Becoming Katharine Graham (2025)

Becoming Katharine Graham tells the story of a painfully shy woman's accidental rise to power and how it changed history.

Born in 1917, Katharine Graham-known as "Kay"-was raised to adhere to the expectation that men would have careers, and women would raise the family. Kay, like most other women at the time, abided by these societal norms. But the course of her life would drastically change once her father, financier Eugene Meyer, bought a struggling newspaper at public auction in 1933.

This struggling newspaper was The Washington Post, and it was on the brink of collapse. The paper's performance incrementally improved under her father's leadership; Mr. Meyer poured his own money into the business to ensure its growth. Then, in 1946, Mr. Meyer handed control of the newspaper over to the next generation. A product of his own times, Mr. Meyer never considered giving the "Publisher" title to his daughter, even though she had quietly participated in the initial struggle to keep the paper afloat and had worked as a journalist both in San Francisco and at The Washington Post. Instead, he bequeathed the title and two-thirds ownership of the paper to her husband Phil Graham exclaiming that "no man should work for his wife." The performance of the paper grew exponentially under Phil's leadership, but his suicide in 1963 left Kay with a leaderless newspaper and four young children, forcing Kay to decide whether to take over the cherished family business herself or sell it.