ORLANDO, Fla. – Katharine Meyer Graham’s posthumous journey to the front of a postage stamp was hard fought and hard won.
After losing her husband, she took over The Washington Post in 1963 with only newspaper reporting experience and quickly learned she would have to prove herself every day.
“I thought the way men thought because I’d been brought up in that world,” Graham told News 6 in a decades-old interview. “I thought they were in charge and bright and I was a sort of second-class citizen.”
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Her biggest challenge was a showdown with President Richard Nixon and the U.S. Government during the Vietnam war.
“No reporter from the Washington Post is ever to be in the White House, is that clear?” Nixon infamously said.
As depicted in the Steven Spielberg film “The Post,” Graham had to decide whether to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study revealing the truth about the war.
Graham’s son Don, Chairman of Graham Holdings Co., was a young reporter at The Washington Post at the time.
“It was fascinating to listen to her as the first time she learned the Pentagon Papers had been given to the Washington Post,” Don Graham said. “A day later she had to make the decision are we going to publish the story, and the Attorney General of the United States sent her a message: if you publish this and you are convicted of a crime as a result, the government could take away your television stations which are 1/3 of our company.”
Katharine Graham was unsure about her decision to publish the papers, according to her son.
“My mother was oddly a CEO but was a very, very self-doubting person,” Don Graham said. “A lot of CEOs have big egos and she never did. She was always saying to herself ‘I wonder if I’m getting this right, I wonder if I’m not about to make some terrible mistake.’ So here she had the full opportunity to think to herself of maybe the negative consequences of what she was doing.”
After publishing the papers, Katharine Meyer Graham was vindicated a month later by the Supreme Court.
And shortly after, through solid journalism and a commitment to truth telling, Graham and The Post changed the course of history yet again, exposing the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation.
“The fact that I was a woman made me more conspicuous,” Graham said.
In 1980, she was named the most influential woman in the country.
“And it is a good lesson that someone pretty normal, someone who didn’t have elaborate preparation, someone who had never been to business school but had good judgment and great people to surround her to make those decisions, turned out to be a really good leader,” Don Graham said.
Katharine Meyer Graham passed away in 2001.
So, how does someone get their own stamp?
The Postal Service Citizen’s Advisory Committee picks the finalists and sends them to the Postmaster General.
Don Graham was told by the USPS almost nine years ago that the Postal Service was considering his mom for the stamp.
The stamp will be printed starting next year.