Ben Bradlee

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Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (August 26, 1921 – October 21, 2014) was an American newspaperman.

From 1968 to 1991, he was the executive editor of The Washington Post.

During Richard Nixon's presidency, he criticized the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and oversaw the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's articles chronicling the Watergate controversy.

He held the position of vice president at large of The Washington Post at his funeral. He served for years as an active trustee on the boards of several prominent educational, historical, and archaeological research organizations, as well as being an educator for education and the study of history.

Early life and education

Ben Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr., who was a Boston Brahmin Bradlee family and who worked as an investment banker, and Josephine de Gersdorff, the daughter of a Wall Street lawyer. Frank Crowninshield, the founder and first editor of Vanity Fair, was his great uncle.

Bradlee was the second of three children; his siblings were older brother Frederick, a writer and Broadway stage actor, and younger sister Constance. The children were raised in a wealthy family with domestic help. They learned French from governesses, took piano and riding lessons, and then moved to the opera and the symphony; but Bradlee's father lost his career, and they took on whatever form he could find to help his family, from selling deodorants to supervising janitors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Bradlee continued his education at Dexter School and then to complete high school at St. Mark's School, where he played varsity baseball. He contracted polio at St. Mark's, but was able to walk without limping. He attended Harvard College, where his father had been a star football player, and graduated in 1942 with a combined Greek–English major.

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Early career in journalism

Bradlee was recruited by a high school classmate in 1946 to work at the New Hampshire Sunday News, a new Sunday paper in Manchester, New Hampshire, at loose ends after the war. For two years, the paper struggled to grow advertising revenue and circulation, but the Manchester Union-Leader, the competing daily newspaper, was able to sell the paper to the Manchester Union-Leader. Bradlee used family connections for job leads, and he obtained interviews at both The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. Bradlee said when the train arrived in Baltimore, it was raining, so he stayed on the train to Washington and was recruited as a reporter by The Washington Post. He wanted to know associate publisher Phil Graham, who was Eugene Meyer's son-in-law. Bradlee, 50, was alighted from a streetcar in front of the White House on November 1, 1950, just as two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to shoot their way into Blair House in an attempt to murder President Harry S. Truman. Bradlee was appointed assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris in 1951.

Bradlee began work as a European reporter for Newsweek in 1954. He stayed in the United States for another four years before being transferred to the Washington, D.C. bureau of Newsweek.

Bradlee, a journalist from Harvard, became close friends with then-senator John F. Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard two years before Bradlee and lived nearby. Bradlee toured with both Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960's presidential campaigns. He later wrote Conversations With Kennedy (W.W. Norton, 1975), reliving their friendship during those years. Bradlee was, at this time, Washington Bureau chief for Newsweek, a position from which he helped negotiate the magazine's transfer to The Washington Post holding company.

Career at The Washington Post

Bradlee continued with Newsweek until he was promoted to managing editor at the Washington Post in 1965. In 1968, he became executive editor.

The Washington Post faced significant challenges during the Nixon administration under Bradlee's leadership. The government was successfully sued by the New York Times and the Post in 1971 over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Bradlee and Carl Bernstein were hired journalists by reporter Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they investigated the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel one year later.

According to Bradlee:

Ensuing probes into suspected cover-ups resulted inexorably to legislative panels, conflicting testimony, and eventually to Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. Bradlee was one of the only four publicly known individuals who knew the true identity of press informant Deep Throat, the others being Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat himself, who later revealed himself as Nixon's FBI associate director Mark Felt.

Janet Cooke, a newspaper reporter from 1981, received the Pulitzer Prize for her story "Jimmy's World," a portrait of an 8-year-old heroin addict. Cooke's article turned out to be fiction: there was no such addict in the world. Bradlee, the executive editor, had been chastised in several circles for failing to ensure the article's accuracy. Bradlee (along with publisher Donald Graham) ordered a "full" probe to determine the truth after concerns about the story's legitimacy arose. Bradlee apologised to Mayor Marion Barry and the chief of police of Washington, D.C., for the Post's fictitious article. Cooke, on the other hand, was forcibly to resign and relinquish the Pulitzer.

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