Samuel Hay Kauffmann was the last long-term president of the Washington Evening Star Newspaper Company to come from the three-family dynasty that built the newspaper into one of the leading papers of its day. "The Gray Lady of Pennsylvania Avenue," as the paper was known in Washington, D.C., in the mid twentieth century, was rich and politically conservative when Kauffmann was named president in 1949. It had dominated the Washington market for many years and ranked fifth nationally in classified advertising. Kauffmann, who had worked in every mechanical and business department at the newspaper during his years of being groomed for the top position, was a member of a privileged, genteel, insider class that ran Washington through strong personal ties.

Yet during Kauffmann's tenure as president of the Star, Washington changed from a southern city of powerful families into a complex and massive bureaucracy peopled by a younger...