Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  “Why don’t you come over here, Sal,” Ben said softly. Looking at her, smiling: “I’ve got a better shoulder than either of those guys.”

  I’ve also seen up close what a wonderful dad Ben has been to Quinn. Quinn was born with velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS), a genetic condition that comes with a host of physical and cognitive difficulties. He had open heart surgery at three months, and for most of his childhood one malady followed another. (He wasn’t diagnosed with VCFS until he was fourteen.) Once, a trained professional insisted to Ben and Sally that Quinn was retarded and would have to be institutionalized. In those moments Ben’s capacity for denial dovetailed with what was best for Quinn: Ben didn’t believe it for a second, and so as a family they plowed ahead.

  Quinn softened Ben. For one thing, he was born in 1982, which was right when Ben began his slow withdrawal from everyday involvement in the editing of the paper. Ben had time for Quinn in a way that he didn’t for his other children. (That, more than the money battles, is what seems to hurt the older kids the most.) But Quinn is so sensitive, and his mind works in such quirky and unpredictable ways, that the only way to understand him is through patience. Ben is not known for his patience, but I have watched him exert it with Quinn over and over and over again.

  In November of 2010, I flew up to Boston to go through David Halberstam’s archives at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Jean Halberstam had kindly given me permission to look through her husband’s research materials for his seminal book The Powers That Be, and I gave myself two days. Five minutes after I arrived, I realized I hadn’t left myself enough time.

  Halberstam talked to everybody—everybody. The transcripts took up two full archival boxes, each capable of holding two stacks of eight-and-a-half by eleven paper six inches high. The interviews made for fascinating reading, and some of the material that Halberstam didn’t use (and much of what he did) has played an important role in this book, particularly in my understanding of how others felt about Ben during Watergate.

  Time and again, Halberstam’s interviews with Post people return to Ben—his relationship with Kay, his role as editor, his life with Sally, his presence in the newsroom, even his upbringing. Part of this is natural. Ben was the boss. It was his ship. But, at a certain point, Halberstam clearly became smitten, as so many before him have, with Bradlee as a man and as a character:

  Parenthetical note on Bradlee—this is me talking, not Bernstein. It’s almost as if he is the Hemingway hero—ideological, not ideological, sprung of the moment, grace under pressure, style more important than anything else, cool, always charming, there but never giving seemingly too much of himself, holding himself just in reserve.

  “I’ve only scanned The Powers That Be,” Eugene Patterson would write to Ben shortly after the book came out in 1979, “but I see you mesmerized David.”

  Part of what makes Halberstam’s portrayal of Ben in the book so interesting—the best of any I’ve read—is that he includes a good deal of criticism of Ben. That Ben was superficial, that he didn’t care about the substance of stories but only the impact, that he had no ideology, that the only thing he believed in was the Washington Redskins. In the interviews there had been a lot of grumbling about this kind of thing, with people taking shots at Ben for not being a perfect manager, for having a short attention span, for glory hounding, for failing to give the paper sufficient intellectual heft. Assessing Ben’s frailties, knocking him down a peg, was clearly a favorite spectator sport at the Post in the late seventies.

  I finished the final interview in the stack—Woodward—with about fifteen minutes left to spare on my second day there. There were still a couple of boxes that I hadn’t done much with. When I had opened them on the first day, I had encountered row after row of Halberstam’s notebooks, with file cards and loose-leaf paper scattered around them. I figured the transcripts were the best use of my energy.

  But now I had fifteen minutes to kill, so I took a quick spin through what was left. The notebooks were mostly indecipherable scrawl, but I found some file cards, bundled together by an old rubber band, that all seemed to pertain to the Post. On top of the file cards was a series of pieces of paper with notes written on them, including an old empty envelope from the White House addressed to Halberstam. I wondered what that was, so I flipped it over to look at the back.

