Katharine Meyer Graham (1917–2001) became president of The Washington Post Company after her husband Philip Graham died by suicide in 1963. Britannica and Smithsonian accounts describe the abrupt transfer from wife of the publisher to the woman responsible for the paper and company. The Washington Post obituary confirms her death in 2001 at age 84 and credits her with leading the organization through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, when legal and political pressure tested whether the paper would keep publishing. The Pulitzer Prize site records that her memoir Personal History won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and notes its frank account of marriage, Philip Graham’s illness and death, and her later leadership. Her worth was not only business success; it was institutional courage. She helped show that ownership could protect journalism instead of taming it when presidents, lawyers, bankers, and fear pressed hard.