With the editors at the ASNE and in his correspondence, Ben stuck out his chest and tried to take it like a man. He did the same thing with me. When I asked him how long Janet Cooke hung over his head, he said, “You know me well enough to know that those things don’t hang on me very long. It’s not that I shrug ’em off, but you can’t sit there and moan about it for the rest of your life.”
Ben has never been one to moan about anything, to be sure, but I don’t think he moved on from it as quickly as he says. Pat Tyler, who was close to Ben at the time, remembers riding over to Ben’s house to play tennis in the aftermath of the scandal. “He said that he thought that his career was over,” Tyler told me. “He wasn’t certain that he was going to recover from it.… He really thought that he’d been devastated by Janet.”
Memoir interview with BF, May 24, 1990
BF: Were you real depressed?
B: Oh! Terminal.
BF: Really?
B: It sort of convinced me that I’d been flying awful high and been very lucky. I think in effect that I’d—it was a story that I didn’t pay enough attention to.
BF: How can you pay attention—
B: You can.
BF: You can?
B: Sure. Early on. I thought Woodward and Maraniss, there were no two better people in the fucking plant that could have done that, passed their standards. It just didn’t occur to me that it was going to fail in any way. I didn’t see how it could. But you know it was also, you don’t quite understand that there were probably seventy-five phone calls a day for a week from people, from reporters all over the country. The determination that you were going to answer every one. That I was going to answer every one. That I wasn’t going to slough it off on anybody else, and that I would take the blame, I had to. There was no point in—the first time I would have said well, what I just said to you about Woodward, Woodward was in charge, implying that it was his fault.
BF: Did you ever lose your temper at anybody through this?
B: I don’t see what good that does.… I was ashamed. I was ashamed vis-à-vis the paper, I had gotten the paper in terrible trouble. I let the Grahams down. The Grahams had been so incredibly supportive.
BF: So you really felt responsible.
B: I was responsible. You can’t ride it up and not ride it down. I mean you can’t take all the credit for everything …
BF: I know but there’s a difference between taking the credit and taking the blame and what you really feel and it sounds like you really feel …
B: I don’t take the credit. But you are the editor of the paper and what happens in the news columns is your fault.… I am an extreme pragmatist—I don’t spend any time at all on “what if’s.” None at all … I don’t need to lay blame anywhere.
BF: That’s the mark of a secure person.
B: Well, it’s also the mark of a realist. What good does it do when the scars are there?
FULL CIRCLE
On April 16, 1981, a front page news story by David Maraniss announced to Post readers that Janet Cooke had fabricated her story, and that her Pultizer had been withdrawn. That news, as devastating as it was to everybody at the Post, wasn’t deemed by editors to be the most important story that day; it ran underneath a national lead story, “President Pardons 2 Ex-FBI Officials Guilty in Break-Ins.” The lede: “President Reagan yesterday pardoned two former top FBI officials convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins, saying that they had served the bureau and the nation ‘with great distinction.’ ” The two FBI officials are pictured, grinning, at the heart of the front page. The man in the foreground of that picture, the man whose face and smile dominate the entire top half of the newspaper, is Mark Felt, otherwise known as Deep Throat.
It’s a stunning juxtaposition. The most famous anonymous source in the history of The Washington Post, and perhaps in all of journalism, sits smiling at his own legal exoneration directly atop the Post’s own admission that a much disputed story based on its second most famous anonymous source had been invented. Felt’s secret was still safe, and his smile reads to a modern eye as almost preternaturally smug.
A few days later, Richard Nixon would comment on both the Janet Cooke incident and the pardon of Mark Felt as he toured Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, in Charlottesville, Virginia. “This was perhaps as irresponsible an example of journalism as you could find, and I hope the Post does a better job in the future,” Nixon told UPI of the Cooke episode. His excitement is clear from the understatement, never mentioning his own tangles with the Post, tactfully sensing no personal gain from twisting a knife already so deeply buried in his old nemesis’s side. Of Reagan’s pardon of Felt and Edward S. Miller for their role in “black bag job” break-ins on members of the Weather Underground in the late sixties, Nixon said it was “a courageous and correct act on the part of the president.”
