Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

As David Remnick, a former Post reporter and now the editor of The New Yorker, put it to me, “He’s not a Jew. You can quote me on that. ‘Not a Jew.’ ” Richard Cohen, a longtime Post columnist and close friend of Ben’s, once described the experience of staying at Ben’s country place in West Virginia during the seventies:

  Actually, he always had two houses. One of them was a shack in West Virginia where Ben used to go on weekends to chop wood … and clip coupons. The place had no central heating. Just a pot-bellied stove. This was the WASP idea of Grossinger’s.

  I went there once. Ben made your basic Protestant meal—hard boiled eggs, a pint of vanilla ice cream and a double scotch. Then we all retired to our little Protestant bed rooms where the temperature was about 10 below zero.

  I covered myself with 300-year-old quilts and stray pieces of export china. This was such a deeply Gentile experience that I awoke the next morning with a foreskin.

  The point is less that he’s a WASP than that people love to talk about what a WASP he is.1 It’s a crucial building block in the Bradlee myth, this tough-talking, profane guy whose dad was a member of the Somerset Club.

  Ben’s a Brahmin, even though he loves to play against type. Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, born in Boston in August of 1921 to two blue-blood parents who were both descended from the same Crowninshield line some generations before. His mom was Josephine deGersdorff, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy lawyer in New York.2 If you ask Ben about her, one of the first things he will tell you is a simple but loaded detail: “Great teeth.” That’s a full sentence in his memoir. It took me a little while to realize that this wasn’t a flattering comment:

  B: She was smashing-looking, spectacular, handsome, pretty lady. Very graceful, good figure, and pretty for a long time, I mean she was a pretty fifty-year-old. She smiled a great deal, laughed a lot, had no sense of humor, none.… She talked a lot, compared to my father. And she laughed easily. And some of us thought sort of thoughtlessly.

  They clearly butted heads. “Bennie was the only one of my children who was spanked,” his mother told the Grant Study interviewers in 1941, “and this was because he was a very obstinate child.”

  Ben’s mother was the long arm of the law around the house. She was the one who made all of the children speak in French on Saturdays, attend the symphony, and do all of the other things that the children of well-heeled WASPs did in those days. (Ben had an older brother, Freddy, whom he loved, and an older sister, Connie, of whom I have never once heard him speak.) Freddy was the oldest, but he was an outsider in the family—gay, destined for Broadway, bored by sports. He thought that Ben was powerfully influenced by their mother, even more so than by the father whom Ben adored. “Much of Ben’s drive and competitiveness comes from her,” Freddy told David Halberstam in the late 1970s. “She was a fiercely competitive, ambitious woman, ambitious for her children … that came from her.”

  His father, with whom he had a much stronger emotional connection, was Frederick “Beebo” Bradlee, a former all-American football player at Harvard. One of Ben’s earliest and fondest memories of his house in Boston was the picture of his dad and the rest of the Harvard football team that hung in the waiting room at the top of the entry stairs. The coach was standing behind Ben’s dad, with his hand directly on Beebo’s shoulder. Father and son would go to the Harvard games on Saturdays, where Ben was always struck by his father’s modesty. During one game a Harvard back broke off a long run for a touchdown, and somebody in the stands nearby yelled, “Shades of Be Bradlee!” Ben’s dad had said quietly, “Yes, shades. Pull ’em down.”

  His dad had worked as a banker after leaving college, but he lost his job at the Blair Investment Company at the beginning of the Depression. Both Ben’s mom and dad were set to inherit a fair amount of money, but Beebo’s main trust didn’t come due until after World War II. Ben’s dad took on a series of odd jobs, keeping the books at country clubs and the like, sometimes doing things—like cleaning out a railroad car with a friend’s commercial deodorant as a promotional gimmick—that embarrassed Ben and his siblings, even as they respected the industry. The Bradlees went from having a governess, a cook, and a maid to having nobody but themselves. (This is why Ben always notes that his family’s house was on Beacon Street, but not on the “sunny side.”) They were never going to be poor, by any stretch, but definitions like that are mostly relative when you’re a kid. You have no concept of worlds outside of your own. Ben and Freddy and Connie were referred to as “scholarship” kids at school, because a relative was paying their tuition. They felt it. Ben very clearly felt it.