  Stripped in pencil at the top of the envelope was the word “Bradlee.” I couldn’t make out much of the rest of the writing at first, but these were clearly notes from a conversation of some kind, written down on whatever piece of paper had been closest at hand when Halberstam took the call. The postmark from the White House was dated May 20, 1977.

  I sat back with the envelope in my hand and scanned it, trying to decipher the writing. I had an instinctive feeling that what was written there was going to matter to me.

  I stared at the words. Finally, the last phrase on the envelope snapped into focus, simple, direct, conclusive: “Those who wanted him to be more were always disappointed.”

  Ben is such a legendary figure that it’s easy to want him to be perfect, to have him stand for everything that’s good instead of the things that he actually stood for. I am as guilty of this as anybody. I decided early on that he had a lock on life, and that if I read his words closely enough and listened to him closely enough and watched him move through the world closely enough he would reveal what he knew to me. That this was futile is obvious to me now, but he is compelling enough that for a long time I believed it.

  The secret of Ben is that there is no secret. His nonideology and his passion for great stories were what they were, and nothing more. I have never caught him in a lie. I don’t regret a moment spent with him, either in person or in onionskin copy. I would be content if the picture I have of him grinning and holding my newborn daughter is the only thing that I keep with me from my time spent working on this book.

  In August 1991, right after Ben stepped down as editor of the Post, a letter arrived at his office from a young woman named Shanon Fagan. She was a senior at T. C. Roberson High School in Asheville, North Carolina, and she had recently been named the executive editor of her school newspaper.

  “I have long admired your colorful career in journalism and met the news of your retirement with sadness,” she began. “An era in newspaper publishing had ended.” She praised the “integrity and extreme dedication” Ben had shown in running the paper. “While our publication may not rank as a world class journal,” she wrote, with a hint of Bradlee-esque steel, “I intend to run it as if it did.

  “In a search to define my position, I write this letter to you. I am greatly interested in what principles you have followed during your tenure as executive editor and would be appreciative of any advice or wisdom you could share with me. I would wish that my small part in this endeavor could be as honorable and distinguished as yours.”

  Fagan’s letter arrived at an empty office. After leaving the newsroom on July 31, Ben had departed Washington for a month’s vacation on Long Island with Sally and Quinn. He didn’t see the letter until after Labor Day, when he returned to his new digs in the executive suite on the seventh floor of the Post, two floors above the newsroom he had led for more than twenty-five years. There, on September 5, Ben composed his response:

  Click here to view a plain text version.

  “It’s a brave journalist, a brave newsmaker, and therefore a brave reader (or viewer) who can look the world in the eye and say, with authority, ‘This is the truth. There is no more,’ ” Ben said, in a speech in October of 1984. Those words have haunted me as I worked on this book, the bogeymen of historical complexity and my own limitations always taunting me from their perches on my shoulder. But from the day in 2007 when I came across Shanon Fagan’s letter until the day that I set these words down, I have always known that I would say, of this exchange, of who Ben is and has been, and of what he has meant to so many people for so long: This is the truth. There is no more.


  * * *

  1 Frankel was Rosenthal’s managing editor, and looked more like Rosenthal than Ben.

  2 The Globe piece was a huge Sunday magazine feature, “The Times, The Post, and Watergate,” and it also quoted Times publisher Punch Sulzberger saying, “We had to run a long way to catch up, but we’ve done it.” Ben didn’t believe this; neither did the piece’s author, Robert Lenzner: “No one else interviewed for this comparison of the two most powerful newspaper editors in the nation believes that the Times has made up the ground lost in the first newsbreaks of the Watergate affair. In fact, one Times man calls his paper’s performance ‘the classic failure of modern American journalism.’ ”

  3 As it turned out, the Times ran more than a paragraph. The day after the Post broke the news, the Times ran a 1,430-word story about Ben’s retirement. In addition to recounting Ben’s achievements, the piece wondered whether Downie, “the son of an Ohio milkman,” could survive, asserted that the Post had lost its edge since Ben had taken a step back, aired criticism of Ben from the black community in D.C., and printed a sentiment attributed to former Times Washington bureau chief Bill Kovach, who never even worked at the Post, describing the leadership atmosphere there by likening Ben to a walnut tree that “puts out a toxin so that other big trees cannot survive nearby.” Gracious indeed.

