The Grant Study is still ongoing today, tracking the lives (and deaths) of 268 Harvard students from the classes of 1939 to 1944. Ben and the others in his cohort were selected because they looked like winners, no small feat in the narrow slice that was any Harvard class in those days. The founders of the study had set out to determine the factors that led to “intelligent living” and successful aging, and its researchers sought bright, well-adapted young men to track over the course of a lifetime. Ben was an obvious choice, from a good Brahmin family, the fifty-first Bradlee to go to Harvard, quick and good-looking and already, per a Grant Study intake form from his sophomore year, apparently quite self-assured:
HAS THE STUDENT:
ANY FEELING OF INFERIORITY ABOUT HIMSELF IN ANY WAY? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIMSELF? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIS FAMILY? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIS WORK? No.
The subjects endured rigorous physical examinations and psychological evaluations while they were at Harvard. After college, they filled out questionnaires roughly every two years and sometimes met with researchers from the study for face-to-face interviews. Ben’s 1969 interview with Vaillant, who would later become the director of the study, was his first such interview in twenty years.
Ben was forty-seven years old. He had been the executive editor of the Post for a little less than a year. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate lay just ahead, unseen over the horizon; Ben’s friendship with Kennedy,1 and the access and prestige that he had derived from that relationship, still largely defined his public reputation. He had been a naval officer on a destroyer during World War II, a reporter for multiple newspapers, a press attaché in the American embassy in Paris, and a foreign correspondent, Washington correspondent, and Washington bureau chief for Newsweek magazine. Now, in 1969, he had just started in on the job that would change his life forever, and he knew it:
He said that the three years he had spent as managing editor were the hardest three years he had ever spent. He had not known anything about daily journalism and had showed up at the office at eight, worked until eight in the evening, and then often after supper came down to the office and worked until one in the morning. He continued doing this six days a week for two years. He said at Newsweek, where he’d been bureau chief, he’d been able to do it with “my left hand.” Joining the Post was “a watershed” in his life.
… [B]eing the editor of the Post interrupted his life but was the greatest job in the world—“there’s nothing I’d rather do.” He then said that he was an over-achiever, that he’d always operated at 100%, that he possessed no unused talent.
Vaillant took the interview along a pretty standard trajectory: work history, family history, medical status, psychological status. In addition to talking about how much he loved his job, Ben dug into some complicated feelings about his family—his love for his father despite his father’s problems with drink, his conflicted relationship with his mother, his first and second wives. He spoke with such frankness that he seemed even to be surprising himself. “I’m letting it pour out,” he remarked to Vaillant at one point, after stating that of the three Bradlee kids he had been the closest to his father. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?”
It was. But the most revealing part of Vaillant’s report isn’t his summary of what Ben told him. What’s most revealing is the effect that spending time with Ben had on Vaillant himself.
At first, Vaillant records what Ben says without adding much commentary of his own. Gradually, though, as the report progresses, Vaillant begins to include some of his own observations. He notes parenthetically that Ben speaks in a “charming and urbane way,” then later that Ben is “dressed in a dapper fashion.” When the conversation veers into the relationship with Kennedy, Ben gives Vaillant a copy of “That Special Grace,” the prose poem he filed for Newsweek the day after Kennedy was killed. “I had the feeling not of an artist pushing his wares,” Vaillant writes, “but of someone giving me a profound gift.”
In the final section of the report, entitled “Description of the Man,” Vaillant tries to summon a more clinical assessment of how being around Ben has made him feel:
[I]n walking over to the office there was a contagious quality about him that made me feel bigger than life just to be with him. It stemmed partly from his being completely generous with his own feelings, combined with a social gracefulness that must have been largely habit.…[H]is facial expression conveyed both tenderness and seriousness while making me laugh. He said many things that were funny, but never at his own expense and never to lead me off the track from something that was emotionally relevant to him.…
He also possessed a contagious enthusiasm and constantly saw the positive aspects, not because he defended against them but because there were many things that he really enjoyed. I could easily understand why a President would have picked him as his closest companion during the Presidency.
The final paragraph takes it yet one step further:
This was a man with a great capacity to focus his attention. He was a man who cared about things only as they related to people. Thus he gave up golf when he stopped playing it with Jack Kennedy. What he admired most about the latter was Kennedy’s ability to love and his gracefulness. I left the interview feeling that I had greater capacity as a human being just from having known him.
That’s the end of the eighteen-page typewritten report. Even Vaillant seems a bit stumped by the intensity of his own feelings; written in, by hand, is a concluding question, appended perhaps after he has read the report through and his inner clinician has had a chance to right himself. “An illusion, yes,” he writes in a neat print, “but what in a personality creates that illusion in others?”
