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Katharine Graham: A Modern Elder Role Model


When Katharine Graham died in 2001, her obituary in Newsweek (a magazine she owned) read, “She seemed to have everything the times demanded.” This was true on so many levels, even when her prize possession, the Washington Post, was at political and financial risk for publishing Woodward and Bernstein’s account of President Richard Nixon’s unethical and illegal Watergate behavior.

Mrs. Graham grew up in an emotionally-remote, aristocratic home. She was insecure and stayed in the background taking care of her kids and aging parents while her husband built and tended to an empire. Seemed perfect on the surface, but it wasn’t. Her mentally ill husband left her for another woman and tried to take the paper with him; he came home one day and shot himself in the bathroom. Suddenly she went from being a housewife to being a publisher. She wrote, “I didn’t understand the immensity of what lay before me, how frightened I would be by much of it, how tough it was going to be, and how many anxious hours and days I would spend for a long, long time. Nor did I realize how much I was eventually going to enjoy it all.” It has been said that Graham grew from “being a good girl to a great woman.”

I’ve had the good fortune of chatting with people who knew “Kay Graham” and they tell me she was a quintessential modern elder: the perfect alchemy of curiosity and wisdom, courage and humility. I wish we could say the same about Jeff Bezos who now owns the WashPost and decided, at the last minute, that the Post would stop its half-century tradition of endorsing a Presidential candidate. The Post had been offering endorsements since 1976, soon after the Watergate scandal and initiated by Kay Graham. How we wish Jeff Bezos could be the man who “seemed to have everything the times demanded.”

-Chip

P.S. As you’ve heard me say many times, “Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom,” in the context of “10 years from now, what will you regret if you don’t learn it or do it now?” Two days from now, you’ll likely regret (if you’re an American) that you didn’t vote so put some time aside to consider the value of civic engagement. I appreciated podcaster Ryan Holiday’s recent episode “Who Would Marcus Aurelius Vote For?” Hopefully, anticipating your regret will be the catalyst for you to vote tomorrow if you haven’t already done so.

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