Book Review: Personal History

I read Katharine Graham’s memoir, “Personal History”, because I wanted to discover how she transformed herself from a self-described “doormat wife” into the heroic publisher of the Washington Post during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and also the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.

Graham was thrust into the position of publisher after her husband’s tragic suicide. She loved the Post, which her father had owned, so she was determined to make it work.

Katharine Graham used her low self-esteem to her advantage. She lacked the ego that she should already know everything, freeing her to ask lots of questions about how things worked. This was exactly the right move for stepping into the complex operation of a major newspaper. Some people were put off by her constant questioning and left. The right people stayed, and she hired more who worked well with her, building the right group of advisers.

I don’t know if she had ADHD, but parts of her self-description sounded relatable. Her lack of confidence largely stemmed from being subtly undermined by her mother and her husband. At the time, she dismissed her husband’s jabs as just part of his biting wit—but later her friends told her that she had, in fact, absorbed them.

In Chapter 21 she clearly lays out her own internalized misogyny and how it hindered her from advocating for herself and the women under her, and the steps she took to overcome it. This chapter should be required reading for all leaders of every gender.

“Personal History” is 912 pages long, and some parts are so information dense that I read only a few pages at a time before needing to take a break while my brain digested it. She and her parents knew a lot of notable figures, mostly in politics and the art world. I now know a lot more about presidents Kennedy through Nixon, and also Adlai Stevenson. And as a photographer myself, I took special delight that her wedding photographer was Edward Steichen!

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This is the Philosophical Layer of my coaching—how ideas, ethics, and meaning shape leadership.