Reading through the final bewildered sentences of Vaillant’s report is like watching a laboratory experiment in the real-time effects of charm and charisma, with a trained psychiatrist as the subject. It’s hard to talk seriously about somebody being “bigger than life” without sounding like a fool, like a rube with stars in your eyes. In fairness to Vaillant, it’s easy to imagine why he might want to pencil in a qualifying sentence about illusions before handing the typewritten report to his superiors.
But if I have learned anything about Ben over the time I’ve spent with him, it’s that “illusion” is the wrong word. What happened to Vaillant was a real, observable phenomenon, part of Ben’s primary functioning as a newspaper editor and as a person. Anybody who has spent much time with him will tell you that, even the people who don’t particularly like him. This is not to say that he was perfect, or that he didn’t hire the wrong people or have lapses in judgment or leave some emotional and professional carnage in his wake. He did all that, too.
But the truth at the heart of Ben’s time at the Post is the infectious sense of possibility that he created for himself and for the reporters and the newspaper that he led. When you were around him, and when he focused on you, you were included in it, too. You can call that quality in Ben “larger than life,” you can call it “charisma,” you can call it “genius” or “instinct” or “focus” or “verve.” Whatever it is, the most important thing to know about him is that he had it, and he knew it, and he used it.
* * *
1 Not surprisingly, another Grant Study subject, three years ahead of Ben.
NEWS
Click here to view a plain text version.
—BCB to Abe Rosenthal, Managing Editor,
The New York Times, May 16, 1973
In February of 1968, more than a year before Ben would sit down with Vaillant for their interview, a Post reporter got his hands on a summary of an embargoed copy of the Kerner Commission’s much anticipated report on race in America. (“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”) Joe Califano, the lawyer who would go on to represent the Post during Watergate, was serving as President Lyndon Johnson’s top domestic aide at the time. When he found out the Post was planning to
break the embargo, he was pissed.
“So I call Ben,” Califano told me. “And Ben says, ‘Well, we got a copy of the report with the embargo page torn off.’ ” He laughed. “You can imagine that conversation. We went at it. Really went at it.”
Califano took the issue up with Kay Graham, who didn’t think the Post should publish the summary, either. The government planned to release the report a couple of days later; what was the point? But Ben didn’t bend, and he certainly wasn’t going to be told what he could or couldn’t publish by Joe Califano. On March 1, 1968, the Post ran the text of the summary in full, spread out over three inside pages in the front section.
That same day, Ben wrote a private memo to Kay to explain his decision:
Katharine:
You said yesterday that you didn’t really understand why it was important to publish the summary we had in our possession.… It is important to me that you understand my motives.…
My answer is simply that our duty is to publish news when it is news, and that means when we learn and when we have checked its bona fides and when we have secured the information legally and when we have checked it for libel and when we have assured ourselves that publishing is not against the national or public interest.…
A newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures takes a sure step—perceptible however small—out of the newspaper business. Of course no one of these steps would put us out of the business, but that is not the issue. Each such step yields the independence we all cherish to someone else. Often, in this town, to a President or his representatives, and that is unfortunate because the pressures are greater.
A newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures sacrifices one of [its] most precious assets—the vitality and commitment, and possibly the respect of its reporters. If only one man says “What’s the use of getting the news first if we don’t print it,” we lose something vitally important unless our reasons are iron-clad.
Twenty-two years later, sitting with Ben for an interview, Kay Graham remembered the story, and the memo. “I still, as a matter of fact, if you …” She hesitated.
“Go ahead and say it, Katharine,” Ben said.
“If you want to know, I’m still not thrilled with publishing an official report two days before they’re going to issue it. I mean, it doesn’t seem to me the end-of-the-world kind of wonderful journalism.”
“But it didn’t screw anything up,” Ben said. “That’s the other thing that it never does.”
“I still think I’d call that one 50–50,” she said, conceding that the memo was a “very good defense” of the rationale for publication but content for the moment to let the disagreement lie.
It was a small story, a twenty-four-hour victory, but that was Ben’s whole point. They were in the business of twenty-four-hour victories, of pushing the limits, of getting it first and running it if you had it. That was the game, new every day. Ben was never a theoretician of the news. He was a practitioner, more interested in what happened than how or why, preferring his own instincts to abstract ideas. But if there is such a thing as a Bradlee philosophy of newspapering, that memo to Kay Graham comes pretty close. And there’s no better example of how Ben and Kay practiced that philosophy together than the sunny day in June of 1971 when the Pentagon Papers arrived on Ben’s doorstep in Georgetown.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but my eyes glaze over at the first sight of those words: Pentagon Papers. Before I knew Ben, whenever I saw a reference to them in a book I would reflexively start paging through to see how long it would be before the chapter ended. Whatever I learned about them never seemed to stick. Most people I know don’t really have any sense of what they were, or why they mattered, beyond the facts that they were about Vietnam and that a man named Daniel Ellsberg leaked them.
