Ben didn’t like that idea. In accordance with his sixth rule, he decided to pick a fight. Behind Gilbert’s back—there is no other way to put it—Ben assigned a female reporter named Elsie Carper to the story, without telling her what Gilbert had told him. If Washington were really about to be appointed mayor, the FBI would be running background checks and there would be a paper trail somewhere. Carper nosed around and confirmed, on the record and on her own, that Washington was indeed going to be the appointee.
At the White House, when top domestic aide Joe Califano got wind that the Post had the story, he called Kay to complain. If they ran it, Johnson would hold up the appointment, Califano said. Kay stood with Ben. “We just had to think about what our job was,” she said later, “and our job wasn’t to make Walter Washington mayor.”
Somehow, with all the back-and-forth between Ben and Califano and Kay, Gilbert still hadn’t heard that a Post reporter had confirmed the story independently. Every day at a newspaper, the production department creates what’s called a “dummy” of the front page, so editors can get a sense of what the morning’s paper is going to look like. The day before the Washington story ran, Ben and the rest of the editors who were in cahoots with him dummied a phony story in place of the Washington story so Gilbert wouldn’t know what was happening.
Later that evening, Ben realized that the secret still wasn’t safe. Like most people in positions of authority at the Post, Gilbert had the bulldog edition of the paper delivered to his house as soon as it came off the presses. The bulldog would have the real story, and when Gilbert saw it he would go ballistic—and possibly try to pull the plug for later editions of the paper. And so, in one last twist, Ben sent an editor to swipe the bulldog from Gilbert’s front stoop. Gilbert didn’t figure out what had happened until the final edition of the paper hit his doorstep the next morning, August 24, 1967. The headline that led the paper read, “Walter Washington Seen as Top Choice for D.C. ‘Mayor.’ ”
The entire escapade is somewhat surprising, given Ben’s image as a brash and fearless commander. “I can tell you authoritatively,” Len Downie, Ben’s successor as executive editor, told me, “Ben does not like confrontation. He does not like having arguments. He’s this bigger-than-life character so everybody assumes that he’s a bruiser, but he’s not. He retreats from that.” Of the Walter Washington story and the confrontation with Gilbert in particular, Downie said, “Ben just wanted him out of there. He didn’t want to have to argue with him.”
There would, eventually, be real blowups between Ben and Gilbert, including shouting matches over two different stories that were also related to the black community. But the Walter Washington story was a major marker, and after that episode Gilbert knew that his days were numbered. “The whole city room was watching the struggle between us,” Ben told me, and in that theater he had bested Gilbert and staked a claim about what the Post would and wouldn’t do.
“It was a very nice announcement that something new had begun,” Robert Kaiser would say later of what had unfolded between Ben and Gilbert, “and we called that the Bradlee era.”
* * *
1 Ben didn’t see Bundy’s memo to Johnson until 1991, shortly before he retired from the Post. “Get a load of this!” he wrote on a covering note as he passed a copy of the memo along to Kay. “Our dear, independent friend McGeorge Bundy reporting slavishly to Lyndon Johnson about dinner with you.… This gives me the willies.” He signed it by hand, and then, underneath his name, wrote in, “For the memoirs!”
2 Even in later years, when the Post was passing the Star in circulation and importance and profit, Ben would say that “people lived in the Post but they died in the Star,” meaning that the Post was a livelier and better paper but that the death notice in the Star would be more official, and mean more.
3 Just’s firsthand account of his own wounding ran on July 17, 1966, under the headline “Ain’t Nobody Been Walking This Trail but Charlie Cong.” The writing is superb, and Hemingwayesque: “Verlumis walked up and offered me his .45 pistol. I refused it, arguing that it was bad luck for a non-combatant to be armed. Verlumis persisted. He said anyone who wandered around Kontum province unarmed ought to have his head examined, and besides, it was a fair trade for the drink of whisky the night before. So I took the .45 and Verlumis shouldered his M-16 and we moved out. I never fired the .45 and Verlumis was dead before dusk.”
SUBSTANCE
The whole country has their eye on your bold new venture. I like it.
—Tom Winship to Jim Truitt, the first editor of the Style section, February 4, 1969
In 1991, when Ben was thinking of writing a book called “How to Read a Newspaper,” he and a colleague, Tom Wilkinson, commandeered a microfilm machine and went back through every issue of the Post printed after Ben’s arrival in 1965, searching for signs of his influence. They ran a tape recorder, and it makes for pretty good listening.
“I’ll tell you what strikes me about this,” Ben said, looking at one early front page. “How unimportant it all is.” Asked what he took from another, he replied, “That the papers are boring and not reader friendly is what I take from it.”
As the papers scrolled by, Ben grew dispirited. “Boy, I’ll tell you, the change is really gradual, isn’t it,” he said, clearly hoping for more visible proof of his hand at the wheel. “All this talk about what a killer I was and what a shark I was, and I don’t see any blood on the floor at all.”
A little later in that same session, you can hear the microfilm machine whirring and then a finger suddenly tapping on its glass screen. Ben had been talking distractedly, but at the moment that he tapped on the screen he stopped mid-sentence.