“I know both of these men,” Nixon went on. “I testified for both of them, as you may recall, in Washington, and I think for them to have served so long and so well, to have been convicted and then have their citizenship taken away … would have been a great miscarriage of justice.” According to numerous sources, Nixon sent both Felt and Miller a bottle of champagne, along with a card that read, “Justice ultimately prevails.”
Nixon wasn’t naive about Mark Felt. As the once secret White House tapes reveal, Haldeman very early on began to suspect that Felt was the source of some of the leaks during Watergate. On October 19, 1972, nine days after the Segretti story ran in the Post, Haldeman told Nixon that somebody at the FBI was leaking. “Gray doesn’t know who it is, but we do know,” Haldeman said. “And it’s very high up.”
Nixon: “Somebody next to Gray?”
Haldeman: “Mark Felt.”
One doubts that Nixon had forgotten this, given that he never forgot slights of any kind, but the dual vindication of the Post’s misstep on Janet Cooke and the exoneration of Felt, at whose trial Nixon testified, had perhaps emboldened him.
The coincidence of Cooke and Felt on the front page of the Post, unnoticed as it might have been, presaged a larger pattern: the widespread exploitation of the Cooke episode as a vehicle to reexamine Watergate and to voice lingering doubts about Deep Throat. In the May 2, 1981, issue of The New Republic, a piece entitled “Deep Throat’s Children” argued that “Whatever gods designed the Jimmy fiasco seemed determined to give it the shape of Watergate.
“As a result of the Cooke affair,” the piece went on, “there is growing agreement among newspaper people, including the Post’s ombudsman, that a confidential source cannot be kept from one’s editor. It is not just the reporter who is on the line, but the newspaper he or she works for. This is a sensible rule; but what do you do about Deep Throat? Deep Throat, whoever he may be, is in many ways Jimmy’s real father. The mythologizing of how a reporter gets a really good story—meeting mysterious figures in obscure places at great peril—helped Cooke pull off her deception. She assumed the right postures and learned all the gimmicks she hoped would protect her as they had protected sources in the past.” The piece argued that Cooke had intuited what her bosses wanted and responded to, whether they told her explicitly or not: a big sexy story, anonymous sources, and the like. “The fabrication was Cooke’s, but the myth was the Post’s, and Cooke exploited it magnificently.”
As with the Post of two weeks before, the very next piece in that edition of The New Republic, titled “Bag Job Snow Job,” concerned Mark Felt’s pardon. It’s astonishing to see the two pieces contiguous with each other in another publication and to realize it was all right there, bubbling up into the open, but only Bob, Ben, and Carl knew. When I asked Bob about it, he told me that he didn’t remember that this had all happened at the same time, and neither did Ben. When I told Don Graham he just shut his eyes and said, “Wow.”
Deep Throat no longer seemed quite so sacred. Critics of the paper voiced doubts that perhaps they might previously have kept to themselves. UPI reported, on April 21, that Senator Sam Ervin c
alled the Jimmy story “an isolated case of evil” that didn’t have “any relationship to Watergate.” But he did now feel at liberty to say that he thought Deep Throat was a composite. “I think Deep Throat was a symbol that Woodward and Bernstein invented to signify the people who gave them information,” Ervin said. “But I think there’s a difference between evil and a symbol.” The story also noted that Reed Irvine, the head of a group called Accuracy in Media, had gone on record as saying that he thought Deep Throat was a composite and wanted the Post to reveal Deep Throat’s identity. Ben refused.1
New York Times columnist William Safire went after Ben in a piece called “Bradlee’s World” on Monday, April 20, 1981, the day after Bill Green’s piece ran. “The irony is that the young Watergate reporter who kept from his colleagues the identity of his all-important confirming source was Bob Woodward, who is The Post’s metropolitan editor today—and who did not demand to share the identity of the ‘Jimmy’s World’ source with the convincing liar on his staff.” He thought Woodward’s admission of culpability was that of a loyalist protecting the man at the top, but ultimately he sided with Ben in keeping Deep Throat’s name—and the principle that allowed him to remain secret—sacrosanct: “I have been systematically deceived several times and know how easy it is to be taken in by a skillful liar,” Safire wrote. “Journalism need not allow its critics to use one nearly successful hoax as a device to undermine the confidentiality of sources.”
