Katherine Graham, the publisher whose battles with the Nixon administration during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate crises helped transform the Washington Post into a beacon of international journalism, died Tuesday at the age of 84.
She had been unconscious for three days after falling and striking her head on a pavement in Sun Valley, Idaho, where she was attending a conference. She died in hospital in Boise, her family by her side.
"Kay" Graham was a hands-on owner and publisher of the Post -- the paper her father had bought in a bankruptcy auction in 1933 -- for 28 years following the suicide of her husband Phil Graham in 1962. She stepped down in 1991.
Her years in charge coincided with some of the most important and resonant journalistic battles of the century.
But Graham always managed to balance that role with that of quintessential Washington social insider. No one better mastered the art of hosting dinner for the most powerful men and women in the world while at the same time lambasting their misdeeds in her paper.
During her interview with then president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) on Oct. 7, 1986, Graham was told that the Taiwan government was planning to lift martial law -- which had been in place since 1949 -- in the near future. Chiang also revealed that his son "cannot and will not succeed his post as the president." That move made by Chiang paved the way for political reform and the process of democratization in Taiwan.
Graham's Washington Post owed much to the role played by its editor Ben Bradlee and its reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in unmasking the Watergate cover-up and forcing the resignation of then president Richard Nixon.
Yet probably Graham's greatest moment came earlier, in the spring of 1971, when the Post's editors and lawyers were locked in a furious battle over whether to publish the Pentagon Papers on US involvement in Vietnam, after the New York Times had obeyed a judge's order to hold off.
"I say we print," said Graham. They were four simple words which Post executives past and present believe were responsible for the paper's rise to new levels of national and international esteem.
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