“Now there!” he said.
This was the front page that he was tapping:
“Now that’s a Bradlee …” he said, trailing off.
“What’s the guy’s name?” Wilkinson asked, referring to the person who drew the caricature of Senator Everett Dirksen.
“David Levine,” Ben said. “That’s a gorgeous picture. I mean, you never saw that in a newspaper in your life.”
“It’s a Bradlee what?” an observer asked.
“To order the caricature and to put a profile on page one, we started doing that.”
“Was there resistance to that?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember from whom?”
“Gilbert?” Wilkinson asked.
“Yeah, the traditionalists,” Ben said.
“Did you just go ahead and do it, or did you argue with them?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve got the A-bomb by now,” Ben said, meaning that by January of 1966 it was clear that he was running the show. “That’s the story, right there!” he said. “No jump, no nothing. You’re really leading with that picture. That’s the story.” There is real excitement in his voice. “For a newspaper you have no idea how shocking that was at the time.”
Three years later, nearly to the day, the first edition of the Style section would appear in the pages of The Washington Post. The same spirit that inspired the Dirksen caricature would inspire Style, on a much grander scale; from the minute he came over from Newsweek, Ben had wanted to give the Post a sense of vitality, of soul. He also wanted to shock people, to get them talking about more than just the news. Though he began to make incremental progress toward those goals shortly after his arrival at the paper, with the creation of Style in January of 1969 Ben made a huge leap forward.
“When my life is written as a journalist,” he once told me, “the Style section is going to be the most important thing.”
“Really?” I said. “I think a lot of people would be surprised by that.”
“That’s the most significant,” he said.
In pure newspaper terms, he might be right. In a profile of Ben in Esquire in 1976, James Fallows referred to Style as Ben’s “clearest personal monument,” even after Watergate. “Bright people were set free to write about the soul of the town,” Fallows wrote, and t
hat’s the essence of what Style became.
“The Style section was Ben’s great invention and a huge contribution to the modern newspaper,” Carl Bernstein told me.
“Within ten years every newspaper in America had a lifestyle section just like it,” Don Graham said in 2008, when Ben won the Illinois Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. “But Ben was the first, and Style was the first.”
The precedent for Style in Ben’s life dates back to before he was born. His great-uncle on his mother’s side, Frank Crowninshield, was the first editor of Vanity Fair, a post he held for twenty-one years. Crowninshield was a fixture on the Manhattan social scene, natty and elegant (and “gay as a goose,” as Ben says), but more important he took a frivolous fashion magazine and turned it into one of the better literary journals of its era. Like his great-nephew, Crowninshield excelled at identifying and attracting talent, though the talent in Crowninshield’s case included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, whose early work all appeared in the magazine. Ben’s Style section would be a different enterprise for a different era, but its core mission was much the same: to identify the writers and writing that spoke the truth about modern life.
Style unofficially began in early 1966, when Ben hired Nicholas von Hoffman onto the National staff. Von Hoffman was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, specializing in the coverage of civil rights. Before Ben arrived at the Post as an editor, the paper had already tried to hire von Hoffman away from the Daily News. He had flown to Washington and made the rounds in the newsroom, stopping afterward for a drink with his friend Tom Kendrick, who was a reporter at the Post at the time.
“Unless you really need this job,” Kendrick told him, “I wouldn’t take it. This is an unhappy place. Everybody here is miserable.”
“I respected Tom,” von Hoffman told me. “I didn’t really know anything about the Post, and at that time it didn’t have any great prestige. I thought, ‘I don’t need that.’ So I went back to Chicago.”
But the Post stayed interested in him, and after Ben came aboard that interest intensified. As Ben sought to remake the paper, to make it more lively, he occasionally bought von Hoffman’s pieces about racial issues from the Chicago Daily News service. Though his reporting ran as news coverage, and not as analysis, von Hoffman had a way of injecting a viewpoint into his writing that did more than just convey the news. “Emmett Till was lynched without having his day in court,” von Hoffman wrote in 1965, during his coverage of a racially charged trial in Greenville, Mississippi, which the Post reprinted. “He was just taken out and murdered. Ever since, his name has stood for the denial of justice to black men in Mississippi.”
Von Hoffman had never felt at home in the culture of the Chicago Daily News—an editor there had once introduced him to a visiting guest as “our niggerologist”—and in early 1966 he again began to look for other opportunities. An interview at Newsweek led to lunch with Ben and Larry Stern, the Post’s National editor, and before lunch was over von Hoffman had agreed to come aboard. “I was signing before I was thinking,” he told me. “It was clear that Bradlee was a very enthusiastic man. It was obvious that he was up for trying things. And so I went to work.”
Week after week, month after month, Ben put von Hoffman’s charged writing about civil rights and racial issues on the front page of the paper. In June of 1966, after James Meredith was shot during his “March Against Fear” through the South in support of black voting rights, Ben sent von Hoffman to cover the march, which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had stepped in to save. For three weeks von Hoffman filed from Mississippi, blending eyewitness reportage with ominous detail:
BATESVILLE, Miss., June 11
… All the town seemed to be waiting for the Meredith Mississippi freedom marchers. There were white teenagers, sun-burnt blonds in madras shorts, straddling parked Hondas at the street’s edge, and elderly ladies in fresh, hot-weather cottons on the front porches.
