"As a transitional woman, with all the pain and late blooming that implies, Katharine Graham helped bring us out of a very different past. Because we are all in transition to an equality no one has ever known, she will be a touchstone for the future."

Gloria Steinem, in the New York Times, on the death of Katharine Graham.

Sensitive souls are hereby forewarned: The following column will deal with the New York Times.

On July 17, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham died. The woman who would become the First Lady of the American press, was a sheltered heiress when her husband, Philip, shot himself in 1963.

A Democratic Party stalwart, Kay Graham became most famous for publishing the articles on the Watergate scandal, beginning in 1972, by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that became the book All the President's Men (and the eponymous movie, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman). Her life at the Post was also notable for the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers exposing the prosecution of the Vietnam War (a publication which the federal government sought, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to suppress); for the long reign she supported of socialist editor, Kennedy sycophant, and obsessive Nixon-hater, Ben Bradlee (Mrs. Graham was herself no lightweight when it came to Nixon-hating); and for having rubbed elbows, as a legendary hostess, with almost every power broker in town at her "round table" salon. In 1998, Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography for her 1997 memoir, Personal History.

Ten years ago, Mrs. Graham retired to Sun Valley, Idaho, leaving her media empire in the hands of her son, Donald. That is where, on July 14, she had a bad fall, and hit her head. (However, Katharine Graham's was a very busy "retirement" -- the much-traveled businesswoman and journalist was in Sun Valley for investment banker Herbert Allen Jr.'s annual conference of media executives.) Graham died without ever regaining consciousness. Doctors were unsure whether a brain hemorrhage caused the fall, or was caused by it. Kind of like old women and broken hips. But the real cause of Kay Graham's death was old age. As my great-uncle Hugo said during the mid-1980s, when I asked him what ailed him, "I'm eighty years old." There's nothing mysterious about an 84-year old woman hitting her head and dying. It's sad, but not surprising.

I bear Kay Graham no grudge for helping to bring down Richard Nixon; through his unnecessary, paranoid cover-up of the 1972 Watergate break-in, Nixon was the author of his own downfall. She had an amazing life, and one that she could not have had, had she not been born fabulously wealthy. One lesson of Graham's life, is that one must choose one's parents well. At the same time, for every Kay Graham, there are oh, five spoiled debutantes who grow up content to "marry well," shop too much, abuse the maids, and shtup the chauffeur.

Katharine Graham may not, however, rest in peace. Not only did the New York Times have to have at her, but its editors -- ignoring laws forbidding the violation of the dead, paid none other than Gloria Steinem to subject Mrs. Graham to the ritualistic abuse of some of Steinem's er, journalism.

Steinem's July 21 op-ed page obit, "A Great Woman Who Was Everywoman," opens,

"Katharine Graham left us as unexpectedly as she arrived.... A resident of a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, she became a wife and worker with whom many women identified because of both her painful lack of confidence and her determination to overcome it....

"On the face of it, we were unlikely friends, yet she credited me with introducing her to feminism. The truth was that she had her own rage at the injustice she had experienced, so much so that she sometimes invited me to speak on her behalf, as if she feared what might happen if she expressed herself.

"At a lunch in the early 1970's with a few of her male colleagues, including the columnist Joseph Alsop, she asked me to explain the rapidly growing feminist movement. Later, she confided that when one male Post executive refused to allow papergirls as well as paperboys to sell The Washington Post, she grew so angry that she threw a paperweight at his head. Of course, she was careful not to take aim, but she seemed surprised at the well of anger this small example of injustice had tapped....

"As a transitional woman, with all the pain and late blooming that implies, Katharine Graham helped bring us out of a very different past. Because we are all in transition to an equality no one has ever known, she will be a touchstone for the future."

Steinem does violence to the English language, and to Graham's life. Graham was not "everywoman"; she was a patrician who was raised to be served. She was not a "worker," but an owner. Graham had no "male colleagues," but rather only male employees. And Steinem conveniently forgets that the same woman whom she describes as a victim, afraid of her own rage, was known as a ruthless businesswoman, who had no inhibitions about ruthlessly breaking a 1975 pressman's strike at the Washington Post by hiring non-union pressmen, and firing the strikers en masse. As the Daily News' Brian Kates recalls in his July 18 obituary, "'You can't like someone who did what I did,' she once said, referring to her personnel policies." But since Graham was a Democrat, and was supportive of Steinem, such ruthless anti-union behavior (which, after all, only harmed working-class men) can conveniently be swept under the rug.

Sticking to the truth does not diminish Katharine Graham, but readers unfamiliar with her life who see Steinem's ham-handed disrespect for the truth, may doubt Graham's very real accomplishments. A friend deserves better than to be reduced, in death, to a political slogan.

But what does Gloria Steinem know of friendship? She tells us that Katharine Graham was a "a transitional woman" -- using the sort of phrasing that the Stalinists who founded 1960s feminism took directly from communism. Graham was a victim of "injustice" and a role model, from whose life we may draw "parallels" to women's lives today.

On July 28, the New York Times published the following letter by Hannah Pakula:

"I was astonished to read Gloria Steinem's assertion that she knows that Katherine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, was 'discouraged by such slights as her exclusion from All the President's Men.'

"As the widow of Alan J. Pakula, who directed the movie, I have to wonder how Ms. Steinem can know more than Kay Graham herself, who admitted how ambivalent she was about the whole project. Alan gave Kay every chance to be included in the cast of characters. Yet she wrote in her autobiography that when the scene in which she was to be portrayed was dropped, she was both 'relieved' and 'hurt.'

"Bob Redford, the producer of the film, did not see eye to eye with Kay, but she made a point of writing him to say how she found the movie 'extraordinary in every way.' As to Alan, she wrote in her autobiography that they 'became great friends and have remained so' — a friendship that lasted with me as well until her death last week.

Katharine Graham's life was meaningless to Gloria Steinem except as it could be used as grist for feminism's mill, which Steinem considers her mill. And so, we learn that Graham gave the "first seed money" for Ms. magazine, which Steinem founded. The story I've read is that Steinem, who built her entire career by exploiting her sex appeal, got her wealthy male lover, Mortimer Zuckerman (currently the owner of U.S. News & World Report, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Daily News), to give her the money with which to start Ms. But it sounds so much better, when Zuckerman's name is replaced with a woman's. "Sisterhood is powerful," and all that rot.

The significance of Katharine Graham's life was not in its "parallels" to women's lives today. Rather, Graham's life is a perfect contemporary subject for what used to be called the "Great Man" approach to history, which in recent years has been replaced by socialist, bottom-up, history. But Gloria Steinem has use only for wealthy women. Raping truth and logic, Steinem tries to turn the "Great Woman," into an "Everywoman."

About ten years ago, a group of prominent feminists, including Steinem, declared in a coffee-table book, that they would remake Judaism in their own image. I was shocked, but not surprised. After all, Steinem's pretty face notwithstanding, she had always had a lot of Bella Abzug-style obnoxiousness in her. More recently, Steinem was prominently featured in an encyclopedia of Jewish women. There's just one problem with this picture: Gloria Steinem is a gentile! And yet, her feelings of entitlement extend to seeking to destroy OTHER PEOPLE'S RELIGIONS.

The life of a Katharine Graham is small potatoes for a woman who holds in contempt the living, the dead, and indeed, all eternity. No doubt, Gloria Steinem understands the catch-phrase of feminist theology -- sheology -- in a most personal sense: "She who is."

Copyright 2001 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved.
Don't bring around a crowd,
to reign on my parade!