She is quoted as telling a reporter, “I think what I learned from my mother was a basic lesson of humor, which is, if you slip on a banana peel, people will laugh at you; but if you tell people you slipped, it’s your story—you are in fact the heroine of slipping on the banana peel.”
Preach it, sister.
Four
Ben
Three things cannot long stay hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
—Buddha
My mother died of heart disease in late August of 1989. Like anyone who loses a loved one after a long illness, I felt many things at once. Guilty relief, overwhelming grief, and mounting anxiety about a future without her. And again I suddenly felt a bit adrift professionally. Though Alice Mayhew had been sending me occasional editing projects after Loyalties hit the bookstores, I didn’t have a long-term, full-time gig and now, at age twenty-nine, I was without a mother, a family of my own, or a steady job, and that made me feel vulnerable.
Shortly after my mother’s funeral in Chicago, I returned to D.C., and Woodward and Elsa invited me over to try to cheer me up.
We were sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner, where we had shared countless meals together, when Woodward put down his fork and grinned.
“Ben wants to hire you,” he said.
“Ben who?”
I thought maybe he meant Ben Weiser, a reporter then on Woodward’s investigative unit (who now writes for the New York Times). Perhaps that Ben needed a researcher.
“Ben Bradlee,” Woodward said, laughing, Elsa joining in.
He said Ben was in the process of signing a deal with Alice Mayhew and needed a researcher to help him produce an autobiography. I looked at Woodward in disbelief. Ben was perhaps the most famous newspaper editor in modern times, and his book would chronicle a life that included a close friendship with President John F. Kennedy, his role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and, most notably, his legendary reign as editor of the Post during Watergate, famously immortalized by Hollywood in the movie version of All the President’s Men. I had seen Ben strutting around the newsroom like a proud rooster for several years, but my only interactions with him had been as a conduit to Woodward. I would have been shocked if he actually knew my name, much less wanted to hire me, as Woodward was claiming.
I knew if Woodward was being more precise, he would have said, Ben needs a researcher, doesn’t want the hassle of interviewing candidates, and I told him he should hire you. He added that Ben’s secretary was expecting my call.
Within a few days, I found myself having lunch with Ben at the McPherson Grill, a nearby restaurant he frequented when he didn’t just go down to the Post cafeteria, grab a tray, and go through the chow line like the rest of us.
I was nervous because this was the first time my exchanges with Ben would go beyond him asking me about Woodward’s whereabouts and me supplying that information. This meeting was about me. Or at least it was about me in relationship to Ben rather than in relationship to Woodward. So we were having an actual conversation. Ben Bradlee and me (!).
Inside I was giddy. Outside, I was monosyllabic, petrified of saying something deal-breakingly stupid. By this time I had met countless famous people, through covering parties for the Style section and in the course of working for Woodward, then Bernstein. But Ben was in another league. For starters, he was movie star handsome; he was more handsome than Jason Robards, the movie star who had played him on the big screen. And, at age sixty-eight, he still had it going on, as my students would say. He had a kind of “animal magnetism,” which had been noted in countless profiles about him over the years.
But beyond his physical appearance, or maybe in a complementary sense, there was something intangibly and incredibly compelling about Ben. He had made his name in Washington but was not a product of the place. He had the razzle-dazzle of Hollywood and the sophistication of New York and the pedigree of Boston. And above all else, he never seemed to depend on anyone else for his happiness, his buoyant spirit powered by a self-generating energy.
Even a charmed life such as his had its share of challenges and disappointments, but I never saw him break down or even flinch, nor was there any evidence as such in his very public life. He possessed a true resilience that, more than anything else, I would marvel at and try to understand as I got to know him.
But right then, during this conversation, Ben was talking and I was nodding, like one of those bobblehead dogs in a car’s rear window. I had gone from monosyllabic to mute, and I couldn’t stop my mind from replaying that newsroom scene in the movie All the President’s Men, when Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee talk about Deep Throat.
“How much can you tell me about Deep Throat?” Bradlee asks them.
“How much do you need to know?” Woodward responds.
“Do you trust him?” Bradlee says.
“Yeah,” Woodward replies.
“I can’t do the reporting for my reporters, which means I have to trust them. And I hate trusting anybody,” Bradlee says, then pauses. “Run that baby.”
I had to shake myself out of it and focus and also try to exhibit something resembling a personality. You’re blowing it, Barbara, I told myself. Speak now or forever kick yourself.
I knew I had better ask a question so I asked him about his project—What did he need a researcher to research? He said he had been thinking for several years about writing a book he would call How to Read a Newspaper. He would give his insider’s view of the news. He told me he was about to sign a two-book deal for that book and also for his autobiography. He rolled his eyes when he said the word autobiography and mumbled something about Sally Quinn, his wife, and Alice Mayhew thinking this was a good idea. He would write the autobiography first, he speculated, because that was the book the publishers would be interested in. He looked at me expectantly.
