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| (image from Observer.com) |
by Jeff Himmelman
Ben Bradlee comes as close to a god as you will find in
Washington, DC. Presidents enter and exit on schedule,
but for nearly three decades Bradlee and The
Post identified who was important, where Americans should focus our
attention, and why we should care. He
was, by all reports, handsome, charismatic, and loved and feared by those who
worked for him. Most important was his
commitment to ferreting out the news and explaining it with as little bias as
possible, without concern for how the subject of the reporting might feel about
it. Anyone who lived in Washington, DC,
from the late 1960s through the early 1980s knows what happened to The Washington Post during that
tumultuous period. The city’s second
best newspaper, after The Washington Star,
made history under Bradlee’s transformational leadership putting news reporting
ahead of politics, friendship, personal freedom, and even money.
In 2009, on the recommendation of Bob Woodward of
“Watergate” fame, Jeff Himmelman began
the daunting task of writing about the life of Ben Bradlee. In his own words:
In the permission letter that both Ben and Sally (Ben’s wife)signed when I undertook my book, Ben wrote,
“I have given Jeff full access to my archives ... he has our permission to use
what he deems necessary for the successful completion of the project.” Ben
explicitly instructed me not to pull punches, and he never once told me not to
use something I had found, including personal correspondence. When I brought a
( possibly troubling) memo to him (from
his files) in March 2011, he said, “Don’t
feel that you have to protect me. You and I have a great relationship, and
there’s nothing you can do in this book that’s going to change it. So just
follow your nose.”
Bradlee, to those who worked with him, was heroic, even
mythic, an almost perfect example of leadership and certainly the standard
bearer for what journalists aspire to be:
arbiters of unvarnished, unqualified truth. Just the same he is and was human and made
mistakes and misjudgments, some with damaging consequences. There was no attempt on Bradlee’s part ever
to hide or cover up any part of his career.
In his files, Himmelman found volumes of notes and copies of
correspondence covering decades of Bradlee’s professional and personal life, as
if Bradlee had prepared his whole life for someone to write about him.
Ben Bradlee was a man who seemed to have it all: good looks, a blue-blood pedigree, some
family money, charm, intelligence, and a knack for being in the right
place at the right time. In the late
1950s, Ben and his second wife, Tony, were walking down their street in
Georgetown, DC, and introduced themselves to the young senator and his wife who
had just moved in a few doors down. The
Bradlees and the Kennedys remained close friends until President Kennedy was
assassinated in November of 1963. Ben
Bradlee, journalist first and friend second, kept detailed notes of his
contacts with President and Mrs. Kennedy.
When the President died, Ben Bradlee wrote a heartfelt tribute to him which ran in
Newsweek, a magazine which Bradlee
had convinced Phil Graham, publisher of The
Washington Post to purchase. Later,
Bradlee turned his record of the friendship into a book which was poorly
received, most especially so by Mrs. Kennedy.
By the time that Richard Nixon was in the White House, Ben
Bradlee had risen in the ranks of the Post
to executive editor and this is when his life began to get really
interesting. In 1972, two of his local
reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, connected a break-in at the
Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel to a secret
fund controlled by President Nixon’s re-election committee. The ensuing investigation and elaborate
cover-up led to Nixon resigning in order to avoid impeachment. During this period, The Washington Post took great risks, essentially betting the
company, to bring the facts to light. Before
Watergate, most Americans believed that the President of the United States, and
the Federal Government, told the truth.
After Watergate, that innocence was lost forever.
Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of the Watergate story
made them famous; and in 1974 they
published an account of the story behind the story called All the
President’s Men, which was made into a film in 1976, starring Robert
Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively. The part of Ben Bradlee was played by the
brilliantly cast actor Jason Robards, who turned Bradlee from a local hero into
a national celebrity. The story of
Watergate, in addition to the scandal inside the White House, was also about
the responsibility of journalists to unearth the truth and bring it to
light. Inside the paper, there were conflicts
over whether to let the two local reporters continue with the story or whether
to turn it over to the national news reporting team. In the movie, it is the Ben Bradlee character who decreed
that “the boys” should keep the story.
