Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  BF: Does that bother you?

  B: Yeah. It hurts my feelings a lot. I don’t want to be her best friend but I think this is shit. She can say, I really wish you hadn’t written that book. Probably somebody’s fed her some stuff.… I’ve sort of said to various people I’m really upset by that. I would like it to end, I would just like to shake her hand, end it right.

  Ben never got the chance to end it right with Jackie. In 1992, he wrote to Caroline Kennedy, “I would just like to say hello sometime and the same goes for Jackie. We got crossed for reasons that I don’t understand and I would like to uncross our wires.” Nothing came of it. Later, when Ben heard that Jackie had fallen ill in early 1994, he apparently wrote her a conciliatory letter (no copy of it exists in his files), but he wasn’t sure that it ever reached her. She never responded. “I know how that must have hurt, but I can understand it,” Ben’s friend Eppie Lederer (better known as Ann Landers) wrote to Ben in 1995, of Jackie’s repeated rejections. “You knew too much that she needed to forget.”

  Jackie might have wanted to forget Ben, but he has never wanted to forget her. For the last several years, up until he began to prepare his papers for sale, Ben rented a safety deposit box at the bank across the street from the Post. There he kept, among other things, his Washington Post stock certificates, two personal letters from President Carter, and two small effects of Jackie’s.

  The first was the mourning card that Jackie had sent to Ben and Tony in December 1963, just after her husband had been killed. The second was a small White House notecard, filled on its blank side with Tony’s handwritten notes from dinner at the White House on August 14, 1961. The men present had all weighed themselves, and Tony had taken the numbers down. But that’s not why Ben saved it. The reason he saved it is on the card’s flip side: a wide and perfect lipstick kiss from Jackie. It’s a memento of her former tenderness, frozen in time, that Ben kept safe, and to himself, for nearly fifty years.

  * * *

  1 That Special Grace, Ben’s prose poem about Kennedy written for Newsweek, was issued as a book in 1964 but hadn’t been written as one.

  2 Even stranger: Angleton didn’t actually destroy the diary. He kept it, and only disclosed that fact years later, when Tony asked him point-blank how he’d destroyed it. Tony retrieved it from him and burned it herself. “You have to think that he didn’t do it because he wanted to retain some kind of control over somebody,” Ben told Barbara in 1990—but over whom, or for what reason, nobody knows. There are people who have claimed over the years that Ben worked for the CIA, and who see the Angleton episode as supplementary evidence. I don’t buy it. (A CIA memo from February 18, 1971, based on internal reports of Ben’s years in Paris: “A reliable source described Bradlee as an unscrupulous, ambitious individual who has no sense of security and little sense of discretion. He is in constant personal and financial difficulties, drinks heavily, talks too much and is emotionally unstable.”)

  3 For most of the interview, Kennedy has lived on a different level from Cannon and Ben, parrying their questions, always a step ahead of them, demonstrating the quickness that would characterize him as a candidate. The only moment Kennedy goes back on his heels is when Ben tells him that he didn’t think a statement Kennedy had made earlier that week had been any good. Kennedy promptly, and with great conviction, blames Pierre Salinger.

  4 It would surface again later in Conversations with Kennedy: “For some reason it bugs Kennedy that I speak French. Kennedy finds it intolerable that he doesn’t have the facility for languages that others have, and his pride in Jackie’s linguistic talents is tinged with jealousy and bewilderment. His French can only be described as unusual.” Fallows, writing for Esquire in 1976, of this moment: “Bradlee cannot be as blind to his own one-upmanship as he pretends to be.”

  5 I didn’t know of the existence of this book, or of Tony’s cooperation with it, until I came across its description in the obituary of Tony Bradlee that ran in the Post shortly after her death in November 2011. Ben hadn’t mentioned it to me, and had said he knew of “no overt incident,” so I had presumed that the whole thing was still somewhat secret.

  6 On March 15, 1961, just a few months after his inauguration, Kennedy chose the Pinchot sisters as his dinner partners, one on either side, at a White House dinner dance.

  7 Ben used even this to his advantage. “Bradlee, who lived on the same block as Kennedy, lets you know that Jackie Onassis is very eager, too eager perhaps, to see what he is writing,” Robert Lenzner wrote, in August of 1974, in a massive magazine piece comparing Ben and Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of The New York Times, in The Boston Globe.

  CHRISTMAS AFTERNOON

  Then Woodward says … I Halberstam, now I have to deal with the question of the Post, whether it is going into a decline, and he says this is very private and to go to no one else, that Kay Graham has talked to him, that she is very disturbed about the Post and what’s happened to it.… Her feeling is that it has slipped.…

  She also feels that Bradlee has somehow lost his interest, that post Watergate she feels he is being pulled away in part by Sally Quinn and the life style, that his interest is not in the paper, and that Jim Bellows, she has a feeling.… [Jim] Bellows is in the City Room at the Star every day, I have a sense of him right in the middle of that City Room with his sleeves rolled up, I have a feeling that he’s right there. And she doesn’t have that feeling about Bradlee, and she’s very disturbed and she says, you know, she may have to move him out, this is a real concern, that if necessary she will bring someone in like Gene Roberts to edit the paper. And she feels the paper is too much of a club, the national staff is a club … herself said of Howard that his job was somehow to wipe up after Ben.

