WASHINGTON — Benjamin Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided the Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Tuesday at his home of natural causes. He was 93.
From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.
Journalism landmarks
The most compelling story of Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Washington Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history.
But Bradlee’s most important decision, made with publisher Katharine Graham, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish them.
The Post’s circulation nearly doubled while Bradlee was managing editor then executive editor — as did the size of its newsroom staff. And he gave the paper ambition.
Bradlee stationed correspondents around the globe, opened bureaus from coast to coast in the United States, and created sections and features — most notably Style, one of his proudest inventions — that were widely copied by others.
During his tenure, a paper that previously had won just four Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was for reporting, won 17 more, including the Public Service award for the Watergate coverage.
“Ben Bradlee was the best American newspaper editor of his time and had the greatest impact on his newspaper of any modern editor,” said Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher of The Washington Post and Bradlee’s boss.
“So much of The Post is Ben,” Katharine Graham said in 1994, three years after Bradlee retired as editor. “He created it as we know it today.”
President Barack Obama saluted Bradlee when giving him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013: “He transformed that newspaper into one of the finest in the world.”
Bradlee’s patrician good looks, gravelly voice, profane vocabulary and zest for journalism and for life all contributed to the charismatic personality. Modern American newspaper editors rarely achieve much fame, but Bradlee became a celebrity and loved the status. Jason Robards played him in the movie “All The President’s Men,” based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about Watergate. Two books Bradlee wrote — “Conversations With Kennedy” and his memoir, “A Good Life” — were best sellers. His craggy face became a familiar sight on television. In public and in private, he always played his part with theatrical enthusiasm.
“He was a presence, a force,” Woodward said of Bradlee’s role during the Watergate period, 1972 to 1974. “And he was a doubter, a skeptic — ‘Do we have it yet?’ ‘Have we proved it?’ “
Decades later, Woodward remembered the words that he most hated to hear from Bradlee then: “You don’t have it yet, kid.”
Bradlee’s tactics were also simple: “Hire people smarter than you are” and encourage them to bloom. His energy and his mystique were infectious.
“It was hard to explain the full force of his personality to people who never met him,” said Ward Just, the reporter-turned-novelist whom Bradlee sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1966-67. “He really was one of those guys you’d take a machine-gun bullet for. You only meet three or four of them in an entire lifetime.”
But the editor who could inspire his troops to do some of the best journalism ever published in America also fell for an artful hoax by a young reporter. Janet Cooke invented an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy and wrote a moving story about him. After the story won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, Cooke was exposed as an impostor who invented not only Jimmy but also her own life story.
Bradlee and his editors interrogated her and extracted a confession. Bradlee quickly returned the Pulitzer then encouraged Post ombudsman Bill Green to investigate and report how the incident could have happened.
High connections
Bradlee made friends easily with important people — the most famous was John F. Kennedy — but he also had pals among printers at The Post and farmers in Southern Maryland, where he spent weekends at his country estate for many years.
He and his third wife, the writer Sally Quinn, loved to give parties at their big house in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. In his 80s, Bradlee still caroused energetically with people 30 and 40 years younger, amazing his old friends.
“He gave a whole new meaning to ‘over 80,’ ” Don Graham said.
Bradlee’s relationship with Katharine Graham was critical. She allowed him to spend money, ultimately many millions of dollars, to build a great newspaper. At key moments — particularly the 1971 decision to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers and later during Watergate — she stood squarely behind him, defying the advice of her attorneys and business advisers and her powerful Washington friends.
Bradlee “was just what Kay needed — somebody who built her confidence and worked hard at it,” said the late Philip Geyelin, who was editor of The Post’s editorial page from 1968 to 1979. “He made her comfortable. He called her up and told her dirty jokes and told her the latest skinny. It was a wonderful relationship. I can’t remember any time they had any quarrel. She was nuts about him.”
Bradlee got his first whiff of the newspaper business at age 15, when his father arranged a job for him as a copy boy on the Beverly (Mass.) Evening Times. He could augment his $5-a-week salary by reporting events in the lives of local citizens.
“I learned a vital lesson: People will talk if they feel comfortable,” Bradlee wrote in “A Good Life.”
Bradlee had been in Newsweek’s Washington bureau four years when he found the nerve in 1961 to telephone Post publisher Philip Graham to propose that The Washington Post Co. buy Newsweek.
“It was the best telephone call I ever made — the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding,” Bradlee wrote. The deal came together, and Bradlee ended up with a cache of Post stock and the title of Washington bureau chief for Newsweek.
Four years later, it was a conversation with Philip Graham’s widow that proved pivotal for Bradlee. Katharine Graham had taken over The Post after her husband’s suicide and was looking to inject new life into the paper. In a quotation that has become Post lore, Bradlee told her over lunch that if the managing editor’s job ever opened up, “I’d give my left one for it.”
Bradlee soon had the title of deputy managing editor and an understanding he would move up quickly. As recounted in Howard Bray’s book, “The Pillars of the Post,” managing editor Al Friendly cautioned Bradlee, “Look, Buster, don’t be in a hurry.” Bradlee smiled and replied: “Sorry, but that’s my metabolism.” He succeeded Friendly three months later.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
