I said, “It’s not going to be sensational, but it will be different, it’s something the Times hasn’t printed.” That’s what Ben wanted, so I am printing something those bastards hadn’t printed. Because Ben is a terribly competitive guy, as you know.
Ben wasn’t interested in the issue at all. He was interested in the journalism. He says he has no politics, he doesn’t care whether the president is a Republican or Democrat. It’s true. It’s hard to believe about him, but it is true.…
[H]e really is apolitical and he wanted good stories. He was still trying to make it. He was not the Ben Bradlee of Watergate at this point. We gotta think of him in a different context. He was a stoop for the lemonade girl.1
“It was an almost personal thing,” one editor said of Ben’s approach to the story. “It was almost manhood on the issue, it was macho.” Phil Geyelin, the editorial page editor, said that as Ben wandered between the reporters and the businesspeople it was as if he were back in the locker room at St. Mark’s prep school. “Bradlee was go,” Geyelin said. “That was his first instinct and I think it was his instinct all along.”
As the day wore on, Ben and the rest of the news side began to realize that the decision to publish wasn’t going to be automatic. For starters, the Post’s lawyers didn’t believe that the government would make false claims about national security privilege just to cover its own ass. The implicit assumption was that the government did what was right, that the president was infallible, trustworthy, deserving of the benefit of the doubt.2 This is one of the hardest aspects of the story to believe, forty years later.
One of the more convincing arguments that the lawyers offered was that the Times had already been enjoined. The Post couldn’t claim that they didn’t know what the stakes were. There was language in the statute about “willfully” publishing material that could be “used to the injury of the United States,” and that now meant something different to the Post than it had to the Times.
And if that weren’t enough, the Washington Post Company, which in addition to the newspaper included Newsweek, three television stations, and three radio stations (among other holdings), had gone public two days before, offering $33 million worth of Class B common stock. If the Post were to be charged with a crime for publishing sensitive information, the underwriters of the offering might back out of the contract. This would cost the company money in the short term, but more to the point it would put the entire strategy and public position of the corporation in jeopardy.
Over the course of the afternoon, positions sharpened. “We were not doing very well in the argument,” Ben told me. Various compromise strategies floated around, including one in which the Post would notify the attorney general of what they intended to publish and then allow the Justice Department a day to respond. The reporters didn’t like that strategy much. One piped in, constructively, “That’s the shittiest idea I’ve ever heard.” Chal Roberts threatened to resign.
Word that the Post had the Papers was already starting to travel. If they didn’t print what they had, people would know—and the emerging reputation of the Post as a hard-charging, take-on-all-comers newspaper would suffer. “Here was this big new hotshot who was supposed to take the Post into the Promised Land,” Ben would say later, imagining what the line on him would have been, “and yet the first time he had any kind of challenge he caved.”
Late in the afternoon, somewhat desperate, Ben realized that the only person who could help him was his best friend, the famous trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. Williams was a grand Washington character, another larger-than-life guy, and one of a small number of people who could reasonably be called Ben’s peers. They first met in the late forties, when Ben was a court reporter for the Post and Williams was an up-and-coming defense lawyer, and they had stayed friends ever since. Williams was working a case in Chicago at the time, but Ben eventually tracked him down by phone:
Edward Bennett Williams, private interview, late seventies, undated:
He outlined the case, and then I said, Bradlee, you and I have been friends a long time—and actually our friendship went back to 1949—and I said it’s the first time I’ve seen you so far behind, it’s 21–0, it’s the fourth quarter, and there are eight minutes to go, and you better get going.…
I’d been watching [this] city for about 30 years, and I’d been watching responsible and respectable journalists tell the Congress to go to hell and to go fuck themselves, and every journalist, at a moment of crisis, if he was respectable and the Congress was pressing for information said, you know, go to hell.… Congress always [lost] its guts when it comes to taking on the press. [And] that’s what I really was telling him. I guarantee that the Nixon people haven’t got the balls to go after you, because Nixon doesn’t have the balls to go for you.…
It was a political judgment and not a legal one, and I just knew that Nixon didn’t have the guts to go after them, therefore in this town you went with it, you didn’t sit there and be indecisive, you went to it, & you put the ball in their court.
Ben’s summary of this conversation was that Williams had told him, “Fuck ’em, your job is to print it.” The call bucked him up, right when he needed it. He also knew that Kay respected Williams, and that Williams’s support for publishing would give him a card to play during what was rapidly shaping up to be the most important up-or-down phone call in the modern history of The Washington Post, placed later that evening from Ben’s living room to the home of Kay Graham.
That evening, Kay was throwing a retirement party at her house for Harry Gladstein, the Post’s circulation manager. She had known since that morning that they had the Papers, and that various editors and reporters and business types had congregated at Ben’s house to hash it out. But she hadn’t realized how serious it was getting. It began to dawn on her only late in the day, when Eugene Patterson, the Post’s managing editor, arrived at the party and pulled her aside.
“This problem is going to come to you,” Patterson told her. “You’re going to have to make a decision. And when it comes to you, the Post’s immortal soul is going to depend on your decision to print.”
“Oh God, no!” Kay said, somewhat stricken. She hadn’t expected a decision of that gravity to fall to her alone.
She went on with the party as planned. Right in the middle of her toast to Gladstein, as she stood on her back porch addressing the assembled guests, the call came from Ben’s house. This was it. Kay wanted to finish her speech but was told there wasn’t time, they needed her right away. She wrapped it up and hurried in to the phone.
First on the line, by himself, was Fritz Beebe, the chairman of the Post Company, who had been at Ben’s house for most of the day. He was an old family friend of Kay’s, and he had been her father’s estate lawyer. (“Old Man Meyer,” as Ben always calls him, had bought the Post at auction in 1933.) After Phil Graham, Kay’s husband, had died in 1963 and Katharine Meyer Graham had taken over the reins at the Post, Beebe’s had been the one shoulder she could always lean on. His advice meant more to her than anybody else’s.
“He crushed me,” Kay later told Ben, of what happened with Beebe on the phone. She and Beebe had never been apart on anything before. She assumed he would say, “It’s all right, go ahead and publish,” but he didn’t. What he said was, “I guess I wouldn’t.”
Ben, editorial page editor Phil Geyelin, and deputy managing editor Howard Simons came on the line. “I was ready to beg,” Ben admits. “I would have done anything to get it published.” He reported that Williams had told them to go with it, that they couldn’t afford to wait. To fail to publish would indicate to the world that there were “considerations other than news that guided our decision-making,” as Ben later put it.
Kay sensed that Ben was under enormous pressure, that the newsroom was going to go apeshit3 if she said no. She asked Geyelin what he thought. He said that with everything hanging in the balance he knew it was a tough problem for her, but that he thought they should publish.<
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“Well, it could destroy the newspaper,” she said bluntly.
“I’ve heard that in the argument,” Geyelin told her, “and I can’t easily dismiss it, but there is more than one way to destroy a newspaper.”
The answer could come only from Kay. It was her family fortune, her newspaper. The fact that Beebe hadn’t slammed the door as firmly as he might have had given Ben hope, but after he had made his case there wasn’t much more he could do. She knew where he stood. The editors fell silent on their end, and so did Kay on hers. The sound of music from the party in Kay’s garden drifted in and out over the open line.
“In a real sense,” Ben would say in a speech a few years later, of the moment that followed, “it marked the beginning of the journey which placed the Post once and for all on the cutting edge of history and of journalism. Throughout 1973, I was asked to define the key moment in our coverage of the Watergate matters, the one moment when we took an irrevocable decision. The answer is plain to me: the moment when Kay Graham said, ‘I say we print’ the Pentagon Papers.”
Kay agreed with that, particularly in hindsight, but later she needled Ben about that speech. That wasn’t exactly what she had said, she finally told him, during one of the interviews for her memoir.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“I just said, ‘Oh, go ahead, go ahead.’ ”
“I couldn’t say, ‘She moaned, “Oh, go ahead, go ahead.” ’ ”
“I did, but I didn’t moan,” Kay protested. “I just said ‘Go.’ I mean, I was so tense that I would—the idea that I would say, ‘I say we print …’ ”
“All I remember is hanging up the phone so fast,” Ben said.
“Before she changed the wording?” an observer of the interview asked.
“Yes,” Ben said.
“After you hung up the phone,” the observer asked, turning to Kay, “did you have any regrets?”
“No,” she said.
After two days of Pentagon Papers stories in the Post, the government attempted to enjoin them, too. Although the injunction wasn’t granted at first, the appellate process tied the Post’s hands until the Supreme Court was willing to hear the case. For expediency’s sake, the Court joined the Post’s case with the Times’s and heard them together, on June 26, 1971. There they were, the Post and the Times in the same breath on the national stage, fighting together for journalistic freedom. Ben’s gamble had paid off.
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the Times and the Post. Each justice had written his own opinion, and the verdict itself was something of a mixed bag. The upshot was that the Court had found that the government couldn’t prevent publication of classified information in advance, but they could attempt to prosecute under criminal statutes after the fact if they chose. The case was seen as a narrow but important victory for newspapers and for the First Amendment, and in hindsight as a foreboding sign of the Nixon administration’s willingness to abuse national security claims in order to obscure its own behavior.
At the Post, there was nothing narrow about the victory at all. When the word came in over the wire machines at the far end of the newsroom, Gene Patterson stood up on a desk to shout it out and the whole place erupted. It was a vindication of the burgeoning culture of the paper, of Kay Graham’s ownership, of Ben’s editorship, of everything that the Post as an institution believed about itself and wanted to stand for. Ben and the rest of the reporters and editors had asked Kay Graham to put her company on the line, and she had done it.
Ben always calls Kay a “gutsy dame” or some variation of that phrase, and he means it. Despite her many hesitations and uncertainties, that’s what she was. A lot of people thought that Ben brought the bravery out in Kay, that he helped give her the confidence she needed when she couldn’t supply it on her own, that she ran the Pentagon Papers stories because she wanted to be on Ben’s team, to stand with him. I’m certain that’s true. But it went both ways.
When I first started coming down to the Post in 2007, before new management installed a series of high-definition television screens, a set of large pictures of the paper’s past faced the bank of elevators in the lobby. This was always my favorite of them:
Ben and Kay have just left the federal courthouse in D.C. during the early stages of the legal battle over the Papers. They seem so vital, so assured, like the real life you always thought you might lead if everything went right. This is what Ben stands for, and Kay, too: the golden era in newspapers that’s gone and isn’t coming back, as unrecoverable as the joke Ben cracked the instant before the picture was taken.
Click here to view a plain text version.
Click here to view a plain text version.
Click here to view a plain text version.
* * *
1 Ben’s ten-year-old daughter, Marina, had seen the comings and goings at the house and had cannily hastened to set up a lemonade stand outside.
2 The Nixon tapes reveal that the day after the first Pentagon Papers story ran in the Times, Bob Haldeman said to the president: “But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing … you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the—the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the President can be wrong.”
3 Her word.
FATE
“If you wrote that in a novel, you wouldn’t believe it,” I said. We were sitting in Ben’s office, talking about how he had first arrived at the Post in 1948.
He was twenty-seven at the time, three years back from the war and dead set on a career in journalism. He had spent two years working on a start-up weekly newspaper in New Hampshire, The New Hampshire Sunday News, but that paper had been sold and he was out beating the pavement. He had interviews, set up by high-placed family friends, at The Baltimore Sun and the Post.
As the overnight train from Boston approached the station in Baltimore on the morning of the interviews, Ben looked out the window and saw rain coming down in sheets. The Sun was the preeminent paper in Baltimore and a prestigious place for a young journalist to catch on, but it was raining so hard that Ben decided to stay on the train. He would take his chances at the Post.
When he arrived in D.C. later that day, he rented a room at the Willard Hotel (for $6) and then walked a block over to the Post’s old building on E Street for his interview. “It is hard to recreate the fear I felt,” he would write later. “This was the city room of a newspaper where every reporter I admired would die to work.” The Post didn’t make much money, and the Evening Star was considered D.C.’s paper of record, but the Post was liberal in Ben’s sense of the word—civil libertarian, anxious to tackle the tougher issues, unafraid to offend the big shots and the establishment.
As Ben made the rounds, one of the editors let slip that the Post just happened to have an unexpected vacancy; a reporter had quit the day before. Ben Gilbert, the city editor, and Russ Wiggins, the managing editor—two men who would get to know Ben and his ambitions quite well over the following decades—intimated later that afternoon that they wanted to hire him, pending the approval of publisher Phil Graham. The next day, the parsimonious Graham signed off on the hire, and after a whirlwind twenty-four hours Ben was the new low man on the city desk of The Washington Post.
“The continued intersection of your life with the Post,” I said to Ben in his office, “through Phil Graham and then through Newsweek, I mean it really seems—”
“Fated,” Ben said, interrupting me.
“Fated,” I echoed, relieved that he had said it first. “It just seems like there was something pushing you …”
“Yeah.”
“… here. That this is where you were supposed to end up, and you got here.”
“Yeah.”
“But say that the wrong way and you look like a jerk.�
�
“Yeah, well, say it the right way,” he said.
The story of Ben’s life has a lot of mythic elements to it—not apocryphal, but big, cosmic, blurring the lines between fate and luck and free will, like the story with the rain on his way down from Boston. He got his start in journalism, for instance, because his dad wanted him to have a job one summer and happened to know the owner of the Beverly Evening Times, a small paper near the Bradlee summer place. That was it. His dad picked up the phone and Ben’s career in newspapers was born.
That’s how things worked in Ben’s life. When he got caught out where the waves broke, he was always able to ride them in. When he was fourteen, an epidemic of polio swept through his boarding school, killing one of his good friends, and he spent the summer laid up in bed as his body battled the disease. If you believe him, he never worried about whether he would walk again. Even the doctors at the Grant Study were mystified by his attitude, wondering openly about the relation between his confidence and his near-complete recovery:
In spite of being unable to move his legs [for a couple of months] and in spite of one of his friends dying in the same epidemic … he never did consider that he would be paralyzed. This is a very interesting fact in illness. Do those people who develop a permanent paralysis have as much confidence while they are ill as this boy had?
Ben was just made that way. Even if you factor in the prerogatives of wealth and whiteness and WASPness and maleness and attractiveness and intelligence and charm and all of the other advantages that Ben was born with, you still can’t quite reach his easy way with the world.
Yours in Truth Page 5
