|
 Bradlee's death at his Washington home of natural causes was
announced by the Post, which reported late last month that he had
begun hospice care after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for
several years.
As executive editor from 1968 until 1991, Bradlee became one of the
most important figures in Washington, as well as part of journalism
history, while transforming the Post from a staid morning daily into
one of the most dynamic and respected publications in the United
States.
Bradlee's work guiding young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein as they traced a 1972 burglary at Democratic Party
headquarters at the Watergate office and apartment complex back to
the Nixon White House has been celebrated from journalism schools to
Hollywood.
The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate
scandal, which forced Nixon to quit under threat of impeachment in
August 1974.
Bradlee gave Woodward and Bernstein license to pursue the scandal
and its cover-up vigorously, approving their use of the unidentified
"Deep Throat" source, and the newspaper published about 400 articles
about Watergate over 28 months.
The Post's coverage -- along with the book and movie about it, "All
the President's Men" -- inspired a generation of investigative
reporters.
"I think the great lesson of Watergate was probably the
stick-tuitiveness of the Post," Bradlee once told the American
Journalism Review. "The fact that we hunkered down and backed the
right horse. I think that was a wonderful lesson for publishers,
too."
Upsetting presidents was a Bradlee stock-in-trade. In 1972 the Post
joined the New York Times in publishing stories based on the
Pentagon Papers, a secret government account of Vietnam War
decisions, despite heavy legal pressure. The Post also uncovered
details of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Ronald Reagan's White
House.
FRIEND OF JFK
"I think this shows the (adversarial free-press) system works,"
Bradlee said. "It's a wonderful control on governments that are not
all that careful on policing themselves."
Bradlee did have a close friendship with one president, John F.
Kennedy, who had been his neighbor in Washington's Georgetown
district when Bradlee was a Newsweek correspondent. In 1975 he wrote
a book titled "Conversations With Kennedy."
Bradlee said he never knew about such Kennedy peccadilloes as an
affair the president had with Judith Exner, a woman said to have had
organized crime connections. Bradlee said later that if he had found
out, he would have been forced to expose that liaison and probably
destroy his friendship with Kennedy.
Woodward once described Bradlee as "Kirk Douglas as a submarine
commander." Always nattily and expensively dressed, he cut a dashing
figure in the Post newsroom, where he held sway with a fiery and
brusque demeanor, sharp wit and swagger.
Bernstein told CNN that Bradlee was, "the most galvanizing,
remarkable figure to work with and for. You know those are kinds of
clichés that people use, except this time it's really the case."
"His life was really about the truth," Bernstein added.
Bradlee also was known for his blunt way of expressing himself.
"One of the first things you notice about Ben, both the written and
in-person Ben, is his vocabulary, his vernacular, his penchant for
one-liners and salty phrases," Jeff Himmelman wrote in his
biography, "Yours in Truth." "Swearing with Ben makes you feel like
you're part of his club, the club that doesn't take anything too
seriously."
Bradlee also was a fixture on the Washington social circuit with his
third wife, former Post reporter Sally Quinn, who was 20 years
younger.
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FROM COPS TO POLITICIANS
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston on Aug. 26, 1921,
to an aristocratic family. He attended Harvard and served on a Navy
destroyer in the Pacific during World War Two before starting a New
Hampshire newspaper in 1946.
His career at the Washington Post began in 1948 as a police
reporter. He quit to become a press attache at the U.S. Embassy in
Paris, then Newsweek magazine's Paris correspondent and its
Washington bureau chief. He returned to the Post, was named
managing editor in 1965 and became executive editor in 1968, holding
the job until his 1991 retirement.
When the Watergate burglary occurred and was dismissed by the White
House as trivial, Bradlee was skeptical of the investigative efforts
of Woodward and Bernstein. But once he sensed they were onto
something big -- that the burglars were employed by Nixon's
presidential re-election committee -- he urged them on.
Post publisher Katharine Graham had backed Bradlee when the Nixon
administration tried to stifle publication of the Pentagon Papers
and supported him again as he pushed Woodward and Bernstein deeper
into Watergate. Their work reshaped American journalism.
"It is wonderfully ironical that a man who so disliked -- and never
understood -- the press did so much to further the reputation of the
press, and particularly the Washington Post," Bradlee wrote in the
forward of his memoir, "A Good Life." "In his darkest hour, he gave
the press its finest hour."
Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were the only people at the Post to
know the identity of Deep Throat, the source who revealed key
secrets of the Nixon Watergate cover-up to the Post in clandestine
meetings.
Mark Felt, a former No. 2 official at the FBI, revealed in 2005 he
was Deep Throat, but Bradlee said he did not ask his reporters about
the source's identity until after Nixon had resigned.
Actor Jason Robards won an Academy Award for his portrayal of
Bradlee in "All the President's Men," the film treatment of Woodward
and Bernstein's first Watergate chronicle.
Bradlee also was in charge of the Post when it suffered a major
embarrassment. In 1981, the newspaper returned a Pulitzer won by
Janet Cooke after it turned out the reporter's story about an
eight-year-old drug addict was a fabrication.
Under Bradlee, the Post doubled its editorial staff to 600,
increased its news budget from $3 million to $60 million and boosted
its circulation from 446,000 to 802,000 readers.
President Barack Obama gave Bradlee the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
"A true newspaperman, he transformed the Washington Post into one of
the country’s finest newspapers, and with him at the helm, a growing
army of reporters published the Pentagon Papers, exposed Watergate,
and told stories that needed to be told – stories that helped us
understand our world and one another a little bit better," Obama
said in a statement.
Bradlee was married three times, most recently in 1978 to Sally
Quinn, then the Post's top features writer. He had one son,
Benjamin, by his first marriage; a son and daughter, Dominic and
Marina, by his second; and a son, Quinn, by his third.
(Additional reporting by Peter Cooney; Editing by Sandra Maler, Lisa
Shumaker)
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