Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

  Q: Paint?

  B: You don’t think of me as a painter, do you?

  Q: Pictures or houses?

  B: Paintings.

  Q: Were they good?

  B: No.

  Their marriage was mostly a happy one. Even in 1969, after Ben had been at the paper for four years, he would report to Vaillant that things were as good as they ever had been:

  He said, “our marriage has a rhythm to it. I know no other marriage like it.” He said it burned “terribly brightly, almost too close. We are almost too dependent,” and that when this happened, “we back off slightly, not in hostility or enmity” but from an awareness that “the fire is too bright.” He said there was a “fantastic closeness.” He said when they met, he was separated and she was married, but “when we fell in love, it was a hell of an ambitious project, to break up two marriages to build one.” … He said sometimes their own closeness led them to ignore the kids more than they should.

  One family friend told me that most nights Tony dressed up for Ben’s return home from work. As Ben puts it, they were “in business” for a long time.

  In the early seventies, Ben and Tony drifted apart—on both sides. They had lost JFK and then Tony’s sister, Mary, in a little less than a year, and over the course of the next several years Tony gradually withdrew from social life, which had been so sustaining for both of them. She plunged deeper into her art, and into the spiritual teachings of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and his program for self-awareness and discovery, “The Work.” Even in 1969, when Ben was still so happy with Tony, he told Vaillant that most nights they were in bed at 9:30 and that they rarely socialized. That might have worked for a while, but that couldn’t have lasted forever for somebody like Ben.

  In 1990, when an interviewer asked Ben what had happened, why he and Tony had drifted, he said, “I don’t know. You see, I really don’t still know.” But in 1979, with the Grant Study, he gave a different answer:

  My second wife and I separated in June of 1973. We are friends now, and agree each of us was replaced in the other’s heart and mind. I was replaced by Tony’s increasing involvement in something called “The Work”, a small group of people dedicated to the life and teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I never was sure of exactly what they believed, since they are not supposed to talk about it, but generally they believed that through meditation and self-discipline they could raise their consciousness gradually to levels of total understanding and awareness. There was less and less, and finally no, place for me in this pursuit. Tony was replaced in my heart and mind, by my job, I guess, by the process of getting on top of it, and then by the truly endless, challenging task of using the newspaper for the general welfare. I think we both underestimated the impact each of our non-marital interests would have on the other. The impacts were fatal.

  From 1965 on, Ben’s life had been The Washington Post. And Tony, though she enjoyed some of the people, never had an overriding interest in the Post in particular or in newspaper journalism in general. She rarely read the Post. As Art Buchwald, Ben’s old friend, once put it, “Bradlee’s totality of investment in the paper” cost him his marriage. He had given all of himself to something else. That was one of the many reasons, aside from her youth and attractiveness and the chemistry between them, that Sally made so much sense for Ben. She loved the newspaper as much as he did.

  In what Sally calls the “agonizing year” before she and Ben officially got together, Ben made a few more than the routine number of trips back to the Style section. Once Sally was talking with Larry Stern, an old Post hand and one of Ben’s closest friends, and Ben came over and put his leg up on the desk, one of Ben’s famous poses, and she and he started sparring. Stern was still there, but he might as well not have been. Ben and Sally went back and forth for ten or fifteen minutes and then Ben walked off.

  “Larry turned to me, he had this kind of smirk, and he said, ‘That was probably the single most sexual scene I’ve ever seen in my entire life,’ ” Sally told me.

  In June of 1973, Gordon Manning, an old friend of Ben’s who worked at CBS News, offered Sally an opportunity to host the CBS Morning News, a program that the network was rejiggering to try to make a run at the Today show’s audience share. (Some things never change.) She would be one of the first female news anchorwomen in history, behind Barbara Walters. She loved her job at the Post, but this was a huge opportunity.

  Ben didn’t want her to leave, not only because of the frisson of whatever it was between them but because she was one of the paper’s biggest assets. A memo from Ben to John Prescott, the president and general manager of the Post, from right at this time:

  This will alert you to a larger-than-usual merit raise coming your way, and to explain the background.

