It began with a bankruptcy sale in 1933, when a Republican businessman and presidential confidant reinvented himself as a newspaper publisher in the nation's capital. It ended with an announcement that his descendants had sold the newspaper to an Internet wizard who lives in the Washington on the other side of the country.
In between, The Washington Post and the family collectively known as the Grahams became inseparable, indistinguishable. They were journalism royalty known around the world but remained as distinctly Washington as the cop on the beat. Which one of them was.
From Eugene Meyer to Philip Graham to Katharine Graham to Donald Graham to Katharine Weymouth, it was always a question of when power would shift from one generation to the next, not whether it would.