From Weekend 1
his friends did; he may have given the party for me primarily so that I could see it all close up, just once. I also think I was appropriate because I was really a sort of middle aged debutante.
Truman Capote's biographer, Gerald Clarke, had his own theory. "She was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolise her emergence from her dead husband's shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world."
Graham quotes this passage but makes no comment on it. It may have rung true for her. As for the ball - "for one magic night I was transformed".
THE bitter four month strike by printers at the Post some years saw the belle of the ball helping to keep the paper open by working in the mailroom, taking classified ads over the phone and "picking up accumulated trash" in the machineroom. The strike was her toughest ordeal and she reproaches herself with "management failures". However, from the moment of Phil's death, she was determined to keep the Post in the family and mistakes would hurt but never budge her from her purpose.
As she moved into her 70s, she was glad to let her son Donald move into the publisher's chair. He had volunteered for Vietnam, worked in Washington as a policeman on the beat and learned the newspaper business from the bottom up.
She had more time to travel the world and interview people like Anwar Sadat, Col Muammar Gadafy and Mikhail Gorbachev. She continued to entertain at her Georgetown home to which the Reagans came and friendships with Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara deepened.
She was invited to become a member of the prestigious Brandt Commission to analyse the gap between the rich countries and the Third World and offer solutions. When the report was published, the Post ran it on page 25 and she was so angry with Bradlee that she could not speak to him for 24 hours "lest I explode".
The company which had gone public has become a huge commercial success seeing off most of the Washington competition. She had once seen her role when Phil was there as "the tail to his kite". Now she has flown higher than he could have ever imagined.