This conversation wasn’t exactly a job interview, so its rhythm didn’t follow any logical progression or provide any obvious prompts. Was this the moment I was supposed to make my pitch? Was I supposed to sell myself? I just started to talk, describing how I had worked with Woodward, and then Bernstein. I told him that every book takes on a life of its own (I had heard Woodward say this on occasion, and it sounded good to me). I said we would figure out a process that would accommodate his schedule and work habits, and I would be there to facilitate it all. He could worry about the writing, and I would take care of the research and organization and preliminary editing.
The waiter removed our dishes and served coffee.
“So when can you start?” he said, looking at me intently.
He seemed almost nervous when he said it, though I knew enough to know that I couldn’t make Ben Bradlee nervous. If it was tentativeness I detected, it was nothing more than the self-realization that hiring a researcher was a tangible commitment to moving forward with the book rather than just talking about it.
I looked at my watch. “How about in an hour?”
Ben laughed. He told me to call his secretary, and we would work out details like the “money thing.” I should come over to his house in Georgetown and meet Sally, and I could look through his files and get acclimated. He explained that before he could start writing he needed me to organize and make sense of all the papers and other things he had accumulated over the course of his larger-than-life life. And there would be people to interview, to fill in memory gaps or information that other people knew that pertained to his life but that hadn’t been shared with him previously.
Not long after that meeting, I showed up early one morning, as instructed, at the Bradlee mansion, which takes up about half a square block in Georgetown and was once owned and occupied by Robert Todd Lincoln. Standing on the front porch, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I was in the right place because there was a mezuzah, a piece of parchment with Torah verses inside a decorative case, on the door frame.
Finally, I sucked it up and pressed the buzzer. The door swung open, and there was Ben, in one of his signature Turnb
ull & Asser shirts. He saw my eyes dart back and forth between his face and the mezuzah and he laughed. “You’re in the right place. Buchwald gave it to me.” He was referring to Art Buchwald, whose humor column ran in Style. Buchwald, I would learn, held a special place in Ben’s heart.
Ben led me into the foyer. I expected elegance, but what I saw was opulence, with a Gone With the Wind sweeping stairway and grand ceilings that made me feel like I had wandered into Architectural Digest. Ben introduced me to Sally, who was sitting at the dining room table, drinking coffee and reading the paper. She was Ben’s third wife, twenty years younger than he, and she had made her name writing provocative celebrity profiles in the Style section; though she was no longer on staff, she still wrote occasional pieces and wielded considerable power.
Ben showed me up to the third floor where he had a sprawling, messy, comfortable office that looked out on a pool and tennis court. Papers and accordion files and boxes were piled everywhere. Looking around, I figured it would require at least a month just to get his papers organized, and that had to happen before it made sense to do any additional research. Ben left me to it and I dove in, finding things like an adoring letter from a high school student seeking an autograph or a quote for a term paper next to a memo about Watergate or something related to the Pentagon Papers or his friendship with President Kennedy. That first day I sat on the floor lost in Ben’s past, poring over everything, organizing nothing. Usually, a job like this would be tedious, but given the subject, the time flew by. I was fascinated and didn’t realize that three hours had passed and it was already lunchtime, my stomach growling to remind me. Just then, Sally popped in and asked me if I wanted lunch.
“Um, no, thank you,” I said. I have to admit I was terrified of her. She was portrayed in gossip columns as a social climber and backstabber. “I’m, uh, on a diet and skipping lunch these days.”
Sally shrugged. “Okay, if you change your mind, come downstairs to the kitchen.”
As the afternoon wore on and my hunger gave way to a headache, I told myself that this was not a sustainable plan. Given my fondness for eating, I was going to have to get over my fear of Sally.
In the meantime, I had my work cut out for me.
With Woodward I was implementer more than architect: he knew how he wanted information organized. And his book covered a relatively manageable chunk of time: William Casey’s tenure at the CIA during the Reagan administration. With Carl, given that the FBI files were sharing space with the frying pans, anything I did in the way of organizing was an improvement. And Carl’s book was a memoir—a discrete era chronicling the Red Scare years.
Ben’s book was more epic and would cover his life, sixty-eight years and counting, and spanned many historic events and decades. Organizing papers for someone who has led such a big life takes care and thought. Archiving takes expertise, which I didn’t have, and so I improvised. A degree in library sciences would have come in handy because I quickly realized that cross-referencing was important. For instance, should JFK’s clandestine relationship with Ben’s sister-in-law go in the JFK years or topically under “lying”—one of Ben’s pet obsessions—or for the How to Read a Newspaper book maybe it would go under “Sources: conflict of interest”?
Soon after that, Dossier magazine, which covered social Washington, ran a few sentences in a column called “Eyes Only” about Ben’s two-book deal. He was quoted as saying he had hired me to sort “years of accumulated junk into two piles, one about our business and the other anything you want to call it.” I was disappointed that he characterized my role as merely “sorting,” but I reminded myself how lucky I was to have the job. I told myself it didn’t matter what anyone else thought, and, after all, I was “sorting,” even if that was just the first of many stages in producing a book.