  4 In August of 2011, Baldwin went on Letterman to promote 30 Rock and mentioned the Yoga Boys, prompted by Letterman. “Ben, who just turned ninety years old this year, took the class with us the last couple years,” Baldwin said. “What was great was he was the only one who would say what the rest of us were feeling … she would say, ‘And now we’re going to do the lassa shinasana, or whatever the hell it is’ … and Ben Bradlee literally would go, ‘Are you out of your mind? I can’t do that. You want me to touch my ankle to my chin? I’m gonna snap my hip in half here.’ And we would all cackle laughing, because nobody else would say that.”

  5 Sally’s middle name.

  6 After all of the hubbub, Quinn’s wedding ended up being postponed until October 2010, so Ben went alone to Greta’s wedding that April.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first people to thank are Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, and Quinn Bradlee. How I feel about Ben, and what I owe him, must by now be pretty clear. Less clear is how important both Sally and Quinn were in the formation of this book.

  I got to know Quinn first. We spent the better part of a year together, working on his memoir, A Different Life, which came out in April 2009. Quinn was so honest with me, so consistently, that at first I found it shocking. The lies that we call etiquette do not register with Quinn. He calls you out. He might struggle with certain conventional aspects of learning, but he has an intuitive sense for people that is as unerring as his father’s. He is also one of the gentlest and sweetest people I know. Working with him on his memoir was one of the most satisfying professional and personal experiences I’ve ever had.

  Sally and Ben trusted me because of the work I did with Quinn. When Sally asked me what I wanted to do next, I told her I really wanted to write a book about Ben. Six weeks later, I had an agent and a book contract. I could never have done this without her. Sally is my friend. She has been wildly generous with me, and with my family; she also stood by me at a moment of great professional and personal difficulty, when everything was on the line for me. I knew that by touching certain family circumstances I would likely upset her, but I also knew that if I didn’t take them on I would compromise the integrity of the book. Because this book was about Ben, there wasn’t enough room for the manifold kindnesses that Sally has shown to me over the last four years. I hope that in mentioning them here I can at least partially repay that debt.

  I am also deeply indebted to Bob Woodward. Bob’s belief in me when I was a twenty-four-year-old kid changed my life. In the rolling journalism clinic that was everyday life on the third floor of his house on Q Street, Bob taught me to trust my instincts, to write my first thought, and to tell the truth even if I wasn’t sure how it was going to go over. His favorite work of mine was always the work that I did the fastest, with the least analysis. (I remember him coming into my office early on and saying, “ ‘Aforementioned’? We don’t use words like that around here.”) He and his wife, Elsa Walsh, and his daughter, Tali, have been friends of mine for a long, long time. Bob gave an impromptu and much-cherished toast at my wedding, and he has always been willing to help me, vouch for me, whatever I needed, since the day I walked in the door.

  Now I have repaid him for those kindnesses by including material in this book that I know he didn’t want me to include, that he feels will expose him to scrutiny he doesn’t deserve. I didn’t go looking for the material about Z and Deep Throat, but I found it—and once I found it, I felt I had an obligation to pursue it, and to tell the truth about it. Bob taught me how to do those things, and I could have had no better teacher.

  Outside of Ben’s direct family, I am also indebted to his extended family at The Washington Post. Carol Leggett, Ben’s secretary since 1991, has helped me in every conceivable way for the past four years. She has found documents, made phone calls, saved things of interest in a folder marked “Jeff,” introduced me to the fried chicken salad (and Steve) at Georgia Brown’s, doted on my daughter, and even once ran down to the street to feed coins into a parking meter (without telling me about it) when she noticed that one of my interviews with Ben was running long. Any list falls far short of capturing just how much she has done. She will be my friend long after this book has come and gone.

