Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee wouldn’t have had it any other way. He was to the Post what Charles A. Dana was to the old New York Sun, a brilliant editor who exposed the underside of the establishment. During the 26 years he presided in the Post newsroom, he took a sedate daily and turned it into an institution of such reach that it worried self-consciously over its new image and responsibilities. He brought Style to the Post, creating a gossipy, mustread for insiders within the Beltway and beyond. No one else around town had quite his panache or hubris. He had a slightly - seductively - ravaged face and the look of a defrocked confessor. When the mood possessed him, he could speak beautiful French or swear like a sailor. Under his sway, the Post doubled its staff, supercharged its circulation, increased its news budget twentyfold and accumulated 23 Pulitzer Prizes.
Bradlee wanted exclusives, scoops to draw readers, headlines to shake up presidents. He got them. “He was eclectic, irreverent,” says Osborn Elliott, who was editor of NEWSWEEK when Bradlee, earlier in his career, was the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. “He brought snap, crackle and pop to the practice of American journalism.” No reporter exposed to the Bradlee Treatment ever forgot it. Four months into the game at the Post, a cub named Bob Woodward was working on a lead story about the police department the first time Bradlee pulled up a chair and grilled him: “Do you know what you’re talking about? Who are your sources? They any good? Where’s this story going?” “Then BOOM, he was gone,” Woodward recalls. “You didn’t get into long, esoteric, meaning-of-life conversations with him,” says Karen De Young, the Post’s assistant managing editor for national affairs. “He wouldn’t pussyfoot around. There was no ‘What’s so-and-so going to think?’ You could always count on him.”
Bradlee had an eye for talent and the guts of a Comanche. When The New York Times started publishing the Pentagon papers, a secret government critique of the Vietnam war, he wangled his own set. The Post’s lawyers counseled Katharine Graham - the paper’s owner, conscience and court of last resort - not to publish the trove. The privately held Washington Post Company, which also owned NEWSWEEK, was about to go public. The Nixon administration was threatening indictments that could have upset a multimillion-dollar stock offering and cost the company its television licenses in Florida. “Mama, this looks like a mother-f—er,” Bradlee observed. He also said the Post could start running the story the next day or get a new executive editor. “Ben held firm, and Katharine Graham gambled her whole empire to back him,” recalls Ben Bagdikian, the editor who acquired the papers. The newspaper fended off the indictments and shot into national prominence. Bradlee’s contribution to the Post Graham said last week, was “magic.”
The Pentagon papers offered Bradlee a warm-up for Watergate. The country - and Richard Nixon - probably remember him as the swashbuckler played by Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men.” What Woodward remembers most is that Bradlee was at his journalistic best when he was saying no: “We’re not ready. It’s not there yet. We’re not going to write it that way. We’re not going to put it on the front page.” But if the story’s risks were enormous, so were the rewards. Woodward says Bradlee doesn’t just look like an international jewel thief. “He is an international jewel thief. What he is after is information, hidden, new, never picked over - and you have to work for those gems.”
Bradlee’s pursuit of the “holy shit” story did lead him into his worst humiliation after Janet Cooke fabricated a yarn about a child heroin addict and the Post successfully nominated it for a Pulitzer Prize. When Bradlee found out, he returned the Pulitzer, but by then, his enemies were muttering, “So that’s how they do it at the Post - they make everything up.” They didn’t of course; but damage was done.
That was a long time ago. The question now is whether Bradlee’s retirement will make the Post a blander newspaper. Some of the paper’s old guard are quite worried about this. The anxiety is probably exaggerated. Vital issues like global debt and the shame of the cities - and business imperatives like market research, zoned editions and stronger suburban reach - tended to bore Bradlee. Now those matters will be in the hands of his successors, Leonard Downie Jr., 49, and Robert Kaiser, 48, who are expert in them. And the paper is probably fairer and less partisan than it was in Bradlee’s heyday. So the newspaper will be fine - though Washington won’t be quite the same without Ben Bradlee to kick it around anymore.
