Donald E. Graham

Don Graham
Born	Donald Edward Graham April 22, 1945 (1945-04-22) (age 79)
Education	Harvard College
Occupation(s)	CEO and Chairman
Employer(s)	The Washington Post Company Facebook
Spouse	Mary Wissler (1967-2007) Amanda Bennett (2012 - )
Children	four
Parent(s)	Philip Graham, Katharine Graham

Donald Edward Graham (born April 22, 1945) is chief executive officer and Chairman of The Washington Post Company. He is also on the board of directors of Facebook Inc.

Early life

Donald Edward Graham was born on April 22, 1945. His parents were Katharine Graham (née Meyer), later a publisher of The Washington Post, and her husband, Philip Graham.

Graham graduated from St. Albans School and then attended Harvard College. In 1965, he was elected president of The Harvard Crimson, the college's breakfast daily. After graduation in 1966, he volunteered for military service and served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. There "he worked as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968."

From January 1969 to June 1970, Graham joined the Washington Metropolitan Police Department as a patrolman and was sent to the Ninth Precinct in Northeast Washington.

The Post

Eugene Meyer, Graham's maternal grandfather, bought The Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933. Graham's father was publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 until 1961 and president of the Washington Post Company from 1947 until his death in 1963. Graham's mother, Katharine, was the head of The Washington Post newspaper for more than two decades, overseeing its most famous period, the Watergate coverage that helped bring down President Richard Nixon. She has been widely described as one of the most powerful American women of the 20th century.

In 1971, Graham joined The Washington Post as a reporter, and went on to hold various news and business positions at the Post and Newsweek (until 2010, owned by The Washington Post Company).

He was elected to the board of the company in September 1974 and was made executive vice president and general manager of the Post in 1976. Graham became publisher of The Washington Post in 1979, succeeding his mother, who retained her corporate positions of chairman of the board and CEO of The Washington Post Company. The Company owns the newspaper, as well as the educational services provider Kaplan, Inc., Post-Newsweek Stations, Cable One, Slate magazine, and other smaller companies. Donald Graham became CEO in 1991 and chairman of the company in May 1993, while Katharine Graham assumed the position of chairman of the executive committee of the Washington Post Company.

In 1994, Graham was responsible for “a heavy blow to the newspaper’s credibility” (WaPo ombudsman on October 9, 1994), when he successfully lobbied Senator John Danforth for a special provision, favoring Washington Post Co.'s cell phone holdings, in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty. A Washington Post editorial had described the treaty as including "no surprises,", igniting heavy criticism from rival companies. The Washington Post had to apologize and Graham later said about the conspericy: “In hindsight, there should have been an editorial that mentioned this provision in the GATT treaty. We clearly should have done that.” He also offered an insight into the difficult balance between the interests of the newspaper and that of the holding company: “We run a business and make no apologies for the fact that we try to run it well.”

In September 2000, Graham was elected chairman of the newspaper and passed the position of publisher to Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr.

Other roles

Graham also serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He is president of the District of Columbia College Access Program and a trustee of the Federal City Council in Washington, D.C. Graham is a member of the board of directors of The Summit Fund of Washington and a member of the board of directors at Facebook.

He is also an invitee of the Bilderberg Group and attended conference meetings in Greece 2009, and Spain 2010.

Personal life

In 1967, Graham married Mary Wissler. Wissler earned a law degree from Georgetown University and a bachelor's from Harvard-Radcliffe where she met Graham. She is a research fellow at the Kennedy School's Taubman Center at Harvard focusing on such issues as health and safety regulations. In 2007, they announced that they were separating. The Grahams have four grown children including:

• Laura Graham works as the head of business development at Slate.com.
• Will Graham is the executive producer of The Onion.

On June 30, 2012, he married Amanda Bennett, a senior editor at Bloomberg News, a former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a colleague from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

See also

• Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr.
• Kaplan, Inc.
• Andrew Rosen

References

• The Washington Post Company. Donald E. Graham. Retrieved on December 13, 2005.
• Scott Sherman, Columbia Journalism Review 5/2002: Donald Graham's Washington Post. Retrieved on April 10, 2006.
• The Washington Post Company. History & Leadership. Retrieved on April 11, 2006.
• Zuckerberg, Mark (May 24, 2010). "From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings". The Washington Post. Retrieved 24 May 2010.
• Facebook, Inc. filing with United States Securities & Exchange Commission

"[1]" Retrieved on February 1, 2012.