I’m telling you, as your buddy, that it really is getting counterproductive. And it’s got nothing to do with race.…
If you are writing your letter of July 26 to me to show to some other people, well and good. So be it. But if you are writing that letter to help your cause, the cause of the good people in this world, you are close to being counterproductive. Next time you’re in town, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what newspapers are for. One of the things they are not for is simply this: They are not to serve anyone’s special interest.…
Your friend,
When Barry Goldwater, another friend of Ben’s, took to the Senate floor to put up a stink about the Post’s publication of information about a signals intelligence satellite—information that was already in the public domain, it turned out—Ben wrote, “That’s me you’re recommending be tried for treason, friend, and I resent the hell out of it.”
But there was humility, too. When he had to eat it, he ate it. In July of 1976, the Post ran a news story about Senator George McGovern’s decision to rent his home in Washington to the Syrian ambassador. To any neutral eye the story was slanted, full of implication about McGovern’s foreign policy views that had nothing to do with the rental arrangement. The Post’s editorial page disavowed the story, and so did Ben:
Dear George:
I think that our story about your house was bullshit, and I’m sorry it ever ran.
Sincerely,
Internally, he was as direct but more extreme. On a different story, during the eighties:
Dear Tom:
You fucked up big time.
I can’t let yesterday’s incident pass. You violated some basic rules, despite the fact that all the radars were on as a result of the Cooke case.
You took a quote out of context in a way that was guaranteed to get the quote denied by the FBI, and you were really daring me to cut it out.
I could easily have backed you. I wanted to because I trusted you and I believed you; and had I done so, I would have been in the same goddamn shit sandwich that I find myself in now.
You lost my trust, no matter how good that story was. And you lost the trust of some of your colleagues.
He seemed particularly irked by people—reporters, editorial colleagues, job applicants—who thought more highly of themselves than they should:
I have reviewed your clips, your letters, reports of your conversations, and I find you lacking. You lack courtesy, you lack flexibility, you lack any semblance of humility. You think you are better than you are, which is not sinful, but it is apparent …
I don’t think you would be happy here, and I don’t think we would be happy with you here.
But he didn’t always bring out the rapier. Sometimes he could be much more gentle about the comedown, as with a young man who had written (as so many did) to “Ben Bradley” looking for advice:
Dear Mr. Patterson:
The first advice I would give anyone looking for a job in the newspaper business is that you spell the name of the editor correctly.
After you have learned that, I think I would advise you to decide what you want to do. You haven’t convinced me you are interested in journalism yet, sounds more like you want me to choose something for you. I can’t do that.
As a rule, he wasn’t big on giving advice. People needed to figure things out for themselves. “Read a lot,” he told one aspirant. “Work harder than anyone you know, and you will find it if it’s there.”
Sometimes there were tidbits you could use:
Dear Sandie:
I wish I had been told so many things when I was your age. But one special thing would have helped me enormously, and it is this: Any time spent convincing other people that you are or were important is wasted.
And in more than a few places there was a surprising tenderness, given Ben’s reputation as a fire-breather:
Dear Susan:
That’s quite the nicest letter I ever got.
I will miss you, no matter how unprofoundly we knew each other.
Your letter gives me credit for all sorts of virtues I don’t have. You are an able and interesting person who seems to me at first glance to appreciate grace and lots of other things.
We will all miss you, but your reasoning sounds convincing. If the personal reasons why it is best for you not to be in Washington are what they sound like, he is wrong.3
Your friend,
He also rarely missed a chance to crack a joke. One reader sent in a crossword puzzle that he had completed backwards, and Ben wrote him a one-line response: “!SNOITALUTARGNOC”. (Ben loves crosswords.) On a letter of complaint from George Allen, the reviled coach of the Washington Redskins, Ben simply wrote, “File under ‘Assholes.’ ”
One of my earliest favorites was Ben’s response to former president Ronald Reagan during the nineties, when Reagan invited Ben to California for a conference called “What’s Wrong with American Politics?” Ben had written back, “Thank you so much for your invitation to attend your conference … I am really impressed that you think you can answer that question in two days.”
* * *
1 Geyelin was the longtime editor of the Post’s editorial page. Meyer was Kay Graham’s dad, and Phil Graham was her husband; both men preceded her as publisher of the Post.
2 Hewitt was the creator and executive producer of 60 Minutes.
3 He was guessing—correctly, as it turned out—that she was leaving because of a breakup with an unnamed boyfriend.
III
Click here to view a plain text version.
I came in every afternoon to read. I didn’t spend much time with the real Ben at first. Half the time, I had no idea whether he knew who I was. One early “meeting” ended when I asked him how much thought he had put into some of his letters, and he said, “The number of letters I wrote twice you could put in your ear.” Another ended when he started working on a crossword puzzle while I was in the middle of a sentence.
