Here’s a bit of useful history.
In 1933, the then-bankrupt Washington Post was purchased by the wealthy financier Eugene Meyer. With Meyer’s passing, the paper was inherited by his daughter and son-law, Katherine Meyer Graham and husband Phil Graham.
As his wife noted in her memoirs, Phil Graham himself met with tragedy, suffering from manic depression and eventually taking his own life. With that, Kay Graham was on her own – and decidedly made the Washington Post the paper to read when it came to coverage of all things Washington.
Famously, along the way, she and Executive Editor Ben Bradlee managed the paper through a series of what liberals perceived as heroic crusades, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Iran-Contra. As a sign of its esteem in media circles, the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes, a total that eventually climbed to 73.
And then, the…
