Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  “This is not a modest man we have here,” Patterson went on. “He is not one to shrink from glory. But as Dizzy Dean reminded us, ‘It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.’ ”

  Where Patterson had been perhaps too much like Ben to succeed, Howard Simons was, until the movie tore them apart, the perfect complement to Ben. Temperamentally and culturally he couldn’t have been more different—reflective, intellectual, Jewish, born of humble origins in Albany, paid his way through Union College by washing dishes at a fraternity house. He started at the Post as a science reporter but quickly worked his way up into becoming an editor, and he was famous at the paper for conceiving of, and then running, what was known as the SMERSH team: Science, Medicine, Education, Religion, and all that SHit. All the stuff, basically, that Ben had no interest in.

  After Patterson resigned and Ben pulled Simons into his orbit, the two of them clicked. “We didn’t have to finish each other’s sentences,” Ben once said. “I mean, I knew how he felt. It was extraordinary. And he me. I knew what he was going to say. I literally did.” They became so close that each volunteered to serve as the guardian to the other’s children should anything befall either of them.

  “Ben sucks the flowers dry and Howard waters them back to life” is how Kay Graham once put it. “Howard flushes out the rat and Bradlee swoops down and pounces” is how Pakula characterized it to himself in his own notes. Whatever metaphor you want to use, the paper couldn’t have been what it was at its peak without both of them. Ben allowed Simons to run the story conference, ceding most of the daily responsibility for the newspaper to Howard and concerning himself with the bigger picture of running the Post, which meant worrying more about next month’s newspaper than the next morning’s.

  It was Simons who received the call on Saturday, June 17, 1972, from Joe Califano, mentioning something about a break-in at the Watergate. It was Simons who approached Barry Sussman in July of 1972 with the New York Times’s scoop in his hand and said, “Why didn’t we have that?” It was Simons who, according to Haynes Johnson, explained Watergate to Ben at first—why it mattered, how it all worked. He was the highest-ranking editor to take an abiding interest in Watergate for much of the story’s development, often dropping by Woodstein’s desks first thing in the morning to encourage them, pester them, and keep them moving.

  None of this makes it into the movie, though Simons does get credit for coming up with “Deep Throat” as the interoffice handle for Bob’s secret source. Rosenfeld gets most of the inspirational stuff, the badgering, and most of the doubt gets consolidated in the godhead of Robards. Martin Balsam–as–Simons functions mostly as a kind of schlubby henchman for Robards, not as a force in his own right. He can’t seem to do anything without checking with Robards first. But what rankled Simons the most, and the people who knew him well, was that in his first important scene, he listens to Rosenfeld describing the White House connection to the bugging attempt and then says, “Harry, this isn’t a police story anymore. This is national, we need a top political writer on it.”

  Those two sentences were the hammer blow that undid Simons, the step too far into Hollywood oversimplification that ruined his relationship with Ben for the rest of his life. Ben would say later, publicly and privately, that he never thought seriously about taking the story away from “the boys,” but it’s apparent that at various points he at least entertained the idea. Certainly his surrogate, National editor Dick Harwood, entertained the idea. At one point Harwood and Len Downie, then a Metro editor, had a shouting match about it on the newsroom floor. Harry Rosenfeld told me that he remembers quite clearly a day in October of 1972, as the Watergate story was taking off, when Ben called him into his office and insisted that National run the story from there on out.

  There’s no paper trail in which Simons argues strenuously for letting Woodstein keep the story, so all I have to go on is the outrage that others expressed after the fact. Simons himself told Halberstam in the late seventies, “There were a couple of times when Bradlee said he would take the story away from the kids and go national. And he felt they were not quite big enough, I mean he had hitters like Harwood, Broder, and Johnson. And I said in effect, ‘Over my dead body.’ ”

  “[Howard] is a victim of Watergate,” Richard Cohen would say later. “In the movie, for instance, it’s Ben Bradlee who says ‘Let the kids stay on the story.’ In real life it was Howard.”