  And it also as clearly took a toll on Ben’s dad. Asked in 1981 by the Grant Study what blows in his life had hit him the hardest and upset him the most for some time afterward, Ben responded, “Understanding that my old man drank too damn much, which I discovered when I was about twelve and he drove me home drunk. But it curiously brought me closer than ever to him. Off the pedestal into reality, etc.” His dad had been driving him home from a dance at one of the country clubs and was pretty bombed out—weaving back and forth all over the road. Ben doesn’t like to talk about it, but he was so angry at the time that he actually tried to hit his dad, through his tears. “Our real understanding dates from that,” he told George Vaillant in 1969. Ten years later, he would tell a different interviewer that “when you recognize frailty in your father it is a real milestone, and it allows you in some way to love him as [you were] not able to before.”

  As an adult, Ben would look back on that time and say that the Depression, on balance, was a good thing, because it forced the Bradlees to become a family for the first time. At the Bradlee country place in Beverly, father and son worked out in the woods together, often in silence. Ben noticed that whether they were chopping down trees or clearing paths, his dad always did everything completely and without complaint of difficulty. No task was too small to be done well, and Ben admired that and took the lesson to heart. “He didn’t go disappear up his asshole,” as Ben says, of the challenges his dad faced during the Depression. “He went out and did things.”

  Though Ben remembers his upbringing fondly, the main reason his WASPness is relevant is that he ultimately rejected it as a way of viewing the world. That rejection was his first true step toward journalism as a calling. If you ask him why he became a journalist, he will tell you “the war.” And if you ask him to explain, he will say, “My life had no purpose before the war,” or “I gave a shit about nothing before the war,” and then he will look at you in a way that says, “I hope you have another question.”

  You can’t spend nearly four years on destroyers in the Pacific during a world war without undergoing some kind of transformation. “The war was the first marking experience as an adult for my generation,” he says. “You were struggling for the first time with great issues. Most of all, what the hell were you doing here? Why were you fighting? Why was a nice little WASP from Boston suddenly in a goddamn destroyer off of New Guinea somewhere?” When Ben left for the Pacific, he was a relatively spoiled, insulated kid who had been on probation at Harvard twice and had decided to graduate early to fight in the war because “that was what you did before you thought anything through.”

  In November of 1946, the Grant Study questionnaire featured a special section titled “Armed Service War Record”:

  Now that it is over, what effect has the war had upon you? Are you the same man who went into uniform or are you different, and if so, specifically in what way? What changes in your general outlook on life, especially in your religious beliefs, and ethical and moral standards have occurred? What is your present opinion as to what the world owes you and you it, and is this a change from views formerly held?

  This is Ben’s response, written in longhand, after he’d been home for a year:

  A better man, he cried, in that I know something at last of the human forces at work in America today.

  No changes—religiously. Today’s #1 problem is how best to educate that
great person & poor bastard, the average American. He gets us into troubles by an uninformed lethargy, but doesn’t see how he did it.

  I value friends more & by friends I mean from Alpha to Omega. I defecate figuratively on the old school tie which I wore so proudly & misinformedly in youth—18.

  The world owes me nothing. I owe it everything. This is not maudlin & represents a complete metamorphosis.

  The language is raw, more ardent than Ben would allow now, but it captures how he felt before he’d told the story a thousand times. The war opened Ben’s eyes to people who lived outside the three-mile track between 267 Beacon Street and Harvard Yard, and also to the thrill of real responsibility in high-pressure situations. His job on the USS Philip had been to run the Combat Information Center, a position in which he had to cull information from various sources and tell the captain what he needed to know, when he needed to know it. (He proved to be so good at this, and pioneered such a successful methodology, that the Navy had him spend the second half of the war jumping from destroyer to destroyer, teaching other CIC crews what he had learned.) On the Philip, once he made officer of the deck, he ran the ship for four hours at a time—as a twenty-one-year-old kid.