  It involves Sally Quinn, perhaps the hottest property on the paper today, if Woodward and Bernstein aren’t.

  Sally was hired—for peanuts and without experience—maybe three years ago. She turned pro but fast. We gave her a $50 a week merit raise in May 1971, and have been unable to give her another since, because of wage controls. We certainly would have given her 50 in May 1972, and another 50 in May 1973. She is that good.

  NYTimes has offered her the moon. Ditto NBC and CBS. Ditto [Kay Graham]’s friend [Clay] Felker of New York magazine. And I’ve even heard that Oz Elliott has made a move.

  I want to bring her to $400 a week, from $338.

  It was too late. Sally took the job5 and moved to New York, where she started at CBS on August 6.

  In the interim, Larry Stern threw a farewell party for her at the Post. Sally flew down from New York and asked Ben if he would take her to lunch that day. He did, and that’s when she told him she was in love with him, that that was the real reason she was leaving. She knew he hadn’t really understood why she had wanted to move to CBS, and she wanted him to know the truth. She thought he would say something like, “There, there, dear girl, I’ve got a family,” that kind of thing. But he didn’t. As he confessed in his memoir, he had secretly been hoping that she felt exactly as she did. “And so we agreed to meet that night at my apartment,” Sally says.

  Back at the paper, at about five in the afternoon, Woodward and Bernstein came up with another big breaking story. Ben jogged over to Sally in the newsroom and said, “I know I said I’d meet you at 7:30, how about 8:00?”

  “I said, ‘How about never?’ ” Sally told me. “And he said, ‘I’ll be there at 7:30.’ ” She smiled. “And he was. I don’t know who edited their story, but it wasn’t Ben.”

  Richard Cohen lived in California House, the same apartment building that Sally lived in, and later that evening he was leaving for work when he saw Ben coming in.

  “It was like Jimmy Olsen,” Cohen told me. “I said, ‘Hi Mr. Bradlee.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Cohen, huh?’ I said, ‘Yeah. What are you doing here?’ I was so surprised. And he said, ‘Well, it’s Sally’s last day, and I promised the kid I’d have a pop with her.’ ”

  Cohen had no idea that Ben was there to seal a much anticipated deal. Mostly he just wondered why he wasn’t invited to the party. “I went off and I thought, ‘Isn’t that nice of him,’ you know? ‘He’s such a thoughtful man.’ ”

  They managed to keep it under wraps for much of the summer and fall of 1973, with Ben making occasional surreptitious afternoon trips to New York but returning to the paper in time for the evening story conference. On one of these trips in the fall, they decided to go out and have lunch at the Tavern on the Green, in Central Park. They didn’t want to be spotted, so they took a seat out on the terrace, alone except for a couple of women across the way who were minding their own business.

  That afternoon, when Ben got back to the Post, Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld sidled into his office and shut the door. “I have it on very reliable sources that you and Quinn—” he started.

  “How do you know!” Ben shouted, clearly caught off guard. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ll never tell
you,” Rosenfeld said, tongue-in-cheek. “I will never reveal my sources.” When Ben incorrectly identified the person who might have ratted him out, Rosenfeld revealed that his own wife and mother-in-law had been the two ladies out on the patio at the Tavern on the Green. (When I asked whether he enjoyed this moment, Rosenfeld told me that he hadn’t relished it too much but felt obliged to give Ben shit, “just to keep the franchise.”)

  Sally’s experiment at CBS would be brief and difficult. She and morning television were not a match made in heaven; in one particularly uncomfortable moment, she tried to soften a story on exploitive child labor practices by noting blithely that it reminded her of when her parents made her clean up her room. Within a couple of months, she had washed out of morning television and had set her sights on a return to newspaper journalism, and to the Post. Now that their relationship was public Ben couldn’t hire her or supervise her, so Howard Simons controlled the process and brought her back to the paper for good.

