that women didn't belong in the boardroom" - a foreshadowing of the importance to the women's movement of "self-esteem." Thus, Sally Quinn gushed that "she was so self-deprecating sometimes that it took your breath away." Her employees certainly took the occasion to make up for that omission on her behalf.
Frequently repeated was the opinion of Nora Ephron that "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." Or, indeed, in any century, she might have added. No less an authority than Gloria Steinem ratified this as the official view in an Op-Ed column for The New York Times headed: "A great woman who was every woman." Mrs. Graham was, she said, "a woman raised mainly to be the wife of a powerful man" who "responded to widowhood by becoming a publisher who helped end a war and bring down a presidency. A resident of a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, she became a wife and worker with whom many women identified because of both her painful lack of confidence and her determination to overcome it. . . . As a transitional woman, with all the pain and late blooming that implies, Katharine Graham helped bring us out of a very different past."
This moving tribute was rephrased by Maureen Dowd in a fashionable postmodernist idiom when she wrote that this same paragon "had an arc that echoed the evolution of women: Raised to be a milquetoast, her confidence undermined by her domineering mother and philandering husband, she somehow made herself over into a figure of greatness." It was also Miss Dowd, sounding even more than usually like the most popular girl in class, who took the prize for sheer silliness in writing of her favorite teacher:
But the really cool thing about America's most powerful woman was that
she was a girl. Our grande dame was not at all stuffy. She loved ice cream
and chocolate desserts. She loved to flirt with men and seek their counsel
and chat about clothes and perfume with women. She was the little brown
hen who blossomed into a swan, looking more glamorous every year,
remaking herself in Oscar de la Renta and Armani, with the help of the
Vogue editor Anna Wintour. She loved movies, even silly ones.
I am inclined to think that this "really cool thing" really is the culmination of the heroic Grahamiad, otherwise so full of portentous moral heroism. If so, it tells us all we need to know about quality of mind of our new media aristocracy.
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