  In terms of his path to the Post, the most relevant part of Ben’s war experience was the “complete metamorphosis” that it brought about within him, particularly with regard to the narrowness and privilege of his upbringing. There was no way he could return from the war to be a stockbroker with one of his dad’s friends, which had been the informal plan before he left. When he lay in what he calls his “fart sack” at night, trying to sleep in the simmering heat of the ship, he wondered what he could really do when he got back to educate “that great person and poor bastard,” to make some difference in the world.

  “The only other thing I ever thought of,” he once told me, “was teaching, and the more I thought of it the less it interested me.” Floating somewhere out there in the ocean, Ben picked journalism, and when he got home he went straight for it.

  Ben spent two and a half years as a city reporter at the Post during his first go-round, from 1948 to 1951. These were the days of newsboys yelling “EXTRA!” in the streets, when the small, scrappy Post ran third in a four-newspaper town. He covered the courts, the gamblers and the vice squads and the part of the city that people love to call the underbelly. He climbed out on a ledge next to a suicide jumper that he’d spotted on the ninth floor of the Willard as he walked out of lunch one day, taking notes for a front page story while the cops talked the guy down. Once he heard shots while he was on his way to work on the trolley car and saw bodies in the street. He stepped off the trolley and walked into the middle of the assassination attempt on President Harry Truman, who was staying at Blair House, the presidential guesthouse, while the White House was undergoing some remodeling.

  The most historically important moment of Ben’s first stint at the Post occurred in June of 1949, when he and another reporter covered the attempted integration of one of the city’s public swimming pools in Anacostia. There had been a near race riot, with whites attacking blacks and vice versa, which Ben and his colleague had witnessed and then filed by phone with the rewrite desk. (In those days, many of the stories in newspapers and magazines weren’t written by the reporters themselves, but by “rewrite men” who stayed in the office and converted the raw files, dispatches, and telephone reports into a finished product.) The riots were a front page story, without question.

  Later that night, when the bulldog edition3 of the paper came up from the press room, Ben saw that the story had been buried inside the local section of the paper, with the “race riot” element severely downplayed as an “incident.” He was pissed. “The great liberal Washington Post was scared to tell the truth,” as he put it. He was sitting in the city room of the paper, making his displeasure known, when all of a sudden he felt a tap on his shoulder. Behind him was Phil Graham, the Post’s publisher, wearing a tuxedo.

  “All right, Buster,” Graham said. “Come on up with me.”

  Without Phil Graham there is no “Ben Bradlee,” and there isn’t really a “Kay Graham” either—not as the historical figures they became. Kay’s father had bought the paper, but in 1946 he had made his son-in-law the publisher and part owner. From then until his death in 1963, Phil shaped the Post, more so than any of its editors or reporters. And he wasn’t just the boss in name; out of the five thousand Class A shares that Old Man Meyer made available to Phil and to Kay to purchase as a couple, he allotted 3,500 to Phil and only 1,500 to Kay. “As Dad explained to me,” Kay wrote in her memoir, “no man should be in the position of working for his wife.”

  David Halberstam memorably introduced him in The Powers That Be as “the incandescent man,” and Ben always says that Phil Graham was the most interesting person in the room, no matter what the room was or who else was in it. He crackles in the pages of books. Everybody who encountered him remembers him as brilliant in every sense of the word, irreverent, obstreperous, unstoppable. As a young man he had been president of the Harvard Law Review and clerked for two Supreme Court justices, and as the publisher of the Post he had become one of the most influential operators in town. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson took his phone calls and relied on him for advice. “You could give him the most complex problem and he’d solve it in three sentences,” Arnaud de Borchgrave, an old colleague of Ben’s and Phil’s, told me. “And so we all followed him. He and Ben had a lot in common.”

