Civilians, people who don't think the toppling of a sitting American President with newspaper articles is one of humankind's lasting achievements, will read encomiums to Ben Bradlee like this one and wonder: What's the big deal?
After all, he didn't cover the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. It's not as if he wrote the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential subjects. People who worked for him went through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which altered it.
The newspaper business can be a grand endeavour, but most of the people who commit journalism would never be mistaken for larger than life. Journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who actually do things.
But Ben Bradlee did things. He went to war, loved early and often, befriended and took on presidents, swore like a sailor, and partied like a movie star. Now that he is gone - he died on Tuesday at the age of 93 at his home in Georgetown - it is tough to imagine a newspaperman ever playing the kind of outsize role that he once did in Washington. Newspapers, and people's regard for them, have shrunk since he ran The Post.
He took over an also-ran paper and turned it into a formidable fighting ship like the one on which he served in World War II. Once the newspaper he oversaw gained steam, there was only the relentless effort to beat the competition, to find and woo talent, to pursue targets that The Post deemed worthy.
In the more than quarter-century that he helped lead the newsroom, from 1965 to 1991, he doubled its staff and circulation, and multiplied its ambitions. He would have been a terrible newspaperman in the current context - buyouts, reduced print schedules, timidity about offending advertisers - but he was a perfect one for his time. "I had a good seat," he told The American Journalism Review in a 1995 interview. "I came along at the right time with the right job and I didn't screw it up."
Bradlee had the attention span of a gnat - anecdotes of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common - but he was completely hypnotised by the chase of a good story.
His own life and persona make for a pretty fair tale: Boston Brahmin, junior naval officer in World War II, Paris in the '50s, friend of the Kennedys, tormentor of Nixon. He was Zelig-like in his ability to appear at critical junctures in American history.
I knew him in the mid-'90s, when he was vice-president at large of The Post, but he was still large, still engaged, perpetually on the hunt for political gossip or newsroom intrigue. He was a decent, if relentlessly loyal, source when I covered The Post as the editor of the Washington City Paper. But even though I barely knew him, he was hilarious to bump into.
"I like your paper a lot," he'd deadpan, "whenever it doesn't have its," insert sailor adjective, "finger in my eye." Cue big roar of laughter, dancing eyes, deep pleasure at his own riposte.
Anybody who has ever watched Bradlee enter a room knows that whatever "it" is, he had a lot of it. There was the smile, a flash of white teeth matching the white collar of the custom striped shirts he wore without fail, and a voice that was a mix of gravel and gravitas that had a hearty (and generally profane) word for everybody. In a town notorious for big entrances - Bill Clinton, Marion Barry, Ronald Reagan, you name it - Bradlee tilted a room just by being himself. "He was one of those people who could make you feel like a superstar just by being in the same room with him," David Von Drehle, a longtime Post writer now at Time, told me by phone on Tuesday. "Every woman in the room wanted to be with him, and every man in the room wanted to be him."
He was a durable celebrity in Washington and beyond, partly because he was the rare person who became more handsome as he grew older. A photo from just two years ago that ran with a Post piece shows a remarkably good-looking 90-plus-year-old, a patrician pirate. Few journalists could suggest that they were better looking than the movie stars who played them, as Jason Robards portrayed Bradlee in the film about Watergate, All the President's Men, but Bradlee could have claimed as much. He was more Clark Gable than Clark Kent.
After all, he didn't cover the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. It's not as if he wrote the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential subjects. People who worked for him went through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which altered it.
The newspaper business can be a grand endeavour, but most of the people who commit journalism would never be mistaken for larger than life. Journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who actually do things.
But Ben Bradlee did things. He went to war, loved early and often, befriended and took on presidents, swore like a sailor, and partied like a movie star. Now that he is gone - he died on Tuesday at the age of 93 at his home in Georgetown - it is tough to imagine a newspaperman ever playing the kind of outsize role that he once did in Washington. Newspapers, and people's regard for them, have shrunk since he ran The Post.
He took over an also-ran paper and turned it into a formidable fighting ship like the one on which he served in World War II. Once the newspaper he oversaw gained steam, there was only the relentless effort to beat the competition, to find and woo talent, to pursue targets that The Post deemed worthy.
In the more than quarter-century that he helped lead the newsroom, from 1965 to 1991, he doubled its staff and circulation, and multiplied its ambitions. He would have been a terrible newspaperman in the current context - buyouts, reduced print schedules, timidity about offending advertisers - but he was a perfect one for his time. "I had a good seat," he told The American Journalism Review in a 1995 interview. "I came along at the right time with the right job and I didn't screw it up."
Bradlee had the attention span of a gnat - anecdotes of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common - but he was completely hypnotised by the chase of a good story.
His own life and persona make for a pretty fair tale: Boston Brahmin, junior naval officer in World War II, Paris in the '50s, friend of the Kennedys, tormentor of Nixon. He was Zelig-like in his ability to appear at critical junctures in American history.
I knew him in the mid-'90s, when he was vice-president at large of The Post, but he was still large, still engaged, perpetually on the hunt for political gossip or newsroom intrigue. He was a decent, if relentlessly loyal, source when I covered The Post as the editor of the Washington City Paper. But even though I barely knew him, he was hilarious to bump into.
"I like your paper a lot," he'd deadpan, "whenever it doesn't have its," insert sailor adjective, "finger in my eye." Cue big roar of laughter, dancing eyes, deep pleasure at his own riposte.
Anybody who has ever watched Bradlee enter a room knows that whatever "it" is, he had a lot of it. There was the smile, a flash of white teeth matching the white collar of the custom striped shirts he wore without fail, and a voice that was a mix of gravel and gravitas that had a hearty (and generally profane) word for everybody. In a town notorious for big entrances - Bill Clinton, Marion Barry, Ronald Reagan, you name it - Bradlee tilted a room just by being himself. "He was one of those people who could make you feel like a superstar just by being in the same room with him," David Von Drehle, a longtime Post writer now at Time, told me by phone on Tuesday. "Every woman in the room wanted to be with him, and every man in the room wanted to be him."
He was a durable celebrity in Washington and beyond, partly because he was the rare person who became more handsome as he grew older. A photo from just two years ago that ran with a Post piece shows a remarkably good-looking 90-plus-year-old, a patrician pirate. Few journalists could suggest that they were better looking than the movie stars who played them, as Jason Robards portrayed Bradlee in the film about Watergate, All the President's Men, but Bradlee could have claimed as much. He was more Clark Gable than Clark Kent.
©2014 The New York Times News Service