The First American Woman CEO

The 2018 film The Post tells the story of attempts by journalists to publish the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force’s report, now colloquially known as the Pentagon Papers. These classified documents detailed the United States’s 30-year involvement in the Vietnam War and its ostensible and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to rid the world of communism. 

One of the film’s main characters, played by Meryl Streep, was Katharine Graham. Katharine Graham began working at the Post in 1938 as a beat reporter. Her father, Eugene Meyer, was the publisher of the paper, who, upon retirement, handed over the newspaper to Philip Graham, his son-in-law, and Katharine’s husband. Upon Philip’s death in 1963, Katharine assumed leadership of the Post and stepped into the role of company President and Publisher. Expectations of her were extremely low, as you might imagine, given the time. Publishing and journalism were male-dominated fields, and Katharine feared that she was unsuited for the job. 

Katharine’s career would go on relatively uneventfully until 1971, when a whistleblower leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times published excerpts of the report and was almost immediately slapped with a lawsuit by the Nixon administration. Many of Katharine’s male colleagues discouraged her from publishing the Pentagon Papers—it was too risky, and they didn’t want to ignite the ire of the Nixon administration. But Katharine overruled them—and the company’s lawyers—and published the documents in their entirety. 

This was the turning point in her career. Katharine’s choice to publish the Pentagon Papers put the Post at significant financial risk. In 1971, the Washington Post was preparing for its first public stock offering, and anyone facing criminal charges could jeopardize it. Instead, the opposite happened. Her decision had profound and far-reaching consequences—it revealed that the Johnson administration had lied not only to the public but to Congress about the scope of the Vietnam War. It also made a powerful statement about the importance of investigative journalism as a check against the government.

In the ensuing years, Katharine would transform the Post from a mediocre paper into a major force in the political life of Washington and the nation. As the nation’s first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, she transformed the company into a conglomerate of newspaper, broadcast, cable, and magazine properties. She believed that editorial excellence and profitability were interrelated. And she would famously give the green light to two beat reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to pursue their investigation into the Watergate scandal. She served on numerous philanthropic boards and received countless awards for her accomplishments as a journalist, publisher, woman, and entrepreneur. 

For all the barriers Katharine broke and all the work she did to advance the status of women in the workplace, contemporary Corporate America still has very few women in leadership positions. Among the Fortune 500, a mere 10% have women CEOs, and just 25% of C-level roles are held by women, despite that there are more women in the workforce than ever before—almost half of the labor force is comprised of women.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the history lesson in this final blog of Women’s History Month. We’ve come a long way since 1971, but we still have much more work to do.