Katharine Graham Life Quotations

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.

Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was only a few years older than my mother but outlived her by a decade, dying in 1980. From the time they met, in 1917, they were lifelong friends of sorts, though each was a bit wary of the other.

To me, involvement with news is absolutely inebriating. It's what makes my life exciting.

These cool or antagonistic relationships are part of life in Washington and are accepted as such, but I often think how self-defeating they are and how much better polite professional relationships would serve political figures and journalists in situations like this. I agreed with a charming message I got from George McGovern after he had been defeated for the presidency. He recalled making some bitter remarks about a couple of our columnists at a dinner party; but wrote me, 'I have regretted that outburst and I have also established that the maximum time I can carry a grudge is about three months. This note is simply to say that I have now forgotten all campaign grudges. It is just too difficult trying to remember which people I'm supposed to shun.'