  As Barry Sussman put it in his own book, The Great Cover-Up, “When the time came it was Simons—not Bradlee or the others—who made the crucial early decisions that led to the Post’s extraordinary coverage of the Watergate scandal, especially the decision to allow the metropolitan staff, which did not normally report on national politics, to pursue the story.” Sussman and Simons and others at the Post felt that Pakula and Redford had willfully distorted the truth to benefit Robards’s character.

  “He never forgave me for it,” Ben told Kay years later. “Somehow thought it was my problem or I caused it. It ruined our relationship.”

  I asked Ben if he and Howard ever talked about the movie after it came out, about the way in which Howard felt wronged.

  “Well, it’s too long ago for me to be sure,” Ben told me. “I thought that we did somehow, but not exhaustively, not so that we tore down the problem and went on.”

  I doubted that they had, given what I’d found in the files—a batch of memos and letters from Ben to Howard that said “not sent” or “never sent” on them. Ben isn’t one to hold back. The fact that more than one of these unsent memos existed indicated to me that there were things left unsaid between them.

  The first of them was from 1977, a year after the movie came out, a private memo to Don and Kay Graham titled “Secret Thoughts,” with “NEVER SENT” written on it in BCB’s hand, above the word “CONFIDENTIAL”:

  These thoughts are prompted in the immediate instance by your several reports that 1) a morale problem may be developing as a result of some vague Bradlee-Simons complications.…

  Let me ramble for a minute, first about Bradlee and Simons. We have an extraordinary relationship; we don’t have to finish sentences; we think of the same things at the same time without warning. We complement each other uniquely, I think. The executive editor-managing editor system requires this complementing. Two Simonses would not do the job, and two Bradlees would be chaos. All of this said, we do bristle at each other occasionally—always for the same reason: neither of us is willing to be unimportant. If the executive editor really asserts his presence and his authority to “run” the paper, the managing editor becomes a staff assistant implementing decisions of someone else. (Gene [Patterson] and I experienced some of this). If the managing editor really tries to manage and edit, the executive editor becomes ceremonial. (Russ [Wiggins] and I might have experienced this, if he had not been so much older and so preoccupied with the [editorial] page).

  So Bradlee and Simons bristle at each other every so rarely. Maybe it bothers some of the extraordinarily sensitive souls we have collected under this roof. But you must remember we are a team, an extraordinary team, I would guess. You can look at the record, as Mr. Casey Stengel used to say. Under this team (and for lots of reasons, to be sure, like luck and unbelievable support from you), the editorial product of this newspaper is more widely respected than any other paper in this country.

  David Maraniss, the longtime Post reporter and bestselling author, first came to the Metro staff at the paper right around the time that Ben decided not to send this first memo. “I knew nothing about the history of the internal dynamics of the paper,” he told me, “but from the moment I got there I could feel a certain tension between Howard and Ben—from Howard’s perspective, not Ben’s.”

  I told him a story I’d heard from another reporter, who had referred to Ben as being a kind of “bugaboo” in Howard’s mind.

  “It’s more than a bugaboo,” Maraniss said. “I mean, I think that Ben was like Moby Dick to Howard. It was really the dominant frustr
ation of his life, in some ways.… He felt Ben was lucky and he wasn’t, and Ben was golden and he wasn’t, and Ben was all of those things, you know? Ben was Brahmin and he was Jewish. I think every possible way that you could view an insider and an outsider, Howard felt himself as the outsider.”

  It’s clear that some of these resentments had been in place before Watergate, and before the movie, but the movie and its tilt toward Ben pushed Howard into a realm from which he could not return. He had always resented Ben’s privilege and untouchability—and he was certainly not alone in that. “I mean, his old man was a schlep insurance agent in Albany, broke all the time,” Ben once said, “and here I was with this bent silver spoon. But we were really kindred souls in a good way, and I rescued him from obscurity to make him managing editor … and he resented it terribly. Resented the fact that Sally and I were together. Resented the fact that I had known Kennedy and he hadn’t. That I had written a book and he hadn’t. That I—he just resented it. As a result his life was miserable.”

