Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis

On her father's side Katharine "Kay" Graham descends from prominent French Jews. Her brilliant, confident father, Eugene Meyer, is a thirty-two-year-old self-made millionaire broker and art collector. He is born in Los Angeles and raised there and in San Francisco to be a lonely fighter and reader. Later, he graduates from Yale, apprentices to European banks and opens the Eugene Meyer and Company brokerage house. On Lincoln's Birthday in 1908, Eugene spies beautiful, self-assured twenty-one-year-old Agnes Ernst in a gallery and instantly decides to marry her. A friend arranges a meeting, and Eugene does marry Agnes exactly two years later. For Agnes it is not love at first sight. Wealth and generosity are Eugene's attraction. Descended from German Lutherans ministers, Agnes grows up in austerity and devotion to learning, but when her father strays from the home, she turns bohemian and enters...