{"id":34325,"date":"2014-10-21T21:35:12","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T01:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=34325"},"modified":"2014-10-21T22:02:14","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T02:02:14","slug":"ben-bradlee-the-crusading-editor-of-washington-postwho-directed-coverage-of-watergate-scandal-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=34325","title":{"rendered":"Ben Bradlee the Crusading Editor of “Washington Post” who Directed Coverage of Watergate Scandal dies at 93."},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy <\/p>\n

MARILYN BERGEROCT & Ashley Southall <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Benjamin<\/a>

Benjamin Crowninshield “Ben” Bradlee (August 26, 1921 \u2013 October 21, 2014)<\/p><\/div>\n

Ben Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post\u2019s exposure of the Watergate scandal that led to the fall of President Richard M. Nixon and that stamped him in American culture as the quintessential newspaper editor of his era \u2014 gruff, charming and tenacious \u2014 died on Tuesday. He was 93.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee died at home of natural causes, The Post reported.<\/p>\n

With full backing from his publisher, Katharine Graham, Mr. Bradlee led The Post into the first rank of American newspapers, courting controversy and giving it standing as a thorn in the side of Washington officials.<\/p>\n

When government officials called to complain, Mr. Bradlee acted as a buffer between them and his staff. <\/p>\n

\u201cJust get it right,\u201d he would tell his reporters. Most of the time they did, but there were mistakes, one so big that the paper had to return a Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee \u2014 \u201cthis last of the lion-king newspaper editors,\u201d as Phil Bronstein, a former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, described him \u2014 could be classy or profane, an energetic figure with a boxer\u2019s nose who almost invariably dressed in a white-collared, bold-striped Turnbull & Asser shirt, the sleeves rolled up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ben Bradlee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2013 by President Obama, who spoke about Mr. Bradlee\u2019s legacy and his impact on journalism.<\/p>\n

When not prowling the newsroom like a restless coach, encouraging his handpicked reporters and editors, he sat behind a glass office wall that afforded him a view of them and they a view of him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would follow this man over any hill, into any battle, no matter what lay ahead,\u201d his successor, Leonard Downie Jr., once said.<\/p>\n

His rise at The Post was swift. A former Newsweek reporter, as well as neighbor and friend of John F. Kennedy\u2019s, Mr. Bradlee rejoined the paper as deputy managing editor in 1965 (he worked there for a few years as a reporter early in his career). <\/p>\n

Within three months he was named managing editor, the second in command; within three years he was executive editor.<\/p>\n

The Post as he had found it was a sleepy competitor to The Evening Star and The Washington Daily News, and he began invigorating it. He transformed the \u201cwomen\u2019s\u201d section into Style, a brash and gossipy overview of Washington mores.<\/p>\n

He started building up the staff, determined \u201cthat a Washington Post reporter would be the best in town on every beat,\u201d as he wrote in a 1995 memoir, \u201cA Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.\u201d He added, \u201cWe had a long way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

How long became painfully clear to him in June 1971, when The Post was scooped by The New York Times on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of United States involvement in Vietnam. <\/p>\n

After The Times printed excerpts for three days, a federal court enjoined it from publishing any more, arguing that publication would irreparably harm the nation. The Post, meanwhile, had obtained its own copy of the papers and prepared to publish.<\/p>\n

But The Post was on the verge of a $35 million stock offering, and publishing could have scuttled the deal. At the same time, Mr. Bradlee was under pressure from reporters threatening to quit if he caved in. It was up to Mrs. Graham to choose. She decided to publish.<\/p>\n

Cementing a Reputation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The government tried to enjoin The Post from publishing, just as it had The Times, but the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of both papers. More than anything else, Mr. Bradlee recalled, the publication of the Pentagon Papers \u201cforged forever between the Grahams and the newsroom a sense of confidence within The Post, a sense of mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watergate consolidated The Post\u2019s reputation as a crusading newspaper. A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972 \u2014 the White House soon characterized it as a \u201cthird-rate burglary\u201d \u2014 caught the attention of two young reporters on the metropolitan staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Soon they were working the phones, wearing out shoe leather and putting two and two together.<\/p>\n

With the help of others on the staff and the support of Mr. Bradlee and his editors \u2014 and Mrs. Graham \u2014 they uncovered a political scandal involving secret funds, espionage, sabotage, dirty tricks and illegal wiretapping. Along the way they withstood repeated denials by the White House, threats from the attorney general (who ended up in prison) and the uncomfortable feeling of being alone on the story of the century.<\/p>\n

When the trail of crimes and shenanigans led directly to the White House, Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974. The tapes that he himself had made of conversations in the Oval Office confirmed what The Post had been reporting. Mrs. Graham wrote to Mr. Bradlee in her Christmas letter that year, \u201cWe were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee\u2019s Post and Woodward and Bernstein, as the two became known, captured the popular imagination. Their exploits seemed straight out of a Hollywood movie: two young reporters boldly taking on the White House in pursuit of the truth, their spines steeled by a courageous editor.<\/p>\n

