Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  In the wake of the letter, Ben received numerous confidential memos from highly placed white editors saying that many of the reporters who had signed the letter were subpar reporters indistinctive of race. Of one of the signers, an editor wrote, “He is in the wrong business, and we have all told him so.” Much later, Ben would write privately of the disgruntled Metro reporters, “The fact that some members of this group were less than able didn’t change anything. We made a classic, maybe racist, decision by hiring a multitude of blacks because we felt guilty, rather than hire the best blacks at a time when we couldn’t even define what the best black was, or could be.”2

  A week after the initial letter, Ben and Howard Simons had their first meeting with the black reporters in a conference room at the Post. Ben read his prepared answers to their questions, which boiled down in most instances to this:

  B: You ask why there are no blacks, only one black or only two blacks in various departments. My answer is both simple and complicated: We have not yet been successful in matching our commitment to hire, assign and promote blacks with our commitment to hire, assign and promote the very best journalists we can find to fill the needs we have. This is the cutting edge of the problem that we now face.

  He read out the rest of his statement, and then there was silence. One of the reporters said to Ben that they would use Ben’s written response to come up with a suggested affirmative action program, to be presented at a later date.

  “You don’t want to talk anymore?” Ben asked.

  “We wanted to hear what you had to say, Ben,” one of the reporters said.

  “Well, why don’t we hang it out?” Ben asked, trying to keep things moving, suspicious that that was all there was to it.

  “Everything we had to say was in the questions.”

  “Was it really? I mean, I don’t want to try to deny what you said, but I have the feeling you’ve got more on your mind than that. An affirmative action program is something that I’d be damned interested in,” Ben said. “But I’d like to hear you on the subject of how deep is our problem, what is our problem, how to …”

  “That’s something we’d be better off … taking up at another time,” another of the reporters said. “What we’re suggesting … is another meeting.”

  “Jesus, I got cranked up for nothing!” Ben exclaimed, recognizable across the eons as himself. “I think my door is open to anybody. Apparently other people don’t think so.… But I do not feel abused by people coming in to talk to me, and I would like to say that.” He also said that he hoped that the reporters wouldn’t let their grievance hinder them in getting about their business. “Don’t let it interfere with your jobs, please,” he pleaded. “Don’t be too suspicious of us.”

  Two weeks later, after some additional back-and-forth, the Metro 9 had become the Metro 8, and they presented Ben with an affirmative action program/quota system that was nearly impossible for the Post to achieve. “By one year from enactment of this plan,” they wrote, “black employment on the Washington Post newsroom floor should be in the range of 35 to 45 percent in every job category.” The current percentage of black newsroom employees was 9.3 percent, 37 out of 396. Out of the 37, only 13 were reporters.

  “That was our bargaining position,” Leon Dash told Ben in their interview in 1993. “It was put out there to negotiate from.”

  “Did you have any sense that this was going to be difficult for Bradlee to do?” Ben asked, referring to himself in the third person as he often did. “I mean, because he had to persuade the racist bean counters …”

  “Whether it was difficult or not, this was our position,” Dash said. “You don’t achieve anything if there’s no blood on the floor. You can’t achieve it by sweet talk, or appeals to reason, or appeals to morality. You have to confront the situation.”

  Right around the time of the Metro 8 proposal, Dash had decided to confront the situation in personal terms, by driving over to Ben’s house late one night.

  “I was very angry,” Dash remembered later.

  “Yes, you were,” Ben said.

  Dash felt that his immediate editor was racist and was trying to drive him out of the newspaper, and he wanted Ben to know about it because he felt Ben had been kept in the dark. He was also drunk, and at Ben’s house he proceeded to get drunker. “I was a little bit scared,” Ben admitted in 1993. Tony and the kids were upstairs while the two men thundered down below them, Tony listening intently to Dash’s voice and deciding that because his intonation dropped at the end of each phrase he wasn’t going to do anything physical.

  “There was justified anger,” Dash said. “You couldn’t see the forest through the trees, and it was right in front of you.”

  “Well, it was true,” Ben said. “You were right. That was a seminal moment for me. Because I hadn’t been yelled at. I didn’t get yelled at all that much by anybody, but I sure as hell hadn’t been yelled at by a black, and I hadn’t been accused of things that were true.”

  Dash had resolved to shake Ben’s tree, as he once put it, and that evening he did. “That was a key moment in my understanding of this,” Ben told him in 1993. “The thing that impressed me about your argument is that we were racist in our lack of sensitivity. We didn’t think about it ever. I mean, things that destroyed you just didn’t get on our screen.”

  “At all,” Dash agreed.

  But Ben’s personal appreciation for Dash’s position didn’t mean that the Metro 8’s proposal made sense for the newspaper. As soon as he received it, Ben wrote to Kay Graham and the rest of the legal, editorial, and managerial team with his response:

  Click here to view a plain text version.