  —David Halberstam’s memo of a private interview with Bob

  Woodward, undated but sometime post-1975

  In early 1976, Ben received another unsigned memo. Sprawling over nine pages of six-ply paper, it laid out a series of problems at the Style section and then went on to address some of the deeper problems at the paper.

  “You’ve got the best staff of any paper in the country,” the author wrote, “but they are floundering. They seem to lack leadership, direction, excitement, and energy.” Editors were too scared of each other, too political, and never took responsibility for themselves. “There are so many little things you don’t know, that are kept from you by your editors. Without reporters and their energy and enthusiasm and respect you can do nothing.” Maybe Ben had been “too nice recently.” Maybe now he would “have to kick ass.”

  I know you can, and will. I know you’ve done it for 10 years and you think the challenge is gone. But it isn’t. This is the biggest challenge you’ve ever had. And it should be exciting for you. Just because you won the gold medal and the Olympics once doesn’t mean you can’t try for it again. You are the only person who is capable of doing it. All you have to do is show them that you mean business, shake things up and it will start to turn things around. But you’ve got to do it now.

  I love you.

  It was, of course, from Sally. In the years since Watergate she had watched, along with everybody else, as the paper had struggled to find its way. She once likened Ben’s state of mind after Nixon resigned to a postnatal depression. Every part of him had been activated, and then it had all been taken away.

  In May of 1973, right after the Post had won the Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate reporting, Ben wrote to an admirer that he realized they were all riding high, and that eventually they would have to come down again:

  When this wild self-congratulatory ski-jump is over and we hit solid ground once again, it’s the respect of your peers that means a goddam thing, not the TV cables in the city room, not the cover stories, not even the apology of that piss-ant, Ziegler.

  The moments I most cherish are those too rare occasions when one is doing just exactly what one was put on this earth to do … not practicing psychiatry without a license, not cost accounting without t
alent … and that’s what all of us here are doing these days.

  At the time of that writing, Ben couldn’t have foreseen just how long the wild, self-congratulatory ski jump would be, or how hard it would be to stick the landing. With Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the publication of Conversations with Kennedy in 1975, and the premiere of All the President’s Men in 1976, Ben had been flying high for nearly three full years.

  In the interim, the newspaper had to come out every morning. What was The Washington Post going to be, in the wake of Watergate? As Halberstam wrote, memorably, of Ben, he is “a man by nature geared for big events, not little ones, and the biggest event of all had already come his way.” Many on the paper, notably both Carl and Bob, thought that in the wake of Watergate the Post should have mounted a challenge to The New York Times’s status as the newspaper of record in the United States.

  “Ben’s job, it seems to me, was to then take the post-Watergate Washington Post and determine where it was going to go,” Carl told me. “And Bob and I believed it should go national, and I’m sure that Watergate had given it enough of an impetus that it could have done it. Because right then it was a better paper than The New York Times. Because the Style section was at its apogee. Because of what had happened with the Watergate reporting, and that lesson carrying over.” The paper had missed an opportunity, in large part because it enjoyed a local monopoly in D.C. (having effectively eliminated the Star as meaningful competition) and could comfortably occupy its lucrative perch as D.C.’s preeminent paper. “I don’t know how much is conscious or unconscious,” Carl told me, “but clearly it went back to the local model.”

  Bob wouldn’t give me the same criticism directly. In one of our interviews, he quoted Tom Ross, who was the old D.C. bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. One night in the wake of Nixon’s resignation—Bob thinks it was in early ’75—Bob had dinner with Ross and the reporter Mort Kondracke, who worked with Ross at the Sun-Times.

  “Tom was one of these people who is a very wise commentator on the press,” Bob told me. “And this is all on the record. What he told me, he said, you know, the sadness or the tragedy after Watergate is that the Post had an opportunity to become the great newspaper. The New York Times plus.”

  “With personality and flair …” I said.

  “And all the kind of ‘cruising speed,’ the phrase Ben uses,” Bob said. “And it didn’t happen. He was very critical of the Grahams and Ben.” (Ben often said of The New York Times that he admired its “cruising speed,” meaning its general and sustained level of excellence. Ben thought that from a standing start the Post could compete with the Times on any given story, but he also admitted that the Post was not as reliable a daily index of what mattered in the world.)

  “That’s mostly a Graham decision, is it not?” I asked. “I mean, Ben can’t make that decision.”

  “No, no, he could,” Bob said. “He could’ve pushed it. He could’ve said, ‘Let’s reevaluate who we are. What’s the next big play? What’s the next move?’ And that’s not Ben.”

  In the wake of Watergate the Post certainly could have undertaken a major challenge to the Times. At one point in the early seventies, 1,600 people applied for the fifteen available summer internships at the Post. There was no problem attracting talent; the problem was figuring out what to do with the talent they already had.

