On Sunday evening, as well-heeled guests trickled out of a screening of “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a documentary on the fabled former Washington Post publisher, they couldn’t help but remark on how much has changed at the paper, and in Washington.
Under Ms. Graham, from 1963 to 1991, the publication transformed itself from a regional newspaper into one of the country’s leading journalistic institutions. The film traces her life, focusing on the period she is best known for: standing up to the Nixon administration and publishing the Pentagon Papers, which helped change public opinion about the Vietnam War, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
The premiere was held in a theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Ms. Graham was fond of the arts complex, which President Trump recently took over after saying some of its shows were “woke” and “a disgrace.”
“The country, and the Kennedy Center, I gather, are in the hands of people whose ideas do not always comport with hers,” Ms. Graham’s son Don, another former publisher of The Post, said in an introductory speech.
The event, hosted by the billionaire Warren E. Buffett, a longtime friend of Ms. Graham’s, was a celebration of her life and impact. (She died in 2001 at age 84.) At times, it also felt like a wake for an era that has long since past.
In 2013, the Graham family sold The Post to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Mr. Bezos wasn’t at Sunday’s event, choosing instead to attend the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
But plenty of other prominent people were there: Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder; David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group; Antony J. Blinken, the former secretary of state; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary; and the journalists Andrea Mitchell, Judy Woodruff and Kaitlan Collins.
At a reception afterward, attendees ate pizza, sliders and tater tots. Lally Weymouth, a journalist and Ms. Graham’s daughter, mingled with guests in one area. In another, the actor Bill Murray got into a quarrel with Mr. Woodward over his 1984 biography of John Belushi, Mr. Murray’s former “Saturday Night Live” castmate.
Numerous retired Washington Post reporters attended, as did those who had recently defected to other outlets. They all noticed who wasn’t there: Will Lewis, the current publisher and chief executive of The Post. According to two people with knowledge of the matter, Mr. Lewis had told organizers last week that he would attend. Matt Murray, the executive editor, was also a no-show. A Post spokeswoman declined to comment about the pair’s absence.
Mr. Lewis and Matt Murray have faced several rounds of internal turmoil in the past year, and thousands of canceled subscriptions.
The Post was already reeling from a crisis of confidence in Mr. Lewis when, just days before the November presidential election, Mr. Bezos ordered the opinion section to cancel a planned editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Last week came another bombshell: Mr. Bezos announced that he was taking the opinion section in a new direction, limited to writing in support of “personal liberties and free markets.” The opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned.
Marty Baron, a former executive editor of The Post, harshly criticized the move, saying in a statement that Mr. Bezos was “cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty.” Mr. Baron expanded on his comments in an article for The Atlantic on Monday: “Now we know Bezos is no Katharine Graham.”
Mr. Graham, in his opening remarks, mused about how his mother might have handled the current political situation.
“I’m certain that she would listen to people with different ideas and would ask herself whether some of those ideas are good,” he said. “She would listen, she would think about it, and then, as always, she would stand up for what she believed in.”
Sally Quinn, the widow of Ben Bradlee, the top editor of The Post for much of Ms. Graham’s time running the paper, said it was hard not to reflect on what The Post had been like in those days.
“One of the things that is so different is that it was a family-owned newspaper; their whole lives were invested in it, and it meant everything to them,” she said, adding: “We didn’t have the kind of chaos that we do now.”
Mr. Woodward, who was immortalized in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film about The Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, said he had learned a lot working for Ms. Graham. “She had this moral stature,” he said.
But he declined to comment on The Post of 2025: “Lots of people have asked.”