  That Howard took some of these resentments out on Sally was commonly known around the paper. He would tell others, after Sally had been rehired in 1973, “She shouldn’t be here. Ben made me hire her.” As Bernstein put it during the late seventies: “Howard in the last year has shown a real talent for self-destruction.… [H]e’s taken on as a project the needling of Sally Quinn, which is not something you do.” The needling took many forms, from pretending he didn’t see her at parties to keeping her off choice assignments and even grounding her once, in the middle of a campaign, when she submitted an expense account form late—a stiff penalty for a relatively common infraction. Simons would not be the first or the last to take out some of his repressed feelings about Ben on Sally.

  By 1980, things had progressed to the point where Ben wrote and then decided not to send another memo, this one addressed directly to Simons:

  … I would like to have a serious conversation with you about your future, and our relationship. What that relationship has deteriorated to, and how it’s going to change when you return.

  As far as I can determine, I am going to be here for another five years. During this time, there is a certain amount of shit that I am going to put up with, and there is a definite amount of shit I am not going to put up with.

  In the former category, I include a whole series of actions on your part, which appear from where I sit to have the sole purpose of feeding your ego, making you feel more important. I would like to talk to you about these actions, because I want to be sure you know what you are doing.

  In the latter category, I include another series of actions on your part, which appear from where I sit to be unforgiveably and inexplicably rude, selectively vindictive, and disloyal. Here, I’d like to know why as well as what.3

  I think I know what bugs you, why you are so resentful. I have tried sincerely to accommodate your concerns, by giving you responsibilities which I would much rather have kept. In the first place, I gave you the job, and provoked the departure of the incumbent to do it.4 I gave you story conference. I decided against holding my own weekly staff meeting, when you told me that would undermine your influence.

  If all of that is not enough, we are in trouble.

  Let’s talk—away from the glass windows, at lunch on the 13th.

  Tom Wilkinson, the former head of personnel at the paper, often played referee between Howard and Ben. “For a while, they didn’t talk,” he told me. “One of the most difficult times I had at the paper was trying to navigate that.” Ben would call Wilkinson into his office, and when he saw Simons coming he would shut the door to keep him out. Then Simons would collar Wilkinson later in the day and ask, “What did Ben say? What’s going on?” Wilkinson suggested on numerous occasions that the two men rent a room at the Madison, across the street from the Post, and have it out with each other, but they never did it.

  The final indignity for Howard was the day Kay Graham told him he wouldn’t succeed Ben as executive editor of the paper. He had desperately wanted to be next. “My mother for whatever reasons chooses to share this with Howard,” Don Graham told me, “probably thinking, ‘I’m doing him a favor, better he learns now than after Ben quits.’ It destroyed him.”

  Ben agrees. “He left because he didn’t succeed me,” he told me.

  Simons left the Post in 1984 and went to work for the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. In 1989, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the prognosis was awful. He didn’t have long to live. Pat Tyler was in Cairo, working as a foreign correspondent for the Post, when Simons received his diagnosis, and he called Simons to say goodbye.

  “We visited for about five minutes on the phone, signing off, you know, for the last time,” Tyler told me. “He said, ‘Pat, just remember, you wrote to me first.’ ” Tyler explained that when he had first applied for a job at the Post in the seventies, he had sent his résumé to Howard, not to Ben. I couldn’t quite believe that Simons would have chosen to mention something so small in a moment so large, but Tyler looked right at me and made it clear. “The thing with Ben was still the thing that drove him into eternity,” he said.

  When Simons died, Ben was quoted in the Times obituary as saying, “He got short-changed by the movie,” that Simons had “led the charge” on Watergate. Gracious, if a little late. For Simons’s part, even despite all the difficulty that got loaded onto their relationship, he still managed to refer to Ben on multiple occasions as “the classiest human being I’ve ever known.”