  He would say the exact same thing to the Metro 8 as he had to Kay Graham. “Except for the firmest conviction that the only quota appropriate for this newspaper is a quota on quality,” he wrote on February 29, 1972, “I find much of interest in the program proposed in your letter of February 28.” He proposed a time to meet, but the terms of the standoff were already clear.

  Over the next few weeks, Ben and the rest of the editors came up with a plan that proposed a wide variety of solutions—hiring an equal employment opportunity officer, offering black reporters training at the Columbia School of Journalism, adding a black editor to Metro, creating a mentoring system for young black reporters with older established reporters.

  The Metro 8 weren’t having it. “We have discussed your proposal of March 10,” they wrote on March 15, “and find it an insult to our commitment, vague and totally unacceptable.” The memo concluded, “We are here today again to discuss numbers.” Ben had hoped to avoid a major flare-up—when Dash handed him the first letter on February 7, Ben had told him “Don’t let this go too far”—but it was clear that they were now at an impasse. Eight days later, after another reporter dropped off, seven of the original nine black reporters filed an official complaint against the Post with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

  Contrary to the impression that the complaint created, the Post actually had a better track record on racial matters than most other mainstream newspapers. Shortly after the complaint was lodged, Bill Raspberry, a black man and a highly respected columnist at the Post, put it this way in one of his columns: “The Post, it must be said, has done more than any other white newspaper in the country, both in terms of its editorial policy and in terms of its newsroom hiring practices. And when you do more, more is expected of you.” That was evidently the Metro 7’s view, and also that of some of the newspaper’s readers:

  To the Editors:

  As a long-time subscriber and former admirer of the Washington Post, I urge you to respond favorably and vigorously to the insistence of your black reporters that there should be many more blacks at all levels of participation and responsibility in handling the news which your paper offers to us, the readers.

  I have been shocked and greatly disappointed by the paper’s response to the black reporters’ protest—shocked because I thought that the
Washington Post was far too sophisticated to resort to the irrelevant and obsolete plea “we’re doing better than others,” and disappointed because I would have expected the Post to recognize immediately not only the justice of the black reporters’ position but the importance of black and other viewpoints in the paper’s operation.

  Ben’s response:

  Dear Ms. Ware:

  On February 7, 1972, The Washington Post had more black reporters, photographers and editors than any other newspaper in America.

  On May 30, 1972, The Washington Post had 42% more black reporters, photographers and editors than it did on February 7, 1972.

  Racial issues are rarely only about numbers or hires, and so some people slammed Ben for his lack of understanding even as he and the others around him made the only kind of effort that they knew how to make. Roger Wilkins, the black Post editorial writer who had been cited by the Pulitzer board for his exemplary work on Watergate, eventually left the paper and would occasionally lob tough memos and letters into Ben’s inbox.3 (“I understand that you recently said that you’re tired of pampering blacks … one of the things that makes us tired and gives us the pain that makes us flaky is that we have to pamper arrogant and stupid—at least as they relate to us—white people.”) Some of the letters from Wilkins and, later, from Juan Williams, make you wince; they’re pretty direct attacks. The implication is that Ben was removed enough and white enough that by definition he was part of the problem.

  Ben didn’t back down, but he got the message. To Wilkins, years after he had left the paper:

  Dear Roger:

  I am now recovered from your letter about Sharpton. But it took your wonderful message about the Chris Stern party to do it. I’m used to having you alternate between anger and love by now. I appreciate the love more than the anger but I know you understand my frailties better than most.

  Let’s eat.

  But Ben also wasn’t going to apologize for things that he didn’t think were his fault. This was Ben’s response to a long letter about racism at the Post from Richard Prince, one of the Metro 7, in 1979, roughly two years after Prince had left the paper:

  Click here to view a plain text version.

  On July 12, 1979, less than three months after Ben’s reply to Richard Prince, Ben received a letter from a young reporter on the Toledo Blade, a woman named Janet Cooke. “Dear Mr. Bradlee,” it began, “I have been a full-time reporter for The Blade for slightly more than two years, and I believe I am now ready to tackle the challenge of working for a larger newspaper in a major city.”

  She was black, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar in 1976, according to her résumé, and she had excellent clips. “The answer to a modern editor’s prayers,” Ben wrote of her later. “Female Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Seven Sisters colleges who can write the King’s English with style don’t grow on trees, white or black, and we were a decade into our commitment to increase the number and quality of minorities and women on the staff.” Six months later, she was at a desk in the newsroom.

  Everybody who ever knew Janet Cooke agrees that anybody in Ben’s position would have snapped her up just as quickly as he and the Post did. She wrote beautifully and was beautiful herself; she dressed well, carried herself with style, and made a splash from the moment she walked into the newsroom on January 3, 1980. You could almost forgive Ben for having thought, somewhat naively, that a new era was beginning at the paper, not necessarily post-racial but one in which gains had been made, consolidated, and kept. He seems to have hoped so himself, as a letter written two weeks before Cooke began at the Post indicates:

  December 21, 1979

  Ben Johnson

  City Editor Post-Tribune

  Gary, Indiana

  … Let me tell you this funny story. We gave a lunch for civil leaders the other day, and Mayor Barry was there. He got up to complain about The Post’s coverage and suggested that instead of assigning Milt Coleman (who is black) to cover City Hall, we assign a white reporter.