I focused on the work in front of me, preoccupied with the enormity of material and what a Herculean effort it would take to get it cataloged into some sort of usable system. I quickly got over my fear of Sally and soon looked forward to eating lunch with her on the days she was home. She was funny and welcoming and took an interest in me. Once Ben and I began working mostly at the Washington Post offices, I missed seeing Sally. But occasionally I needed something from the files at home, and I was happy to get a chance to catch up with her.
It took longer than I had first estimated but finally, after a few months, I had all the existing material sorted into some semblance of an order. Ben and I were then able to take stock of what we had and could identify gaps in his chronology and unfolding narrative. We made a list of people to interview, and Ben decided whom he would interview, whom I would, and whom we would tackle together. One of the reasons I did some of the interviewing alone was because it’s hard to get people to be honest about someone, especially someone as legendary as Ben was, when the legend is sitting right there in an armchair. Ben knew that and he decided it would be more effective if I talked to some people about their memories of him without him present.
Ben also felt he needed to interview some people himself, and he took me along primarily to run the tape recorder. But I was also there in case the interview turned into a bull session, and at that point, he instructed me, I should gently nudge things back on track. It happened a few times, mainly because Ben was so much fun to talk to and whoever we were interviewing was eager to reminisce with him. But sometimes they veered off into topics that had nothing to do with the project. Then I would speak up and ask a question to try to get things back on track.
Over the next year, we worked our way through the list.
One of the first people on my list was an old war buddy of Ben’s from World War II when Ben had been a naval officer. Ben hadn’t wanted to do the interview because he thought it would devolve into two old guys sitting around telling war stories. It would be more efficient if I went alone, he thought. In the book, Ben would later describe Robert Edmund Lee as “my best pal and my model, probably because he was so many things I was not.” One of those things he was turned out to be easily insulted. After I conducted the interview with him, he wrote a letter to Ben that began by praising Ben for his illustrious career and saluting him for his achievements. But then the letter got to the part about me and a line that I cherish to this day. “I must say I was a little pissed off,” he said, “when you sent a little girl around a couple of months ago to interview me in aid of your autobiography.” At the time I felt Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan rising up in me but now it just makes me laugh and roll my eyes.
I was thirty-one years old in 1991. Not exactly “a little girl.” But I am a girl. Ben and I shared a laugh, after my initial flash of consternation. Ben just shrugged and rolled his eyes. I inferred from this—and from how he reacted (or didn’t react) to practically every other unpleasantness that came across his desk—that you can either let things get to you or you can shake them off. Sure, it’s easier to shake them off when you’re blue-blood Harvard educated, but I told myself the letter writer was revealing more about his own insecurities than any true deficiencies of mine.
Later in the letter Mr. Lee made a pitch for ensuring that their glory days together found their way into Ben’s book. He asked if perhaps it was neither Watergate nor the Pentagon Papers that had been Ben’s finest hours but rather their shared experience on Treasury Island: “There you had no phalanx of lawyers, publishers and other editors backing you up: only a simple microphone that enabled you single-handedly to direct 40 Marine pilots how to keep more than 100 Japanese planes from fucking up the landing and denying Treasury’s role as the air staging point for the Bougainville Invasion. There’s one for the autobiography.”
I understood his point—even if Ben hadn’t meant to come off as dismissive, it must have stung that Ben didn’t interview him himself. They had been through hell together. But still. Little girl. It irked me.
That momentary slight was easily eclipsed by the many highlights of the job. One of those was being invited to join Ben when he interviewed Kathari
ne Graham for his book. I suspect he took me along because the prospect of interviewing “Kay,” his boss and perhaps his biggest champion, was a little bit awkward. Here they were, two newspaper legends, whose lives and personal histories were inextricably linked; Mrs. Graham was also working on her autobiography and so they found themselves in the strange situation of simultaneously being major characters in each other’s unfolding literary narratives.
As I listened to them talk, I wondered how they could not feel at least a little bit competitive and even a bit nervous about what each would say about the other. Ben’s book, A Good Life, came out first; she joked she was going to call hers A Better Life.
She could have also joked she would call it A Better Book, because it got more laudatory reviews and even won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. Plenty has been written about their friendship and working relationship. What I remember witnessing is the genuine affection they had for each other, and Ben’s deference to her, out of admiration and respect. I hadn’t seen him defer to anyone else, not even Sally. But his bond with Mrs. Graham was immutable and, at least to me, largely impenetrable.
I was reminded of this private world that just the two of them inhabited a few years after I left Ben’s employ. It was 1997, just after Mrs. Graham’s book was published. I had moved on to other book projects and was also teaching part-time. As busy as I was, I missed working with Ben so I convinced him to coteach a class with me at Georgetown University. I pitched him the idea of teaching a course that would cover the material that was supposed to be the basis for the second book he had agreed to write: How to Read a Newspaper. I told him that teaching the class would help him organize his thoughts and generate new material. (It was a good idea, but even after a semester of teaching, he still didn’t write the book. I suspected that book writing required more focus than he felt like summoning up, and it wasn’t much fun. At age seventy-five, he didn’t have anything to prove.)
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