Lawyer and philanthropist William W. Graham – the son of former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham – has taken his own life the week a new movie about his mother is released… and 54 years after his father committed suicide. He was 69.
His brother, former Post publisher Donald Graham, said he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
via The Telegraph:
Graham’s grandfather Eugene Meyer purchased The Washington Post in 1933, and then handed it over to his father, Philip.
When Philip killed himself in 1963, his wife Katharine took over, becoming one of the most influential women in America and the first female head of a Fortune 500 company.The story of her decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the US government’s cover-up of the failings of the Vietnam War, has been made into a film by Steven Spielberg, The Post. Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham.
She died in 2001, and was survived by four children: a daughter, journalist Lally Weymouth; and three sons, Donald, Stephen and William.
Donald took over the newspaper, but then handed over to his niece Katharine Weymouth. She, in turn, left in 2014 – when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the company.
William Graham was a 1966 graduate of the private St. Albans School in Washington and a 1970 graduate of Stanford University, where he majored in history and was active in the antiwar movement protesting US involvement in Vietnam.
(Pics: Facebook and MediaPunch)
