Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  When Ben finished the first draft of his memoir, in 1994, he circulated it to a few trusted readers for feedback. Tom Wilkinson, Ben’s old friend at the paper, wrote back with a long list of items that he thought Ben needed to address. At the top of the list: “You have a tendency to overuse the words ‘joy’ and ‘joyous.’ ” Ben wrote in the margin, “Agree.”

  Ben had charisma and good looks and wit and great instincts and an interesting backstory and a flair for punch and drama, but without the joy he took in what he did the Post could never have become what it was while he was there. Ben loved his job, and he lived for it, and that’s mostly how he inspired others to do the same. He loved newspapers and the battle for the news. He loved the process of reporting, the exposure of lies, and particularly the moment when a big breaking story began to make its murmuring way through the newsroom. The height of joy lay in scooping the Times, of course, which happened often but never often enough. In 1978, when the Post published excerpts of H. R. Haldeman’s book before the Times, which had paid for the rights, Ben was asked how he felt about it. “Delight,” he responded. “Sheer, unadulterated delight.”

  Joy is often underreported as a reason for why good things happen to some people and not others. In Ben’s case, his joy had a great deal to do with how he was able to create an atmosphere in the newsroom that could produce the hard-hitting, vibrant journalism he was after. “That was one of the happiest places I can imagine,” he told Shelby Coffey, a former Post editor and reporter who had been Len Downie’s chief rival to succeed Ben as editor of the paper, in an interview at the Newseum after Ben retired:

  People were doing the best work they could do, and among peers, and they were laughing, and it was a joyous place. It was a joyous place. And, you know, did it ever stop being joyous? I’m sure it did. But I can’t remember it. And I remember that the idea of going to work was the most exciting thing in the morning that I could think of. And to create that, you have to believe it.

  Ben believed it, and so did most of his staff. People wanted to be there. At the root of Ben’s joy was an endless curiosity about what was happening in the world, and why, and what the Post might be able to say about it. Woodward and Walter Pincus and several other of Ben’s star reporters all describe his curiosity as the base of his drive, personally and for the paper. “What the fuck happened?” Ben would ask, sidling over to your desk, and once he put that bee in your bonnet you would do anything to figure out a way to tell him.

  “One of the joys of journalism,” Ben once said, “is that you don’t really run into the same thing over and over again. I come to work and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do in the morning. I mean, we could be interrupted here in the next five seconds by somebody who comes in with news that’s going to change the course of the world.” Deep down he really is like a shark, driven by an atavistic need to keep moving, to keep driving, always on the hunt for what’s next. He claims as his family motto the phrase “Nose down, ass up, and keep pushing forward,” a phrase that tells you a lot about him.

  The complement to Ben’s joy and curiosity, the thing that made him more than just a cheerleader, was his competitiveness. Ben wanted the news first, period. At the daily news conferences, if you were an editor and somebody in your section had been scooped, Ben would pass you a copy of the story with a Post-it note on the top asking simply, “What’s this about?” You were expected to have an answer.

  During Watergate, Carl and Bob remember distinctly that at certain points Ben would throw a story back at them and exclaim, with undisguised glee, “Eat your heart out, Abe!” Abe was A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor and then the executive editor of The New York Times, a man whom Ben described to me on numerous occasions as his “chief rival.” Rosenthal was by all accounts a brilliant (if difficult) man and editor, instrumental in the Times’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. He was at the wheel from 1969 until 1986, dates that track pretty closely with Ben’s. He personified the Times in the same way that Ben personified the Post for so much of his time there.

  For me the competition was over before it started:

  From a letter of Ben’s, to be read aloud at a roast of Rosenthal in the late eighties:

  Following his legendary nose for news, Abe recently found himself in the Galapagos Islands, 500 miles west of Ecuador deep in the Pacific Ocean. There, he told us in his column, he came face to face with an unafraid iguana, and the iguana spat in his face.

  It was inevitable, given the drama inherent in this confrontation that they would make a movie about it. Buddy Hackett will play Abe, and they want Max Frankel1 for the iguana.

  For his part, Rosenthal was aware of the contrast, too. “I’m back in New York even more tanned and handsome than ever,” he wrote to Ben in the late seventies. “My wife has fallen in love with you. Kindly send her a handsome check every week.”

  These were jokes, but the competition was serious. Rosenthal enjoyed sticking it to Ben just as much as Ben enjoyed sticking it to him. In 1974, Rosenthal told The Boston Globe, “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I can’t help it—we cover the world, and the two papers cannot be compared.” This after they’d just had their asses handed to them on Watergate.2 Or from Time magazine, 1977, in a piece about Kay Graham (“Krusty Kay Tightens Her Grip”):

  Ask A. M. Rosenthal, the Times’s executive editor, to name the best American papers and he will tell you. “The Times—space—the Washington Post—space—and then the others.” The Post’s executive editor, brash Ben Bradlee, agrees, although he thinks his own paper in some ways better. Bradlee envies the Times its careful editing, its good desk work, its “cruising speed.” But he also finds the Times “too constipated.”

  A few years later, the Times’s D.C. bureau chief was quoted in the Washington Journalism Review saying, “What hasn’t changed is that the New York Times sets the news agenda for the television networks and the other newspapers around the country, including the Washington Post.”

  “In a pig’s ass—and that’s on the record!” Ben replied. “The New York Times people wish that were true but it hasn’t been since Watergate and they know it.”

  “I hope you keep trying to accept the Post as a truly first rate newspaper,” Ben would write to a reader more than ten years later. “We are not The New York Times and do not aspire to be. We are not pompous. We hope that we are interesting, different. We pray for readers who won’t confuse good writing with arrogance, smugness, and condescension.”

  Ben took any attack by Rosenthal or the Times as a direct personal attack. In many ways this was true of his entire career: when Ben wanted something from you, it became very personal, for him and for you. The Pentagon Papers were about the Post and the Times, but for Ben in a very deep and important way they were also about him. Even when he was in the wrong, when he knew that he’d lost out on the merits in any given situation, he would make a direct personal appeal. “Give me this one,” he would say, to an editor or a reporter who had caught him wrong-footed. “Let me have this one, pal.” And more often than not he’d get what he wanted.

  As Ben and Rosenthal got older, they developed a kind of fondness for each other—the kind that comes from trading barbs for years in the press but finally realizing that you’re coming to the end of the road, and that pretensions are silly. In 1986, shortly before his retirement, Rosenthal sent Ben a long, kind letter, full of jokes about his future role as a columnist and the “lucid instructions” he would be giving the world as such. “Oh, the hell with all this arch stuff,” Rosenthal wrote at the end. “You’re a good editor and so am I and we have always liked each other, and it’s time to say so.”

  And yet even around that very retirement, the hackles of both men would go up in ways that typified each of them. When Eleanor Randolph went up to New York to interview Rosenthal for her three-part series on his retirement in the Post, she asked him what he thought the difference was between the two papers. “I don’t always read the Post,” Rosenth
al said. The three-part series, celebrating Rosenthal and wondering about who his successor might be, ran in the Post in January of 1986. The stories noted that Rosenthal was being moved out by May of 1987 not because of any lack of fitness for the job but because the Times had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five for its executives.

  A few years later, when word started to spread that Ben was thinking of retiring, Rosenthal couldn’t resist a cheap shot. “I retire and they do a series about me,” he reportedly said of the Post. “When Ben retires, we’ll probably give him a paragraph.” So Ben sat down at his typewriter and crafted a response. “Dear Abe,” he began, “Here’s your paragraph. Benjamin C. Bradlee, age 70, retired today …”

  On June 20, 1991, Ben sent out a memo to the entire staff of the Post announcing his departure. “Tomorrow’s newspaper will carry the news that as of Labor Day I will become a vice-president of the newspaper and a director of the Post Company,” he wrote. “This is a cause for nothing but optimism and excitement about how productively time marches on.”

  The following morning, longtime Post reporter Howard Kurtz broke the news on the front page of the paper: “Bradlee Retiring as Editor of The Post; Managing Editor Downie to Move Up.” Inside, on A12, Kurtz had compiled a more complete tribute to Ben: “With Pen and Panache, Bradlee Molded Bolder, Brasher Post.” He led with the Walter Washington episode, noting that Ben had built the Post from a “small, genteel paper with no national pretensions into what is widely regarded as one of the two or three most influential papers in the country.” The size of the newsroom staff had doubled under Ben, from three hundred to six hundred; the news budget increased from $3 million to $60 million; daily circulation had gone from 446,000 to 802,000; and the paper had won twenty-three Pulitzer Prizes. “Even as Bradlee has gradually reduced his role in the newsroom in recent years,” Kurtz wrote, “his personality and approach to journalism—hard-hitting, sharp-tongued, and stylish—have remained interchangeable with the paper’s public image.”3

  Ben never had a contract at the Post. Nor, that he can remember, did he ever ask for a raise. (His bonus check one year in the eighties was for $198,000, so it’s not as if he needed to.) He served, always, at the pleasure of the Grahams, with the clear understanding that once that pleasure had passed so, too, would his tenure as executive editor. “I’m going to retire as soon as somebody with the last name Graham asks me to,” he would say when people asked.

  But with the birth of his son Quinn in 1982—Quinn had a host of difficulties as a kid, including open heart surgery at just three months of age—Ben had begun to contemplate when he might pass the baton. Once Downie had been chosen as managing editor in 1984, Ben knew that his days were numbered, but he was in no rush to move out and Don Graham was in no rush to move him out. At one of their regular Tuesday breakfasts in 1988, Graham turned to Ben and proposed, “How about working until you hit seventy?” and that was it.

  “Currently there’s a sort of mythology that the Post will change radically if I leave … that the bean-counters will take over if Bradlee’s not there to keep ’em sort of straight and narrow,” Ben told George Vaillant, his old Grant Study interlocutor, the year before he retired. “This is bullshit, it really is … because the place, I recognize now, is running just great, and the people who are doing all the work rather than [getting] all the credit are ready to do both. And it’s time.”

  With the announcement of Ben’s retirement in June of 1991, the letters began to pour in—from old reporters, old friends, colleagues, competitors. They all said pretty much the same thing. Ben’s next door neighbor in D.C. sent in a note about having run into a man named Eddie McGrath, an old Harvard athlete who coached school football in Boston during the 1930s. “Eddie said, ‘I coached Ben in the 8th grade,’ ” the neighbor wrote. “ ‘He was the best quarterback I ever had. He was a cocky little bastard, but he put his heart in every play—and he made the whole team better.’ ”

  The best of the bunch came from Mary McGrory, four days after Ben’s announcement to the staff. McGrory had been a legend at the Star, and when the Star finally fell apart in 1981 McGrory’s migration to the Post was a shining moment for Ben and also a convenient lever by which to move himself past the agonies of Janet Cooke. McGrory was a perceptive writer and a perceptive person:

  Even with the long buildup, the announcement was a blow. There was a pall over the newsroom. You were our hedge against tedium vitae, in and on the paper. You were our protection against them, whoever they might be.…

  I will miss you most, not just because I have known you the longest—I’ve been your friend and fan for 40 years—but because you always had time for me. Some of the terminally self-important around here are too busy to say good morning, but you told me stories and made me laugh. I always loved hearing about your father.

  You’ve had “Scaramouche” quoted to you, I’m sure: “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” That’s you, and weren’t we lucky that we had you so long and that you made us feel safe and excited at the same time. Thank you.

