Becoming Katharine Graham examines the life and legacy of Katharine Graham, chronicling her unlikely rise to power and the role she played in shaping modern American history.
Katharine “Kay” Graham was born into a world where women were expected to support their families from the sidelines rather than lead major institutions. That expectation seemed destined to shape her life until her father, financier Eugene Meyer, purchased The Washington Post, a struggling newspaper at the time in 1933. What began as a family connection to a newspaper would eventually place Graham at the center of American journalism.
Following the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham, in 1963, Graham found herself responsible for both four children and a newspaper without clear leadership. Faced with the choice of selling the paper or taking control herself, she chose the latter, becoming one of the first women to lead a major American media company.
Becoming Katharine Graham chronicles her remarkable rise and the challenges she confronted along the way. The documentary explores her stewardship of The Washington Post during defining moments of the 1970s, including the publication of the Pentagon Papers (as depicted in The Post), coverage of the Watergate scandal, and a bitter pressmen’s strike, while also examining the barriers she faced as a pioneering woman in corporate America.
I meant to watch Becoming Katharine Graham last year when it was released on Prime Video. But between one thing or another, I just never got around to doing so. I feel bad because this is a woman who is worthy of our attention. You know it’s bad when there are so few reviews for a documentary that it doesn’t even have a score on Rotten Tomatoes. I hope the PBS broadcast gets more attention than the Prime Video release. When I saw where PBS was airing the documentary, I made sure to make time for the film.
Co-directors George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt make sure that Kay is front and center in telling her story in Becoming Katharine Graham. They could have easily hired a narrator to tell Kay’s story, but they wisely decided to incorporate audio from her self-narrated audiobook and other existing footage covering the period depicted in the film. In addition to the Personal History audiobook, they weave in archival newsreel and TV footage, home movies, and photographs. Between her narration and interviews with friends and family, it allows the Kunhardt brothers to build a better portrait.
It wouldn’t be any sort of film about The Washington Post or those associated with it if there weren’t audio recordings of President Richard Nixon. Oh, did he ever have it out for Kay. You think about the current president openly throwing temper tantrums on social media, but Nixon did it in private while taping conversations in secret. I don’t envy the team that had to listen to countless hours to find the right conversations.
The most interesting choice being made in Becoming Katharine Graham isn’t who they decided to interview. It’s the decision to pair the secret Nixon tapes with audio narration from Personal History. Obviously, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate are well known for many of us watching the film, but the Pressmen’s Strike features previously unseen material, much of it transferred from 16mm to digital.
I was obviously not alive during the 1960s or 1970s. But more often than not, Graham feels like an afterthought in other documentaries about Watergate or the Pentagon Papers. The former shines the spotlight on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—after all, they did break the story. But Graham is nowhere to be seen in the Oscar-winning All the President’s Men. It just speaks to how often she was overshadowed by men during her career. In this regard, Becoming Katharine Graham does right by her.
In many ways, Becoming Katharine Graham works as a thematic companion to The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee, which the Kunhardt brothers produced. After all, Bradlee was executive editor of The Washington Post when Graham was publisher.
Lensing the documentary is Emmy-winning cinematographer Bill Winters. They used Sony Venice cameras and shot in 6K. Unlike a lot of other documentaries where someone is sitting at an angle and maybe looking off at the director rather than the camera, every interviewee is looking at the camera as if they were directly addressing the audience face-to-face.
Among those looking back on this period in Becoming Katharine Graham is investor Warren Buffett. Buffet wasn’t yet a household name when he invested $11 million in The Washington Post Co. through his company in 1973. Buffett wrote a letter to Graham saying that he felt the company was “dramatically undervalued.” He was subsequently placed on the board, a position that he would hold through 2011. At the time, Graham was just one year removed from becoming the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
“He used to come to board meetings with about 20 annual reports, and he would take me through these annual reports,” Graham says. “I mean, it was like going to business school with Warren Buffett.”
Becoming Katharine Graham notes that Graham retired from her role as publisher of The Washington Post in 1979. She would focus on social issues, including teen pregnancy and childhood education. Her memoir Personal History won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
When we think about Katharine Graham and her legacy, what’s really sad is seeing what’s become of The Washington Post nearly 25 years after her death. It’s not an understatement to say that newspapers are struggling across the country, but for a historic newsroom to completely gut its sports section is just unfathomable. A total of 300 journalists out of 800 in the Washington Post were out of a job as a result of layoffs, including those who were covering the Winter Olympics. You have to wonder just what Kay Graham would think of what’s become of the paper since it was sold to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
If gutting sports weren’t enough, this came after a number of opinion columnists left when Bezos decided that The Washington Post’s editorial pages would exclusively defend “personal liberties and free markets,” meaning that anything opposing these views wouldn’t be allowed. A number of columnists subsequently quit. This came a few months after Bezos’ decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris. It’s quite the fall for a company that won numerous Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting.
By centering Katharine Graham’s own voice, Becoming Katharine Graham offers a clear and compelling portrait of a pivotal figure in American journalism. Through archival material, narration, and interviews, the film captures both her leadership at The Washington Post and the challenges she faced along the way. It’s a thoughtful, well-constructed documentary that does justice to its subject and is well worth seeing.
DIRECTORS: George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt
NARRATOR: Katharine Graham
FEATURING: Warren Buffett, Don Graham, Lally Weymouth, Gloria Steinem, David Remnick, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Richard Cohen, Lynn Povich, Susie Buffett, Sharon Osberg, Lynn Povich, Robert Kaiser, Jim Hoagland, Courtland Milloy, John Dean