  There was only one real obstacle during this period: Kay. Because of her experience with Phil, Kay was never very high on Post men leaving their wives for younger women, and she wasn’t keen on newsroom romances, either. This was both.

  “There came a time when I had to tell Katharine Graham about it, about Sally and I, in her office,” Ben told me. “I said, I’ve got to tell you that I have—I forgot how I said it, but in effect was saying that I have started a relationship with someone in the paper. And she said, ‘Oh God, not Sally Quinn.’

  “I always interpreted it as saying, who the hell else in the office was he going to have a relationship with? It wasn’t going to be Mary McGrory,” he said, referring to a well-respected but somewhat matronly columnist who didn’t even join the Post until 1981. Surely that had been some part of Kay’s reaction, but I thought I detected something deeper and said as much.

  “She loved Sally by the end, but she didn’t at the beginning,” he conceded.6

  Bradlee,

  No one deserves an annonymous [sic] letter but until I get securely jobbed elsewhere, this will go unsigned. A couple of years ago any one of us could have walked in and said this to you personally. But, not anymore.

  I’m talking about the Sally Quinn deal. Not only do you look like an aging, menopausal Hearst who is turning his newspaper kingdom upside down to flaunt a ten cent canary but the newsroom morale is so polluted now, it is hurting the performance of this newspaper.

  The other night at Mary Lou’s party bets were being taken on who would be the first to go when your woman comes aboard. You know the ill will Quinn generates around here.…

  Bringing your bedroom into the newsroom was a bad move. None of us are prudes, Ben, but you’ve made the Post the brunt of every sick sex joke in town. And, considering what you did to Ben Bagdikian, you should have been smarter. But you don’t seem to give a damn about anything anymore. You would be well advised to arrest the rumor that you’re going to make your mistress a columnist. That and the reported $42,500 you are paying her is causing ugly vibrations around here, especially since you promised your next employment efforts would be directed to minorities.

  Your word is not worth a damn anymore. But you’ve got all the chips right now. But, that’s about all you’ve got.

  Pretty tough, and evidence that Ben started taking shit about Sally right from the start. It hasn’t ever let up, not to this day.

  Shortly thereafter, another letter came in, from Ben Bagdikian, former Post National editor, and his wife, Betty Medsger, a former Post reporter. Bagdikian had left his previous wife and taken up with Medsger in 1971, and both felt they had been pushed out of the paper as a result. That letter, dated March 15, 1974:

  Dear Ben—

  Today we received a copy of an anonymous letter apparently sent to you. Because Bagdikian was mentioned in it we felt compelled to let you know how we feel about it.

  The attack on you for your relationship with Sally is stupid and brutal. It has no place in a colleague’s professional judgment of either of you. We know how sick that kind of self-righteous condemnation is. When people, including some from the Post, have said similar things we have been disgusted and told them so.

  But we would be less than honest if we didn’t say that both of us felt the irony of that anonymous letter, given what the Post did to us because of our relationship.… Betty, because of this, was pushed out of her job.… Afterward, when Betty applied for jobs, highly placed people in the trade knew the story, knew about our relationship and knew, as one put it, “that Katharine Graham didn’t like it.”

  We think of the irony of your being a party to all that cruelty and now having the same thing being done to you and Sally. We think it’s ironic but we take no pleasure in it. We’re not inspired by what you permitted to happen to us, but we still believe that private lives are no one else’s professional business, and we mean no one.

  The anonymous letter writer had been on the money: Ben did have all the chips. Different rules applied to him than to other people at the paper, particularly with regard to Kay. Bagdikian would later repeat a tale he had been told, that when somebody mentioned Ben and Sally Quinn with Kay at around this time, she had said, “Well, as Grant needed his liquor, I guess Ben needs his Sally.”

