I've never met Katharine Graham. But I always wanted to thank her
for keeping me from becoming a lawyer.

That's what my Republican Party-activist parents had planned for
me, with the hope that I might end up in Washington. Around my
junior high school in Michigan, there were even jokes that I might
become the first woman president.

But after I began following the story of Watergate --- and hearing
about the ladylike but gutsy publisher who faced down the Nixon
Administration --- the only thing about Washington that interested
me was the Post.

Now, more than 20 years after the story that made her a journalism
icon and inspired my reporting career, Katharine Graham has written
her memoirs. Entitled PERSONAL HISTORY, her book has shot to the
top of the bestseller lists, which might lead some people to
dismiss it as simply another famous person's superficial
tome.

But her book's popularity masks its depth and insight. The last
time a book of this sort sold in such magnitude was TRUMAN, David
McCullough's deserved success. Like McCullough's book, Graham's is
an extremely well thought-out, detailed look at the last 70 years
of American journalism, politics and social history. And like
TRUMAN (which took me three weeks to get through), this is not a
fast read, even given the exciting times in which Graham lived and
participated. To appreciate it, the book demands a reader's time
and deliberation.

To anyone who has followed Graham's career, the basic details are
well-known. Katharine Meyer, daughter of publisher Eugene Meyer and
eccentric writer and artist Agnes Meyer, was born in 1917 and grew
up in a wealthy, liberal family that divided its time between
sprawling homes in New York and Washington. Her mother ignored
Katharine and her other children to pursue her own interests, which
included friendships with photographer Edward Steichen and art
collector Charles Freer (for whom the Freer Gallery at the
Smithsonian Institution is named.)

After a whirlwind courtship, Katharine married up-and-coming lawyer
Philip Graham, who not long after their marriage joined her father
in running the Post, which Meyer had bought at an auction. It was
then one of a half-dozen Washington newspapers, and hardly a shadow
of the paper it was to become. Children followed; then the ground
is laid for tragedy.

As Graham writes of her married life, you can smell trouble. After
her third child, she gave up her own career at the newspaper for a
stilted life as a society matron. (Graham apologizes for the choice
repeatedly in the book, but as she points out, women in her stratus
in the 1950s were emphatically discouraged from holding
jobs.)

You need only glance through one of the photo inserts to see how
much damage her charming, unpredictable and ultimately abusive
husband did to her psyche. There is one chilling shot of the
Grahams: he gazing authoritatively into the camera, she looking
like a deer caught in headlights. Contrast it to the smiling photo
of Graham at her debut, or even her happy wedding photo, and it
serves to illustrate the increasingly sad story that Graham
outlines in painful pages that tell of her husband's metal
breakdown, his intention to divorce her, and finally his
suicide.

It's remarkable that she is able to tell of her husband's
disintegration so objectively,  even writing about the
girlfriend he planned to abandon her for. But what became
remarkable was the life that his death transformed.

In just a few days after finding her husband's body, she was named
publisher of the Washington Post. Within just a few years, the Post
had risen to join the New York Times as a journalistic powerhouse.
And less than a decade after taking charge, Graham was at the helm
of a newspaper that had broken the Watergate story, stood with the
Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, and had played a central
role in the downfall of Richard Nixon.

It is those years that form the true center of the book. Filled
with anecdotes and details, they provide valuable insights into
events that shaped the last third of the twentieth century. Every
famous figure imaginable, from John F. Kennedy to Warren Buffett to
David Bruce and Adlai Stevenson, appears. And there is a true sense
for what it was like inside the upper echalon of the Post newsroom,
where dynamic editor Ben Bradlee was king to Graham's queen.

If there is any flaw at all in these pages, it is that the book
suffers from "Filofax-itis" ---the feeling that Graham has gone
through decades of meticulously kept personal agendas and somehow
included every entry in the pages of her book. Some judicious
editing wouldn't have been a bad idea, if only to keep the
narrative flowing at an even pace from Graham's youth to marriage
to publishing career.

But the wrong editor would have eliminated some of the delightful
personal details that give us a picture of just how different
Graham's life has been from the rest of ours. Graham is first to
poke fun at herself, telling a series of tales that are reminiscent
of George Bush encountering a supermarket scanner for the first
time.

Graham writes that she wore the same cashmere sweater to college
classes every day until Thanksgiving, when a classmate suggested
that she wash it. Graham says she had no idea how to wash a sweater
-- at home, they simply appeared, clean, in her drawers, sudsed by
invisible hands. Even when she was a housewife, at home with small
children, her wealth meant she always had the kind of domestic help
that other young mothers pine for. "To this day, I have never
ironed a dress," Graham writes.

Equally delightful is the story of her brief job as a labor
reporter in San Francisco. She writes of her ability to wheedle her
way into the trust of the city's labor leaders --- and of joining
them for shots and beers. "If you bought two, the third was free
--- pretty heady stuff for a 21-year-old," she writes. Even later
in life, when she is thrust into the public spotlight by her
husband's death, Graham seems charmingly perplexed and secretly
delighted about the attention. In telling the story of Truman
Capote's legendary 1966 Black and White Ball in her honor, Graham
admits that she was being used by Capote, whom she barely knew. But
"for me, the party was just great pleasure, maybe doubly so because
it was so unlike my real life. I was flattered, and although it may
have not been my style, for one magic night I was transformed."
  

It is this combination of sweeping events and personal confidences
that makes PERSONAL HISTORY an enjoyable book. It transforms Graham
herself from a giant of twentieth-century journalism to someone you
would like to have lunch with, if only to talk about labor writing
and Woolite.

Micheline Maynard is USA TODAY's Detroit bureau chief and author of
COLLISION COURSE: Inside the Battle for General Motors (Birch Lane
Press).