  Phil was six years older than Ben, and they moved in some of the same social circles, but in June of 1949 Ben was a cub reporter and Phil Graham was the boss. Up in Graham’s office, Ben discovered that the secretary of the interior (Julius “Cap” Krug) was already there, along with famed counselor-to-presidents Clark Clifford, who represented President Truman. Heavyweights. The secretary of the interior had jurisdiction over D.C. pools at that time, because D.C. was still run completely by the federal government. (There was no elected mayor of D.C. until 1975.) As Clifford and Krug looked on, Graham asked Ben to recite the story of what he’d seen at the pool and then dismissed him. Ben didn’t know it at the time, but later he discovered that his version of events became a bargaining chip in a deal that Graham struck with the government that night: close the pool in Anacostia at once and then reopen all of the city’s pools on an integrated basis the next year, “or Bradlee’s story runs on page one tomorrow.” The government took the deal, and that was that.

  “Probably pretty wise,” Ben said of it later. “Probably a good deal. But unthinkable to me. I don’t think you can pay too great a price for telling the truth.” D.C. would be ravaged by race riots in 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. If Phil Graham had run the pools story on page one in 1949, those later and larger riots could well have happened much sooner. “It might have been better if we had,” Ben said. “I can’t make the judgment and I’m sure no one else can either.”

  After a couple of years on the city desk, Ben realized that his options for immediate advancement at the Post were limited. He wanted to work on the National desk, but the paper was so small and so broke at the time that in order to get a new slot, he says, “you had to wait for some poor bastard to die.” Ben asked Phil Graham if he would support his application to the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard, which would give Ben a chance to change his surroundings and maybe result in some kind of promotion when he got back.

  “Fuck you,” Graham said. “You’ve already been to Harvard.”

  So much for that. But in Ben’s life there’s always a door that opens, and in this instance it was opened by a letter from a friend at The New Hampshire Sunday News who had become the press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. He was being transferred out soon, and he knew that Ben spoke French and had always wanted to live in Europe. Would Ben have any interest in being his successor? Phil Graham wasn’t overly pleased with it, but he granted Ben a leave of absence to go.

  Ten days after he
started the job at the embassy, Ben knew that he was going to end up hating it—“cookie pushing,” he called it. You always had to cover your ass, and you could never say what you really thought. He had to tell a white lie here or there to make sure the stories came out right. It was an important job, but even after six months you can tell that he missed the Post:

  I wanted to change because I wanted to get foreign experience: it was as simple as that. I hope to return to the POST either as a foreign correspondent, or as a reporter.…

  My work is very much the same, except for its geography. I suppose I am now more sedentary, since I no longer chase fires, rapists, gamblers or disasters. I suppose I feel more satisfaction, because the experience is new, and I feel necessary in the making of a successful journalistic career. But I did not change jobs because I was disinterested in the one I left.

  That’s Ben’s Grant Study questionnaire from January of 1952. By July of that year, he was already openly campaigning for a return to the Post. He wrote to the higher-ups at the paper from the French countryside, where he and his first wife and some friends had rented a château,4 living “as high on the hog as we will ever be”:

  Re return to Washington. I have entered negotiations with M’sieu Wiggins, but situation is complicated. Believe it or not, I am a fair-sized cheese (not too big, mind you, but ripe, solid) in this job, and I fought like hell to get it. I have just been upped a class. I am making $10,000 a year, living in a beautiful city, seeing parts of life and the world that I will never have the chance to see again. If I leave before June, I have to pay my way back—call it an even grand. There is something in me that says I would be crazy to leave this for anything. We want to come back, don’t get me wrong, but not to Municipal Court. I bet when I took this that I could go faster from here, than from there. And I don’t want to lose, without an effort.