Katharine Graham Esther Olivares and Pablo Vallaure Hi, I’m Katharine Graham and I am about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, I want to share with you everything I had to overcome to make my dreams come true. Hopefully, if you are listening to this tape, it means that society has changed a little bit. I was born on June 16th 1917 in New York, USA. I was born into a wealthy family composed by my father Eugene Meyer, my mother Agnes E. Meyer, and my sister, Florence Meyer. My vocation began when my father bought a newspaper called The Washington Post on a sale in 1933, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. This newspaper was published in Washington, so we moved there. The contact with this newspaper since my childhood obsessed me and made me take the degree of Journalism in 1934 at the Chicago University. I graduated in 1938 and after a short period in San Francisco, I returned to Washington and joined The Washington Post. Then I fell in love with Philip Graham, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard, and one year later I married him. We had a daughter called Lally Graham and a son called Donald E. Graham. After two years working in The Washington Post, my father transferred 70% of my income to my husband. The reason my father gave me was: “No man should be in a position to work for his wife”. Later I had to retire to take care of my children, so my husband took over the company. After a while, my husband suffered a chronic depression in the late 50s and he finally killed himself in 1963 at his cottage. This tragedy marked my life and made me realize I needed to take the lead of my family, so I returned to the newspaper and achieved the charge of director. This made me one of the most powerful women in the USA and the first female publisher of a major American newspaper.
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