Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  The most important piece of conversation was one which Kay asked me to pass on privately to you. She has decided to move Ben Bradlee from NEWSWEEK to the POST. He is to be Al Friendly’s deputy on the news side, and is to move into Friendly’s place in a couple of years if all goes well. Kay knows you have reservations about Bradlee, but she also knows that he has the respect of the professional press and she has had to go on her own best judgment. She wants you to know this decision from her.

  This may be as good a time as any for me to repeat my own judgment that while Ben Bradlee is a very determined and inquisitive reporter, he is not hostile to us or in anyone else’s pocket. It is certainly true that he was a great personal friend of President Kennedy. But he has never been close to Bobby—they are temperamentally opposites. What made Bradlee and President Kennedy friends was a shared coolness and irony and detachment, which was the side of JFK that does not appear in his brother.1

  Bill Moyers, LBJ’s close advisor, once said that Johnson viewed Ben as “a metaphor for a kind of journalism and culture that he did not like, and he personalized it very much. I mean, Bradlee, he particularly disliked him … it was almost emotional.” Johnson apparently referred to Ben, disdainfully, as “the one with the Stacomb hair.”

  At the end of 1964, Ben had written a piece in Newsweek stating with authority that the search for J. Edgar Hoover’s replacement as the head of the FBI had begun. Shortly thereafter, Johnson held a press conference at which he reappointed Hoover essentially in perpetuity. On his way out to deliver the statement, Johnson turned to Bill Moyers (who was the source for Ben’s story), and said, “You tell your friend Ben Bradlee, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  On Monday, August 2, 1965, Moyers’s friend Ben Bradlee officially returned to the Post for good, as the deputy managing editor for national and international affairs. As he tells it, he never considered the fact that his career as a reporter was over. He was too busy throwing himself into the job. He worked the longest hours of his life, going home for dinner and then coming back at night to learn the mechanics of production, the editing processes, the people—everything. He often stayed until one or two in the morning, watching as the paper got put to bed, as it’s called, each night.

  “There was really no holding Ben down after he came back,” Russ Wiggins once said in an interview for Ben’s memoir. Wiggins had been the managing editor of the Post during Ben’s first stint at the paper in the late forties, an erudite and well-read man of the old school. In the first months after Ben’s return to the Post, Wiggins—now the head editor—watched as his former Municipal Court reporter ate up the ground between them. “He had cranked himself up to where he was really ready to take over responsibility,” Wiggins said. “There was no doubt about it.”

  A young Don Graham talked to his mom during the first week Ben spent on the job. “What she talked about was his energy,” Graham said years later. “That he was working nights, he was trying to figure out how the paper worked and what everybody did, and his ambition. He walked in the first day wanting to make it much, much better. And that feeling only got stronger.”

  Al Friendly thought he had at least a year left in the managing editor’s chair while Ben learned the ropes. This was a delusion that few others shared. “There were no Friendly-Bradlee run-ins,” Post reporter and historian Chalmers Roberts wrote later. “It simply became a question of when Bradlee would take over.” In October of 1965, less than three months after Ben had started back at the Post, Friendly was sent packing, first as an “associate editor” on the “new ideas” beat—whatever that meant—and then, after a couple of months, off to London. This was all labeled as a promotion, but everybody in the newsroom knew what it meant. Ben was the new managing editor of the Post, and he had Kay Graham standing right behind him.

  “I think back on those months as some of the greatest ever,” Ben says, of his days gathering steam. “I had the best goddamn time. It was so exciting. I mean, you felt that you were doing what the hell you were put on the world, on the earth’s surface, to do.”

  “When Ben became managing editor of the Post, what he did was go hire people,” Don Graham told me. He went so far as to say that Ben did his job by hiring, and that the utility of hiring as a management technique was “Bradlee’s first lesson.” As Ben puts it, he didn’t yet know everything about newspapers but he did know what a good reporter was, so he started there. One of the key points he’d negotiated with Kay before he came over was that she would hold all vacancies for him, and she held five—no small number, given the size of the paper at the time.

  One of the first, and most important, of Ben’s hires was David Broder. At the time, Broder was a well-respected but somewhat disgruntled political reporter at The New York Times, unhappy with that paper’s stodgy bureaucracy and its stifling effects on his reporting. He had just written a long internal memo about exactly what he thought was wrong with the Times, and somehow Ben had gotten wind of it and decided to pounce.

  “I romanced him like he’s never been romanced,” Ben wrote later, “in coffee-shops, not fancy French restaurants, because Broder was a coffee-shop kind of man.” He sold Broder on the idea that the Post would give him a better platform to do the kind of political reporting that he had sought and failed to do at the Times. When Broder finally agreed to come over to the Post, the victory was twofold: Ben had just landed a young talent who would become one of the finest political commentators in the history of the modern newspaper, and on top of that he had managed to lure him away from the enemy.

  This was a pattern that would repeat. Jim Hoagland was another early hire, also lured away from the Times by the promise of what Ben was building. As Hoagland told me, a friend of his had urged him to meet Ben and he had taken him up on the offer, without any intention of making a career change:

  “You ought to go talk to this guy named Bradlee, who’s just taken over at the Post. They say he’s gonna do great things” … and I say, “No, I’m happy at the Times, I’ve got my career path set there.” “Just go talk to him.” Ben and I talk for ten minutes, he offers me a job, and I take it. Because in that ten minutes I figured out something I’d never seen before. This is a guy I want to work for.…

  Before that conversation with Ben, the idea of coming to the Post had never entered my mind.

  As Haynes Johnson, whom Ben hired away from The Washington Star, told me, “There wasn’t any doubt, after I had met him and we talked. He reached out, held out his hand, and I grabbed it, and that was it. There was no contract, nothing. It was just, ‘Come, we want you,’ and I’ve never forgotten that.”

  Others in the business took notice of the Post’s hiring spree. In August of 1966, almost a year after Ben arrived, his old friend Tom Winship—who had worked as a reporter with Ben at the Post but had since moved on to The Boston Globe—wrote a note to Kay praising her for her “conquests.”

  “Don’t you and Ben feel a little bit greedy,” he wrote, “grabbing up … three or four of the best young reporters in the country, the hottest columnist property, and stealing the second best political writer in the country from the Times? You have the Star eating tacks with frustration.”

  Kay forwarded Winship’s letter to Ben with her own handwritten notes in the margin. Underneath his list of their acquisitions, Kay wrote simply, “It does sound great.”

  “The other thing you have to remember,” Carl Bernstein told me of Ben’s early days, “is that The Washington Star was a great newspaper. When I went to work there in 1960, it was still a better paper than the Post.” From the start Ben wanted to compete with The New York Times, but in a very real way he had to outdo the Star first. With the purchase of the Times-Herald in 1954, the Post had become the only daily morning newspaper in town. But the Star, an afternoon paper, was still preferred to the Post as the paper of record in D.C.2 “Not only did we beat the Post regularly,” Carl says, “but the Post was not an honest newspaper in its coverage. It had agendas.”

  If Ben ha
d a single journalistic goal in his effort to revamp the Post, it was to remove the agendas from the Post’s news reporting and from the paper’s general posture in the community. He wanted what he called “a harder news edge,” in addition to vitality and flair. In an early memo to a correspondent who complained that the editors in Washington had mutilated one of his stories, Ben laid it out as clearly as he could:

  We are not trying to make this paper flatter. We are trying to make it fairer. What you interpret as an effort to remove flavor, individuality and allusion is in fact an effort to remove the tipped hand, the veiled stand, the editorial phrases that make your position clear while they cloud the news.… If we flattened [your] vivid writing to colorless mush, the Washington Post would be a loser. We want flair, audacity and a flashing quality to wax in this paper. You’ve got those qualities. They’re valued. But we’re talking here about something entirely different: tilt. Tilt flaws the effort we’re making to become a newspaper distinguished by flavor, individuality and allusion—while being, above all, fair.

  Toward the end of 1965, Ben had a chance to send his first handpicked correspondent to cover the war in Vietnam. Ward Just had been a young reporter at Newsweek whom Ben had taken a liking to, and when Ben came over to the Post he brought Just with him as one of his first hires. Just was a strong, subtle writer—Ben called him “Ernie” as a joke, in reference to Hemingway—who would eventually leave the newspaper business to write a series of successful novels. He brought that sensibility to his reporting. “I think he saw my highest and best use as probably not a beat reporter,” Just told me. “He had very, very good instincts about what to do with the people he had, where to place them.”

  As the story goes, at a meeting in Ben’s office before Just left for Vietnam, he asked Ben, “Well, what do you want me to do over there?”

  “What do you mean, what do I want you to do over there?” Ben barked. “I want you to be a goddamn reporter, that’s what I want you to do!”

  I say “as the story goes” because I didn’t hear it from Just himself, but rather from somebody else who cited it as a typical Bradlee story, the kind that was always floating around the newsroom in one exaggerated form or another. When I called Just to confirm it, he said the story was “too charming to deny.”

  “I have to tell you,” he said, “it sounds like him. I was certainly not given any instructions.” He referred to his stint in Vietnam, where he was given free rein to report on anything that he wanted, as the greatest time he ever spent in journalism. “I never got a call or a cable from the office telling me to do something, never,” he said. “Not once in a year and a half did that happen. They absolutely allowed me to write it, to define whatever it was I found and then write it up.”

  Just also contributed a series of increasingly dark analysis pieces about the war, including one concluding with the pithy assessment that “we are here defending freedom as we understand it for people who don’t.” When he was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a grenade in the course of reporting a story, he insisted on going back after a short period of recuperation at home.3 This was exactly the kind of person Ben wanted covering a war. Kay paid Just the highest compliment that she could, and summarized exactly why Ben had sent him in the first place, when she said of Just that “not a single person on the Post could tell where he stood from his news stories.”

  Peter Osnos, another of the young highfliers at the paper in the late sixties, remembers that Ben called him into his office one day and said, without small talk or fanfare, “Do you want to go to Vietnam?”

  “Just like that?” I asked.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Osnos said. “That’s the way it worked. If Ben Bradlee calls you in and says, ‘Do you want to go to Vietnam?’ you don’t say, ‘Listen, I’ve got to talk to my broker.’ You say, ‘When can I leave?’ ”

  This kind of management strategy didn’t apply only to Vietnam. Across the board, Ben did his job by picking people he trusted, firing them up, and then setting them loose. (The flip side of this was that he wouldn’t give you the work if he didn’t trust you. One of Bernstein’s beefs with Ben, prior to Watergate, was that Ben refused to send him to Vietnam.)

  The main knock on how Ben did things flowed directly from the best aspects of how he did things: critics, even within the paper, thought he was too agnostic and dispassionate about the war, too unwilling to push toward conclusions and judgments about Vietnam. Ben is the first to admit that this is true, that he was hesitant to take sides. He never wanted anybody to accuse him of “whatever the fucking editorial policy was,” as he once put it. “It wasn’t in me to preach. I can say somebody’s a horse’s ass, but I can’t tell people what to do.”

  During Ben’s years as managing editor, editorial policy was set by Russ Wiggins, and it was openly, disproportionately supportive of Lyndon Johnson and his administration’s war effort in Vietnam. Wiggins played by a different and older set of rules. He had come up during the Phil Graham days, when the Post meddled in policy debates and tried to steer the political process toward the “right” outcomes. Ben could do whatever he wanted to make the news coverage fairer and flatter, but for his three years as managing editor he didn’t have much say (by choice, but also by design) in the editorial page’s posture on the war. Even as Ben ran Ward Just’s reports of the carnage in Vietnam, the editorial page walked in lockstep with the sanitized version of the war that Johnson was trying, with increasing lack of success, to peddle to the American people.

  When Ben replaced Wiggins in 1968, one of his first orders of business was to split the editorial page off from the news operation. Wiggins had been “Editor,” in charge of news and editorial. Ben created the title of “Executive Editor” for himself, with a responsibility solely for the news, and appointed Phil Geyelin (a deputy to Wiggins) to run the editorial and opinion pages. This division between the news and opinions about the news was one that Ben had always maintained within himself, but now it was an institutionalized value. As Ben once put it, when Jim Lehrer asked him why he didn’t care about editorials: “I think that what I think is not important.”

  Though Ben’s philosophy differed from Wiggins’s, the two men liked each other and worked together well. Wiggins had gotten an awful lot right during his days in charge at the Post, from removing most racial signifiers from news coverage (saying simply that a man had been shot, for example, instead of a “Negro” man) to building a newspaper that was willing to call Joe McCarthy what he was. In March of 1950, Herblock, the Post’s famous cartoonist, had deployed and coined the phrase “McCarthyism” in a cartoon, emblazoned atop a stack of buckets of tar. Ben maintains that Wiggins charted a positive course for the Post that “ten Bradlees couldn’t change.”

  During his three years as managing editor, Ben also created a small sideline in collecting some of Wiggins’s oddball remarks. He called them “Thoughts of Chairman Wiggins,” a play on the Quotations of Chairman Mao that had come out in 1964. A sample, typed out by Ben: “We’re never going to get anywhere in this business until we abolish people. What we need are good looking girl computers.”

  In preparation for a speech after his career as an editor was over, Ben wrote down twelve “Editor’s Lessons.” They’re pretty simple, particularly the first five:

  1. Owners are everything

  2. Energy is vital; yours & staff’s

  3. A vacancy is a beautiful thing

  4. Hire people brighter than you are, & listen to them

  5. Don’t micro-manage (over-edit)

  The sixth lesson is different, and subtler: “Pick your fights. Don’t duck ’em, but don’t fight 2nd rate opponents.” Underneath this rule, Ben wrote in “Libel—Gilbert.”

  The most fundamental confrontation about news independence and the direction of the Post wasn’t about Vietnam, and it didn’t unfold between Ben and Wiggins. The real battle was fought in the city room, between Ben and a man named Ben Gilbert, the deputy managing editor for local news and Ben’s chief r
ival from the minute Kay brought him back to the paper.

  Gilbert had been the city editor during Ben’s first run at the Post in the late forties, and Ben had learned from him but never much liked him. When Ben came back in 1965, a rumor circulated among some of the reporters that he had punched Gilbert in the face in the old days, a rumor that Ben didn’t hasten to dispel. Various old-timers at the Post described Gilbert to me as “a terrible person,” “a sad creature,” “abrasive,” etc. “Many people detested him,” former Post editor Robert Kaiser told me, adding that Gilbert was “really deeply manipulative and profoundly insecure personally.” Ben says simply that Gilbert had “the people’s touch of a Gorgon.”

  Ben never cops to much in the way of bureaucratic maneuvering, but he does acknowledge that he knew right away that he would have to find a way to “get on top of Gilbert,” as he put it. Though Ben outranked him after succeeding Al Friendly, Gilbert controlled the structure of the paper, from how many pencils went to each desk to how the Post played stories. He also enjoyed his status as a kind of unofficial mayor of Washington. He was well wired in with the black establishment in the city at the time, and he was particularly close to Walter Washington, a black politician who ran the housing authority in D.C. during the early sixties and was one of the city’s prime movers. Washington and his wife, Bennetta, stopped by Gilbert’s house most nights for a social call, a drink or a cup of coffee. The fruits of this relationship were blatantly apparent in the paper. “Walter Washington was a good public servant,” Ben told me. “But the worship of him by Gilbert and the Post was embarrassing.”

  In 1967, LBJ decided to appoint Washington as the first mayor-commissioner of the District of Columbia. Washington naturally tipped Gilbert, and Gilbert in turn told Kay and Ben, but it was explicitly off the record and not for publication. Gilbert also arranged for Washington to be invited to an informal lunch at the Post during which the Post higher-ups would mingle with him and, implicitly, approve of him.