The story of the Washington Post is really the story of three family members and one outsider who, over a period of four decades, took a somnolent and bankrupt newspaper in the capital of the United States and turned it into an icon of good journalism. The four people are Eugene Meyer, his son-in-law, Philip Graham, Meyer's daughter and Graham's wife, Katharine, and the man Katharine hired to be the executive editor, Ben Bradlee. It is also the tale of two Pulitzer Prizes, the yin and yang of the Post's rise to fame.

The Washington Post, born in 1877, was undistinguished as a journalistic organ for a good part of its first century of life. Eugene Meyer bought the bankrupt paper in 1933 for $825,000 at an auction, a time when there were four other more substantial dailies in Washington and the premier paper was the...