Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  Bob immediately began concocting possible explanations for how Ben could have been involved. “I think he’s writing a book,” Bob told Armstrong and Kamen, thinking out loud about why Ben might have been interviewing young girls with a tape recorder. He was on his way out the door when the phone rang. It was the copy aide calling back to confess that the whole thing had been a joke. “I was willing, as a reporter and as a friend and admirer, to accept any explanation for what you had done to these young girls,” Bob said. “And, in an interesting way what was going through my mind: I had forgiven you for the crime that you had not committed. We talk about loyalty and devotion and Bradlee’s ability to get people to make strange connections and do things for him that they would do for no one else. Well, that is my best example.”

  After a few more long speeches, Ben yelled, “When are you gonna put a paper out?”

  Haynes Johnson told the story of the impromptu memorial service on the top floor of the Post building when longtime Post reporter and editor Larry Stern died. After an emotional commemoration at the Quaker meeting house on Florida Avenue, people had returned to the Post to drink and to remember Stern, who had dropped dead while jogging on Martha’s Vineyard. (Ben was so curious about how it had happened that he requested, and received, the autopsy report concluding that Stern had died of cardiac arrest, most likely as a result of an allergic reaction to a bee sting.) Upstairs in the Post’s outdoor courtyard, Ben had been at a loss for words and decided spontaneously to throw his glass against the brick wall of the courtyard. Everybody present had followed suit, and when the bill from the catering company came in for all the broken glasses Ben had it framed and hung in the newsroom next to a picture of his friend Larry.

  David Broder followed. I never interviewed him officially for this book, but he would sit with Ben and me in the Post cafeteria every so often, eating the humblest slice of pizza you can imagine and telling stories about the old days. The last time I saw him, he told me the same story that he told on the day Ben retired:

  In 1980 at the Republican convention came the moment that really defined him for me. Lou Cannon, our White House reporter, was determined that he was going to beat the world on the choice of Ronald Reagan’s running mate for the 1980 campaign … and by the third night of the convention, we were pretty convinced that it was going to be George Bush. Lou wrote a story saying, in effect, that the decision had come down for George Bush.

  Our neighbors at Newsweek in the next space [literally, right next to them in the convention hall], had had Ford as their lunch guest for an off-the-record exclusive Newsweek lunch that day and at that lunch, Ford had started dropping hints about how he might be interested, and that story built and built and built and the Newsweek people were absolutely riding the hell out of us, saying you guys are wrong, it’s not gonna be Bush, it’s gonna be Ford.

  Finally, late that night … Reagan came to the convention bringing Bush with him, saying, “This is my choice.” Bradlee got up on the partition between us and Newsweek … [Broder claps; when he told me the story, he mimed beating his own chest] “We had it, you didn’t,” and a few other words besides.

  That, to me, was the quintessential Ben Bradlee, outrageous, but why? Because he was so goddamn competitive, so proud of this organization and so goddamned determined that we have it right. I don’t think any of us will work for a better editor than that.

  When Broder was done, Don Graham stood up. “In a game scheduled for twenty-seven innings, I feel all the excitement of the guy called in to work the top of the twenty-second,” he said. Because time was running short, he kept his remarks brief; he didn’t tell his favorite Bradlee story, the one that he has told so many times since that it has become a standard part of Bradlee lore. In December 1984, the Reagan administration decided to send off a space shuttle with a military package on it, ostensibly for the first time. In advance of the launch, Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary, asked the media not to report on what the package might contain. An Army general threatened to open investigations into any members of the press who dared even to “speculate” about it.

  With Ben’s prodding, Walter Pincus used mostly open sources to discover the contents of the package, an orbiting “signals intelligence” satellite. After careful consideration, and with no small amount of joy at the prospect of ruffling some feathers, Ben put it in the paper. The next day Weinberger accused the Post of “the height of journalistic irresponsibility,” braying publicly that the paper had given “aid and comfort to the enemy” and had essentially committed espionage.