The story, of course, became the basis of a best seller, \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d by Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein, and the book did become, in 1976, a Hollywood box-office hit. Jason Robards Jr. played Mr. Bradlee and won an Oscar for his performance.<\/p>\n

In their book, describing meetings in Mr. Bradlee\u2019s office, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein recalled how Mr. Bradlee would pick up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball and toss it at a small hoop attached to a window.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe gesture was indicative both of the editor\u2019s short attention span and of a studied informality,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThere was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee.\u201d<\/p>\n

They observed that double-edged manner in Washington society, sometimes seeing it displayed in one swoop, as when Mr. Bradlee would \u201cgrind his cigarettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBradlee,\u201d they added, \u201cwas one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Watergate, journalism schools filled up with would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins, and the business of journalism changed, taking on an even tougher hide of skepticism than the one that formed during the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter how many spin doctors were provided by no matter how many sides of how many arguments,\u201d Mr. Bradlee wrote, \u201cfrom Watergate on, I started looking for the truth after hearing the official version of a truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee had been consumed by Watergate, spending most of his waking hours at The Post, when he started receiving what he called anonymous \u201cmash notes.\u201d <\/p>\n

His second marriage, to the former Antoinette Pinchot, was cooling, and the flirtation intrigued him. In 1973, Sally Quinn, an irreverent Style reporter, let him know that she was his secret admirer.<\/p>\n

After Mr. Bradlee\u2019s divorce, a third marriage was a questionable proposition. He said he once told a reporter that he would marry Ms. Quinn when the Catholic Church elected a Polish pope. On Oct. 16, 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland became pope; four days later, the couple were married.<\/p>\n

Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee died in November 2011.<\/p>\n

The Post\u2019s Watergate coverage won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service. It was one of 18 Pulitzers The Post received during Mr. Bradlee\u2019s tenure. (It had won only a handful before then.) The total would have been 19 if The Post had not been compelled to return one awarded to a young reporter, Janet Cooke, for an article, titled \u201cJimmy\u2019s World,\u201d about an 8-year-old drug addict whose heroin supplier was his mother\u2019s live-in lover. Only after she was given the prize was it discovered that she had fabricated the story \u2014 and lied about her credentials when she was hired.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee offered to resign over the affair but received the same support from Mrs. Graham\u2019s son Donald, who had become the publisher, as he had received from Mrs. Graham during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate crises.<\/p>\n

By the time of the Janet Cooke episode, Mr. Bradlee had weathered strikes by members of the Newspaper Guild, many of them his friends, and the pressmen, who had vandalized the pressroom. During those strikes he served as a reporter, mailroom clerk and general lifter of spirits.<\/p>\n

He had also endured libel suits and government efforts \u2014 unsuccessful ones \u2014 to stop The Post from publishing articles on the ground of national security. In one case even his own friends pressured him, to no avail, to a kill a story.<\/p>\n

The article, appearing on the cover of the Style section on Sept. 19, 1986, had to do with the discovery that the diplomat W. Averell Harriman had not, in fact, been buried at the time of his funeral, on July 29 \u2014 and that his final resting place would not, as had been widely reported, be next to that of his second wife, Marie, on the Harriman estate, north of New York City. <\/p>\n

Rather, The Post revealed, on the instructions of Pamela Harriman, Mr. Harriman\u2019s third wife and widow, his remains had been placed in a crypt while a permanent lakeside burial site was being prepared three miles away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe passage of time,\u201d Mr. Bradlee wrote, \u201chas done nothing to dim my enthusiasm for this story. No one should be able to perpetrate a fraud on the public and escape the modest consequences.\u201d <\/p>\n

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston on Aug. 26, 1921, the second son of Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr. and Josephine de Gersdorff Bradlee. In a family that moved from 211 Beacon Street to 295 Beacon Street to 267 Beacon Street and finally to 280 Beacon Street, his boyhood, as he wrote, was \u201cnot adventuresome.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his brother, Freddy, and a sister, Constance, he learned French, took piano lessons and went to the symphony and the opera. He was at St. Mark\u2019s School when he was stricken with polio during an epidemic. But his self-confidence was undiminished: He exercised rigorously at home, and when he returned to school the next fall he had noticeably strong arms and chest and could walk without limping.<\/p>\n

Continuing a family tradition that dated to 1795, he attended Harvard, where he joined the Naval R.O.T.C. As a sophomore he was one of 268 young Harvard men, including John F. Kennedy, chosen, as \u201cwell adjusted,\u201d to participate in the now celebrated Grant longitudinal study, which tracked their lives over the years.<\/p>\n

On Aug. 8, 1942, Mr. Bradlee graduated (\u201cby the skin of his teeth,\u201d he wrote of himself) as a Greek-English major, was commissioned an ensign and married Jean Saltonstall \u2014 all in all, a busy day.<\/p>\n

A month later, Mr. Bradlee shipped out to the Pacific on the destroyer Philip and saw combat for two years. During the last year of World War II he helped other destroyers run shipboard information centers.<\/p>\n

