An inspiring, astounding saga, Katharine Graham’s transition from dutiful wife to hard-charging widow and newspaper publisher is vividly detailed in Tuesday’s PBS documentary “Becoming Katharine Graham.”
Known as Kay, born in 1917 to great wealth, Graham is often checked for three things.
She published the Pentagon papers, which exposed decades of lies about America’s involvement in Vietnam. She backed investigating the Watergate break-in, a scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.
And she assumed control in 1963 of the Washington Post after her husband, the Post publisher who struggled with mental health issues, shot himself in their bathroom where she discovered the body.
She went from being the traditional wife and mother into a formidable leader and feminist icon.
No one is more surprised at how topical Graham’s story seems today with Donald Trump’s presidency than the doc’s four-time Emmy® winning filmmakers, the brothers George and Teddy Kunhardt.
“We had no idea this was going to be so topical and are disheartened it’s so relevant,” Teddy said in a joint Zoom interview. “History is repeating itself.”
“This began,” George said, “with a film we did years before on (Washington Post editor) Ben Bradlee, ‘The Newspaper Man.’ Kay was a tiny, tiny character in that.
“After Warren Buffett had seen it – we had profiled him in ‘Becoming Warren Buffett’ years before – he loved the film but said we missed the mark by not including Kay as an essential figure!”
Once they read Graham’s memoir, “We realized this film needed badly to be told. So we’re very lucky.”
The gift that keeps on giving – at least for documentarians – are Nixon’s roughly 3,600 hours of secret White House recordings that captured everything said in the Oval Office.
“They are remarkable,” Teddy said. “Which is why it seems so contemporary – because he is so vulgar and unrestrained the way Trump is. I mean the parallel – it’s shocking to hear them call her a bitch and an old hag.”
We hear the comment, “She looks like she’s 98 years old.”
“Yes, that’s the head of the FBI.”
Added George, “She’s a ‘frigid old B,’ they say. Those tapes are just revolting and yet are amazing.”
They had already researched them for their “Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words” doc. “We had firsthand experience just how awful and crazy and vile these tapes were.”
When they researched Graham in the tapes, “The amount of hits that came up was jaw dropping. Nixon’s anger was so targeted strictly at Kay. You think it’d be more towards Ben. But he had a severe inferiority complex and scaredness of Kay that came shining through on those tapes.”
“Becoming Katharine Graham” airs Tuesday on PBS