At first, she relied on Frederick S. "Fritz" Beebe, a New York lawyer who had become chairman of the company after the purchase of Newsweek in 1961. Other important advisers were James Reston, the chief of the New York Times bureau in Washington, and Walter Lippmann, the columnist.

In "Personal History," Mrs. Graham said her biggest handicap was a sense of being inadequate for the task that had befallen her.

"What most got in the way of my doing the kind of job I wanted to do was my insecurity," she wrote. "Partly this arose from my particular experience, but to the extent that it stemmed from the narrow way women's roles were defined, it was a trait shared by most women in my generation. We had been brought up to believe that our roles were to be wives and mothers, educated to think that we were put on earth to make men happy and comfortable and to do the same for our children."

A major theme of her autobiography was the transformation of these attitudes and her emergence as a strong executive.

Becoming a Decision-Maker

One of her first important decisions was one of her most successful. It involved Ben Bradlee, who had worked for the paper from 1948 to 1951. Impatient to get ahead, he left for a job with the U.S. Embassy in Paris and then joined the Newsweek bureau there. He later headed the magazine's Washington bureau. He persuaded Philip Graham to buy Newsweek after the death of Vincent Astor, its previous owner.

Bradlee twice turned down promotions that would have required him to move to New York. Mrs. Graham decided to find out what he did want to do and invited him to lunch at the 1925 F Street Club. He told her that he liked working for Newsweek in Washington but that "I'd give my left one to be managing editor of The Post."

Mrs. Graham was impressed, and it counted a great deal with her that Lippmann and Reston were admirers of Bradlee. After she hired him as an assistant managing editor in 1965, Bradlee quickly moved up to managing editor and then executive editor. Mrs. Graham did not know Bradlee well when they joined forces, but she admired his toughness and his eye for good stories and good reporters. One of the first things she let him do was go on a hiring spree, and the newsroom budget increased rapidly in subsequent years.

They soon became friends as well as colleagues -- there was a special chemistry between them. What made them such a formidable newspaper team was their shared desire to publish stories that had what Bradlee described as "impact."

Pentagon Papers and Watergate

The Pentagon Papers was such a story. It pitted the First Amendment of the Constitution and its guarantee of the right to publish against the government's right to protect secrets. It also involved possible consequences for The Post that threatened its financial stability.

After the New York Times obtained the Pentagon Papers and began publishing stories about them, the Nixon administration obtained a court order barring further publication pending a final higher court decision. The Post obtained its own copy of the papers on the day of that court order, and Bradlee brought reporters to his Georgetown home to begin secretly preparing stories for publication about the 7,000 pages of Vietnam war history.

Post lawyers urged Bradlee to wait until the courts decided the New York Times case. Let the Times carry the burden of the First Amendment argument against the government, they said.

But Post Co. Chairman Fritz Beebe, who joined the debate at Bradlee's home, found the editor and his staff determined to print their own Pentagon Papers stories in the next day's Post. Veteran reporter Chalmers Roberts, who was writing the first day's article, threatened to resign two weeks ahead of his planned retirement and publicly accuse The Post of cowardice if publication was delayed, and Bradlee thought others might resign as well.

Sizable financial issues also were at stake. Any criminal prosecution could imperil the company's then-imminent public offering of $35 million in stock. Moreover, if convicted of a felony under the espionage laws cited in the Times case, the company would lose the licenses for its two Florida TV stations, then worth about $100 million.

The debate lasted for hours. The decision would have to be Mrs. Graham's. With the first edition already on the presses, she received a call at her home, where she was giving a party for a retiring Washington Post business executive. In her library, a tense Mrs. Graham listened on the phone as Beebe, a trusted adviser, explained the dispute. She asked if he would support publishing that day. "I guess I wouldn't," he said, offering less than emphatic opposition and making no mention of the financial risks.

Mrs. Graham nervously asked Bradlee and those on other phone extensions why the rush -- couldn't they talk it over for a day in light of the risks to the paper? But Bradlee pressed for publication, and editorial page editor Geyelin said that "there's more than one way to destroy a newspaper."

With time running out to get a story into The Post's second edition, Graham made the difficult decision: "Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let's go. Let's publish."

The 2 1/2-week Pentagon Papers episode, which ended with victory for the Times and The Post in the U.S. Supreme Court, was a turning point for Mrs. Graham and the newspaper.

But it was to be overshadowed by the issues she began to confront a year later, after Post Managing Editor Howard Simons phoned her at home on a Saturday, June 17, 1972, to tell her, as was his habit, what stories the paper was working on. Simons told her of two strange developments the night before: A car had driven through a house where two people were making love on a sofa -- and five men had been arresting after breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building.

During the more than two years of the Watergate scandal that followed, The Post Co. was the target of unrelenting hostility from the White House and its friends.

Nixon, it was learned later, told aides, "The main thing is The Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station . . . and they're going to have to get it renewed." Suddenly, four challenges were filed against the company's Florida TV license renewals, triggering a 50 percent plunge in the price of Post stock.

The White House orchestrated intense attacks on articles by two young Post reporters -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- that began to flesh out details of White House involvement in the Watergate burglary and its coverup. Nixon's campaign manager, John Mitchell, told Bernstein that if The Post printed a story about him sharing control, while he was attorney general, of a secret fund to gather intelligence on Democrats, "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer." And a Wall Street friend with administration contacts ominously warned Mrs. Graham "not to be alone."

But Mrs. Graham again stood behind Bradlee and his staff. "By the time the story had grown to the point where the size of it dawned on us," she said, "we had already waded deeply into the stream. Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back."

After Nixon's resignation, the newspaper's role in unraveling the Watergate story produced, among other things, worldwide acclaim for Mrs. Graham and the paper, a Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service, a Robert Redford movie based on the Woodward and Bernstein book "All the President's Men" -- and discomfort as well as pleasure for the paper's publisher. With all the attention The Post was receiving, she feared that the staff might be distracted from its daily work, that the paper might become too taken with itself, "that if your profile gets too high it will be a target."

However, she prized a gift Woodward had presented to her: a $10 antique washing machine wringer, signed by editors and reporters who played key roles in the Watergate coverage. She kept the wooden wringer in her corporate office, near her desk.

Mrs. Graham also accepted and capitalized on her growing global stature. She connected local, national and international figures she met with each other, with Post and Newsweek journalists and with her friends in the Washington establishment. These relationships, often reaching across party and ideological divisions, were nurtured at the large dinners and receptions she held in her home.

By this time, Mrs. Graham had acquired glamour as well as fame and influence. The writer Truman Capote in 1966 had thrown a masked ball in her honor at the Plaza Hotel in New York -- guests wore black and white attire -- that became famous in the annals of party-giving. When friends persuaded her to pay attention to clothes, she patronized Halston, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass. Her house on R Street in Georgetown, filled with fine art, became one of Washington's leading salons. And she later bought and renovated a house on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where in the summer she entertained streams of friends.

Some of her pleasures were modest. With Meg Greenfield, who in 1979 succeeded Geyelin as editor of the editorial page, she sometimes sneaked away from the newspaper for an afternoon at the movies.

Learning the Business Side

It was harder for Mrs. Graham to make her mark as a businesswoman than as a news executive. For several years, she could not find the management team she wanted, and as executives came and went, critics described her as erratic and arbitrary. Supporters said the process showed she set high standards and insisted that they be met.

She was criticized for her missteps -- often, she thought, rightly so. What she despised was the sexist way that her mistakes, particularly with executives, were ascribed to the belief that she was a "difficult woman" to work with, one who acted on female whims. She was well aware, as she said, that male corporate heads "fired executive after executive, but no one attributed their actions to their gender."

She was no longer the person who, in the 1960s, had "adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children."

She found an influential mentor in Buffett, the investor from Omaha. Buffett, who had been a Post carrier as a teenager after his father's 1942 election to Congress, became the company's largest stockholder outside the Graham family as well as one of its directors. He brought her stacks of corporate annual reports and explained their mystifying numbers. He advised her against acquiring what he considered overpriced media properties.

Some investments were still unsuccessful. In 1974, the company bought the Trenton (N.J.) Times. In 1981, it was sold to cut losses. In 1980, it started Inside Sports, a monthly magazine. A year later, after $20 million had been spent, it too was sold.

The most difficult task, however, was transforming The Post Co. from a relatively small, family-owned business into a major modern corporation. Mrs. Graham found that control over crucial aspects of producing the newspaper was held by various craft unions, which had no incentive for increased efficiency or the introduction of new technology. If profitability was going to be increased, she had to change this.

By the early 1970s, the unions for both the printers, who set stories in type, and the pressmen, who ran the presses that printed the paper, were using slowdowns as bargaining tactics in contract negotiations in which the company sought work rule changes. Press runs often were so late that morning delivery schedules were missed. As production costs rose, profit margins decreased. Complaints from readers and advertisers proliferated.

"I was beside myself with worry," Mrs. Graham said. "Night after night, the questions were: How could we get tomorrow's paper out, and how late would it be?"

In 1973, she and her management team found during a wildcat walkout that nonunion Post workers, trained to use new computer and photocomposition technology, could put out the paper without the printers. The printers got the point: In September 1974, in return for cash buyouts and guaranteed lifetime jobs, they agreed to accept the new technology.

Negotiating a way out with the pressmen proved more difficult as a contract deadline approached at midnight on Sept. 30, 1975. At 5 a.m. on Oct. 1, Mrs. Graham was awakened by a telephone call from Mark Meagher, The Post's general manager. The Post's pressmen, he told her, had gone on a rampage. They had sabotaged the presses, set fire to one of them and beaten their night foreman, Jim Hover, who had come to Meagher's office with a bloodied head to report the news.

Thus began what Mrs. Graham termed her "business-side Watergate," a 139-day strike that climaxed a series of Post labor conflicts, ironic battles for a woman with a history of pro-labor leanings as a university student and young journalist. But however sympathetic she may have been toward labor, as a publisher she was exasperated by the powers that Post production unions had been ceded because of long-standing management fears that a strike would send readers and advertisers fleeing to the Washington Star.

When she drove to the paper early on the morning of Oct. 1, Mrs. Graham found firetrucks, police cars, flashing red lights and shouting pickets. In the ensuing days, the scene outside The Post sometimes resembled a war zone. Helicopters landed on the roof to fly pages to six plants that had agreed to print an abbreviated Post while the paper's presses were being fixed. Several employees, including editorial and commercial workers who had voted to cross the picket line because of the pressroom violence, were beaten. Verbal attacks were hurled at the publisher, with one sign at a union rally declaring, "Phil shot the wrong Graham."

Inside The Post, Mrs. Graham worked cheerfully beside the others, taking classified ads, bundling papers in the mailroom, fielding subscriber complaints and cleaning up trash in the pressroom, where newly trained employees had begun to run the presses as they were repaired. Privately, though, she was in deep despair.

"The uncertainties, the difficulties, the violence against the people who were working, the fear that the Star would use the opportunity to turn the tables, were all overwhelming," she said. "I felt desperate and secretly wondered if I might have blown the whole thing and lost the paper."

But she wouldn't waver in her determination to have management manage the pressroom and to remove any pressmen involved in the violence, two of the terms the union wouldn't accept. So the strike dragged on with no hope of a settlement, and The Post succeeded in putting out larger and larger papers without its blue-collar workers.

In December, after the pressmen overwhelmingly rejected a final contract offer, The Post began hiring and training replacement workers, a fatal blow to the union. With the new crews running the presses, the mailers' union voted in mid-February to accept a new contract, and other unions soon followed. The pressmen maintained a picket line for many more weeks, but the strike was over, as was their union's existence at The Post.

The once passive Mrs. Graham, who had long thought of herself as a "Goody Two Shoes," as always trying to please, clearly was no longer the same person.

In 1981, after years of decline, the Washington Star went out of business, and for a brief time, The Post was the only newspaper of general circulation published in Washington.

In December 1988, Business Month magazine named The Post Co. one of the five best-managed companies in the nation. Fortune magazine later chose Mrs. Graham for its Business Hall of Fame.

When she had taken control of the newspaper in 1963, The Post Co. had revenue of $84 million. In 1991, when Mrs. Graham stepped down as chief executive, revenue was $1.4 billion. The company's stock, first offered to the public in 1971, has been one of Wall Street's most spectacular performers.

In addition to The Post and Newsweek, the corporation now includes the Herald newspaper in Everett, Wash.; television stations in Detroit, Houston, San Antonio, Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville, Fla.; cable television operations in 19 states; Kaplan Inc., which provides test preparation, education and career services; Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, an electronic information company that publishes washingtonpost.com on the Internet; Post Newsweek Tech Media Group, a publisher of business periodicals; the Gazette Newspapers, publishers of community newspapers in suburban Maryland; and Robinson Terminal Warehouse Co. The Post Co. also has interests in Bowater Mersey Paper Co., the International Herald Tribune newspaper and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

Graham credited others for a good deal of the company's business success, particularly Buffett and Richard D. Simmons, former president of Dun & Bradstreet, whom she named Post Co. president in 1981. Simmons was the seasoned chief operating officer Graham had long been seeking, a partner to whom she gave free rein in managing the company and who made shrewd decisions with her on what and what not to acquire. A Merrill Lynch analyst termed Simmons's tenure "one of the best 10 years that anybody has seen in any company and in any stock."

While Graham cited many other people, as well as sheer luck, for playing vital roles in the company's success, the driving force behind it all was her passionate devotion to the company. "I loved my job, I loved the paper, I loved the whole company," she said.

She remained active in the company and the community after her retirement, hosting newly elected Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at her home, actively participating in interviews that Post and Newsweek editors and reporters had with newsmakers in Washington and New York, leading delegations of editors and reporters on visits to heads of state overseas, lending her presence to charitable events throughout the country and working on such local matters as improving public schools.

Her dinner parties and receptions were more than just glittering social occasions. "She was a believer in the round table," former secretary of state Shultz said yesterday. "She was a convener. She stimulated conversation and explored ideas. She had an impact because she brought together people who had something to say. She was a big influence in Washington in part because of that."

The Princess of Wales visited Mrs. Graham in Washington on several occasions during the period when Diana was struggling through a divorce from Britain's Prince Charles. Diana and Mrs. Graham joined with fashion editor Anna Wintour, then of Vogue magazine, to host a 1996 charity dinner in Washington that raised about $1 million for breast cancer research. Praising Diana after she died in a 1997 car accident, Mrs. Graham said the princess's social activism "was from her heart. . . . I just admired and liked her a whole lot."

Mrs. Graham made frequent public speeches, particularly on news media issues on which she was widely recognized as an authority, ranging from the roles of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence to the impact of the Internet on the news. Characteristically, she prepared thoroughly for her speeches, interviewing other experts on their subjects at The Post, Newsweek and elsewhere, just as she had done much of the painstaking research for her autobiography.

Before her death, Mrs. Graham had been working on a possible new book, an anthology of stories and essays about Washington from 1917 -- when she was born and her father moved to Washington -- to the present. Among the sources being considered was columnist Joseph Alsop's memoir about dining out in Washington. Mrs. Graham had written some of the introductory material for pieces she was considering even though she was not certain the book would work out.

It was an extraordinary journey, from homemaker to head of one of the world's leading news and publishing companies to one of the best-known and most influential women in the world. All along the way, her heart remained in The Washington Post, of which she once said:

"When my husband died, I had three choices. I could sell it. I could find somebody else to run it. Or I could go to work. And that was no choice at all."

Mrs. Graham is survived by her son Donald E. Graham, The Post's chairman and CEO; her daughter, Lally Weymouth, a Post and Newsweek journalist, of New York; her son William Graham, an investor, of Los Angeles; her son Stephen Graham, a producer, philanthropist and doctoral student of English literature, of New York; 10 grandchildren; a great-grandchild; and a sister, Ruth M. Epstein of Bronxville, N.Y.

The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at Washington National Cathedral.

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