Don Graham's decision to sell The Washington Post was his reverse "Sophie's Choice" moment.
She had to decide which cherished child to save and which to send to the gas chamber. Don and the Graham family weren't forced to make an anguishing choice, but did so anyway. They relinquished the newspaper they love in order to protect it.
If the comparison sounds hyperbolic, you don't know the Grahams. Their identity is so inextricably bound up with that of the newspaper, and the newspaper with that of the Graham family, it is — or at least it was until Monday afternoon — unimaginable to consider the two as separate entities.
Through good times and bad, and it has mattered most in the bad times, the Graham family has understood itself as having been entrusted with the care of a special institution. The Grahams served as buffer, insulating the paper from malevolent outside forces.
First, from powerful politicians: Think of Katharine Graham's bravery in letting the paper pursue the Watergate story, at a delicate time when the Post needed to renew the licenses of its valuable television stations and in the face of a counterassault by the Nixon administration.
It was a welcome sign that the new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, recalled Attorney General John Mitchell's famously crude threat in his letter to employees: "While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham's example, I'll be ready."
Second, from the travails of the newspaper industry itself, culminating in the brave and painful decision to sell. The easier course for Don Graham and his niece, publisher Katharine Weymouth, would have been to hold on to the paper and find themselves endlessly buffeted between their duty to shareholders and their custody of the institution. The Post would have limped along; Don and Katharine would not be remembered as the Grahams who sold it.
Intellectually, I and my colleagues get it. Emotionally, we are reeling. To us, as to the city, the Grahams are the paper. Monday afternoon was the day our Earth stood still.
A few stories to explain the personal bond many of us feel. It is November 1997, my book group is reading Mrs. Graham's autobiography, and they have asked me to invite her. I send a note upstairs, pre-emptively apologetic. I'm sure you're too busy. Please do not feel obliged.
Mrs. Graham came, and stayed for hours. I think she enjoyed herself, but I also know that she did feel, in the best possible way, a sense of noblesse oblige.
Mrs. Graham was the grand personage; Don is more the self-effacing foot soldier. His knowledge comes not only from the salons of Georgetown but from the trenches: in Vietnam, as a cop on the beat in the District, as a reporter. He not only knows the names of everyone in the building, he is apt to know their children's names as well.
In the old days, when you would write an especially good story, Don would send a lovely note. These days, it is likely to be an email, at an intimidatingly early hour, coupled with a "like" on Facebook. It is small gestures like this — combined with the fundamental conviction that the Grahams have our back, journalistically — that breed loyalty and affection.
Bezos' letter to employees began with the right note, about the inevitable "apprehension" greeting the sale. But it ended, from my point of view, on an even better one: about Don.
"I do not know a finer man," Bezos wrote.With that assessment, he has the makings of a worthy successor.