  Love, Mary

  On July 31, 1991, Ben’s last day in the newsroom, all of the editors showed up at the 2:30 story conference in Turnbull & Asser shirts. (“At almost $100 a shirt, few of them sported the genuine article,” Ben couldn’t help but note in his memoir, “but the Art Department had provided ersatz white collars for the cheapos.”) Several editors pitched bogus stories designed to get a rise out of Ben. He had always been skeptical of science stories in general and in particular of the depletion of the ozone layer as a threat to the health of the planet. One editor pitched a story combining the Big Bang and ozone depletion, just to piss him off. Downie ran the meeting and, in homage to Ben, lobbed gratuitous curses and comments throughout. At the end, the editors balled up their budgets—the roster of stories for the next day’s paper—and threw them at Ben, as he characteristically did at the end of each story conference.

  Later that afternoon, there was a public sendoff near the north wall of the newsroom, where the entire staff had assembled.

  “None of us have really known how to deal with this day, including Ben, including me, because it’s a day that we didn’t ever really expect to happen or understand how we’re gonna get through, or beyond,” Len Downie said, starting things off. He talked about how Ben had overseen the renovations of the newsroom in 1972, when the new building was acquired, and also succeeding renovations involving the installation of computerized systems and everything else that came with the transformation of the Post into a modern newspaper. “We’re in Ben Bradlee’s newsroom, quite literally,” Downie said. “And, in a more important way, this is Ben Bradlee’s newsroom because most of us are Ben Bradlee’s people.… He gave us room to spread our wings and to fly in a way that nobody else of his genius has been able to do in most other walks of life. Ben created the newspaper that we work for now.”

  Walter Pincus joked that, in light of Ben’s retirement, Robards had given up acting, too. “There have been a whole slew of us who’ve gone through this place really enjoying every minute of it because we liked each other and because we were working for an extraordinary bunch of people and because the guy running it made it that way,” he said.

  Meg Greenfield, the longtime editor of the editorial page, came next. She and Ben had had their share of prickly moments. “I don’t agree that there will be another Ben,” she said. “The Lord made only one Ben Bradlee and editorial writers say, on balance, that was a good decision because what would the other Ben Bradlee do?” Her favorite moment in all of her time with Ben had been when William Rehnquist, then the assistant attorney general (and later the chief justice of the Supreme Court), called to try to prevent the Post from continuing to publish the Pentagon Papers after the first day they had run in the paper. As Ben was saying all the right things to Rehnquist over the phone, he was making obscene hand gestures to Greenfield, who was sitting (dying) in his office. This was the posture of the Pos
t she remembered, a paper that was “dangerous to people in government.”

  Tom Wilkinson, the head of personnel, followed Greenfield. The first story he told has always been a kind of legend at the Post; a number of different people told me that Ben had said it to them first, and not to Wilkinson. Who knows. As Wilkinson told it, when he became head of personnel, one of the first applicants he saw was “pretty good.” “He had a variety of clips—hard news, features, politics, solid experience at a couple of papers, kind of reticent, little soft-spoken, kind of shy, but he interviewed around the newsroom and did pretty well.” Ben was the last stop in the process, so Wilkinson sent him in to Ben’s office and then went in after the guy left. He hoped for thoughtful analysis of the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses, or at least a critique of his clips. Ben’s summary: “Nothing clanks when he walks.”

  “That was the end of the discussion and the end of him,” Wilkinson said. “After that, I knew a little bit more about what Ben was looking for.”

  Woodward got up and told a story on himself. On April Fool’s in 1975, an article in the Post had run with a composite sketch of a man suspected in the disappearance of a pair of sisters known as the Lyon sisters in Wheaton, Maryland. They had last been seen talking to a man with a tape recorder who loosely matched Ben’s physical description. Scott Armstrong and Al Kamen, who were working with Bob on The Final Days, were in on the joke, and along with a copy aide at the Post they told Bob that Ben was in jail and would only talk to him. “I got dressed, put on my best suit, this was gonna be the interview of the decade, Bradlee in the cell block,” Bob said.