The Klan was waiting, too.
When he got back, von Hoffman billed Ben and the Post for a pair of shoes. (“And we paid it,” Ben says.)
When Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, Ben sent von Hoffman to cover the funeral. “Every inch of this is going to be covered by every television network in the world,” von Hoffman told him, “so we’re not going to have any news. I think we have to do it differently.” Ben agreed.
On the day of the funeral, von Hoffman filed a story that began, “The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led his last march here today. He was in a cherrywood coffin, carried in an old farm wagon to which were hitched two downhome mules.” The story captured a series of vivid impressionistic details, including one college student’s wry observation that Dr. King would have been unhappy with his own funeral. “All the poor people are standing so the rich people can sit,” he said.
When Ben Gilbert saw von Hoffman’s story, he was furious. “This is not going to lead the newspaper,” he told National editor Larry Stern. “This is a crummy sidebar and it’s going inside.” The two of them fought about it so vehemently that Stern threatened to resign if it didn’t lead the paper, and they had to call Ben to play referee. They read the story to Ben over the phone, and when they got through, Ben said, “Run it.”
“Where?” Stern asked.
“On the front page,” Ben said.
This was another example of Ben moving Gilbert out, to be sure, but it was about more than that. What Ben wanted most from his newspaper was a different way of writing about and experiencing the news. Von Hoffman’s pieces were full of life and detail; they brought readers into the story in an entirely different way than standard, straight reportage could. Television could bring you the visual images, and the Associated Press could give you the facts. Newspapers, if they were going to do something genuine and interesting, had to try to tell you something that you couldn’t get anyplace else.
“Nick expanded all the boundaries of writing at the paper,” the reporter, editor, and columnist Jim Hoagland told me. He referred to von Hoffman’s hiring, and Ben’s unstinting support for what he did, as a “crucial moment” at the paper.
“You saw what Nick could do,” Hoagland said, “and you realized what you could do. And Ben backed that up.”
One of Ben’s least favorite sections in the paper had always been the “for and about Women” section, which he found trivial and demeaning. The section was full of recipes and cooking tips and pictures of garden parties hosted by the wives of unimportant generals, the kind of stuff that “bored the ass off of all of us,” as Ben likes to say. It treated women as “women,” not as people.
Ben replaced Russ Wiggins as executive editor of the paper at the end of September of 1968, and shortly thereafter—not his first order of business, but close—he sent out a memo to Kay Graham and top editors proposing that the “Women’s section as it is now constituted be abolished.” He tasked David Laventhol, a favored assistant managing editor who had already played a pivotal role in helping Ben redesign and streamline the Post’s cluttered front page, with brainstorming ideas for what a different section might look like. “We needed a feature section,” Ben told me, “and we needed to treat women as human beings, and we needed great help in organizing the paper.” He wanted to try to kill all those birds with one stone.
Two weeks later, on October 11, Ben reviewed a prospectus from Laventhol describing “a new Washington Post section devoted to the way people live.… People would be stressed rather than events, private lives rather than public affairs”:
A number of old departments—women’s, food, travel, books, gardens, amusements, TV, shows—would be combined into the new seven-day ongoing operation. The new section would not mean the abandonment of women’s news; rather it would expand the horizons of the kind of news women are interested in. It would greatly open up the confined and space-poor “amusement” pages, provide standard everyday locations for key features, develop whole new areas of coverage in the leisure field; and cut across traditional ba
rriers to apply cultural reporting to individual lives.
It’s hard to believe that this was a radical idea, but up until then you never knew, looking at the Post each morning, where the TV schedule was going to be. You had to figure out its location from the key box on the front page of the newspaper, or else hunt for it. Book reviews appeared in one section one day, and in another section the next, as did theater reviews and the like. One of the most basic functions of any new section was simply to consolidate all of the disparate arts and features coverage in one reliable daily location.
But Ben was after more than organization. He wanted a designated location at the paper where the writers he had hired, von Hoffman and others, could spread their wings. He wanted humor and personality and bold design and new ideas, a section that would provide a mechanism by which the newspaper could express its view of itself, its personality. When we had lunch with a group of White House Fellows in 2007, Ben was asked what was important to him about a newspaper, and he said, “You’ve got to have some sense that it’s got a soul, and it’s got a sense of humor. How to get that without making a fool of yourself is one of the goals.” The core mission of Style was to push the conception of what a newspaper could be.
The name itself came hard, and took some getting used to.1 As Ben began to gear up for the launch of the new section, he called his old friend Myra MacPherson to tell her that he had an offer that she couldn’t refuse. MacPherson had been working for The New York Times, but she was married to Morris Siegel, who had been a sports reporter at the Post in 1948, when Ben arrived.
“We’re starting a new section, and it’s going to be great, and I want you to be a part of it,” Ben told MacPherson when she arrived at his office.
Yours in Truth Page 12