The Deep Throat/Jimmy comparisons stuck around. In 1982, when Cooke went on Phil Donahue’s program to explain herself, Donahue made the comparison explicit. Woodward wasn’t her immediate editor, Donahue noted, but “the buck stopped at his desk in terms of your story, I think. Can we say that?”
“Exactly,” Cooke said.
“He didn’t oblige you to tell him the identities …”
“No.”
“… of the sources any more than Ben Bradlee obliged him to identify Deep Throat at the time of the Watergate investigations.”
“That’s correct.”
Janet Cooke says more about Ben Bradlee than Watergate does, because she says the exact same thing that Watergate does. That’s why all the echoes of Watergate in the Janet Cooke episode matter. In the broad history of journalism, Watergate and Janet Cooke are seen as aberrations, extremes, what’s possible in a positive sense and what’s possible in a negative sense. But in Ben’s life they aren’t aberrations at all. They are two very similar examples of who Ben was and how he did his job that happened to have wildly divergent outcomes.
The main point is trust. Newspapers operate on trust, as so much else in the world does, but Ben operated on trust more than most even within the world of newspapers. Alan Pakula, in his copious notes for the movie version of All the President’s Men, put it this way: “Ben does it not because of lawyers but because he has trust in you. Trust in specific people essence of the Post.”
That was it. Ben’s trust in Carl and Bob and the editors supervising them led directly to Watergate. It was a huge gamble to trust those two young reporters, but Ben stuck with them. Part of that was belief in what they were doing, and part of that was Ben’s own intuition about the story of Watergate itself, and where it might lead. Something within him told him to keep going, and he did, and it worked to such brilliant effect that he became a household name.
Ben didn’t bet on Janet Cooke in the same way, but what had made Watergate possible made her possible, too. Ben trusted her. He never thought, for one second, that she was making it all up. He also trusted that the editors above her—Coleman, Maraniss, Woodward, Simons—had done their jobs properly, too.
As the executive editor of a newspaper, overseeing every section except for the op-ed page, you have to depend on other people to do the bulk of the work for you. You can’t put out a newspaper if you don’t. This doesn’t absolve Ben of responsibility for what happened, but it does explain how it could have happened. On a big story you trusted your team and then went with your gut, with the guts of the people who had been through battle with you. Ben had been through battle with Simons and Woodward before, and they had won.
What makes Janet Cooke more interesting than Watergate, to me, is that Ben picked the wrong horse and it bucked him. What do you do when you play the game in just the same way that you always have, but all of a sudden you find yourself fighting for your life?
On April 24, 1981, nearly ten days after Cooke had confessed, the Howard University journalism faculty filed a suit against the Post with the National News Council. The suit alleged that, among other things, Cooke couldn’t have come up with the story (or the idea to fabricate the story) herself, that the editors at the Post must have been complicit in it.
In June of 1981, the council delivered its opinion on the complaint. “The Council staff canvassed the elements in the Green report and found it to be in truth as comprehensive as it appeared to be,” a section titled “Staff Analysis” began. “Nothing discovered in dozens of personal and telephone interviews raised any serious question about the report’s basic accuracy.”
Then, from the actual opinion:
Obliged to face the reality that they might have perpetrated a fraud on their readers, the editors recognized that their first duty was to establish the facts, however embarrassing, and make them public. That duty they fulfilled—spectacularly.…
A lie perpetrated by Janet Cooke produced a monstrous miscarriage of journalism. The Washington Post was negligent in the editing process that preceded publication of her false story. Following publication, it failed to react in any constructive manner to questions from the community and from a few members of its staff regarding the existence of Jimmy.
