Katharine Weymouth Takes Charge at the Washington Post [ H0us3 ]
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Katharine Weymouth Takes Charge at the Washington Post
Katharine Weymouth, fourth-generation publisher of The Washington Post.
WASHINGTON — On the eve of the 2012 White House Correspondents' Dinner, this city's annual media-politico-Hollywood love fest, Katharine Weymouth convened the sort of Washington power dinner for which her grandmother, Katharine Graham, the pioneering publisher of The Washington Post, was famous.
Ms. Weymouth, in her office at The Washington Post, in which hangs a picture of Katharine Graham, her grandmother (at left), and Lally Weymouth, her mother.
Donald Graham and his sister, Lally Weymouth, at their mother's funeral in 2001.
Leonard Downie Jr. receiving a hug from Ms. Weymouth as he announced his retirement in 2008; Mr. Graham looks on.
Marcus Brauchli, right, whom Ms. Weymouth hired to replace the retiring Mr. Downie. Martin Baron, was hired to replace Mr. Brauchli.
Around the dining room table in Ms. Weymouth's airy Craftsman home sat a collection of Kay Graham's intimates and descendants: Vernon Jordan, the Clinton consigliere; C. Boyden Gray, counsel to the first President Bush; her oldest son Donald, now chief executive of the company that owns The Post; and Lally Weymouth, Mrs. Graham's daughter and Ms. Weymouth's mother, a globe-trotting journalist and Manhattan socialite known for both her interviews with Middle East dictators and glitzy Fourth of July Hamptons parties.
At the head of the table sat Ms. Weymouth, a Harvard- and Stanford-educated lawyer, single mother of three and, at 47, a fourth-generation publisher of The Post. As her guests chatted, she gently intervened, steering the conversation, salon-style, toward the economy and presidential politics. When it was over, Mrs. Weymouth, not an easy one to please, showered her daughter with praise.
"It was a big moment," said Molly Elkin, Ms. Weymouth's best friend and one of the dinner party guests. "It was sort of like: 'I've passed the baton, kid. You've learned well, you did a good job.' "
It was the kind of scene, rife with unspoken family drama, that captivates longtime Washingtonians, who have scrutinized and mythologized the Grahams for decades, much as the British do their royalty. Now, in an exceedingly difficult climate for newspapers, Ms. Weymouth is charged with saving the crown jewels. In a city and a clan filled with expectations for her, that is no easy task.
She is carving her path in a capital, and an industry, vastly changed from the one her grandmother inhabited when big-city newspapers were flush with advertising; The Post helped bring down a president; and for nearly four decades, Mrs. Graham ruled social Washington, feting presidents and prime ministers in her elegant Georgetown manse, dining at the White House with kings and queens.
"There is never going to be another Kay, never in Washington, because the times are different," said Sally Quinn, the columnist and the wife of Ben Bradlee, the editor whose partnership with Mrs. Graham was chronicled in "All The President's Men." "People just don't entertain that way," Ms. Quinn said. "People have kids, they work late. That is not what Katharine wants to do."
Ms. Weymouth is many things: a working mother and enthusiastic cook; a fearless skier ("She has not met a slope she won't take," says Liz Spayd, a former managing editor of The Post); a fitness buff ("She can crunch till the cows come home," said Pari Bradlee, a yoga instructor and daughter-in-law to Ben) and, for a while, one of the most sought-after dates in town. (After seeing a local architect, Ms. Weymouth has recently reunited with an old flame, Marty Moe, a former AOL executive.)
She does not take her famous name too seriously, and she likes to have fun. For years, she and Ms. Elkin, a labor lawyer, held a backyard Summer White Party, a spoof on the lavish Black and White Ball hosted in 1966 by Truman Capote to honor Mrs. Graham. Once, at a club in Aspen, Colo., Ms. Weymouth spied Yankees shortstop Alex Rodriguez watching her dance.
"We are the only people in this club who don't want anything from you," she announced. "Come dance with us." He said he would rather watch.
To her 2012 "grown-up" dinner, she wore a $35 scoop-neck sleeveless sundress from J. C. Penney, a playful nod to an important Post advertiser whose chief executive at the time, Ron Johnson, was a guest. (She bought J. C. Penney dresses for Ms. Elkin, who wore hers, and Mrs. Weymouth, who wouldn't be caught dead in one.)