  Carl left the paper at the end of 1976, largely for his own reasons but in part because the paper didn’t know where to put him. “One of the reasons I left,” Carl told me, “was [Ben] wanted to offer me a local column that became [Richard] Cohen’s column, and I didn’t want to do that. I was like, ‘Shit, I’ve done Watergate, and now I can’t go to Vietnam again?’ I said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ”

  Richard Cohen had been on his way out the door, too.1 “I was sick of The Washington Post,” he told me. With David Broder, he had generated much of the Post’s first-rate coverage on Vice President Spiro Agnew, and after writing a quickie book about Agnew he returned to the Post. “They put me on the city desk as a reporter, and they were just giving me a hard time. I don’t know why I deserved it … The first story they sent me on was a garbage fire. I thought, ‘What is this about?’ …

  “Ben could attract such great talent,” Cohen said. “But he also didn’t know what to do with it half the time.” Building the Post in the sixties, adding great reporters in bunches, was a far different enterprise from managing them all once they had made it.

  Post reporter Jules Witcover told David Halberstam that “Howard Simons and Ben are really out to lunch in the post-Watergate era.” After Watergate there had been “a lot of talk about staying up there, really turning it on. But Ben really has been playing at being a celebrity. He claims he doesn’t like it but he really does like it, and he liked the kind of glamour that Watergate brought. At the same time he really has no attention span.”

  Larry Stern, Ben’s neighbor and one of his best friends on the paper, put it more simply, and maybe more accurately: “Ben is bored now, and that has become a serious problem at the paper.”

  These were the knocks on Ben from below, an important constituency but not nearly as important as the one constituency that mattered most: Kay Graham. He served at her pleasure, and by all accounts she was displeased, too. In her memoir, she would describe the period 1976 to 1981 as “the most difficult years I ever lived through,” in part because of the malaise that Sally, Bob, Carl, Cohen, and Witcover had described:

  I had some grave concerns about the quality of the paper and of the editing. I felt that the national staff and the metro staff had let down, that we were doing things superficially. Ben didn’t agree with me, but Bob Woodward did, putting it succinctly one day: “The paper is going down the shit hole.” It is to Ben’s great credit that he and I survived the difficult times and all my questioning.…

  Not listening to me—and to others—was both Ben’s strength and his weakness. However, as I wrote him at the time of this disagreement about the quality of the paper, “No superficial problems either of us may have at any particular moment matter compared to the basic trust and rapport with each other. Because if that’s there—and it is there as far as I’m concerned—all else flows from it.

  —Clipped comic from Saturday, October 19, 1974, saved in Kay Graham’s private files, with her handwriting at the top

  There is no relationship that has mattered more to Ben’s life than his relationship with Kay Graham. Sally has played a vital role since 1973, but without Kay Graham there is no Sally—first because Kay picked Ben as her editor, and then later, in 1973, because she accepted Sally’s role as Ben’s partner even though it violated her sense of propriety.

  Sally knows this as well as anybody. “I know I’ve told you this before,” she wrote to Kay in December of 1978, shortly after she and Ben were married, “but I want to impress upon you again how grateful I shall always be for the way you received me and us after we got together.”

  It made so much difference in the way we were accepted not only at the paper but in the community and if anyone is responsible for the fact that our relationship worked out it has to be you—I know how hard it must have been for you and how generous an act it was.

  After Kay died in 2001, Sally wrote a column for the Style section. “Kay and Ben had worked so closely together before we were together that she often seemed like a very welcome third person in our marriage,” she wrote. “[A] favorite aunt, a wise confidante, a pal. When Ben was invited by President Ford to a White House dinner, he took Kay instead of me, with my approval.”

  Is there such a thing as a welcome third person in a marriage? I suppose there might be. That Sally could write something like that illustrates what was so transformative about Ben’s relationship with Kay, a powerful man working for an even more powerful woman in an era where there wasn’t much precedent for that kind of relationship.

  “When I put you there and you related to me,” Kay told Ben in the interviews for her m
emoir, “it was a whole different ballgame.” All of the editors and businesspeople that she had inherited from the Phil days had been condescending to her, showing her the ropes while never quite believing she could master them. “I don’t mean they were really condescending, I guess,” she said, “but at the same time they didn’t think of me as a boss. And I don’t mean you did in any …”

  “Yes, I did,” Ben interrupted her. “I really did.”

  Kay was always, irrevocably, the boss. That was the only reason Sally would have tolerated anybody else as a “welcome third person” in her marriage. Kay and the Graham family owned the A shares of Washington Post Company stock, the voting portion, and as Ben likes to put it, “one of the lessons I learned in journalism is that you don’t argue with the A shares.”

  Ben has often said that his most important job as editor of the Post was “managing the Grahams.” For the bigger moments of his career, including the doldrums of 1975–1976 and beyond, that meant managing Kay. She didn’t much like the idea that Ben managed her—he largely had her convinced that she was one of the boys—but from their letters to each other it’s quite clear that he did.

  Just before Christmas in 1968, shortly after he took over as executive editor, Ben sent Kay a letter in place of the holiday flowers that he had sent to her in previous years. “No reasonable quantity can convey my Christmas thoughts to you,” he wrote. “And so I wonder if you will settle for a Christmas letter from someone who admires uncommonly your style and sense and commitment and maybe most of all, your company.”