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Walt Harrington Memo to Bob Kaiser, October 29, 1993:
Nothing compared to the feeling I got the times Ben walked back to the Magazine to drop a sentence or two about one of my stories, usually loud enough for everybody to hear. When I heard that he’d announced that the Bush piece was the best political profile he’d ever read, my rational side knew enough to discount the remark as in-house political hyperbole, but I still felt as if God had reached out and touched me. I even remember being amazed and a little embarrassed at how good it made me feel.
But looking back, I don’t think it was a Great Father and Obedient Child thing or even that having the boss praise you is always good, although that was some of it. I think it was much more that I trusted and shared his judgment. If I could do a piece that got Ben (1) to read the whole damned thing with his notoriously short attention span and (2) to get up from his desk and walk over to drop a quip, I knew I’d accomplished something larger. For me, Ben was like a medium through which the interests of readers seemed to pass. If it moved him, I knew it would move them.
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Grant Study, 1979:
Section VIII: Politics
1. What presidential candidate do you hope will win the 1980 nomination:
Anderson__
Baker__
Brown__
Carter__
Crane__
Connolly__
Bush X
Dole__
Haig__
Kennedy__
Richardson__
Reagan__
Ford__
[written in below:]
I suspect Carter will probably be re-elected (12/14/79)
Letter to BCB from John Dougherty, November 29, 1993:
One memory of my time there stays crystal clear. One afternoon, you stormed into the newsroom carrying a tape deck blasting the theme to Rocky. Dressed in a white shirt, with sleeves rolled up, you jumped on top of a desk and announced to a cheering newsroom that the Post was victorious in a legal battle with Mobil Corp. I remember thinking to myself, “So that’s how to run a newsroom.”
Letter from BCB back to John Dougherty, December 3, 1993:
That wasn’t the theme from Rocky. That was the overture to Die Walkyrie from Honus Wagner’s great grandfather Richard. I had said about that trial that it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. And that was the fat lady singing.
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BCB to Mrs. Arthur Ashe, February 8, 1993:
Dear Mrs. Ashe:
This is a letter to tell you how much Arthur meant to me although we knew each other only slightly and to the world which really revered him.
For almost 30 years he has moved me with his grace and his incredible sense of what is important and what is appropriate.
I would also like to tell you a story that I hope will make you laugh as I think it would have made Arthur laugh if I could have reached him with it.
One afternoon I came in from working in the woods, clearing brush, at our place on the St. Mary’s River in southern Maryland. My wife told me Arthur Ashe had called and wondered if I was game for tennis the next day. I found it only a little hard to believe but I wanted to do it so much that I called the number given and spoke to “Arthur” and asked him what he was doing in the area and got an answer that he was trying out a new court. I wanted to play with him so badly, I saw no incongruity in what he said.
That night I told my 10-year-old son that I was going to take him over in the morning to see one of the great tennis players of our time but also one of the bravest and most interesting men I knew. I gave him the whole nine yards—I talked about race relations, achievement, eye on the main chance—it was almost a sermon.
The next morning we drove over to the “new court.” We couldn’t find anyone immediately. It was a super luxurious home done in incredibly bad taste.
And then my heart sank as I saw someone I knew only barely approach with three racquets under his arm. It was a man named Arthur Esch. I had never considered the possibility that it was he, not Arthur, who wanted to play.
My son looked at me oddly for the rest of the weekend and I didn’t get a chance to laugh until I was out of there.
I guess it shows how much I enjoyed Arthur’s company and looked forward to seeing him.
The outpouring of love and admiration makes me feel good about my country even though we’ll all miss him so much.
With great sympathy,
(s) Ben Bradlee
BCB speech to the Dirks Newspaper Financial Forum, Atlanta, April 16, 1974:
There are many obstacles on the road between philosophy and practice. There is rarely such a thing as absolute truth. We can only print what we think is the truth at the time, what we are told is the truth at the time. We are writing, in the words of Philip L. Graham, only “the first rough draft of history.” More than any other profession, we are legitimately subject to the second guess. Unique among manufactured products, the newspaper is completely different every 24 hours, and it can’t be recalled for mistakes of fact or judgment. It is produced in an adversary environment where the goals of the reported inherently conflict with the goals of the reporter and the reader. It is this daily conflict that gives concrete importance and meaning to the First Amendment, to freedom of the press. Without that freedom there is no conflict, and without that conflict there is no truth.
Interview with Michael Gartner in American Heritage, October/November 1982:
Q: You’ve just had a son. Will there be newspapers around when he’s ready to enter the real world?
B: I can’t help but think so, though maybe I’m beginning to deceive myself. I think that newspapers may look different, but people will always want to read hard copy. You can’t Xerox television, and you can’t memorize what the radio or television announcer tells you, so people will always want to study the details and to read the ads. No question about that. But if a person is looking for a 1972 blue Mustang with whitewalls, and if he can type that into his computer and come up with three such Mustangs for sale in the Washington area, that would scare me if I were running the classified ad department.
Interview with Harvard Business Review, September 2010:
Q: Is print journalism a dying industry?
B: Look, when I started in this business, I think there were close to 2,000 daily newspapers in America, which is ridiculous. Some of them weren’t any good. But this country has a handful of papers that are the best in the world. The reporters are working hard and really, really searching for the truth. And I guaran-damn-tee you that a lot of the people putting out the television news and the internet news are getting it from the papers. I don’t know what generation you are, but sometimes I think I can’t read without my arms wide open.
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Ben has a number of favorite phrases. Among them are “The wisdom of the ages cries out for silence” (when he doesn’t want to answer your question), “The caravan moves on” (when he doesn’t intend to dwell on something), and “Keep the faith” (when he is ready for you to get out of his office). The one that Sally quotes most frequently is the one she struggles to apply to her own life: whenever she is worried about something, Ben will turn to her and say, “When the history of the world is written, this will not be in it.”
By that criterion most of our lives are completely meaningless, but sometimes hearing it helps.
When the history of Ben’s life is written, the truth is that most of the eighties, from a pure journalistic perspective, doesn’t make the cut. This isn’t my judgment alone. In his five-hundred-page memoir, Ben devotes a mere thirty-five pages to the ten years between Janet Cooke and his retirement in 1991. “Historically, the eighti
es must look not like Ben’s glory years,” Bob Kaiser told me, with only a slight hint of aspersion. He was just stating a fact.
With the departure of Howard Simons in 1984, Don Graham chose Len Downie as the next managing editor of the paper, and Downie quickly became Ben’s heir apparent. The transfer of power was quick and basically painless. Both Downie and Kaiser, who served as Downie’s deputy, still remember a particular day in June of 1985, when a TWA flight from Athens to Rome was hijacked and flown instead to Beirut. The hijackers had killed an American serviceman on board and still held several other U.S. citizens as the Post went to press. It was a big breaking story and the entire staff was mobilized.
At about 7:45 that night, Ben approached Downie and Kaiser as they stood together in the newsroom, discussing the makeup of the front page and the play of the various hijacking stories. He was wearing his overcoat. “You guys have got this under control,” Ben said. “I’m going home.”
“Big symbolic moment for all of us,” Kaiser told me.
Ben’s tenure as executive editor would last another six years, but Len Downie ran the paper from there on out—just as Ben had under Russ Wiggins some twenty years before.
This doesn’t mean that nothing happened in the eighties. There were important stories—Iran-contra, the Reagan assassination attempt, and a series of struggles with the CIA and FBI over national security matters (Russian spies and the like) in which Ben played a determinative role. But, increasingly, he was becoming more conservative, and in his own memoir he admits that he had probably begun to lose a step. Downie and Woodward pushed for publication of intelligence-related scoops, and the once hard charging Bradlee found himself pushing back. He didn’t want to stick it to people quite as hard as he once had.
But while in the histories of Len Downie or Bob Woodward or even the Post itself those might be important stories, they’re not overly important to Ben. In 1985 he turned sixty-four years old. His legacy was secure. And though he would often write or call a reporter to tell her that she had done a helluva job on a certain story—thus making that reporter’s day—it wasn’t Ben’s news judgment or his instincts that mattered as much anymore. The stories people tell about Ben from the eighties aren’t about what went into the newspaper, for the most part. They are the stories that Ignatius and Kornheiser tell, indicative of the phenomenon that the Frenchman described: in the eighties, Ben’s presence in the newsroom meant more to the Post on a day-to-day basis than his editorial skills did. What mattered to people was that they worked for Ben Bradlee at a Washington Post that still bore his imprint—if not in terms of what went into the paper then at least in terms of how he reflected back what his reporters wanted to see in themselves.
From October of 1972, when the Post finished renovations on its newly acquired building on 15th Street, until July 31, 1991, when Ben walked out of the newsroom for the last time as executive editor, he spent most of each working day inside a glass-walled office on the newsroom’s northern edge. He had originally wanted his office to be entirely open, no barrier, so he could hear and see everything that was going on, but in the end he was forced to accept a glass partition for security reasons. He could at least see out into the newsroom—and, far more important, the newsroom could see him.
The first time you see Robards in All the President’s Men he is behind a replica of this very glass wall, conferring with other editors in his office. “There is something reassuring about being able to see Bradlee in his office sitting there below his books behind the glass (BIG DADDY),” Pakula wrote in his notes for the film.
Ben intended for the glass wall to convey his openness, his desire to be involved and to know what was going on at all times. But to a large degree Ben’s intended symbolism was trumped by a different, deeper symbolism that extended far beyond his physical office: that Ben was the one being observed; that seeing him meant more than being seen by him; that his office, his leadership style, even in a sense his entire career as the editor of the Post, were at heart a bravura performance.