  A series of uniquely vitriolic letters from readers followed. Addressed to “Ben Bradlee, Kremlin on the Potomac”: “If JFK asked you to withhold printing that story, it would have been. You & your paper are traitors and should be tried for treason.” Another: “You are unspeakably arrogant and are doing everything in your power to damage the United States. Sir you are a traitor to your country.” One took a slightly more oblique tack: “By the way, are you still fucking your mother?”

  But the one that got under Ben’s skin was from a man named J. C. Turnacliff, dated December 20, 1984:

  Ben Bradlee (WASH. POST)

  HOW DO I VIEW THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

  (1) DUMB (2) SMART ALECKY (3) IRRESPONSIBLE

  (4) UNAMERICAN (5) A REALLY POOR NEWSPAPERMAN

  (WHAT DID YOU DO DURING WWII?)

  YOUR IRRESPONSIBLE RELEASE OF THE UPCOMING SHUTTLE MISSION PROBABLY SET BACK ARMS TALKS BY 10 YEARS.

  This was Ben’s response, dated a week later:

  Click here to view a plain text version.

  It’s one of the most infamous of all the letters that Ben has ever written. If I could have gotten away with it, “Dear Asshole” would have been the title of this book. Kay Graham was said to have loved that letter more than any other.

  But what has always made it interesting to Don Graham was what happened next. A couple of weeks later, J. C. Turnacliff wrote Ben back. “Mon Cher Con,” he began, “the salutation in your recent letter (copy enclosed) was vintage Bradlee-eze and I’m glad I have it for my memoirs. It takes one to know one.” He said that he felt compelled to write because he didn’t want Ben to think that ten battle stars meant a whole lot to a Marine Corps combat officer who had participated in landings on Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Iwo Jima. “I guess we both contributed our share,” Turnacliff wrote.

  I still think America’s interests would have been better served if the press had acquiesced to the Defense Department’s request to withhold details of the exact military nature of the January shuttle mission.

  I believe in freedom of the press, but I also believe in a responsible press which uses good judgment and places America’s security interests above the desire to be the first to blab, whatever the consequences.

  Your asshole buddy,

  Another week later, Ben returned fire, enclosing a statement from an Army general who said that in his official view the Post hadn’t violated national security. But this time, Ben began, “Dear Pal.” “Do you realize,” he wrote at the letter’s close, “that I probably took you to Bougainville? I’m glad Weinberger wasn’t in your foxhole or my battle station. Keep the faith.”

  Turnacliff wrote back one last time, saying that he didn’t expect a response but wanted to close the loop. “I do … hope that your last letter to me made you feel as good as it did me,” he wrote. “It’s much better being friends than enemies.… I must admit that when I saw that large manila envelope containing your reply to my letter I opened it with some trepidation. I thought it might contain an 8x10 glossy photo of you mooning me. Its actual contents were much more satisfying.” He had since read both of Ben’s books, and said that he felt he knew Ben a bit better. “I hope our paths cross sometime,” he wrote. “Two independent thinkers like us can’t be all bad.”

  Don Graham’s point, whenever he tells the story, lies less in the obvious Ben-ness of starting a letter with “Dear Asshole” than in the fact tha
t the correspondence grew from there, that the two men ended up as something approximating friends. “One of those nice accidents of Ben’s life,” as Graham once put it, “but typical.” Ben’s firebreathing side is more famous than his softer, more forgiving side, but that softer side—particularly with people who showed themselves willing to confess frailty, or to retain an open mind—was always there.

  As the celebration in the newsroom drew to a close, Len Downie stood up and read a final testimonial from Nora Boustany, the Post’s correspondent in Beirut:

  Whenever I found myself alone on the streets of Beirut, I would just shrug off the shelling, the gunmen and the dark corners, telling myself there is this distinguished eminence up there who really appreciates and understands the true meaning of courage in journalism. I always made it to my destination safely and with the story. I find myself in Beirut again. The streets are a little calmer now, but for me you will always be the grand brave man of the news who watched over me and made me want to give just a little bit more. Thank you for giving us all something so special to believe in. Your fan forever, Nora.

  With that, Ben addressed the newsroom one last time. “I was doing great until Boustany’s wire,” he said. “I am overwhelmed by you, as I have been since the day I met all of you.” He didn’t want to run too long, but he wanted Downie—“Leonard,” as Ben called him—to know that he wanted to bequeath him something.

  He went on to tell the story of the ASNE conference in April of 1981, right after the Janet Cooke scandal had unfolded—the meeting of ombudsmen, the 750 people, the television cameras, the works. “What I bequeath you is the loyalty of the publisher,” Ben said to Downie. “Because during that day, which was murder for me, it couldn’t have been much fun for him, and I can just tell you there was not a picture taken of me that day that did not have Don Graham’s arm draped around my shoulder. And that’s as meaningful to me today as it was then. So Leonard, you’ve got that.” They embraced. Then, waving to the rest of the newsroom, Ben said, “Thank you all.”

  As Martha Sherrill, the Style writer tasked with reporting the story of Ben’s retirement for the next day’s paper, wrote, “Cake waited to be eaten. Bradlee turned to a nearby reporter. ‘You’re a girl,’ he said. ‘Cut it.’ ”

  After the farewells and the hugs and the cake, as Ben made his way toward the elevator with Sally, a spontaneous standing ovation broke out across the newsroom. Reporters and editors stood on desks, doing whatever they could to follow Ben as he walked out for the last time as their boss. He paused at the doorway to the elevators and raised his fist in a final salute, and then he put his arm around Sally and walked out for good.

  The morning of Sunday, August 30, 2009, broke calm and clear on Long Island, but by noon Grey Gardens was humming. Florists burst in and out of the front door, teams of maids were running up and down the stairs, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Ben had turned eighty-eight a few days before, but tonight was the main event.

  At the table in the sun room, Sally and Eden Rafshoon scrutinized the seating charts for the dinner, calling out names, furiously scribbling and then erasing, dishing about who couldn’t sit next to whom and why. Ben and I sat in the corner by the television, watching tennis and tangling with a particularly screwy Times Sunday crossword. The other houseguests—Maureen Dowd and Eden’s husband, Jerry, and an assortment of other D.C. types—lounged and read on the couch or walked on the beach.

  The whole thing was like a scene out of a Victorian novel, everybody in the great house preparing for the big party. Grey Gardens itself is a marvel. It was famous before Ben and Sally ever moved in, the subject of an eponymous and classic documentary film from the seventies that later became a fictionalized Broadway show and HBO movie. The house sits at the corner of posh Lily Pond Lane and West End Road, across the street from Steven Spielberg and a healthy stone’s throw from the beach. Like Ben and Sally’s other two homes it’s ritzy and historic and perfectly restored and all of that, but more than anything it’s just a beautiful place. The gardens take up an entire acre and are as lush as you can imagine, full of archways and hydrangeas and picturesque seating arrangements that nobody ever uses.

  Time spent there is an idyll. You get up whenever you want. Breakfast and lunch are taken outside, under an umbrella on a deck beside the pool. Ben’s usually the first to the table, and when you’re ready for it Evelyn cooks your breakfast to order. Everybody reads the papers and gossips about whatever happened the night before—in the Hamptons, there is always a party, and Ben and Sally are always invited—until somehow you find that it’s after noon, you’ve been by the pool for two hours, and Ben, baked to a disconcertingly deep shade of red, is pulling himself out of his lounger to make Bloody Marys. A woozy late lunch, a bit more sun with a book, and then you find yourself getting ready for a party, or a catered clambake on the beach, or a gourmet dinner cooked by a private chef. One of Ben’s favorite aphorisms, taken from the Jewish elders, is “Love work, hate domination, and steer clear of the ruling class.” All true, but a bit hard to wrap your mind around when you’re there.