Ms. Weymouth's penchant for showing off her athletic figure — she arrived for a photo shoot in a crisp white sleeveless sheath and four-inch lime green Jimmy Choos — provokes titters in the newsroom. Then again, she works hard for it; Ms. Elkin said the two spend Sunday mornings doing free weights and "boy push-ups" with a personal trainer.
"We smack-talk each other the entire time," Ms. Elkin said, "just like we did when we were 20 years old."
Quick-witted and no-nonsense, Ms. Weymouth is more like her steely grandmother than her famously demanding and mercurial mother. But since becoming publisher in February 2008, she has had a rocky ride; she has already hired her second editor, and critics lament that she is presiding over a newspaper in retreat.
Ad revenue is declining and average daily circulation was 474,767 in March, down from 673,180 when Ms. Weymouth took over, the Alliance for Audited Media said.
Lacking the magic bullet, she is emphasizing a local mission — she has reduced staff, shut bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and eliminated the well-regarded Book World section on Sunday — to meet demands by her uncle, and The Post board, that the newspaper turn a profit. (It is, she said, although on Friday the parent company reported a 14 percent drop in second-quarter earnings, compared to a year ago.)
Recently, she upset sentimentalists by putting The Post's 15th Street headquarters up for sale. She says her grandmother always hated the boxy building.
But while Mrs. Graham, who took over the company in 1963 after her husband's suicide (and later became publisher and chief executive), battled lifelong insecurities as she transformed herself from a 1950s housewife to the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company (as well as the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir), not so Ms. Weymouth.
"Katharine is far more comfortable in her own skin than Kay ever was," said Robert G. Kaiser, a Post associate editor who has worked there for 50 years. Still, he said: "She has a burden. Your biggest anxiety, as I know from personal experience with Kay and Don, is: 'Am I going to screw this up? Am I the one who is going to be remembered as the goof-off who couldn't keep it together?' "
On a steamy summer Friday in July, Ms. Weymouth was curled up on her living room couch, not in fashionable Georgetown but in the practically suburban northwest Washington neighborhood of Chevy Chase, where a Post honor box and fleet of scooters are parked on her front porch. Her golden retriever, Dakota, scampered about, a slobbery tennis ball in its mouth.
If her social life is centered anywhere, it is here, in the house she shares with her children Madeleine, 13, Beckett, 11, and Bridget, 9; an assemblage of pets (three dogs, a guinea pig, a rabbit, two gerbils and a hamster); and a grandmotherly housekeeper, Olinda, whom she "sort of inherited" from Mrs. Graham. It is the scene of countless family dinners with her tight circle of friends, including Ms. Elkin, whom she met at Oxford.
Ms. Weymouth is proud of her culinary skills, another break from family tradition. "My mother doesn't cook, my grandmother didn't cook," she said. "Her kids were raised by servants. They would joke about Sunday night dinner. It was the only night she would cook, and apparently it was just horrendous, like scrambled eggs and Campbell's soup."
On this afternoon, she had left work early to prepare yellow gazpacho, swordfish kebabs with bacon and cherry tomatoes, and strawberry shortcake for 10 friends and colleagues, including the Post foreign editor, who had returned from Afghanistan. Her daughter Bridget wandered in nibbling a piece of bacon.
Ms. Weymouth frowned ("I need that for dinner!" she said), but it was a mock frown, a precious moment of normalcy. In April 2011, when Bridget was just shy of her seventh birthday, she fell off a pony, mangling her left arm. She spent 28 days undergoing a dozen operations at Children's Hospital here (and later two more in New York). Ms. Weymouth moved in, conducting business meetings from the child's bedside.
"She was dealing with doctors and surgeons and a child who was in a lot of pain," said Kevin Sullivan, a Post reporter and close friend. "But it wasn't like she flushed her BlackBerry down the toilet. It's not one of those jobs where you can say, 'I'll be gone a couple of weeks.' "
Moving to Washington to join the family business, Ms. Weymouth said, was never in her "grand plan." Dowdy D.C. seems a world away from her childhood in Manhattan, where she attended the all-girls Brearley School and danced the "Nutcracker" while studying, quite seriously, with the School of American Ballet.
Her father, Yann Weymouth, a noted architect (and brother of bassist Tina Weymouth, a founder of the Talking Heads) and mother divorced when Ms. Weymouth and her younger sister Pamela were little. The girls were raised in their mother's orbit on the Upper East Side, in the swirl of New York's literary circles.
