A truth universally unacknowledged

WRITING one's memoirs is by now almost a knee-jerk reaction of a person retiring from public life. But how many feel the need to ask themselves the question Katharine Graham does in her book Personal History: "Why dare to write a book?" For writers of autobiographies, the urge, of course, is not only to tell their stories, but to tell their side of it. For the reader, however, the question remains: What makes this life special?

In Katharine Graham's case, the answer is obvious. As owner and President of a company that owned, among other things, The Washington Post, Newsweek and numerous radio and TV stations, she was in a unique position of wealth and influence. This apart, as daughter of millionaire and media baron Eugene Meyer, she was born into a family that hobnobbed with Presidents and Prime Ministers, celebrities and intellectuals. For which reason Personal History provides a century of American history, with an amazing list of names and events seen from a vantage point of view, since the family was always close to the centre of power. The book also gives a glimpse of a uniquely American phenomenon in the life of Eugene Meyer, second generation Jewish immigrant and self-made millionaire, whose desire for public service led him to diverse fields. His purchase of The Washington Post, then a languishing local daily, was the "transforming event" in the lives of the Meyer family, specially Katharine herself. The special place the Post had in her life gives it a large place in Personal History; and through its fluctuating fortunes, culminating in the investigative journalism of two reporters, which we now call Watergate, we have a sampling of the growth, practices and ethics of American journalism as well.

Essentially, however, this is a very personal history of a girl born into a family of wealth and influence, with an unusual mother, who set impossibly high standards for her children and a father, distant at first, but to whom she grow closer in her adolescence. Her growing admiration for him and a leaning towards journalism led her eventually to a job in the Post. Soon after she married a lawyer Phil Graham ("brilliant, charismatic and fascinating") and began a life of "wife, mother and good works" - a life which evolved only to accommodate the "changing needs of Phil, four children and aging parents". This downward curve of her life was paralleled by a meteoric rise in Phil's, specially after he joined the Post and very rapidly stepped into Eugene Meyer's position. Katharine, dazzled by her husband's brilliance, dynamism and his political ambitions that took him close to Johnson and Kennedy, willingly took on the role of the family prop. What followed was predictable: Phil had an affair with a young reporter and asked for a divorce. A cliched story behind which lay the tragedy of Phil's drinking and mental illness, ending in his suicide. Katharine's description of the crumbling of the larger than life-size figure that she had constructed of her husband makes poignant reading. And it is at this point that Katharine's story ceases to be the story of a privileged individual and becomes unique in quite another way. Questions surface and contradictions confront her during Phil's desertion and after his death. Why, in spite of her career in journalism and her love for the Post, did her father choose Phil to succeed him? And yet, why did she too regard herself, when she took over, as a stopgap until her sons could take over? And how was it she never saw Phil's cruelty when he made her the butt of his witticisms? And why did she, once a bright young woman, think she was boring when men paid her no attention? Worse, she admits herself that when she took on the job of publisher of the Post, she was still handicapped by the old assumptions of women's intellectual inferiority and their inability to manage anything more than their traditional roles of wives and mothers.

All these questions and contradictions come together in a self- introspective chapter which alone makes the book worth reading. What makes this specially valuable is that her growing awareness is connected both to her personal experiences and to the women's movement. Indeed it is rare to have so complete and acute a picture of how the women's movement can transform a life. And how refreshing to have Katharine Graham admit that the women's movement helped her to achieve "a happier time in my private life" - a truth which is almost universally unacknowledged, specially in India, where almost every woman achiever begins by saying "I am not a feminist". That the narration is almost entirely shorn of polemic and theories, concentrating instead on personal experiences and an understanding of them, makes it a story of any human whose potential, for any reason, has remained untapped. At the same time, it is specifically the story of all women whose "authentic self" has been "pretty well squashed" as Katharine said to Gloria Steinem about herself.

Waking up after years of acceptance to an awareness of a pervasive and invisible sexism is something many women will identify with. But that this should be also the story of such a privileged woman says volumes about women's conditioning. Katharine admits that even as President of the company, she not only accepted the fact that she was ignored, patronised or, worse, treated with levity during meetings, she put it down to her own inexperience. Insecure and "carrying inadequacy as her baggage", it was her working experience and the influence of the women's movement that slowly changed her perceptions. Yet, in spite of being the head of the company, she couldn't make many changes in the Post, except for "small inroads", like making the language more sensitive towards women - something the Indian media, unfortunately, is yet to learn. (Words which the Post decided not to use as being sexist, like "housewife" or "grandmother", continue to be blissfully used here. I remember an editor's refusal to understand that the use of the word "grandmother" in the headline of a professional interview was blatantly sexist). Like many of us, Katharine hoped that "things would grow better with time, that the atmosphere would become more welcoming of women" and ultimately realised that "it didn't happen that way", though she says that laws and lawsuits do help. But the nicest part of this history is that, even after assuming full control of her company and gaining confidence in herself - specially after Watergate - she exhibits none of the "belonging to the men's club" attitude many successful women assume. On the contrary, she was fully aware of the contradictions between being a woman and a boss; when told about a complaint by a woman journalist in Newsweek, her question was "Which side am I supposed to be on?"

Watergate obviously occupies a large portion of the narrative. Much murky water has flowed under the bridge since then and the drama is no longer as shocking as it seemed at the time. But in the story of Watergate we also see the growth of a woman from being one who, she admits, suffered an exaggerated desire to please and mistrusted her own judgement, to the publisher who, during Watergate, held out against the "full brunt of Presidential wrath". Imperceptibly, this has become a success story, but there is as little self-aggrandizement here as there was self-pity earlier.

At the end of the book, Katharine Graham says that one of the reasons she wrote this book was that, "I wanted to look at my life". Which she has done with an unusual honesty, justifying, for once, the use of words like "candid" and "frank" on the back cover; it is a searching self-examination in which she admits her faults and takes responsibility for her mistakes. But what to me really distinguishes this book from most others of this genre is her resolve to honour the privacy of others - a quality extremely rare in these days when scandals are the selling points of books. Even the young woman who broke up her marriage is accorded her dignity and spoken of with generosity: a greater achievement of Katharine's, perhaps, than her many public ones. In fact, the book turns the reader not into a voyeur but into a confidant, as if the writer's talent for friendship, so plentifully illustrated in the book, continues to function.

Women writers are often accused of dwelling on the private at the cost of the public. Here, in Personal History, there is a deft mingling of both, with a total lack of pompousness and never any inflation of the "I". If not for the fear that this could be termed a sexist remark, I am tempted to say that only a woman could have done this - and so well!

SHASHI DESHPANDE

Personal History, Katharine Graham, Vintage Books, p. 642, $15.

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