The truth, uncovered by Jeff Himmelman, was somewhat different.
The Washington Post
has been owned by the same family since 1933 when Eugene Meyer bought it out of
bankruptcy. Meyer gave the paper to his
son-in-law, Philip Graham, in 1946, who ran the company until his death in
1963. Katharine Meyer Graham, with the
support of the Post’s editorial
staff, took over as publisher and it was she who stood by Ben Bradlee when the
Nixon administration attempted to crush the release of the “Pentagon Papers”
(detailing the horrors of the Viet Nam war) as well as the story of
Watergate. Katharine Graham and Ben
Bradlee were the ultimate power couple in Washington, except that their
relationship was entirely platonic. Just
the same, Graham was the most important woman in Bradlee’s life, his closest
and most constant friend. Many in
Washington suspected that the two were lovers, but Himmelman found no evidence
of that even though Graham was clearly in love with Bradlee, according to
almost everyone who knew her.
Following the Watergate era, the Post entered a period of heyday when it rivaled the New York Times in terms of news reporting. Bradlee’s management style was to trust his
reporters and their editors, after all it was only by trusting Bob Woodward’s
information from a secret inside source known as “Deep Throat” that the paper
was able to crack the Watergate scandal wide open. In the late 1980s, a young African-American
journalist named Janet Cooke joined the staff and she brought the Post a different kind of fame. Like so many professions, journalism had long
been dominated by Caucasian men. While
white women had begun to make inroads, there were very few African Americans on
the reporting staff of the Post. Bradlee began to make a concerted effort to
change that and Cooke was one of his most promising hires. Unfortunately, she was also a pathological
liar who fabricated a news story about an eight-year-old heroin addict named
Jimmy. Her series on “Jimmy’s World”
earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 which Bradlee had to give back when
fact-checkers could not verify any part of Cooke’s story. This was a shameful episode for Bradlee and The Washington Post, but Katharine
Graham refused his resignation when he offered it.
Yours in Truth not only tells the life story of Ben
Bradlee, it also examines the nature of truth and how to tell it. Bradlee’s good friend John F. Kennedy once
said, “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood
in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” That statement gets at the essence of
Bradlee’s approach to journalism as well as his instructions to his young
biographer, Jeff Himmelman. The love
that Himmelman has for his subject comes through on every page even when the
truth as he discovered it was uncomfortable, even embarrassing. Any dilution or veiling of the facts would not have done justice to the legacy of Ben Bradlee.
It was Bradlee’s wife, Sally Quinn, who instigated the
biography and brought Jeff Himmelman into their lives. Bradlee was not enamored of the idea, but
eventually agreed to go along after a lot of pushing by Quinn. According to Himmelman, Sally Quinn is an extremely talented and complicated
person who is often surrounded by drama of her own making. Writing about her and the marriage was
clearly akin to walking through a minefield because she is often difficult to
be around and apparently has a fragile ego.
Just the same, Himmelman accepted Quinn’s extremely gracious hospitality
on many occasions as he sifted through thousands of pages from Ben Bradlee’s
archives. A less courageous biographer
might have edited Quinn out to the extent possible or hidden behind superficialities when writing about her, but her relationship to
Bradlee is so integral to the story that doing so would have probably have upset
her more than what Himmelman wrote. Himmelman understood that his job was to
write the truth as he saw it without regard to how his subjects might react, after all, he was writing about the Master,
himself.
Biographers tend to fall in love with their subjects,
obsessively, defensively, and blindly, and this is why theirs is one of the most difficult writing
tasks, especially when the subject and many of the important people in his or
her life are still living. Given Bradlee’s iconic stature, it is easy to
imagine Himmelman being a bit intimidated as well as awestruck, but Yours in
Truth reveals neither of these weaknesses.
Himmelman took Bradlee at his word and pulled no punches with the result
being a fine example of journalism in the great Ben Bradlee tradition. He may have done his work too well, however,
because ever since publication, no one in the Bradlee household will take
Himmelman’s calls. In time I expect that
Ben Bradlee will reach out to his young biographer and thank him for this book,
because if anyone can handle the truth it is Ben Bradlee.
Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved
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