It was a childhood spent going out to restaurants ("Grandma disapproved," Ms. Weymouth said) and drinking Cokes at Elaine's. They tagged along on Lally's reporting trips — "We got to have dinner at the Club d'Alep and meet some of the Syrian aristocracy" — discussed fashion with the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and politics with Alexander Cockburn, the left-wing British journalist and, for a time, Mrs. Weymouth's live-in boyfriend.
"It was rarefied," said Diane Paulus, the Broadway director ("Hair," "Pippin"), a close friend since the third grade. "We were like 8- or 9- or 10-years-old, and there were big grown-up dinner parties and each child would give toasts. Lally was very social, very fashionable, very chic and very vocal in her politics. There were always political discussions, and she expected the children to keep up."
But at Harvard, and later Oxford, where the future publisher briefly pursued a master's degree in literature — "My mother told me I had to go to graduate school," Ms. Weymouth explained — and Stanford Law, she rarely let on who she was.
At Oxford, she drank beer, rowed crew and went through a black leather phase — "She scared me, she was so cool," Ms. Elkin said — which turned almost comical on a trip to Israel. During a stopover in Paris to see Mr. Weymouth, who was helping I. M. Pei design the glass pyramid at the Louvre, Ms. Weymouth produced a lengthy itinerary, drafted by her mother, including lunch at the Knesset with Benjamin Netanyahu and dinner at the apartment of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin.
"So the security people are looking at her, with her black eyeliner and her leather jacket and these black earrings, and they're like, 'Who are you?' " Ms. Elkin said. "And I'm looking at her and saying: 'Yeah, who are you? And why did you only tell me to bring one dress?' "
Ms. Weymouth loved the West Coast and hoped to stay there after law school. Her mother had other ideas. "I thought it was a nice place for a weekend," Mrs. Weymouth said in an interview, "not for a life."
Instead, she took a job as a litigator with Williams & Connolly, The Post's law firm. Nicole Chapman, her Harvard roommate, said she wanted to "establish herself as Katharine Weymouth," and eventually have children, becoming a "more there mother" than her own had been.
To herald the arrival of her oldest grandchild, Mrs. Graham invited Washington's young up-and-comers to a dinner party. George Stephanopoulos, then with the Clinton administration, was there. Mr. Jordan sent his niece, Carolyn Niles, now a close Weymouth friend. "She really took the time to establish social connections for Katharine," Ms. Niles said.
If Kay Graham saw her namesake as her heir apparent, she did not say, though it was apparent they were extremely close. Ann Calfas, a Stanford classmate of Ms. Weymouth, recalls the grandmother's simple delight in driving them to the wedding of a friend. "She was like, 'Girls, hop in!' "
Ms. Weymouth has her own fond memories of Friday night "dates" when Mrs. Graham needed a party escort, and of quiet dinners in the library of the big house on R Street in Georgetown. "We would eat on the TV trays and gossip," she said, "and I would tell her about my love life and she'd crack up."
In 1996, The Post put out a call to Williams & Connolly for temporary legal help. Ms. Weymouth put her hand up, and the job became permanent, leading to stints in the online operation (then a distinct subsidiary) and ultimately as vice president for advertising.
Inside the newsroom, one rap on Ms. Weymouth is that unlike her uncle, she has never been a reporter. Over the years, she said, they talked about it, but she didn't feel qualified. "I just felt like it would be too weird," she said.
If there is one decision Ms. Weymouth has made that has mystified people who know her well, it was her July 1998 marriage to Richard Scully, a Washington lawyer. The wedding at her mother's Southampton home, with 470 A-list guests, was a typical Lally extravaganza. Not only did Oscar de la Renta design the dress, a friend said, he was there to zip it up.
The divorce in 2005 was messy. Court records show they fought over their $70,000 country club membership (Mr. Scully, a golfer, testified that Ms. Weymouth "doesn't really value it") and their German shepherd, Maxine, among other things. The court awarded both to Ms. Weymouth.
Last year, Mr. Scully was accused of assaulting his girlfriend. The charges were dropped, but Ms. Weymouth went back to court, asserting that he had stalked her through texts and e-mail and engaged in "angry and explosive outbursts" in front of their children. Mr. Scully's lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, called the allegations "false" and attributed Ms. Weymouth's assertions to an "opportunistic pleading" filed by her divorce lawyer.
Ms. Weymouth and her tight-knit circle prefer not to discuss it. "The less you say about him, the better," Lally Weymouth said.
