Published May 3, 2018

My desire to see “The Post” owed mostly to my long career in newspapers, but motivations are often complex, and that was true about my interest in this movie. A believer in the role that newspapers have as watchdog, I felt an extra pull to view Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. Those characters, the editor and the publisher of The Washington Post at the time of the controversial public disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, have been well known to me for decades.

Still in my first year of living as a woman since coming out in October as transgender, I did not expect “The Post” to stir deeper feelings in me about womanhood, feminism and related issues. Their resonance for me upon viewing the film, along with the timeliness of the broad-brush political themes, solidified it as one of my top five newspaper movies of all time.

On the night when Graham, known to friends as Kay, decides to publish the contents of the classified government report about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Bradlee tells his wife, Tony, of the decision. Tony Bradlee (Sarah Paulson) applauds Graham’s bravery, and her husband replies that there are a lot of brave people involved in the impending publication of the material. Tony has something to say about that.

“You’re very brave,” she whispers, before speaking more forcefully, “but Kay, Kay’s in a position she never thought she’d be in, a position I’m sure plenty of people didn’t think she should have.”

Graham assumed the role of de facto publisher of the paper in 1963 after her husband’s suicide. Eight years later, whether to publish the Pentagon Papers became the most difficult decision of her career. In 1971, Katharine Graham was a notable exception as the first female publisher of a major U.S. newspaper and someone who would become a major player in the sphere of American politics.

Speaking as a woman, Tony Bradlee understood, better than her husband could, the context in which the Pentagon Papers fell into Graham’s lap.

And when you’re told time and time again that you’re not good enough, that your opinion doesn’t matter as much, when they don’t just look past you — when to them, you’re not even there — when that’s been your reality for so long, it’s hard not to let yourself think it’s true. So to make this decision, to risk her fortune and the company that’s been her entire life, well, I think that’s brave.

Later, talking with her daughter, Graham is clearly pondering that context after making her decision known to those who fought to convince her not to publish the government secrets.

You know that quote, the quote, ‘A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs — it’s not done well, and you’re surprised to see it’s done at all.’ Samuel Johnson.”

When Katharine Graham’s daughter calls Samuel Johnson’s quote “nonsense,” Katharine assures her that such thinking did not seem so out of place decades earlier.

Having ascended to the role of publisher before the women’s liberation movement began in the U.S., but facing the decision about the Pentagon Papers as the movement was rapidly growing and forcing change, Graham knew how things had become different than they’d been earlier in her life. Her father, Eugene Meyer, who had once been chairman of the Federal Reserve, was the publisher of The Washington Post for years before handing off the responsibility to his son-in-law, Philip Graham — Katharine’s husband — and not to her.

Kay Graham has a different point of view about the Samuel Johnson quote than her daughter does.

“That’s the way we all thought then,” she says. “You know, I was never supposed to be in this job.”

♦

The lump in my throat and the surge of emotion I felt watching “The Post” — during the winter and again this week — were not unexpected. I’d had similar reactions to other films about journalism, not to mention at dramatic moments during my newspaper career. But there was something more that “The Post” stirred up in me.

I did not expect the movie to tug on feminist heartstrings. And while I could not, as someone who presented as male for decades, relate to everything Tony Bradlee and Katharine Graham alluded to about being a woman in a man’s world, I had my own version of their quotes that are now stuck in my head. Plus, being old enough to remember much of the ’60s and all of the ’70s, I was not surprised by their reflections.

Since the movie’s release in December, a lot of words — covering a spectrum of perspectives —  have been written about “The Post” as a feminist movie. My purpose in writing this piece was not to weigh in on that debate, nor to champion the movie (which has its flaws), but instead to finally put into words how powerful those quotes were for me to hear — especially Tony Bradlee’s. They added depth and meaning to a movie that already had plenty of both for me.

For me, the story makes Katharine Graham another in a series of Wonder Woman characters during a time when so many are finally coming to the big, medium and small screen. It was wonderful to see her opinion matter more than anyone else’s in the room.