Power and Glory - Leadership in Turbulent Times

My short paper on Katharine Graham was picked as an example of good writing in my class on leadership- chuffed! It also took the shortest amount of time to write (about 90 mins).  Unfortunately most times many more hours are expended for lesser products.

(Katharine Graham was the celebrated Chairman and CEO of a publishing company that included the Washington Post which exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down the Nixon Presidency).

Question:The title of this unit is “My Life Is My Message.”  How and to what extent is this true of Katharine Graham?  More generally, how important is it for leaders to live their messages and why?  Do we learn better from leaders who embody their messages?  (Be sure to include relevant evidence for this and the other parts of your response). (Words: 513)

            Katharine Graham was a socialite who came from privilege; but over the last half of her life she proved to be far more than that – a genuine and courageous leader who faced all that a panicked, beleaguered Presidency could throw at her and her organization; and emerged as one of the last, great press moguls who lived and breathed the values of journalistic integrity.

            Katharine Graham did not start life as a leader. In fact she was anything but. For the first 46 years of her life she was the butt of cruel jokes and criticisms from both her narcissistic mother and her brittle, glittering husband.  In her own words she was a “doormat wife”. Like Henry V, Churchill and Lincoln she needed time to find her purpose. She grew into her better self, but the spark was always there; it just took an extraordinary circumstance for that spark to become a great conflagration.  Maybe if Phil Graham had lived she would have spent the rest of her days suppressing that flame, content in being a wife, mother and grandmother. But Phil Graham died suddenly and brutally; and Katharine had the resolve and the chutzpah to seize the moment, as all great leaders do, and take on the role of leading her father’s company.

            She determined to be the best publisher she could be: a custodian of the high-minded principles of the fourth estate, even when threatened by the powerful and frightening Nixon Administration. An example of her courage is in her coruscating address to Colby College in the middle of the Watergate scandal in which she enumerates the lies and deceptions of the Nixon Administration,  knowing that it would find its way back to the President and his henchmen.

             

            Her leadership in publishing the Pentagon Papers and backing Woodward, Bernstein and Bradley in the Watergate affair showed us what a smart, determined, principled woman can do. Phil Graham, at least on the surface the epitome of a leader (Harvard Law educated, handsome, dashing), facing similar pressure to publish damning reports in relation to the failed Cuban invasion in 1961, preferred to protect his cronies in the Kennedy administration than hold to journalistic ideals.

            We admire and respect leaders who are prepared to put their reputation, their means of living and their very selves on the line. Great leaders embody their values.  They show us the way to cast aside our petty concerns and anxieties and to continually push to be better. Katharine Graham did just that.

            Katharine Graham exposed the depravity in the Nixon administration for the entire world to see.  The cost to the US was incalculable - the greatest nation on earth utterly humiliated by the rottenness of the Presidency - but in exposing the chancre, Graham and the Washington Post opened the eyes of the US to the all too human fallibility of the holders of its highest office, and how absolute power can corrupt absolutely. Thanks to them, Americans will never again deify their Presidents; and that is a good and necessary thing.