Friends say Ms. Weymouth has become the ultimate hands-on mother (albeit one with "one-and-a-half" nannies, as she describes it), waking up early to make the children a hot breakfast and driving them to school every morning. In a city of nightly parties, she picks and chooses. She is a regular at galas for the Alvin Ailey dance company and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, because Ms. Elkin is on the board.
But at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, Ms. Weymouth was nowhere to be seen. She was home hosting a sleepover; it was Bridget's ninth birthday.
Not long after her grandmother died in 2001, Ms. Weymouth had a dream. In it, they strolled the beach on Martha's Vineyard, where Mrs. Graham owned a home.
"In my dream, I knew she was dead," Ms. Weymouth said. "But she said: 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry I have to leave you.' "
Ms. Weymouth sees no larger meaning in this — "I don't believe in hoo-ha," she said — though as she charts the future of her family's business, she is also immersed in the past. Pictures of her grandmother line the walls of her office, where Mrs. Graham's memoir, tagged with sticky notes for Ms. Weymouth's speeches, is on a shelf. For her first day on the job in February 2008, she wore Mrs. Graham's pearls "for good luck."
Her ascension generated the predictable buzz in Washington. People speculated about whether there was competition between Ms. Weymouth and her mother, who, the theory goes, remains miffed that her kid brother inherited the throne. (Not true, both women say.)
Ms. Weymouth took the helm just as the bottom was about to fall out of the economy. The newspaper had already gone through several newsroom buyouts, and she told her uncle she would not take the job unless she could integrate the digital and print operations. "Don was hellbent against it, and probably still is," she said.
Deciding a new editor was needed, she picked Marcus Brauchli, from The Wall Street Journal, the first outsider to edit The Post in four decades. Magazines gushed that she had found her Ben Bradlee, but the relationship soured after news broke that they planned to offer lobbyists the chance to underwrite "intimate and exclusive" dinners, for up to $250,000, with Obama officials and Post journalists in Ms. Weymouth's home, a seemingly crass version of Kay Graham's salons.
Ms. Weymouth apologized, but the negative publicity over "Salon-Gate" was brutal. Ms. Niles said it was the first time she had seen her ordinarily unflappable friend cry over work.
Within the Graham family, there is great sensitivity to any suggestion of nepotism. Don Graham, 68, praises his niece as "passionate, hardworking, utterly decent" and also qualified. As to whether she will inherit his job, he ducks the question: "I'm not expecting her to go anyplace."
One hint, Post tea-leaf readers say, can be found in the company garage. For years Kay Graham drove a car with the low-numbered District license plate No. 149, which once belonged to her father, Eugene Meyer, who bought The Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933. Now it is on Ms. Weymouth's 1991 BMW convertible.
In the meantime, things have been looking up. In January, Ms. Weymouth replaced Mr. Brauchli with Martin Baron, a no-nonsense newsman from The Boston Globe (and, previously, The New York Times), who has won praise for sharpening coverage and boosting morale. Reporters at The Post who routinely question whether their publisher "gets what we do," now wonder if maybe, just maybe, she has found her Ben Bradlee after all.
"She made a brilliant choice," Ms. Quinn said, "and it's working."
Not everyone is so effusive. The Post recently began charging for online access, but the climate for newspapers in general, and The Post in particular, remains tough. Mr. Baron called Ms. Weymouth "a realist," who "still wants us to do really great journalism," albeit "within the reality of our economic circumstances." But he could not rule out further cuts.
The question, inside and outside the newspaper, is whether Ms. Weymouth can ever be the great and beloved publisher her grandmother was. "Certainly the genes are there," said John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst. "It's the judgment that has yet to be proved."
Others seem to have written her off. The Guardian columnist Michael Wolff recently criticized Ms. Weymouth, declaring her "a disaster in a job for which she had, other than her lineage, no qualifications."
Ms. Weymouth, mindful of her past yet unsentimental about it, seems unconcerned. Her mother "tells me she is proud of me," she said, and "if I'm not doing a good job, as much as Don loves me, he will fire me." Even her grandmother, she said, grew into greatness, making mistakes along the way.
"I don't feel like my job is to be beloved," said Ms. Weymouth, the woman who might be known as the working-mother publisher, with her children at play and her dogs at her feet. "I certainly hope to be a great publisher, and if people want to love me, too, that's even better."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: August 3, 2013 An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of one of the well-known Washington non-profit organizations thatMs. Weymouth supports. It is the PEN/Faulkner Foundation — not Penn/Faulker.
