The Accidental Feminist

Even those who know Katharine Graham far better than I do are surprised to see the ease with which the regal owner of the Washington Post has taken to the rigors of a book tour. In the past two weeks she has submitted to interviews with all the usual suspects — Barbara Walters, Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose and even the profane and dangerous Don Imus, who awarded Graham's just published memoir "three-boner" status, the highest rank in Imusland. After that phrase was translated for her, she was still game, for, as her story shows, the tall girl who had to struggle "not to be lonely" at Vassar has always been drawn to men with an edge — her dazzling but erratic husband Phil Graham; her legendary editor, Ben Bradlee; and her unconventional mentor, investor Warren Buffett.

And she was right to risk this one. God knows Imus can sell a book, and he directs his scorn mostly at phonies. He bored in on her only once, when he "wondered" if she and Adlai Stevenson did more than discuss international affairs late into the night when they were both staying at the U.S. embassy in London in 1965 and he left his tie and glasses in her room. Imus later admitted he wanted to ask outright "if they'd had sex" but held back because "she's something like 80." In any event, she blithely told him he would just have to "wonder away."

Who would have known that under the dignified exterior beat the competitive, mass-market heart of a Danielle Steel?" (Graham joked that her working title was "A Better Life, to distinguish it from Bradlee's "A Good Life"). As Graham soldiered through a media blitz that would tax someone half her age with two original hips (she had one of hers replaced recently and was still using a cane at her New York City book party last Thursday), her oldest son, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham, fretted that "she would soon be booking herself onto the Home Shopping Network."

But all the flacking in the world wouldn't have been able to catapult her memoir to No. 1 on the Post's best-seller list this week if she hadn't written a spectacular book, rescuing the art of autobiography from years of celebrity abuse. Graham produced her book the old-fashioned way: she wrote it herself. In describing the pain of being the ugly duckling among the beautiful people, and the struggle to transform herself from "doormat" to corporate mogul after her husband's suicide, Graham has mapped the heartache of being flawed and human and female. With the help of Gloria Steinem she came to see that the thousand small slights she endured were not singular to her but common to her gender. When she set out to write, "I didn't think about being honest or revealing," she says. "I did 250 interviews of classmates and family and associates and found all the letters and wrote it down on a yellow pad as accurately as I could."

Certainly a woman as battened down on the outside as this one could have got away without revealing that she was an unmade bed inside. But by confiding so much, she has proved you can talk about humiliation with dignity, reach for help without being weak, be both vulnerable and powerful. In life and the book, telling the truth made her strong.