He didn’t have much interest in the stuff I was digging up from the files, either. Whenever I found a letter that I thought was particularly incisive or relevant or funny I would bring it in to him in his office. He would hold it up, scan it for a couple of seconds, and then put it aside with the very clear intention of never looking at it again. I got used to it after a while.
One of the first things you notice about Ben, both the written and the in-person Ben, is his vocabulary, his vernacular, his penchant for one-liners and salty phrases. You don’t have to hang around too long before you’ll get a good, honest “fuck” out of him. It’s a functional component of his charm. I could hear him cursing from the next office over, and so could the rest of the seventh floor. People would poke their heads out of their offices just to hear what he might say next.
Within days I found myself saying “fuck” or one of its equivalents in places where it didn’t belong, under the misguided notion that it would give me street cred with him. I watched other people do it, too. Swearing with Ben makes you feel like you’re part of his club, the club that doesn’t take anything too seriously. Apparently even Kay Graham started doing it, after a fashion. But Ben’s the master, and nobody will tell you differently. He can say the word “fuck” with Mandarin variation and tonal control.
The film version of All the President’s Men is accurate in that regard. Jason Robards, who plays Ben, is constantly spewing curse words. “What kind of a crazy fucking story is this?” he says near the start. Then, later: “Fuck it! We’re sticking with the boys.” The movie had to be edited heavily in order to be shown on TV:1
Click here to view a plain text version.
It’s not just curse words, though. He uses all kinds of different colorful expressions when he wants to cut to the chase. In the middle of an interview with Woodward and Carl Bernstein in 1973, for the book version of All the President’s Men, Ben’s stepdaughter, Nancy Pittman, walked into the room:
BW: We’re interviewing your father just for posterity.
<
br /> B: They’re writing a book and they’re zeroing in on some of my mistakes.
BW: Do you get any feeling about what your reaction was when Nixon came out and said rather categorically in fact no one is involved—
B: The only one that tightened my sphincter—
BW: [To Nancy] Does he always talk like this around you?
The letters are also dotted with vintage phrases, the kind that only Ben can get away with:
Dear Frank:
I’m late in answering your letter. It isn’t that I have all that goddamn much on my alleged mind, beyond imminent fatherhood, trying to thwart CBS’s plans to steal Woodward for half a million bucks or thereabouts, worrying about some new raspberry plants I just put in, and generally feeling up to my ass in midgets.
A tough situation becomes, in Ben’s mouth, “a basket of crabs”; an unaccomplished rich person a “busted flush”; somebody who disrespects a Washington Post reporter should expect to “hang by his thumbs for a month” before ever seeing his side of a story in print. On a transcribed phone call with a lawyer who had threatened to sue the Post preemptively about a story that hadn’t yet run, Ben began by saying, “I’ve got to tell you that I think that letter has got more bullshit in it per square inch than any letter I’ve received in years. Honest to God.”
Carol, Ben’s secretary, likes to tell the story about the time her son met with Ben because he’d had a problem in college and wanted some advice. After the meeting was over and her son was walking out, Ben clapped him on the back and said, for all of the seventh floor to hear, “Keep your pecker up.”
That’s Ben.
The story that can’t be topped is the one told at Ben’s retirement roast in the newsroom, in 1991, by reporter Tom Lippman:
I had become a sort of freelance guru on style and grammar and usage for people around the newsroom. One day I had an almost hesitant, almost blushing visit from Debbie Regan, who many of you will remember … was Ben’s secretary at the time. Ben had been dictating a letter on that little tape recorder, I guess, which Debbie had to transcribe, and she came over to my desk looking extremely uncomfortable.
She hemmed and hawed a little bit and she said, “Look, I have to ask you something.”
I said, “Yeah, what is it, Debbie?”
She said, “Is dickhead one word or two?”
One night early on I rode out with him to the University of Maryland for a symposium in honor of Shirley Povich, the late and celebrated sportswriter for the Post. Ben loved Povich. He always says that when he first came to the Post, in 1948, Shirley Povich and the cartoonist Herblock were The Washington Post, the only true assets the paper had. Everybody on the panel was telling sports stories, and after a while Ben got bored. A couple of times he stuck both legs straight out in front of him and looked at his shoes, like a boy would. All the talk of blogs and the Internet wasn’t doing much for him.
Then George Solomon, the former editor of the Post’s sports section, began to tell an anecdote about how Povich had helped integrate the press box at one sporting event or another. “Now this is a great story,” Solomon said, launching into it with gusto.
He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth before Ben stirred on the other side of the stage. “We’ll tell you if it’s a great story, George,” he said.
The crowd laughed, and so did the panelists. It did not require any great leap of the imagination to see a younger version of this man presiding as executive editor over a raucous story conference at the paper, cracking people up while also putting them in their place.
“It’s good to know that at your age you still know how to take a cheap shot,” Solomon said, blushing, amused, entirely unoffended.