The truth is that to understand why Ben cared about them, you don’t need to know a whole lot more than that. But, for posterity, the Pentagon Papers were the forty-seven volumes of a top secret internal history of the Vietnam War, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967. Ellsberg had been an analyst at the RAND Corporation who worked on the compilation of the papers but subsequently underwent a personal conversion about the merits of the war. He thought that if the American people really knew what was going on in Vietnam, they would rise up to put an end to it. He decided to leak the papers, first to Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Fulbright didn’t do much of anything with them, Ellsberg turned to The New York Times.
The most important revelation that the Papers contained seems now to be a kind of quaint confirmation of the obvious: the government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, had routinely, and seemingly as a matter of policy, lied to the American public about the Vietnam War. Bombing missions that had been disavowed by presidential candidates were in fact being planned at the very moment of disavowal, by those very candidates. More Americans were dying than anybody knew. There were entire bombing campaigns, in Cambodia and Laos, that had never been reported. Though the media had harbored suspicions about all of these things, the Papers confirmed those suspicions on a scale that even cynical journalists hadn’t quite imagined.
I had always assumed that President Nixon reacted so aggressively to the publication of the Pentagon Papers because they were made public in 1971, and therefore must have embarrassed his administration. It was actually quite the opposite: the Papers contained no information at all about the Nixon administration. They had been delivered to McNamara’s successor as defense secretary, Clark Clifford, five days before Nixon’s inauguration in 1969. Nixon was apparently quite pleased at first with how poorly the papers reflected on the Democrats, particularly his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. It was only when he realized that he could find his own presidency damaged by similar leaks down the road that he decided to take action, thus setting in motion the Shakespearean mechanics of his own demise.
What mattered to Ben about all of this wasn’t the substance of it. Ben cared only that Ellsberg had decided to leak the Papers to The New York Times. In the spring of 1971 everybody at the Post had been hearing for weeks that the Times was planning a major scoop, but nobody knew what it was. On Sunday, June 13, 1971, after months of top secret preparation—reporters working from an undisclosed hotel room, security guards at the door—the Times finally dropped the bomb.
This was the kind of thing that drove Ben wild. His mission, from the moment he walked into the Post’s newsroom as an editor in 1965, was “to get the world to refer to the Post and the Times in the same breath.” That was his definition of excellence. Sometimes he would say publicly that his goal was to have “the best reporter on every beat,” which was true. But the main reason he wanted the best reporter on every beat was so that he could stick it to the Times.
Now the Times had him licked. The only way for the Post to cover the story was to rewrite the Times on its own front page, the bitterest of pills. Ben has a flair for melodrama, and he always says that there was “blood on every word” of the story that ran in the Post that Monday. (“You know how grand he is,” one Post reporter said when interviewed about it later. “I don’t know what the hell he said. It was a professional kick in his face, and he didn’t make any bones about it.”)
After two more days of the same routine, big stories in the Times and baleful rewrites the next day in the Post, Ben finally caught a break. The Nixon administration, claiming national security privilege, had secured an injunction against the Times, restraining them from publishing any further classified material. This marked the first time in American history that the government had ever been able to enjoin, or prevent, a newspaper from publishing in advance. The granting of the injunction posed a series of First Amendment issues, and the Times immediately challenged it.
The break gave the Post an opportunity. Ben Bagdikian, the National editor, knew Ellsberg. On Wednesday of that week, he received a cryptic call instructing him to fly to
Boston, where Ellsberg was waiting for him. Ellsberg was worried that the Times had been silenced, and he wanted the information out. He forced Bagdikian to extract a promise from Ben that the Post would run the Papers if they had them, and Ben relayed his assurance that they would. Bagdikian returned the next day with 4,400 sloppily copied and out-of-order pages, a subset of the original seven thousand that the Times had received. The large cardboard carton, full of small, disorganized bundles of paper tied together with string, sat in its own first-class seat on the flight down to Washington.
Fearing that the Post newsroom would be too public a place to review the documents—they didn’t want to be enjoined before they’d even started—Ben summoned top editors and reporters to his house in Georgetown. The Times had taken nearly three months to comb through the papers and to determine how to present the material they contained. The Post didn’t have that kind of time. To stay ahead of the government and the rest of the media, Ben and the other editors resolved to put out a story the very next day. Bagdikian arrived at Ben’s house from National Airport at 10:30 on Thursday morning. They had roughly nine hours until the first edition deadline.
Ben calls it “bedlam.” There were papers all over the place. The reporters were sequestered in Ben’s library with their typewriters, trying to hammer out early drafts of stories based on whatever scraps of information they could process in so short a time. The lawyers and editors convened in the living room, to figure out exactly what they could and couldn’t (or would and wouldn’t) publish.
Chalmers Roberts, a veteran reporter and one of the fastest typists on the staff, had begun to put together a story about the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to prevent elections in North and South Vietnam in 1954. As Roberts put it in a private interview some years later:
Yours in Truth Page 4