Washington, D.C. Personal History Katharine Graham Based on 250 interviews and piles of jumbled files, Katharine Graham's Personal History looks back on a life that parallels the evolution of women from "second-class citizenship" to positions of rank and leadership. Daughter of a multimillionaire father and socialite mother who ignored her children, Graham learns independence at an early age. In 1917, when her father, Eugene Meyer, goes to Washington with wife Agnes to run the War Industries Board, they leave their children behind in New York -- for four years. While they finally join their parents in Washington, they still see them only on formal occasions. Instead of parenting, Agnes devotes her life to giving speeches and writing books, while Eugene buys and rehabilitates the Washington Post, where Graham will land after college at Vassar and the University of Chicago and a short stint covering labor for the San Francisco News. In 1939 she marries Philip Graham, a poor boy from Florida who had graduated from Harvard Law School and was clerking at the Supreme Court. As he takes over the Post and expanded its holdings to include television stations and Newsweek, Graham recedes into the background, playing the role of dutiful wife so common in the 1940s and 1950s. Says Graham, ''Phil was the fizz in our lives." He has the first of his nervous breakdowns in 1957, beginning a period of manic behavior and romantic betrayal that would end with his suicide in 1963. His death marks the end of Graham's supporting role. She becomes president of the Washington Post Company and hires editor Ben Bradlee to run the eponymous newspaper. The Post leads the fight for the right to print the Pentagon Papers and wins a Pulitzer Prize for its legendary Watergate coverage. Graham learns by doing, growing into her role as one of the leading feminists of her generation. Although a member of America's privileged class, she is capable of rolling up her shirtsleeves. "I worked because my mother brought us up to think we would work, and Phil encouraged me to work a lot more than I wanted to," Graham says. "... The point is that today, a woman can choose." Graham's book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from 50 years of presidents to her wedding photographer Edward Steichen; her mother's pal, sculptor Constantin Brancusi; Phil's boss Felix Frankfurter; her business advisor Warren Buffett; her tennis partner George Shultz; and all the great names from the Post, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee.