On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, was hosting a screening party for “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a new documentary celebrating the career of the Washington Post’s legendary publisher. Guests included Bill Gates, Bill Murray, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, and Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the stories of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that came to define the paper’s golden age.
I had passed the Watergate Hotel on my way to the party. It sits alongside the Kennedy Center, on the bank of the Potomac River. The pair of buildings, each a cream-colored behemoth, were completed in the early nineteen-seventies, a fabled era in the capital, when Presidents feared journalists and the bipartisan élite dined together on lobster bisque and gossip. Katharine Graham, quiet, wry, and patrician, was then one of the most powerful women in America. She not only ran the Post’s business operations—following in the footsteps of her father, Eugene Meyer, and her husband, Phil Graham—but convened members of the Washington establishment around her dinner table in Georgetown, that “tiny kingdom,” as Phil Graham once called it.
A few weeks earlier, Donald Trump had launched a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, naming himself its chair and ending a spirit of bipartisanship that had long reigned in one of D.C.’s most cherished cultural institutions. The center cancelled a performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., and expressed an eagerness to book “Cats.” Now, as the lights dimmed, Graham’s son Don, dressed in a sports coat and New Balance sneakers, stepped up to the lectern. His mother, he said, “had to stand up to one President who had carried forty-nine states, and who truly, as you are about to see, wanted to use the government to destroy her newspaper and her company.”
Nixon’s Attorney General once told Bernstein that “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer,” but Don Graham was likely also alluding to more recent events. He had succeeded his mother as the Post’s publisher, overseeing the paper’s business side for three decades before it was sold, in 2013, to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Three years later, just before the 2016 Presidential election, Bezos said that Trump’s calls for retribution and his unwillingness to concede defeat “erodes our democracy around the edges.” But, in the weeks before the 2024 election, Bezos didn’t allow the Post to endorse a Presidential candidate—the editors had planned to back Kamala Harris—breaking with the paper’s long-standing tradition. After the election, he attended Trump’s Inauguration, to which his company donated a million dollars. Days before the Kennedy Center screening, Bezos announced another major shift at the paper. The Opinions section would feature pieces “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
In the days of Woodward and Bernstein, the Post’s remit had seemed clear: to hold the nation’s most powerful officials to account. Now its journalists were shaken not just by what some saw as Bezos’s capitulation to Trump but by a broader identity crisis at the paper. Those who could find work elsewhere left. In January, a former executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., and a former managing editor, Robert Kaiser, wrote in an e-mail to Bezos, “In our experience going back to the early 1960s, morale at The Post has never been lower.” Bezos never replied.
After the film, guests drifted to a reception in a large gallery, where Woodward soon confronted Bill Murray. Murray had recently said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he was so dismayed after reading “like, five pages” of “Wired,” Woodward’s 1984 book about Murray’s old friend John Belushi, that he thought, Oh, my God. They framed Nixon. At the reception, Woodward interrupted a conversation Murray was having with Klobuchar to defend his work. “Sometimes we learn by talking,” Woodward said. Murray turned away; Buffett’s publicist quickly intervened. Afterward, more than one attendee described the reception—which featured hot appetizers, white orchids, and a roomful of septuagenarians—as a wake for the Graham family’s Post.
The paper’s current leadership was noticeably absent. Will Lewis, a former executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, whom Bezos had appointed as the paper’s publisher in early 2024, had R.S.V.P.’d that he would attend and then asked to see the guest list. (Lewis denies asking to see the guest list.) He and the Post’s editor, Matt Murray, a recent arrival from the Wall Street Journal, had ultimately stayed away. Bezos was out of town, preferring instead to attend the Academy Awards with his fiancée, the journalist Lauren Sánchez.
Bezos was always seen as a somewhat distant owner. Amazon’s holdings now include Whole Foods, Zappos, the streaming site Twitch, and M-G-M Studios. Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company, is a direct competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the race to privatize space travel. “He was sort of like a helicopter parent,” a former longtime employee at one of Bezos’s businesses told me, “giving a lot of direction on a Wednesday and then leaving us to pick up the pieces.” Still, no one seemed to know what his current vision for the Post might be. “In some ways, this is all a story about Jeff and how he changed over the course of his ownership and really became a different person with huge implications for the institution,” one former top editor told me. A journalist who knows Bezos said, “He’s on an intellectual journey. Wherever he lands, he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it’s a mind at work.”
At the end of 2012, Don Graham and his niece Katharine Weymouth, then the Post’s publisher, met at the Bombay Club, a restaurant near the White House that was especially popular during the Clinton era, to discuss the paper’s finances. The Post was entering its seventh year of declining revenue, and, for the first time, they were considering the possibility of selling. “We asked ourselves if we thought our small public company was still the best place for the newspaper,” Graham said at the time.
The Post had been in the family since 1933, when Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, bought it at auction. The Grahams, like the Sulzberger family, which has owned the New York Times for more than a century, viewed the paper not just as a business but as a civic trust. Don and his mother were fixtures in the Post’s headquarters on Fifteenth Street; Don seemed to know everyone’s name—reporters, receptionists, custodians. For years, the Post was a thriving regional monopoly, servicing one of the country’s wealthiest and most educated metropolitan areas.
“So I’m in perfect health except for the mysterious back pains, constant anxiety, and never being able to sleep.”
Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan
The emergence of the internet threatened all that. In August, 1992, Kaiser, the managing editor, returned from a conference in Japan and wrote a memo to the paper’s leadership about the coming upheaval. “The Post is not in a pot of water, and we’re smarter than the average frog,” he said. “But we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured—or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism.” Within a decade, Craigslist had decimated the industry’s classified-ad revenues. In 2003, another Post managing editor, Steve Coll, proposed a plan to reconfigure the newsroom to adapt to the internet and use the paper’s name recognition to become more national in scope. Don Graham rejected the idea, saying that he wanted to maintain the paper’s local identity. Its strategy eventually became “For and about Washington.”
What followed was years of shrinking print circulation punctuated by a series of staff buyouts. In 2007, a pair of Post staffers defected to found Politico, a digital news outlet that covered official Washington. Graham offered to partner with them in the new venture, but they declined. “It was clear that the age of expansion and conquering the world had ended, and it was not clear how we were going to turn it around,” Eugene Robinson, a longtime Post editor and columnist, said. Martin Baron, who became the paper’s executive editor in 2013, told me that, when he took the job, he expected to oversee additional cuts: “It looked like that’s what it was going to be like, year after year.”
Graham was heartbroken about the prospect of selling the Post, but he viewed a sale to a worthy owner as a final act of service. Warren Buffett—who has been a friend of the Graham family’s since the early nineteen-seventies, when he bailed out the Post—recommended Bezos as a potential buyer. At the time, Bezos was worth $27.2 billion—about a tenth of his current net worth—but still living a relatively low-key life in Seattle. He was married to MacKenzie Scott, a Princeton-educated novelist, with whom he had four children. In a 2013 Vogue article about Scott, who was promoting a new novel, Bezos called her “resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot.” He liked to shop for her clothes. Scott drove the Vogue writer around Seattle in her minivan and talked about avoiding the limelight. “Jeff is the opposite of me,” she said. “He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy.”