Once The Post discovered that the story was a fraud, however, the manner in which it reacted was rare in journalism.… The massive 18,000 word self-indictment that resulted was an impressive demonstration of a newspaper’s acceptance of public accountability.
When you make a mistake, clean it up. It was the reason Kay Graham had hired him.
“Who is Ben Bradlee?” Bob asked me rhetorically when we had finally finished our discussion of the convergence of Mark Felt and Janet Cooke and his life with Ben’s, starting with Watergate and continuing into the present day. “He is, ‘We do it today, and then we come back and start the next day.’ And so here you have Janet Cooke connected to Mark Felt, but only he and I know …
“It’s riddled with ironies, and you’re right—you ought to set those things together. But in the world of Ben Bradlee, you know, you move on. Okay, what’s the next story?”
* * *
1 Ben had always disliked Irvine. Accuracy in Media fancied itself a media watchdog, and Irvine was a former Federal Reserve Board economist who attacked Ben and the Post whenever he got the chance. Years before, Irvine had gotten under Ben’s skin by insisting that the Post was covering up the genocide in Cambodia. In response, Ben wrote Irvine a letter saying that he was “a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante,” and that he was sick of dealing with him. “Retromingent” means “urinates backwards.” Ben has no idea where it came from.
BEN
Mr. B. Bradlee’s leadership revisited—The second area of leadership’s performance noticed by the news staff is focused on the mission’s captain. One straightforward way to understand the rationale behind and the prevailing images of Mr. B. Bradlee’s leadership is to compare what reporters believe are the qualities expected of the ideal—Post—reporter and their perceptions of Mr. B. Bradlee. The result is a well-known social phenomena of identification: most reporters provide either identical or similar answers to both questions. Aside from the well publicized stamina traits (high energy level, always at the ready, rarely seeming to run out of steam), the deepest sentiment of reporters is that the Executive Editor’s quest is to achieve institutional success rather than a vulgar, personal aggrandizement in wealth and fame. Indeed, Mr. B. Bradlee is viewed as the pure entrepreneur, l’entrepreneur par excellence, dedicated to The Was
hington Post’s mission. This is described by reporters in quasi-religious terms.
—The Frenchman
Tony Kornheiser, June 22, 2011:
I cannot describe to you what I felt, and I’m sure that so many, many others felt, when he walked among us. Ben could have been a king. Ben in that newsroom was King Arthur. I mean, he was.
David Remnick, October 26, 2009:
Most people are filled with illusions about who they are and how they strike other people. I think Bradlee knows precisely how he strikes other people. I think he is like that kind of star who is very aware of the effect he has on other people, and early on learned how to use that and marshal it to get what he needed in a professional sense. So that the kid coming in to his office scared, that’s a good thing for him. But then by saying something encouraging or funny or deflective or uplifting, married to that sense of nervousness.…
Somebody in his position all day long is meeting people that, for the five minutes they meet with him, it’s the most important five minutes of their day. You have to know how to use that to help the project. The project is maximizing the Washington Post. And there he was brilliant.
He’s in full command of his self. That’s his instrument, like an actor.
David Ignatius, September 27, 2007:
Story conferences are the basic funnel through which all the information we handle has to pass every day. There are two of them. Ben used to preside over them. He didn’t actually preside; he used to sit to the left of the managing editor, who would run the meeting, and he would sit there, kind of leaning back, cracking jokes and little zingers. If you ever said something stupid, God help you.… I can remember as a young editor walking out of those meetings sometimes just wiping the tears out of my eyes from laughter, thinking, “I can’t believe they pay me to do this. This is the coolest thing on earth. God, I’m so lucky. Here I am, and I get to be with Ben Bradlee. I get to work for the coolest guy on the planet.” That sounds corny, but in a business where you’re working too hard, you’re paid too little, that ended up making a huge difference. It was maybe the most important non-monetary compensation of working here.
Yours in Truth Page 40