  And yet his pain about what had happened to him, his perception that life had dealt him a bad hand, was real and enduring. Simons told an interviewer in the late seventies that on the day of the preview screening of All the President’s Men, Alan Pakula had called him and said, “I hope you understand why we did what we did, I’d love to come back and explain.”

  Simons responded, “That’s all right, Alan. My children know who I am.”

  Those two sentences break my heart every time I read them.

  Though the movie hastened the fatal deterioration of the relationship between Howard and Ben, Pakula sensed the dynamic before he ever shot a frame. From his notes to himself, before shooting began:

  Simons always behind Bradlee (sun) Eternally eclipsed.

  * * *

  1 Others who were considered: Karl Malden, Hal Holbrook (who would play Deep Throat), John Forsythe, Henry Fonda, Leslie Nielsen, Richard Widmark, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quinn, Gene Hackman, Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, Robert Mitchum, and Telly Savalas(!).

  2 There was one element of Ben that Robards couldn’t quite capture. As Ben’s friend, the writer Peter Stone, put it at Ben’s retirement party at Porto Bello in September of 1991, “It was the first time in the history of film that the real person had more sex appeal than the actor playing him.”

  3 Ben doesn’t remember the exact context of the grievances in this memo, but Tom Wilkinson took one look at this particular graf and said, “That’s about Sally.”

  4 Gene Patterson told me that Simons began undermining him—“planting knives in me”—as soon as Patterson arrived in 1968, because Simons had wanted to be the managing editor and had been passed over. Animosities mounted to the point where Ben was forced to choose between the two men, and in 1971 he chose Simons. In the eighties, Patterson attended a party at Ben’s house in Georgetown. As he remembered it to me, Ben approached him at one point during the evening and said, “You were right about Howie. He turned out to be a real pain in the ass.”

  HIS NIBS

  Mr. Bradlee,

  Recently on TV there have been film clips of the new movie “All The President’s Men” with Jason Robards playing the part of Ben Bradlee.

  I hope, to be authentic, when the full picture is shown, it shows Ben Bradlee eating shit, specifically, Kennedy shit which you so dearly relish. My hope is that you get a malignant cancer in your gut, and die a slow death, you miserable cock-sucker.

  Sincerely,

  —Longhand letter from
an admirer, April 11, 1976

  When Nixon resigned the presidency in the summer of 1974, the natural question for Ben and for the Post—if not for the whole country—was what would come next. Two years of unstinting Watergate reporting had taken its toll on everybody at the paper, including Ben and Howard. During the summer of 1973, Ben had developed a problem with his left eye, which began fluttering and closing. For ten days he underwent a series of neurological tests, and at one point doctors thought it might be a fatal tumor; it turned out to be stress. Howard liked to tell the story that the weekend after Nixon resigned, his wife turned to him and said, “You’re really very relaxed today. I want you to know something. You’ve been a son of a bitch for two years.”

  And so, immediately after Nixon resigned, Kay offered Ben and Howard three months of paid leave. The next weekend, Ben drove out to his country place in West Virginia and spent roughly three weeks there by himself. He spent every morning at the typewriter on the front porch, cranking out pages, and every afternoon in the woods, clearing his mind. When he returned after twenty-three days away, he brought with him forty thousand words that would form the bulk of his first book,1 Conversations with Kennedy, which was published in June of 1975.

  Ben had always maintained that he was never going to write it at all. In 1969, when George Vaillant came down to Washington to interview Ben for the Grant Study, Ben confessed that with the Kennedys he and Tony had “started to protect our friends, and it’s bad for a journalist to have too many friends. You can’t let friendship interfere with history.” He made it quite plain that he had no intention of using his private notes of his visits with Kennedy for personal gain. “I was offered a fortune for the notes,” Ben told Vaillant. “I decided I would give them to my child as a patrimony.”

  In 1990, when he was getting ready to write his memoir, Ben sat down for another extended interview with Vaillant, this time up in Cambridge. Vaillant returned to the same subject, wondering why Ben had changed his mind: