Tuesday July 17 5:17 PM ET

Washington Post's Katharine Graham Dead at 84

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Katharine Graham, the veteran top executive of The Washington Post who steered the paper to a Pulitzer prize for coverage of the Watergate scandal, died on Tuesday in Boise, Idaho. She was 84.

Graham, the former Post publisher who was chairwoman of the executive committee of The Washington Post Co., suffered a head injury on Saturday in Sun Valley, Idaho, after a fall on a walkway at a conference of business leaders. She underwent surgery on Sunday and died at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise.

Graham never regained consciousness after Saturday's injury, which caused massive bleeding in her brain. Her immediate family was at her bedside when she died, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Born to a life of privilege in 1917 and shy by nature, Graham took sudden charge of The Washington Post media empire after the suicide of her husband, Philip Graham, in 1963.

She put her stamp on the powerful newspaper and stood behind the Watergate expose that helped topple (U.S.) President Richard Nixon, making final decisions on the paper's coverage of the scandal despite legal pressures to keep it off Page 1.

A prominent hostess, Graham invited presidents -- from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush -- to her mansion in Washington's historic Georgetown section. Always immaculately turned out, with a gracious bearing that might have seemed at odds with the rough-and-tumble of the newsroom, Graham was a personal friend to many of the public figures her paper covered.

'STEELY YET SHY'

Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire-Hathaway's Warren Buffett were among those who entered her social circle. So were the late Princess Diana and foreign dignitaries ranging from Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic to Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.

``Presidents come and go, and Katharine Graham knew them all,'' President Bush said in a statement. ``...Mrs. Graham became a legend in her own lifetime because she was a true leader and a true lady, steely yet shy, powerful yet humble, known for her integrity and always gracious and generous to others.''

As the mother of four and the subservient wife of a troubled man, Graham never expected to run the Post, which her father Eugene Meyer had bought in 1933 in a bankruptcy sale. Her husband Philip published the paper until his suicide, and she took over months after his death.

``I felt awfully new and raw, and the job, even as I had limited it, looked very big,'' Graham wrote of her first days at the Post in her 1997 autobiography ``Personal History.'' She told a friend, ``I am quaking in my boots a little but trying not to show it.''

She took over in September 1963; in November of that year, her friend President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

More turbulent times lay ahead. The Post newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its relentless investigative coverage of the Watergate scandal and was then celebrated in a best-selling book and then a popular film, ``All the President's Men.''

The book and movie recounted how Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein tracked the 1972 burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building back to the White House.

Graham backed Woodward and Bernstein's coverage, despite attempts by the Nixon White House to keep the matter quiet.

``Kay was an extraordinary person, of course, a bereaved widow who surprised everyone with her strength, took over the Washington Post to make it one of the world's great newspapers,'' veteran CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite told CNN. ''She is greatly admired everywhere in the very competitive worlds of politics and publishing.''

Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, considered her a friend, and told CNN: ``Her legacy will be as a symbol of integrity, of courage and of high quality ... She is irreplaceable.''

Graham is survived by her son Donald, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Co.; her daughter Lally Weymouth, a Washington Post and Newsweek journalist, of New York; her son William, an investor, of Los Angeles; her son Stephen Graham, a producer, philanthropist and doctoral student of English literature, of New York; 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild, and her sister Ruth Epstein of Bronxville, New York.

The funeral service will be held Monday at 11:00 a.m. (1500 GMT), at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

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