After the war, Mr. Bradlee and a group of friends started The New Hampshire Sunday News, a weekly. For a time he thought \u201cvery, very, very seriously\u201d about entering politics, he said in 1960. When the paper was sold, he snagged his first job at The Washington Post, in 1948.<\/p>\n

One Saturday, as he took a tour of the White House, a delegation of French officials was visiting President Harry S. Truman and no translator could be found. Mr. Bradlee filled in.<\/p>\n

In 1951 he was offered the job of press attach\u00e9 in Paris and left for France with his wife and his young son, Benjamin Jr. From the embassy job he moved on to Newsweek in 1954, as European correspondent based in Paris.<\/p>\n

His work was thriving, but his marriage was falling apart and finally disintegrated when he met Antoinette Pinchot Pittman, known as Tony. They were married in 1957. A year later, Mr. Bradlee took up his post as the low man in Newsweek\u2019s Washington bureau.<\/p>\n

He also took up residence on N Street in Georgetown, in a house next door to Kennedy, then a young senator from Massachusetts. Thus began a rewarding and sometimes uneasy friendship. (The two had not been close at Harvard.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee fell under pressure to separate what information he learned as a Kennedy intimate from what he could use as a reporter. But his inside track on the Kennedy campaign for the White House in 1960 elevated him from rookie status at Newsweek. He later said Kennedy had been aware that he was keeping notes of their encounters, which Mr. Bradlee published in 1975 in the not-always-flattering book \u201cConversations With Kennedy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As journalism changed and private lives became fair game, Mr. Bradlee had to answer criticism that he never reported on what he later conceded was Kennedy\u2019s proclivity to jump \u201ccasually from bed to bed with a wide variety of women.\u201d But he insisted in his memoir that he knew nothing of Kennedy\u2019s sex life at the time, adding, \u201cI am appalled by the details that have emerged.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Lucrative Idea<\/strong><\/p>\n

Concerned about rumors that Newsweek was going to be sold, Mr. Bradlee, in a moment of brashness, decided late one night to call Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, with an urgent message: Buy Newsweek.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the best telephone call I ever made \u2014 the luckiest, most productive, most exciting,\u201d he later wrote.<\/p>\n

Mr. Graham saw Mr. Bradlee that night, and they talked until dawn. On March 9, 1961, The Post acquired Newsweek, and Mr. Bradlee, soon to become the magazine\u2019s Washington bureau chief, was rewarded with enough Post stock, as a finder\u2019s fee, to live as a wealthy man.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee continued his friendship with Kennedy and the Kennedy clan. When the president was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Bradlee was among the friends invited to receive the first lady in Washington.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no more haunting sight in all the history I\u2019ve observed,\u201d he wrote in his memoir, \u201cthan Jackie Kennedy, walking slowly, unsteadily into those hospital rooms, her pink suit stained with her husband\u2019s blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Months before Kennedy\u2019s death, Philip Graham committed suicide, leaving his widow, Katharine, in charge of the family business. Two years later she was still finding her way at a newspaper that had been suffering losses of $1 million a year when she proposed that Mr. Bradlee join The Post as a deputy managing editor. The two formed a lasting bond.<\/p>\n

Their relationship came under scrutiny in a 2012 biography by Jeff Himmelman, a journalist and former research assistant to Mr. Woodward. (Mr. Himmelman had helped Quinn Bradlee write \u201cA Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures,\u201d a 2009 memoir about his coping with velo-cardio-facial syndrome, a genetic disorder.)<\/p>\n

The book, \u201cYours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee,\u201d though praised in reviews, was denounced by many Bradlee associates, including Mr. Woodward, as a betrayal. The book suggests that Mr. Bradlee had questioned Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein\u2019s reporting during Watergate. And through letters and interviews it reveals intimate details of Mr. Bradlee\u2019s family life, including an assertion by Mr. Bradlee that he and Mrs. Graham, who died in 2001, had had a mutual romantic interest that was never acted on.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradlee remained with the paper for 26 years, stepping down in 1991 at age 70. Named vice president at large, he had an office at The Post and became what he called \u201ca stop on the tour\u201d for new reporters.<\/p>\n

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country\u2019s highest civilian honor, in 2013.<\/p>\n

In his memoir he confessed to having no overarching prescriptions for the practice of journalism. He wrote that he knew of nothing more sophisticated than the motto of one of his grade-school teachers: \u201cOur best today; better tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPut out the best, most honest newspaper you can today,\u201d he said, \u201cand put out a better one the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Courtesy: New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By MARILYN BERGEROCT & Ashley Southall Ben Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post\u2019s exposure of the Watergate scandal that led to the fall of President Richard M. Nixon and that stamped him in American culture as the quintessential newspaper editor of his era \u2014 gruff, charming and tenacious \u2014 died on Tuesday. He was …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Ben Bradlee the Crusading Editor of “Washington Post” who Directed Coverage of Watergate Scandal dies at 93.’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34325"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34329,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34325\/revisions\/34329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}