At one point Michael Wilbon, the ESPN host who was then still a Post sports columnist, started talking about how much he had revered The Washington Post before he went to work there as an intern in 1979. He talked about how excited he had been to come to the paper that Ben Bradlee ran, how mythic Ben and the Post were in his own mind because of Watergate. He had watched All the President’s Men the night before his first day on the job, he said. He was almost misting up about it.2
As Wilbon was wrapping up his spiel, the audience collectively caught sight of Ben in the next chair over. He was sawing on an improvised air violin and rolling his eyes for effect. The gesture was expertly timed and executed, playing to an audience Ben knew would be watching. He was poking fun at Wilbon for being sentimental but also showing that he didn’t take his own mystique too seriously. The crowd roared, even Wilbon laughed. He’d been had by his old boss, and he loved it.
I’ve seen Ben whip that violin out on any number of people since then. He’s pretty ruthless. When Sally got up at his eighty-eighth birthday party and started talking about how Ben was her hero, he didn’t waste much time with it, either. When the spirit moves him, nobody is safe—not his wife or his friends, not other journalists or esteemed fellow panelists or anybody else. One step too far into sentimentality or self-importance and blam, there he is, taking the air out of the situation, showing you your pomposity (or preemptively leavening his own), demonstrating to everybody else that he’s on to you. The mocking is almost always gentle; everybody laughs, because Ben is unfailingly charming and it’s all in good fun. But the message is clear, consistent, unmistakably Ben down to its core: Cut the crap, keep it moving, save the self-serving details. Just get it out of your typewriter, kid.
* * *
1 According to Gary Arnold, who reviewed the movie in the Post in April of 1976, Robards’s performance single-handedly “liberalized the ratings system, making the most famous sexual four-letter word of them all acceptable for the PG classification as long as it isn’t spoken in a sexual context.”
2 Wilbon retired from the Post in December of 2010, and in his final column he talked about “the complete awe, even 30 years later, I still feel whenever I’m in the company of Ben Bradlee, even if it’s just seeing him in the elevator.”
IV
Dear Ben:
On your 80th I want to say some of the things that seem never to get said. For reasons of maleness, and maybe time, I’ve rushed by too much that is important, the really, truly important. These things become too important to discuss. Let me try.
The letter was dated August 26, 2001, typewritten on Bob’s personal stationery, with “AS SENT” jotted diagonally across the top left-hand corner in Bob’s trademark scrawl. He pulled it out of an expandable manila folder marked “BRADLEE” and pushed it across the table toward me.
We were sitting at the back of Bob’s living room on Q Street, at the same round table where hundreds of government officials have said things that they eventually regret saying into Bob’s tape recorder. My own tape recorder was there now. It was still early on, before I knew Ben very well, and I had been making the rounds of the ten or fifteen people who knew him best in search of good stories. I had saved Bob for last.
We were talking about the first time he met Ben, and though he recited a version of it to me in person the letter catches it in a more complete way:
I’ll begin with memory—my first of you. It was the first Friday in September 1971. I was waiting outside your office in the old Post. This was the last interview before being hired: Bradlee meets all the new hires; he almost never says no, but he might or he could. The rule was watch your ass, be careful and don’t get into stray talk. Bradlee’s got a short attention span. (At about this very same hour on this same day, unknown to both of us at the time, two guys named E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were boarding a plane at Dulles to Los Angeles so they could burglarize the office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg.)
Could it be that you did not have a window in your old office? In any case that is what I remember. Maybe some renovations were underway? So the office seemed smaller than it should have been. You were already known as this energy force at the paper, and why should this force have such a small, cramped office, I wondered. For about two seconds. T
hen you turned on the lights—your face, eyes, the undivided focus—not exactly the short attention span of legend. The truth is that your strength is your attention span, when something is worth paying attention to. You were not particularly interested in what I had done at the Montgomery County whatever-it-was newspaper. You honed in on one thing. My time in the Navy, five years, not hard war years but a long time. You had been in the Navy, you said, as if it were the brotherhood.…
Everything after the Navy was easy, we agreed. After the Navy there could be running room. But somebody had to give you a job—a profession in which to run.
So that’s what you gave me first—running room. It was a magnificent gift. I felt it every day, and it came directly from you. There was this huge sense that we were your boys, or girls or people—the entire newsroom—turned loose. Running room was a matter of pride and obligation. We didn’t understand fully what it was, but we recognized daylight and went for it because that is where you were pointing. Daylight: news, the unexpected and surprising, and the daily folly and occasional generosity of mankind, that endless buffet.
Bob doesn’t normally write like that. He tends toward the straightforward, the objective, the simple. When I worked for him, he would sometimes encourage me to “swing from the high vines,” to take a chance, to go for it in terms of language or synoptic complexity, but he was always hesitant to do the same. It could be hard to tell how Bob really felt about anything, what it meant to him.
Evidently the occasion of Ben’s eightieth had brought him out. The letter continued, going even deeper:
Yours in Truth Page 2
