WHAT A WOMAN! WHAT A LIFE!

In her amazingly candid and intensely moving autobiography the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham is unsparing in regard to her early ineptitude: "It's hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was...I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn."

Learn she did, turning The Washington Post into a powerful and uncommonly profitable newspaper, while she emerged as a dominant figure on the media scene.

Little in Katharine Graham's materially privileged yet emotionally bereft upbringing was preparation for her future role as CEO of the largest Fortune 500 company run by a woman.

She grew up in a household where sensitive subjects were rarely mentioned. Three topics were particularly taboo: money, her father being Jewish, and sex.

As the child of an immensely wealthy but distant father, Eugene Meyer, and a mother, Agnes, who was a paradigm of self-absorption, Ms. Graham learned to respect authority, to conciliate, and that women were the intellectual inferiors of men.

So well did she absorb the latter lesson that when Meyer made her husband publisher of the Washington Post, Meyer gave Graham almost three times the number of Post shares that he had given his own daughter.

"Curiously," Ms. Graham writes, "I not only concurred but was in complete accord with this idea." After all, it was 1946. The word 'feminist' was not part of our national lexicon. And the recipient of the shares was handsome Phil Graham, a man she never believed could have an interest in her. "I was incredulous - this brilliant, charismatic, fascinating man loved me!"

"Phil was the fizz in our lives," she continues, little realizing that his spark would ignite, only to explode. A manic depressive, Graham began to excoriate his wife publicly. She attributed this to his undiagnosed illness.

Following a period of increasingly erratic behavior, Graham briefly left his family for another woman. He returned home, but their reconciliation was heartbreakingly brief. In 1963 "there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors." He was dead by his own hand.

Always tormented by self-doubt, now convulsed by grief, on the day before his funeral Ms. Graham went to the Post's office to speak to the directors. She was so unsure that she relied upon notes pressed upon her by Lally, the couple's 20-year-old daughter. As she endured personal tragedy with grace, the metamorphosis of a self-described "doormat wife" began.

Detailing her first years of running The Washington Post while simultaneously checking on Newsweek, Ms. Graham glosses over none of her mistakes nor does she excuse them. Her determination to live up to her heritage is both poignant and affecting.

Walking one day with an old friend, columnist Drew Pearson's wife, Luvie, Ms. Graham remembers talking about maintaining the newspaper until her sons were old enough to run it. "I recall Luvie firmly and distinctly saying, 'Don't be silly, dear. You can do it.'

'Me?' I exclaimed. 'That's impossible. I couldn't possibly do it.....'

'Of course you can do it.....You've got all these genes.....You've just been pushed down so far you don't recognize what you can do.'"

She not only did it - she soared! Painfully shy and socially reticent, she emerged into a rarefied world habituated by the power elite. This entry was underscored by an evening orchestrated in her honor - Truman's Capote's famous "Black and White Ball."

With the feisty Ben Bradlee, whom she had hired to run the Post, at her side she faced down the Nixon administration and possible legal action by printing the Pentagon papers. Trusted advisers cautioned against publication; Bradlee pointed out the importance of printing the story expeditiously. The decision was hers.

Beleaguered, torn by disparate voices, she hesitated. A description of her telephoned dictum: "Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, 'Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let's
go. Let's publish.' And I hung up."

Next came an even greater challenge - Watergate. It was 1972 when two now famous young investigative reporters began probing a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters. They eventually unearthed a secret fund at the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The Post was besieged by the powerful to back off the story, assailed by others for being unpatriotic.

Ms. Graham remained resolute even when a red-faced infuriated then Attorney General John Mitchell hurled his ungentlemanly threat: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer!"

Later, a hand-crank wooden clothes wringer, the gift of admiring colleagues, sat in Ms. Graham's office.

The outcome of Watergate is history, recorded in numerous books and preserved on film by Robert Redford in "All the President's Men." During the making of this movie Ms. Graham heard that the one scene in which she was to have been portrayed had been discarded because, as she was told, "...no one understood the role of a publisher and it was too extraneous to explain."

There is not a scintilla of the extraneous in this aptly titled 625 page memoir. Personal History is an extraordinarily moving story of Ms. Graham's personal evolution, and an intelligent eye-witness account of contemporary history. What a terrific book! What an incredible woman!