I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything false about it. I mean only that Ben Bradlee is always on, still to this day. He knows that people are watching him, and he plays it to the hilt. For the last thirty years he has stood almost singlehandedly for a Washington Post and a newspaper business that people want to remember. Everybody who knows him takes solace in the fact that Ben will always be Ben, that you can count on him for that. That he achieves this feat as reliably and as gracefully as he does, performance or not, is one of the things that people like best about him.
The book that Sally wanted me to write with Ben was doomed from the start. There really aren’t any “lessons” from Ben’s life, other than that most people would love to have walked a couple of miles in his shoes. There is very little about him that you can hope to replicate in your own life. “Always tell the truth” or “Be bold” or “Trust your instincts” or some other such formulations would be the closest you could come, but those are bromides and nobody needs them. Only Ben could do it the way that Ben did it. If you tried any of it, you’d look like an idiot.
Which didn’t, evidently, stop people at the Post from trying. When the battle to succeed Ben began in earnest—at the level of editors and high national and international correspondents, a plane where creative tension was absolutely and undeniably real—some of the seekers puffed their chests out and offered their own pale facsimiles of Ben’s persona. A few went even further. Eleanor Randolph, who was the media reporter at the Post in the mid-eighties, asked me what the name brand of Ben’s distinctive white-collared striped dress shirts was. When I told her they were from Turnbull & Asser, she laughed. “Turnbull & Asser,” she said derisively. “Every once in a while some schmuck would come in wearing one.” As another reporter put it to me, “There were at least four or five editors who started wearing glasses with strings around them and talking in incredibly gruff voices, with bold striped shirts.… It was hilarious. And very masculine. I mean, the whole thing was like a hilarious boys town.”
“A few individuals among the perceived ‘high fliers’ tend to exhibit some ‘over-respect’ towards the Executive Editor,” wrote the ever reliable Frenchman:
The posture generates some acerbic remarks from the floor mainly when these “high fliers” desire to interact with subordinates in the same manner as the captain does. On the opposite the most appreciated lieutenants are characters who do not try to replicate the Executive Editor’s style but are deeply committed to the same collective values; thus, they strive to implement them according to their distinctive temper.
This was one of the reasons, outside of his clear chemistry with Don Graham, that Len Downie made so much sense as Ben’s successor. He was not among the people who thought it wise to wear $100 dress shirts in the newsroom, nor to try to imitate Ben in any way. He was, famously, the son of an Ohio milkman, and he had a different, more workmanlike approach to editing and to management for which he made no apologies.
“Ben was much better with the big stuff than the small stuff,” Don Graham told me diplomatically. “I mean, I doubt that Winston Churchill would have been regarded by the people who worked for him as quote ‘a good administrator.’ Ben wasn’t a good administrator, but he had people around him who were.”
Ben doesn’t deny any of this. In 1991, shortly after his retirement, the dean of the George Washington University School of Business and Public Management wrote to see if Ben would accept an honor from the school. Ben’s response:
Dear Dean Burdetsky:
Don Graham has been struck mute at the news that any school of business and management would honor me in any way and as usual I agree with him.
I think that if you just want to fill a hall, then maybe I could help but I feel slightly uncomfortable being honored by you at all.
“People ask me, ‘What was your goal for the Washington Post, what was your game plan?’ ” Ben once said. “I really didn’t have one. You want to make it better, y
ou know where you’re weak, you try to make it strong. And then where you’re weak changes and you’ve got to make it stronger again.” Though lofty journalistic principles sound great, this is how most things actually work. Ben’s managerial approach was always ad hoc. This is true journalistically, too; there isn’t any identifiable record of journalistic principles that he leaves behind in his wake, any rudder for aspiring journalists to steer by, other than always to maintain a healthy skepticism about government and its doings. Ben’s greatest contribution was that he made a series of gut calls at crucial moments in a way that inspired confidence in an entire newsroom for an extended period of time.
Outside of hiring the most talented people he could find and then setting them free to compete with one another, perhaps Ben’s only other identifiable managerial technique was his twice daily circuit through the newsroom. Nearly every other editor I spoke with mentioned this as one of the primary things they took away from having known Ben. It was a simple act, walking through the newsroom and gossiping with the staff, but as a performer he used these rounds to great effect.
In 1984, Woodward was out drumming up publicity for Wired, his book about John Belushi and the Hollywood drug culture. In a morning television interview, Bob said that he had heard an estimate that roughly forty people at the Post used cocaine on a regular basis. That afternoon, Ben hammered out a statement: “I don’t know what the hell Bob is talking about. None of the editors knows what he is talking about. Cocaine is illegal, and if I hear of anyone using it around here, it’s out the door, good-by.” The staff didn’t know if Ben was pissed, suspicious, or what. Later that afternoon, a reporter in the Magazine section of the paper remembers Ben making his way across the newsroom, pointing at various reporters as he went, shouting, “Thirty-seven! Thirty-eight! Thirty-nine!”
Yours in Truth Page 41