Meanwhile, Weymouth has also been focusing on the kind of less exalted newsroom-personnel issues that publishers have traditionally avoided. It didn’t take her long, in a series of informal one-on-ones with reporters and editors, to pick up on morale problems among the national news staff. Two and a half months after Weymouth became publisher, the section’s assistant managing editor, Susan Glasser, was removed from that position and given another one outside the newsroom, working for Don Graham on special projects. Glasser’s tense relationship with many of her reporters was already under scrutiny from her bosses. (Glasser had no comment.) Yet there’s little question that Weymouth weighed in with her concerns, which likely accelerated Glasser’s reassignment and prompted embarrassing coverage from rival news outlets, notably a detailed story about the episode in the New York Times. “It’s shocking to me,” Weymouth says about the press coverage, dismissing it as gossip but declining to comment on her role. “As publisher, I’m going to take a lot of heat for almost anything I do. Some people are going to like it and some people are going to be horrified by it.”

Weymouth joined the Post in the fall of 1996 as an in-house counsel, from the blue-chip Washington law firm Williams & Connolly. (I met her soon after she arrived at the paper—I was a reporter there from 1980 to 2003—when she was assigned to vet one of my stories. She advised me to delete some potentially libelous material. We haggled; she won.) After graduating from Harvard College and Stanford Law School—with a brief interlude at Oxford’s Wadham College, reading English literature and rowing on the Thames—she had clerked for a couple of judges in San Francisco, where she planned to make her home. But she couldn’t find suitable employment.

“I wanted to stay in California, but I graduated during a recession and couldn’t get a job in California,” she tells me over coffee at the Madison Hotel, across the street from the Post building. She’s dressed casually, in corduroy trousers, a Gap shirt, and a jacket from a New York street vendor; in a few hours, she’s taking a crew of editors to a Washington Nationals baseball game.

Moving to the Post after three years as an associate at Williams & Connolly, Weymouth spent the subsequent 11 years in a variety of positions on the paper’s business side—associate counsel to Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, which included the paper’s website, Washingtonpost.com; liaison between the often fractious advertising teams of the website and the newspaper; director of help-wanted advertising; and finally vice president of the entire advertising department, where she directed a sales force of 450. All were part of the grooming process. During that time, she presided over declining ad revenue, but Don was still impressed with her performance: “I have long and deep relationships in that department, and I knew how well people were reacting to her, and I knew how many ideas she had. I knew from several jobs ago how really smart she is about picking people.”

Katharine Graham was pleased when Weymouth finally joined the family business. “She was optimistic but uttered some cautionary words to the effect that Katharine would have to prove herself on the job, which would be true of any Graham at the Post,” says Mrs. Graham’s youngest son, Stephen, another of Weymouth’s uncles. Granddaughter and grandmother were very close; when I ran into them occasionally at Washington parties, they were clearly enjoying each other’s company. “I would often end up with nothing planned on Friday night, and we would have dinner in front of the TV and watch Jim Lehrer,” Weymouth says. “I would tell her about my dating life, and she would be amused.”

In July 1998, she married attorney Richard Scully; her wedding gown was designed by family friend Oscar de la Renta, and among the guests were Warren Buffett, Charles Schumer, Alan Greenspan, and Andrea Mitchell. Weymouth changed her surname to Scully but changed it back again when she and Scully divorced six years later.

Weymouth is herself a child of divorce. Her mother, Newsweek senior editor Lally Weymouth, who is Don’s older sister, and father, Yann Weymouth, a prominent architect, separated when Katharine was five. She grew up with her younger sister, Pamela (now a writer and teacher in California), on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, attending the posh Brearley School for girls while studying at George Balanchine’s famed School of American Ballet. “Ballet taught me discipline,” Weymouth says. “If I wanted to dance three hours a night, I had to make sure to deal with everything else, getting my homework done. I had a little schedule written out, and I didn’t like people to mess with it.”

Yann Weymouth, older brother of former Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth, recalls a little girl who “would worry about whether she had completed all her tasks, whether she had done all she needed to do in school, worried about doing her homework and doing it right.” The formidable Lally, known for her incisive interviews with world leaders, declined to be interviewed herself. “I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less,” she quipped, half in jest but wholly in earnest.