  Once Ben and Sally became a public couple—and particularly after the movie version of All the President’s Men came out in April of 1976—they became the target of gossip and public discussion in a way that few people outside politics ever had been. In 1975, The Washington Star started a gossip column called “The Ear,” run by a woman named Diana McLellan. Though it covered all kinds of D.C. intrigue, “The Ear” reserved a special place in its heart for dirty tidbits out of the O.P. (short for Other Paper), as it called the Post—and particularly about Ben and Sally, whom McLellan dubbed the “Fun Couple.” Seemingly everywhere the Fun Couple went, every restaurant, every movie, somebody would call the tip in to “The Ear” and it would show up in the newspaper. Sally was often described as Ben’s “live-in girlfriend,” which felt like a dig at both of them.

  This wasn’t paparazzi-type coverage, but for mid-seventies Washington it came pretty close. When Sally says that for a time they were like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, it’s one of those borderline-crazy-sounding Sally statements that actually turn out to be true.7 It got to the point where they didn’t want to go out for dinner in public anymore, because of the head turning and whispering and the inevitable gossip item about what one of them had reportedly said at dinner. In his profile of Ben in Esquire in 1976, Jim Fallows noted that Ben had been “portrayed in print and on the silver screen as a hero of the nation. On his arm for all to see was one of the certified bitch goddesses of the country.” (Sally loves that description.) People said and wrote things like that about her, and about them, all the time.

  In 1977, “The Ear” reported that a writer trying to sell a piece to Washingtonian had “trash-napped” Ben and Sally. Instead of simply reporting that fact, though, “The Ear” went on to list the contents of the “hideously detailed inventory,” including ant and roach killer, a get-well card, “a slightly oiled gun-cleaning patch,” and “heaven knows what-all, including all sorts of odd notes.”

  Ben hammered out a response to Jim Bellows, the Star’s editor, who was a well-respected journalist but also acutely aware of the Star’s status as the second paper in town. He had created “The Ear” and enjoyed ribbing Ben, and the Post, as much as anybody did. “Printing shit about my garbage is contemptible,” Ben wrote, but then he crossed it out. “Poring over anyone’s garbage is contemptible enough,” he began again, “but your printing shit about the sickie who went through mine is a new low—even for you.” Ben cc’d Joe Allbritton, the owner of the Star, but then he didn’t send it. At the bottom, he wrote in, by hand, “Not sent, chicken.” Somewhat uncharacteristically, he decided to hold his fire.

  Jerry Rafshoon, President Carter’s communications director at the White House, told me a story that brought home just ho
w high Ben’s public profile was in the mid- to late seventies. Carter had run as a man of the people, the clichéd humble peanut farmer, and he was determined to resist some of the trappings of the “Imperial Presidency.” Along those lines, he instructed the military band not to play “Hail to the Chief” whenever he walked into the room. Rafshoon thought this was shortsighted. He prevailed upon Carter that “Hail to the Chief” was an important part of the presidential mystique, that even if he didn’t like it people wanted it and needed it. Eventually, Carter relented.

  Shortly after “Hail to the Chief” made its return to Carter’s public appearances, a reporter asked Carter why the band had started playing it again. As Rafshoon remembers it, Carter pretended to be surprised, feigning ignorance both of its temporary disappearance and of any private debate about the matter. Instead of answering the question, Carter responded with a quip: “As I understand it, the only time they play ‘Hail to the Chief’ in this town is when Ben Bradlee walks into the newsroom of the Washington Post.”

  Ben had hit it about as big as you can hit it, and Sally only added to his allure. As Carl put it to me, in the late seventies Ben was “the most important guy in town outside of the president. Truly. And with flash and panache that the presidents didn’t have, and with a stability that they didn’t have.” Carl spent a lot of time with Ben during this period, particularly once Carl’s relationship with Sally’s friend Nora Ephron got under way. “Let me tell you,” he said to me, “at the beginning of that relationship [with Sally], I could see Ben become a whole person in a way that obviously he wanted to and hadn’t been.”

  “Sally is part of the stability,” Carl said. “And the stability didn’t exist until those two events, Sally and Watergate. There’s a lot of hindsight involved in that; I would never have thought that at the time.”