Born into privilege, Katharine Graham’s life was defined by and devoted to her family’s company, The Washington Post. While she could have taken it easy and led a life of leisure (she didn’t know how to fold her own clothes in college because “that was always done for me”) she instead took on the stress and challenges of operating a Fortune 500 company. She did this despite her obvious lack of experience and being the only women in the room, pretty much all the time. “Since I regarded myself as inferior,” she wrote, “I failed to distinguish between, on the one hand, male condescension because I was a woman and, on the other hand, a valid view that the only reason I had my job was the good luck of my birth and the bad luck of my husband’s death.” There was plenty of both, but Graham managed to find success through sheer determination and a deep desire to bring good journalism to the people. While her start at The Washington Post was rocky, her confidence grew over the years as she grew into the job and began to accumulate some successes. She covered many presidents (and knew a few personally) from JFK and LBJ to Nixon and eventually Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.Graham’s autobiography is also a biography of The Washington Post newspaper and company—the family owned Newsweek magazine for many years in addition to a few local television and radio stations in select cities around the country. The paper, originally founded in 1877, was sold to Graham’s father at auction in 1933. Keeping it in the family, he eventually passed ownership on to Katharine’s husband Philip in 1946. The burdens of the job (and an undiagnosed mental illness) would eventually lead Phil to take his own life in 1963, catapulting Katharine into the position of president and CEO, one which she held for nearly thirty years before eventually passing the family torch once again to her own son Donald.While ownership of the company passed from one generation to the next, Graham always did her best to maintain her integrity with her readership and insisted on impartial journalism. Today, much of journalism feels as though it is written with a specific ideology behind it, but that was not always the case in the United States. “People who may disagree on politics must still be able to communicate, and it’s crucial for all of us in the press to listen to all sides,” she writes of her time at the newspaper. “I consider it the role of the head of a newspaper to be bipartisan and to bring journalists together with people from government. I think that an easy relationship is constructive and useful for both sides: it helps the publication by opening doors, and provides those who are covered in the news with the knowledge of whom they can suggest ideas to, complain to, and generally deal with.” As a means of honoring their bipartisanship, The Post maintained a precedent of not endorsing political candidates for many years, until eventually breaking this pattern in the 1976 election when they officially endorsed Jimmy Carter.The relationship between government and press is a vital one to a free and open society, and as one of the most prominent news sources in the capital city of Washington D.C. Graham and her associates at The Post had an important job: keeping those in power in check. While her career spanned many important years, there are two distinct events that had massive impact on her tenure. The first was the publication of the Pentagon Papers—which revealed the US’s involvement in Vietnam to be much more vast and devastating than the public originally knew about—and the second was the Watergate Scandal. Watergate, which progressively unfolded from 1972-1974 and eventually culminated in President Nixon’s resignation from office, was a political scandal unlike any other. “Its sheer magnitude and reach put it on a scale altogether different from past political scandals,” Graham remembers, “in part because of the unparalleled involvement of so many men so close to the president and because of the large amounts of money raised, stashed, and spent in covert and illegal ways.” The story revealed the depths of corruption throughout the different branches of government and the lengths to which Nixon was willing to go to cover it all up. Graham herself spent much of her time during the scandal as one of the top names on Nixon’s list of public enemies. Despite the immense pressure to drop the investigation, Graham pushed her reporters to continue pulling at the strings until the entire sweater unravelled. “As astounding as Watergate was to the country and the government, it underscored the crucial role of a free, able, and energetic press.”In conclusion, I found two important take-aways from reading this entertaining and informative book: The importance of a free press in keeping those in power in check, and the importance of leading a life of purpose. Graham could have easily taken her family’s money and done whatever she wanted with her life, including nothing at all. Instead, her parents pushed her (and her four siblings) to live lives of fulfillment and productivity. She then passed these same sentiments on to her own children. Playing a central role in the production of news and the diagnosing of politics led Graham to live an extraordinary life, one of equal parts joy and hardship. Her mark on history was made in the face of gender-discrimination and is a shining example to us all of the importance of leading a life of purpose.