  The first guest to arrive was Barbara Walters, mortified to be precisely on time. “I expected traffic,” she said to Ben out on the porch, by way of apology for being prompt. “I figured it would take at least another half an hour to get here.”

  Slowly, in the time-lapse manner of a party getting under way, the back porch began to fill up with guests. Alec Baldwin came next, with cigars “for Jack,” who turned out to be Jack Nicholson. Jimmy Buffett and his wife walked in just behind Lorne Michaels. Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, walked across the street from their house and in through the open front door. Anjelica Huston, the painter John Alexander, Ken Auletta, Richard Cohen, agents and editors from the big publishing houses in New York, editors from The Washington Post, almost all boldfaced names in their own right. Soon the place was buzzing, as the first drink settled in.

  The dining room was so packed that we had a hard time finding our seats when the dinner bell rang. I had been to some of Sally and Ben’s bigger parties in Washington, but I had never been to anything like this before—a fully seated affair with all of the big names, where you were placed next to somebody for a reason and you were expected to figure out what it was. Things got loose pretty fast. My dinner partner to my left, a smart and beguiling woman from New York, asked me toward the end of dinner to tell her who I thought was the most beautiful woman in the room—a trick question if ever there was one. I mentioned one of the older women there, a woman who is classically beautiful in a delicate, porcelain sort of way. A safe bet.

  “She’s beautiful, okay,” my new friend said, placing a piece of duck on her fork and then looking back up at me, “but do you want to fuck her?”

  It was that kind of party, at least at our table. Paul McCartney stopped by to say hello before dessert, sending a jolt of blushing self-congratulation throughout the room. He, Ben, Lorne Michaels, Alec Baldwin, and a few others all go to yoga together in Amagansett a couple of times a week during the month of August. They call themselves the Yoga Boys, and they all clearly love it.4 (The previous night, at a party down the street, Ben had introduced me to McCartney by saying, “Meet a pal of mine. He’s working on a book about me.” As I fumbled for words, the ever-savvy Macca saved me from myself by saying simply, “It better be good.”)

  I won’t lie. I loved every minute of it. It wasn’t until the toasts that something started to feel a little bit off. Sally got up and said that Ben was her role model, her icon, and Ben sawed away on the air violin while the entire room groaned good-naturedly. Ben’s son, Quinn, offered up a heartfelt toast about all he had learned from his dad. Others made jokes, and then Ben stood up and said, “Sally, words can’t say how much you’ve meant to me in our thirty-plus years …” Before he could finish the sentence, Sally had shouted, “Thirty-six!” Then he called her his “girlfriend,” one of his standard laugh lines, and sent people on their way. As the crowd sto
od up to start heading home I realized it was a script that I’d seen before, and that everybody in the room had likely seen it before, too.

  The thing about being starstruck is that it wears off. As I looked around the room, a room I had felt such a charge to be in at first, I sensed that on the most basic level Ben didn’t give a shit about any of it. This was the fabulous life of Ben Bradlee, the legendary newspaper editor, but I could tell he would have been just as happy watching the Red Sox. The party was about Sally, and about “Ben and Sally,” and about re-creating the parties that they’d had during the eighties and nineties, when Lauren Bacall would sit next to Ben and the sexual tension between them could have powered the house. But on this night, as the party broke up, there was something sad about the whole thing, something missing. For one thing, Ben was getting old, and it was starting to show. For another, he has three other children, and none of them was there.

  In 2007, when I first started to work with Ben, Carol went on vacation for a week and asked me if I would sit out front and play secretary while she was gone. I had known Ben only for a couple of weeks at that point, and I was still scared to talk to him. I figured that sitting out front might at least up my chances of having a meaningful conversation with him.

  Toward the end of the week, one of Ben’s kids called on his direct line. They were on the phone for ten or fifteen minutes, and it was a tough conversation. I wasn’t eavesdropping; Ben talks loudly and leaves the door to his office open. The conversation had to do with money, and how much of it Ben was willing to part with, and on what time frame. It didn’t end well.