Bradlee, ‘Watergate’ editor, dies; 93

WASHINGTON—Ben Bradlee, the hard-charging editor who guided The Washington Post through its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the “Watergate” scandal and invigorated its newsroom for more than two decades, died on Tuesday. He was 93.

Bradlee died at his home of natural causes, the Post reported.

As managing editor first and later as executive editor, the raspy-voiced Bradlee engineered the transformation of the Post from a sleepy hometown paper into a great national one. He brought in a cast of talented journalists and set editorial standards that brought the paper new respect.

Bradlee got an early break as a journalist thanks to his friendship with one president, John F. Kennedy, and became famous for his role in toppling another, Richard Nixon, helping guide Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s coverage of the “Watergate” scandal.

“We shall not see his like again,” Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said when Bradlee retired from the Post newsroom in 1991, adding that the editor’s standards would endure “for ages hence.”

Post publisher Donald Graham said then, “Thank God the person making decisions in the last 26 years showed us how to do it with verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story.”

Enduring partnership

Actor Jason Robards turned Bradlee into a box-office hit with his Oscar-winning portrayal of the editor in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men.” Bradlee’s marriage in 1978 to Post star reporter Sally Quinn (his third) added more glamour to his image.

He was one of the few to know the identity early on of the celebrated “Watergate” source dubbed Deep Throat, finally revealed publicly in 2005 as FBI official W. Mark Felt.

“I think he did a great service to society,” Bradlee said after Felt’s role finally came out.

In enduring partnership with publisher Katharine Graham, Bradlee took a stand for press freedom in 1971 by going forward with publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War broken by The New York Times, against the advice of lawyers and the entreaties of top government officials. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of newspapers to publish the leaked papers.

The Post’s decision to publish helped pave the way for all of the smaller, difficult ones that collectively produced the newspaper’s coverage of “Watergate.”

Bradlee “set the ground rules—pushing, pushing, pushing, not so subtly asking everyone to take one more step, relentlessly pursuing the story in the face of persistent accusations against us and a concerted campaign of intimidation,” Katharine Graham recalled in her memoir.

Exuberant, innovative

In November 2013, at age 92, Bradlee stood in the White House East Room and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who saluted him for bringing an intensity and dedication to journalism that served as a reminder that “our freedom as a nation rests on our freedom of the press.” Quinn disclosed in September 2014 that her husband had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for several years.

Impatient, gruff, profane, Bradlee was all that. But also exuberant, innovative, charismatic.

“Ideas flew out of Ben,” wrote Katharine Graham, who died in 2001. “He was always asking important ‘why’ questions. … Ben was tough enough and good enough so that for the most part I not only let him do what he thought was right, I largely agreed with him.”

Ever the newspaperman, Bradlee imagined his own obituary: “Bet me that when I die,” he wrote in his memoir, “there will be something in my obit about how The Washington Post ‘won’ 18 Pulitzer prizes while Bradlee was editor.” That, he said, would be bunk. The Pulitzers are overrated and suspect, he wrote, and it’s largely reporters, not newspapers or their editors, who deserve the credit.

The low point in Bradlee’s career involved a 1981 Pulitzer for the Post that was rescinded after the Post itself revealed that reporter Janet Cooke had invented her story of an 8-year-old heroin user. Bradlee, whose offer to resign over the debacle was rejected, said it was a cross he would bear forever. Critics faulted editors for failing to ask enough questions about the story and said the incident was in part a reflection of the competition and tension within Bradlee’s newsroom.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born on Aug. 26, 1921, a Boston Brahmin reared in comfort but for family financial setbacks in the Depression and a six-month bout with polio at age 14.

He hurried through Harvard in three years to take his place on a Pacific destroyer during World War II. On his return in 1945, he helped start a daily newspaper in New Hampshire, but it folded 2 1/2 years later for lack of advertising.

Always in right place

So began what turned out to be a charmed life of newspapering, in which Bradlee seemed always to be in just the right place.

He landed his first job at the Post in 1948 when a rainstorm in Baltimore prompted him to skip a job interview there and stay on the train to Washington.

He happened to be riding a trolley car past Blair House in 1950 when Puerto Rican extremists opened fire on the presidential guesthouse while President Harry Truman was staying there. Bradlee turned it into a page-one eyewitness story.

Restless at the Post, he left the paper in 1951 to become press attache at the US Embassy in Paris. Two years later, he joined Newsweek’s Paris bureau and spent four years as a European correspondent before returning to Washington to write about politics.

He happened to buy a home in Georgetown in 1957, a few months before Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife moved in across the street, the beginning of an intimate friendship and a proximity to power that burnished his credentials as a journalist and brought him rare insights into government.

“I was on a roll being in the right place at the right time, a luck that has stayed with me,” Bradlee wrote in his best-selling memoir, “A Good Life: Newspapers and Other Adventures.”

Long after his newspapering days were finished, even in his declining years, Bradlee would head over to the Post once a week to have lunch with “the guys” and “talk about the good old days in journalism,” Quinn recounted.

Access to JFK

Bradlee’s access to Kennedy continued through JFK’s presidency, bringing Bradlee scoops for Newsweek, and experiences that he ultimately turned into the 1975 book, “Conversations with JFK.” The release brought Bradlee much attention and cost him a valued friend, Jacqueline Kennedy, who thought the book a violation of privacy and stopped speaking to him.

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.

Bradlee had four children from three marriages: Benjamin C. Jr., Dino, Marina and Quinn. His first two marriages, to Jean Saltonstall and Antoinette Pinchot, ended in divorce. Quinn Bradlee, his son with Sally Quinn, has battled a variety of ailments, including a hole in the heart and epilepsy, and was eventually diagnosed with a genetic syndrome called VCFS.