  The entire Post organization supported me as I wrote this book, whether they knew it or not. Initially it was the folks on the seventh floor—Eric Lieberman, Caitlin Gibson, and the rest of the legal and executive team—who not only tolerated my presence as I came in every day to work on the boxes but also made me feel welcome. Ev Small and Liz Hylton were both immensely helpful as well. Ev, as I mentioned in the book, found a bunch of additional “Bradlee” boxes that my work would have been worse without. And Liz brought me the box of Kay Graham’s correspondence with Ben that opened up an entirely new understanding of that relationship. She also was a great help with photographs.

  On the ninth floor, where the big boys sit, I thank Don Graham and Rosemary Kennedy, his right-hand woman. Rosemary never failed to give me a boost, from getting me in to see her boss to making sure I always had what I needed. I never asked Don Graham for permission to write this book, because he never made me feel that I had to.

  When it came time for me to secure the permissions for material under the Post’s copyright—roughly 90 percent of the material in this book—Bo Jones made it happen. Bo is the former counsel, publisher, and vice chairman of the Post, and one of Ben’s closest friends; he has also been great to me. (Shortly after we’d drafted the permissions letter, as I was sitting on a couch in Bo’s office, he turned to me and said, “I’m just assuming your book is accurate.”) Tim Jucovy, an associate counsel at the Post, was instrumental in (and quite good-natured about) creating the final permissions letter. And Eddy Palanzo, in News Research, kindly provided me with access to the Post’s archives, both physical and online.

  Outside of the Post, the most important source of research information for me was David Halberstam’s invaluable archives, at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. I thank David Remnick, who gave me the idea during our interview in 2009. I also thank Jean Halberstam, who was kind enough to give me permission to visit her husband’s archives and then to publish what I found. And I thank Sean Noel, an associate director at the Research Center, for coordinating my visit and then the proper permissions once I’d gone.

  Another vital source of information for me, particularly about All the President’s Men, was Alan Pakula’s archive in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. I’d like to thank Hannah Pakula, Alan’s wife, and Jenny Romero at the library for helping to coordinate my visit, and for
picking out everything that I could possibly have wanted to see.

  Outside of the Post and the various research centers, the greatest resources for me were all of the people who were willing to sit for interviews. I could put a long list of those people here, but nearly every one of their names (along with the fruits of their interviews) appears in the book. I thank everybody who made the time to sit with me and to talk about Ben.

  There are a few people to thank in particular. Rosamond Casey, Ben’s stepdaughter, fed me dinner in November 2009, but she also did some reporting for me around her mother’s relationship with President Kennedy and gave me the permission to use certain of her mother’s effects in the book. Ben Bradlee, Jr., Ben’s son, graciously provided me with his dad’s letters home during World War II. Mike Sager, the former Post reporter, never once complained when I asked him leading questions about his friend Janet Cooke, and I am grateful for his efforts with her on my behalf. And Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs, published Quinn’s memoir and has been a friend and sounding board for me ever since.

  There would be no book without Esther Newberg, my agent at ICM. She scared me when it was time to scare me and then stood with me when it was time to stand with me. I am lucky to have her in my corner, as an advocate and as a friend. She and Kari Stuart, her close associate, have done everything they could to support me from the start.

  At Random House, I have first to thank Susan Mercandetti, the editor who bought my book in 2008 and whom I had known since 2002. Susan endured countless fits and starts as the project got under way, consistently finding new and inventive ways to put the screws to me without ever undermining my confidence in my ability to see the book through. Her staunch rejection of several bad early ideas was particularly important. The parts that she liked from the start became, after long labor, the seeds of the book that you hold in your hands.