KATHARINE THE GREAT: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post

by Deborah Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 1979

267 pages of immaterial bunk topped off, in the last seven pages, by an unsubstantiated allegation: that CIA-man Richard Ober not only set up Watergate to do in Nixon, but was also Bob Woodward's Deep Throat. Maybe, the author speculates, Woodward had met Ober ""while working as an intelligence liaison between the Pentagon and the White House"" (assuming that Woodward ever served in just that capacity); or maybe Ben Bradlee, ""who had given Woodward other sources on other stories, put them in touch"" after Watergate burglar James McCord's ""highly unusual"" admission of his CIA connection. Well, maybe, somehow or other; but on the basis of the rest of the flimflam here, there's no reason to think so. The ostensible subject, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, appears only intermittently and fleetingly, and most of what's said about her is presumption--to the trifling end that this great ""legend"" was no great ""power."" (For the sorely-tried life and limited, but real, powers of K. Graham, see rather David Halberstam's The Powers That Be.) Meanwhile the author constructs a theory of ""megapolitics""--traced to a 1930 book by Harold Laswell, Psychopathology and Politics--which is elaborated via circumstantial links (schools, parties, wives and other women) between elite liberals and the CIA, Philip Graham and the CIA, and Ben Bradlee and the CIA. But hooked into this alleged network is so noted a civil-libertarian as Alan Barth--on the basis that, before he wrote editorials for the Post, he'd been employed by the Office of War Information! It's undiscriminating, in short; it's frequently inaccurate on the infrequent occasions when something is verifiable; and the very little real dirt--like the apparent hounding of Thomas Mann by Katharine Graham's imperious mother, Agnes Meyer--has nothing to do with anything.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION