Here's to You, Mrs. Harrison

Many things appear on the auction block: priceless Van Gogh's, Ming dynasty vases, perhaps even a 1960's "I Dream of Jeannie" lunchbox. But a newspaper? That's what happened to one poor bloke who went bankrupt and had to sell The Washington Post in the 20th century. Katherine (Kay) Harrison's father bought it for a steal--$800,000 and some change; almost as good a deal as the settlers who bought Manhattan for $24.

Last week, publishing lost one of the foremost pioneers in its field, and perhaps one of the greatest women in the last century--Kay Harrison, the force behind one of the most influential papers in America, if not the world. The woman who was raised and made to think that she was inept in a man's world, Kay taught the world of media a thing or two when she stuck by her guns and printed the controversial and highly secretive Pentagon papers in the early 1970s, shortly followed by the Watergate scandal backed by the infamous "Deep Throat." Both stories had given other papers pause, but Harrison thought the news was crucial to her American readers.

What is the most amazing about Ms. Harrison is that through it all--her father giving the reins of the paper to her husband since "a man shouldn't have to work for his wife" and her husband being a dastardly adulterer--she came out the other side a little singed but like a phoenix reborn.

Friend of Henry Kissinger and Truman Capote, confidant to many Washington politicos, Ms. Harrison most definitely left her mark on the world.

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