Russ Wiggins’ death Sunday leaves a large hole, so great was his embracing personality and a life lived vigorously until five months ago, when his brave heart started to weaken and then gave out.

I feel grateful to Russ because he quite literally created The Washington Post we know today. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate received so much attention that most people don’t realize what Russ accomplished.

When my father purchased The Washington Post in 1933, it was the fifth newspaper in a five-newspaper town. He set out to improve The Washington Post and make it viable because he believed Washington deserved a top-quality morning newspaper. However, it was difficult to get people to come to work for a paper most people assumed would fail. My father had found a good, old-fashioned, blood-and-guts editor, who began to make some progress. But clearly more was needed.

When my husband, Phil Graham, became publisher after the war, he and my father tried to find a serious editor and leader for the future. They heard of Russ Wiggins, who had been editor of the paper in St. Paul, Minn., where he’d made quite an impression. When some people accused its owner-publisher of being dependent on Russ, the man had walked into the newsroom and summarily fired Russ.

My father and Phil asked Russ to come to The Washington Post, but he elected instead to go to The New York Times as assistant to the publisher. A year later they went back and persuaded Russ to change his mind. He arrived in 1947 and stayed for 21 years.

Russ immediately made several changes that had a significant impact on the quality and integrity of the paper. First, he eliminated taking favors – free tickets for sports reporters, free admissions to theaters for critics and parking tickets fixed by police reporters for people all over the building. This sounds elementary, but in those days it was done everywhere.

One of Russ’ most heroic accomplishments was to lead the way in civil rights. He stopped the use of irrelevant racial descriptions. He printed the first picture of an African-American bride. He started hiring minority reporters. This took courage in those days.

Despite the paper’s precarious financial situation, Russ and Phil together began to assemble a fine staff – attracted by Russ’ own professional standards and hard work. He set the example. He worked seven days a week, when necessary, and rarely took vacations.

Over the years, Russ stood up to many threats to the paper, and he and Phil overcame many obstacles. Not the least was my mother, whose correct but inflammatory political passions encouraged charges of red-baiting. As we grew more successful, Russ built up a national and foreign staff.

His ambition for the paper, Russ told me, “was unachievable. But how do you lift an institution except with unachievable ideals? If your ideals are so low you can achieve them, you ought to adjust them,” he said.

When my husband became mentally ill with manic depression, Russ had to withstand Phil’s destructive impulses. When Phil died, Russ held the staff together and encouraged my coming to work. Then he had to teach me how to understand editorial and news policy, which didn’t happen overnight. Russ was very patient.

One of the first major issues we confronted was the Vietnam war. Russ was a thoughtful and sensitive hawk; he believed the country’s reputation was at stake if we abandoned our allies. At one point, President Johnson said one of Russ’ editorials was worth two divisions. Russ was never personally hostile about issues. This enabled us to get through this difficult period.

At all times, Russ was a voracious and learned reader. He often would thrust books at all of us, tell us we had to read them, and check in a day or two to see if we had finished. Just a few years ago, Russ informed me in a letter that he had just completed Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s autobiography, was up to Volume 4 of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and also had read the 35,000-word Unabomber manifesto. It was repetitious, Russ commented.

Russ set a deadline for himself to retire at 65. A few months before, President Johnson nominated him as ambassador to the United Nations. Russ insisted on leaving without much ceremony.

Then Russ did the most admirable thing of all: He went to Ellsworth, Maine, where he had vacationed, bought the paper there and built it up into one of the most distinguished small papers in the country. He wrote a poem for it every week. And he never lost his creative editorial spirit. To point out the deficiencies of the post office, for instance, he mailed a letter to Ellsworth from a neighboring town and had two oxen pull a cart that beat the letter.

Even after he’d left The Washington Post, Russ remained one of our most interested readers and staunchest supporters. Shortly after the Janet Cooke story erupted, Russ came to a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where we were being drubbed right and left. With his usual wry humor, Russ said, “I feel great about the state of the American press. Every editor I saw assured me this couldn’t have happened at his paper.”

Russ lived his entire life according to the highest intellectual and moral standards, with great humor and compassion for others, and with panache. He was thoughtful – I would even say brilliant. The words he evokes are “excellence” and “integrity.” He had fun and he gave it to others. He was a teacher and a friend to the very end.

Katharine Graham is chairman of The Washington Post’s Executive Committee.