And when I screwed up in some well publicized and some less well publicized ways, what did you do? Never a harsh, judgmental word. Not one. Only human understanding and that wonderful motion with your arms in the air, shoulders in a shrug, and the tilted head and the momentary grimace that said, well, that’s over, let’s move on. No doubt there were times when you were angry or disappointed. Other than Elsa you are the only person who always stood by me in good or bad times.
Bob wondered what might have happened if Nixon had stayed in office, had the Watergate scandal never occurred. What would have come of the FBI, the CIA, “the habits and practices of concealment,” the war in Vietnam? “Watergate upended a lot of things,” Bob wrote. “You made it possible with goading and love and all of yourself, never a partial effort.”
A few paragraphs later, the letter drew to a close. “The brotherhood lives,” Bob wrote. “I feel connected to you like a son.”
The way you and Sally have extended your family to ours in recent years is a cornerstone of our life. I’m feeling older. If the running room is a little less, and the rear end doesn’t move as fast, the old fires of deep appreciation, deeper admiration and the deepest love still burn for you.
Sincerely,
[signed] BW
Later in our interview, he pulled another letter out of the file, this one from Ben to him. It was dated March 27, 1982, typewritten on Ben’s office stationery, with “CONFIDENTIAL” written in Ben’s blue pen at the top. That year, CBS had attempted to hire Bob away from the Post, and Ben made a memorable pitch for Bob to stay:
Dear Bob:
A light will go out in this place, if or when you leave. A light that never flickered, and generally burned strong and clean. That’s for openers. You are quite simply the best investigative reporter I’ve ever met, or imagined. A team of investigative reporters [led] by you can reach levels of impact and importance that can hardly be conceived. (And without you, that team will probably disband.)
I’m not going to belittle television, or demean this latest offer now in front of you.
Instead, I’m going to outline what the POST will do for you now, and what the POST will do for you over the next 18 months … sure that you will do what’s best in the long run.
Ben laid out a series of proposals—more money, more editorial responsibility (including weekend duty running the paper), management of Bob’s own “SWAT” team of investigative reporters. I had never understood when I worked for Bob that he had once dreamed of replacing Ben as the executive editor of the Post. I knew Bob as somebody who reported and wrote and wanted only to do those two things. From the tone and substance of Ben’s proposals in the letter, it’s clear that in 1982 there was still a chance that Bob might succeed him, even though the Janet Cooke scandal had effectively put Bob out of the running.
The outlined proposal, Ben wrote, “should leave the POST in the best possible position to know you, and you in the best possible position to know us.” That’s the final sentence of the letter. Then, where Ben would normally have written “Sincerely,” he had written something different:
yours in truth,
I had read hundreds of Ben’s letters by then, but I had never seen that particular signoff before. It was a powerful way to close, so simple and pure and yet so loaded at the same time.
Bob showed me his response, composed four days later, on March 31, 1982, with “Personal” typed at the top of the printout. “Something will go out in me should I leave,” he wrote, picking up on the opening metaphor of Ben’s letter to him. “I don’t want to.” He would stay.
There were other letters, too, containing far more information than I was equipped at that point to understand. In the mid-eighties, when Bob was upset that some of his reporting on Libya and on Soviet secrets wasn’t making it into the paper, he wrote to Ben that he was again thinking of leaving:
Dear Ben:
Something is dying at the Post, and I don’t know what to do about it. Events, attitudes, decisions etc. have been nagging at me for months. You know that. I know that. And I know the displeasure you feel with my approach.
I say this with great sadness. Like you, I’ve been through two divorces. I know that what was once good and wonderful can turn very sour; the wise know when to depart. If that’s what you want or what seems best, I’m gone.…
I wish there was not the evidence to support this. I hate to be a pain in the ass, your ass. I wish I did not have to say this to you, my friend and boss, a man I love.…
Four years ago almost to the day—it was March 27, 1982—you wrote me a letter that began, “A light will go out in this place, if or when you leave.…”
You tell me how to best handle this. I’d rather be part of the ongoing solution to making a better paper, and not part of the problems you have.
As you signed that 1982 letter—
Yours in truth,
There was no response from Ben to this one. When I asked Bob what Ben had done about it, he said, “There was a story I was working on, and it got in the paper the next day.”
“Maybe that’s one of the lessons,” Bob said. “Simple solutions. Somebody sends you a long, whiny, complaining letter, simple solutions. ‘Okay. Give me a story I can publish.’ And we did.”
But wasn’t there more to it than that? The language of these letters—the references to divorce, to departure, to love and truth—suggested currents that ran deeper than newspaper stories. Later I would mention these exchanges to the reporter Pat Tyler, who for a time was closer than most to Bob and to Ben. I said that I had been surprised to see such an outpouring of emotion—almost like love letters—between two guys who don’t talk about their feelings all that much.
“They’re both prisoners of very strong emotions,” Tyler told me. “But when they were still having their suits cut for dorsal fins, they didn’t show them. They suppressed them very strongly.”
“At what point did you become friends?” I asked Bob as the interview was dying down. “When did you make that transition?”
“Well, you know,” Bob started, “I think you’ve probably got other people …” He trailed off, then tried again. “Ben and I are close and we have this history,” he said. “But he’s not going to call me up and say, ‘Hey, come on down and have a beer.’ I think he does that with Lehrer and Wooten and Shelby some,” he said, referring to three of Ben’s friends.1 Then, a bit uncertainly, “Doesn’t he?”
“I don’t really know,” I said.
Bob paused, thought for a moment. “I mean, you know, it’s ultimately like another father,” he said. “Like with your father, you feel that you never close the deal.”
Bob’s father had recently passed away. I had never heard him talk much about him.
“In the sense of getting everything out on the table,” Bob said.
“I’m not sure that anybody feels that they know him that well,” I said.
It’s true. I’ve never met anybody who claims to have closed the deal with Ben, except maybe for Sally. There is always a tinge of mystery and distance. As one former reporter and close friend told me, “Ben always kept some of Ben to himself.” Earlier Bob had said that with Ben there was always “a sense that he’s got a lot held in reserve.” If these people hadn’t closed the deal, I couldn’t imagine that I ever would.
After we finished up, I went out in the garden at the back of the house to talk to Elsa. It was a sunny and slow Friday afternoon, with cicadas humming in the trees. Elsa agreed that it was hard to feel that you’d touched the bottom with Ben. “In a funny way, he’s actually quite distant,” she said, “for all of the bonhomie.”
About an hour into our session, Bob brought out a bottle of white wine, and the three of us gossiped for a while. I mentioned that I’d uncovered some information in Ben’s files that I didn’t know quite how to handle, old letters that were torn up—saved, but clearly not sent and (perhaps) never meant to be seen.
Bob’s ears perked up, as they always do when
secrets get mentioned. He flashed a knowing smile and reached for the wine bottle.
“All biographers are concealers,” he said.
At that point I was still writing a book with Ben, not about him, but maybe Bob already knew intuitively that that was going to change. I had the first flicker of the realization that writing about your mentor’s mentor is a trickier proposition than it seems. The challenge hung in the air for a second or two, and then we clinked glasses and moved on to other things.
* * *
1 Jim Lehrer, of PBS; Jim Wooten, of ABC News; and Shelby Coffey, a former Post editor.
V
Porto Bello, 2008
“So you want to write the book on me, huh?” Ben growled when he came onto the line. He was kidding around, but I almost never spoke to him on the telephone, so I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. I was a little scared.
It was now July of 2008, nearly eight months after Ben had decided that he didn’t want to write another book. After some quick jujitsu from Sally, I had spent the intervening months helping their son, Quinn, with his memoir, but Ben’s archives had never been far from my mind. Now I was making my big pitch.
“Not necessarily the book,” I said nervously. “But a book.” Too cutesy. I kicked myself for not just walking down to his office to talk to him in person.
He listened as I rambled on about how fascinating his archives were, and then he stopped me. He would be happy to cooperate, he said. Happy to. He just hoped it would be interesting. I told him that was the easy part, and we laughed. In exchange for his time and cooperation, he asked for nothing. As we were hanging up, he said simply, “It’s your ass now, pal.”
Over the course of the next three years, Ben opened his entire life to me, from his archives at The Washington Post to his friends, his colleagues, and his dinner table. We’ve shared birthdays and howled in pained unison at the television screen during Redskins games. We have conducted dozens of formal interviews in Ben’s office and untold hundreds of casual ones over the dinner dishes, or in lounge chairs by the pool. My wife is in love with him. We’re friends.
This is not to say that we bared our souls to each other. He didn’t divulge all of his private thoughts about mortality and the meaning of human life, in part because I’m not sure that he has them. He just answered my questions. “I’m not hiding anything,” he said to me one winter day in his living room. He sat back on the couch, and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me some big secret. Then he said, “I might have bopped a couple of dames that I shouldn’t have, but I think I’ve been pretty honest about that.”
What you see with Ben is what you get. The color is great but the substance is settled. Sometimes after an interview with him I would come away thinking I’d hit the jackpot and then find that he’d said the exact same thing, almost word for word, in his memoir or in a different interview. For a long time now, much longer than I’ve known him, he’s had his story and he sticks to it.
But the files themselves were a different story, and in some instances a new one. In early 2009, a stroke of luck effectively doubled the amount of information that I had to draw from. Ev Small, Kay Graham’s longtime researcher and friend, happened to be out at the Post’s storage facility to pull together some of Kay’s old papers for the Library of Congress. While she was there, she noticed a bunch of boxes with “Bradlee” written on them. Carol had requisitioned everything for us a year before, but evidently these boxes had been missed in that first cull. Ev knew what I was doing and was kind enough to seek me out and tell me about them. Within a week or two, nearly twenty additional boxes had landed at my office door.
They were a gold mine: the Watergate files, a set of interviews that Ben did for his memoir in the early nineties, the complete files on Janet Cooke, verbatim transcripts of editorial meetings from the early seventies. There was new, never before published information about Deep Throat, about the Pentagon Papers, whole histories of events that never made the memoirs. One particularly happy day I came across three private interviews that Ben had done with Kay Graham for her Pulitzer-winning memoir, Personal History, each about fifty single-spaced pages in length. They traced Ben’s entire career at the Post, and the back-and-forth between the two of them was priceless:
K: Well, to ask Bradlee at that point what he wanted was very dangerous. And he said, famous quote, “Now that you ask I’d give my left one to be managing editor of The Post.”
B: If it became available.
K: I don’t think you said that, Ben.
People and relationships I’d read so much about came alive, and not just people from the Post. I knew, for example, that Ben and John Kennedy were friends; it’s been written about ad nauseam by Ben and by everybody who writes about Ben. But one morning in January of 2009, at the back of Ben’s Kennedy files, I found an invitation to a birthday party—a generic card, with furry animals aligned along the side and blanks for the handwritten time and place down the center. It looked modern, enough that at first I figured it had been filed in the wrong place. Then I looked more closely, and I noticed that the party was for John Kennedy, Jr., at the White House, to be held November 26, 1963. In a flash I realized that it was an invitation to a party that never happened, planned as it was for four days after Kennedy’s death. I had to stop working and just sit with it for a while. Ben wrote a book about Kennedy, and has answered countless questions about him in countless interviews since 1963. Somehow the card did more to convey their closeness, and what was lost, than anything Ben has ever said or written.
One morning in the spring of 2010, we were making breakfast in the kitchen at Porto Bello, Ben and Sally’s weekend place in southern Maryland.1 Ben loves a country breakfast, fried eggs and bacon and sausage, the whole works. As he was firing up the skillet, he mentioned that Post columnist David Ignatius had spent the night there before I arrived. I asked him if he remembered an occasion, years before, when with Ignatius’s encouragement he had ordered ever more expensive bottles of wine, ultimately nearly $1,000 worth, at a Post editors conference in Puerto Rico. Ben said that he did, and then chuckled.
“How do you know about that?” he asked.
“He told me about it,” I said, “and I have the letter you wrote, telling the Post Company to charge the dinner to you, not to the company.”
He turned around. “Jesus,” he said. “You know all of my secrets.”
That wasn’t much of a secret, but sometimes I wondered whether he really understood how deeply I was digging around in his past. He often seemed surprised by how much I knew. But other than that brief moment at the kitchen stove, he never expressed any concern when I quoted random documents in conversation or handed him inflammatory letters that he never sent. Once I showed him a tough unsent memo to his former number two, Howard Simons. Their relationship had started off well but deteriorated after Watergate, when Ben’s star rose and Simons felt he never received the credit he deserved for his own contributions to the story. “There is a certain amount of shit that I am going to put up with,” Ben had written, “and there is a definite amount of shit I am not going to put up with.”
“It’s interesting that you didn’t send it,” I said. I was fishing for some reaction from him, to see if he wanted to qualify it at all.
I should have known better. All he did was laugh as he looked the memo over and say, “Makes a pretty good case, though, doesn’t it?” Then he pushed it back across the desk toward me.
There was only one time that he ever tried to steer me off something. I walked into his office with a faded copy of a play called “How, Please?” and plunked it down on his desk with a grin.
“Remember this?”
He looked at the title page and realized what it was: a play that he had written with a colleague at Newsweek during the late fifties, before his meteor ride with Kennedy began. He flipped through it, then looked back over at me.
“Don’t kill me with this,” he said, half imploring, half kidding. I promised him
I wouldn’t. That was the only time in three years that he ever, even jokingly, tried to stay my hand.
One of Ben’s most basic traits as an editor was that, if he trusted you, he set you free and then backed you when it counted. At the Post he lived by that sword and nearly died by it, too. As much as I might have wished it, I never knew him at the peak of his powers, striding through the newsroom, dragging on a cigarette and scaring the shit out of the young reporters (and some of the old ones). That guy was gone by the time I showed up. The self-described “barracuda” for the news had been replaced by a kinder, gentler, more forgetful version. I could feel the old Ben, and see him in the eyes of the people who loved him, but outside of brief bursts I had to rely mostly on the archives to encounter him for myself.
As it happened, though, I did get to know the man who sets you free if he trusts you. At dinner with our families one night in March of 2010, he stopped in the middle of the conversation and raised his glass. “I hope we’re as good friends when you finish your book as we are now,” he said to me, across the table. “But I don’t give a fuck what you write about me.”
Access comes with pratfalls and trapdoors, but it also represents an uncommon opportunity, to look so closely at an uncommon life. I took it, because it was worth it. This is what I found.
* * *
1 By “weekend place,” I mean magazine-quality restored historic manor house on a 200-acre former tobacco farm with several outbuildings and the requisite Bradlee-Quinn swimming pool and tennis court.
IMPACT
On April 15, 1969, a man named George Vaillant met Ben at a coffee shop across from the Post building for breakfast. They had never met before. Vaillant was a young psychiatrist working for the Harvard Study of Adult Development, known colloquially as the Grant Study after one of its founding funders. He had come to interview Ben.
Yours in Truth Page 3