  His reasoning was that a white reporter would be liberal and therefore easy for him to manipulate.

  I laughed and told him that we all had come a long way; we had crossed a lot of bridges to get to this particular place.

  They had crossed a lot of bridges. Janet Cooke’s direct editor at the District Weekly, a small local section, was Vivian Aplin-Brownlee, a black woman herself. Milton Coleman would go on to become the city editor for the daily staff and would be Cooke’s direct editor on the “Jimmy” story. Far from being the only black person for miles, Janet was surrounded by black people in positions of direct editorial control. This was surely a sign of progress, wasn’t it? Black editors editing a story by a black reporter about the black community: wasn’t that the right way for this to work, and exactly what the Metro 7 would have wanted?

  In her desperation to get out of Toledo, Janet had lied on her résumé to create just the impression that she had created. And though later people would protest that Janet’s race had nothing to do with it, nobody really believed that—least of all Cooke herself. Seventeen years after she faked her résumé, when asked what her purpose had been when she sat down at her typewriter to create that false, idealized portrait of herself, she made clear that she had harbored no illusions about the nature of the enterprise.

  “My goal,” she told reporter Mike Sager in 1996, “was to create Supernigger.”

  * * *

  1 “The fifth floor” means the newsroom.

  2 It wasn’t only the white people who felt this way. Leon Dash, one of the signers of the letter, agreed with Ben in an interview in 1993 that some of the other black reporters didn’t belong at the paper. When Ben referred to one reporter, with typical lack of political correctness, as somebody who was “selling dope and screwing white girls,” Dash chuckled and said, “I’m with you.”

  3 When I called Wilkins to try to set up an interview, he told me he wasn’t interested in talking to me, because it wouldn’t be “truth-telling.” “Ben made it this far with all his medals and his reputation intact,” Wilkins said, before dismissing me. “I don’t want to drop a lot of shit on him.”

  JUNKIES

  Q: When did you start thinking that you might want to be editor of the paper?

  BW: When Ben said, “Become Metro editor.”

  Q: Which was ’79?

  BW: Yeah, we were still finishing The Brethren …

  And so I thought—remember, this is all on the record, quotable—Ben was, you know, a journalistic icon and leader, father, godlike figure in the profession. And to be Ben Bradlee’s, you know, successor would’ve been …

  Q: An honor.

  BW: … well, more than an honor. I remember people like Dick Harwood took me out to dinner or lunch and said, you’ll be the executive editor of the paper someday … there was all of that stuff. Until we all discovered that I wasn’t any good at it.

  Q: Is that really true, or do you just say that?

  BW: No, no, that’s really true. I just wasn’t. And Ben realized it. And Janet Cooke brought it to a head in a way that was—it just brought it to a head of, you know, this guy supposedly has got a good shit detector, and where was it? Fair question.

  —Dining room at Grey Gardens, East Hampton, Long Island, August 28, 2010

  I’ve always thought that the term “news junkie” applied in a particularly vivid way to Ben and to Bob—and, in a slightly different way, to Carl, too. Much of the process of addiction is a doomed attempt to recapture the pure rush of the initial high. Ben and Bob and Carl were all doomed. Nothing they could ever do, no matter how distinguished, would be as big as what they’d already done.

  Carl rode the fame high for as long as he could, living it up as a literary lion in New York City, dating Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor, neglecting his work, and then eventually getting sober. He got chewed up and spit out the fastest. When you meet him now, it’s Carl 2.0 or even 3.0. It’s not the same guy.

  Bob is still Bob, digging for
that newspaper high, plunging himself back again and again into his reporting. He impressed the entire paper when he returned to the Post newsroom in the fall of 1975—after a year’s unpaid leave to work on the movie version of All the President’s Men and on The Final Days, his second book with Carl—and started working the phones. He hasn’t let up since then, really. I worked for him from 1999 to 2002, and though he was older and richer he hadn’t lost any drive or determination. He works at a furious pace, always in pursuit of the next secret, the next scoop, the next scandal, haunted by what he doesn’t know but might be able to find out. There is a kind of compulsion to his repeated reenactments of the processes of investigation and discovery. They are the vein that he keeps tapping, over and over, in just the same way, even as the world changes around him.

  In 1976, when the movie version of All the President’s Men came out, Bob was only thirty-three, with ladder still to climb at the Post and in his life. He was still, as Ben would say, on the come. Ben was at the top of the ladder and had nowhere else to go. What kept them both going at the Post was the search for another story that would quicken the pulse and get everybody in Washington talking. At the Post, they called these “holy shit” stories. Bob sitting in the courtroom when James McCord reported that he worked for the CIA is the holy grail of the holy shit story, the high of all highs. After Watergate it was a stated and unstated goal, an expectation that everybody understood at the Post, that what got Ben and the rest of the newsroom going was the holy shit stories, the big ones.