Yours in Truth

by Jeff Himmelman

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  1 The one story Sally remembers from that night was when Richard Cohen told Dick Harwood that he’d met Harwood’s daughter, Helen. Cohen and Harwood were of different cultures, Cohen the young bearded lefty Jew and Harwood the more conservative marine who initially doubted that Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting could even be true. “Cohen, Helen is a dead fuck,” Harwood said. “Do you know what that means?” No, Cohen said. “It means you fuck her and you’re dead,” Harwood said.

  2 Sally has insisted to me on numerous occasions that she and Ben didn’t get together physically until after she had left the paper for a job at CBS in the summer of 1973. Evgenia Peretz reported in Vanity Fair in 2010 that Sally told friends that she had been sleeping with Ben during Watergate and had to be told to stop. I believe Sally, but there are those who don’t.

  3 Ben said later, “The Saltonstall family still had a U.S. senator or a governor or whatever the hell it was … but the fact of the matter was it was watered out.… No Saltonstall male or female had done a goddamn thing for years.”

  4 Jean passed away in July of 2011 but had been suffering from dementia for some years before; Tony Bradlee passed away just four months later.

  5 At one lunch where Manning was trying to woo Sally away from the Post, he was paged and had to get up from the table to take a call. When he got back to the table, Sally asked who it had been, and Manning said it had been Ben. “What’d he say?” Sally asked. “ ‘Fuck you,’ ” Manning said.

  6 In the late seventies, Edward Bennett Williams would tell Halberstam that Kay was “very pissed” about Sally, “that she was very unhappy when it happened, but she is living with it.”

  7 For readers of a certain age, former Post columnist and current ESPN host Tony Kornheiser gave me a more apropos comparison: “When they walked arm in arm, it was like the way people must’ve felt in a different venue with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Everybody knew them. This was well before the Internet. Well before twenty-four-hours television of every stripe. They couldn’t walk down the street. Everybody knew Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn.”

  FAME

  BENJAMIN CROWNINSHIELD BRADLEE: He is the executive editor of the Washington Post—a charismatic man of about 50, tough and bright. An alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner—Boston Brahmin, Harvard University, WWII Navy, and police-beat reporter—Ben was once described as looking like an international jewel thief. Sporting a rooster tatoo [sic] on his left arm, he delights in displaying his street savvy one moment, then rising to greet a visiting dignitary in flawless French—complete with a peck on each cheek. He scares everybody with whom he comes in contact, but he does not mean to. He is courageous in the face of a crisis and is, above all, a decision maker. His tenacity in pressing his subordinates and the two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, was directly responsible for the ultimate cracking of the Watergate case. 14 page 13 scenes.

  —Casting description from the second draft of the screenplay for All the President’s Men, Wildwood Enterprises, September 25, 1974

  A couple of weeks before the official premiere of All the President’s Men at the Kennedy Center in April of 1976, Robert Redford held an advance screening for the Post brass at the Motion Picture Association of America, in downtown D.C. Ben and Kay and Bob and Carl and the rest of the editors sat staggered in the MPAA’s private theater, a safe distance from each other. Nobody knew what to expect. “It was like a fairy tale,” Ben told me, “watching a movie about you.”

  About an hour and a half in, there’s a scene in Ben’s office where Robards-as-Ben blows his stack at Woodstein for the umpteenth time. In the screening room, Kay Graham happened to look over at Ben as that scene began. Robards is leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head as he receives his briefing from the two reporters. It was a relatively common pose for Ben, and clearly something that Robards (or Pakula) had picked up on and decided to use. As Kay looked over at Ben, she realized that he was sitting in exactly the same position as Robards was, hands on the back of his neck, elbows in the air, leaning back. As she realized it, so did Ben. In a rare moment of self-consciousness, sitting alone in the dark, Ben dropped his hands.

  When he arrived at the gala premiere of the film at the Kennedy Center, what amounted to paparazzi at that time lay in wait to take his picture. The Washington Star, the Post’s main competitor, snapped one of him coming in with Sally. Unaccustomed to this particular kind of spotlight, Ben tried unsuccessfully to hide his face with his hands.

  After the movie was over, he could feel the press pushing him toward Robards for the obligatory picture of the two of them together. Ben had prepared some snappy responses ahead of time—he doesn’t always just come up with things off the cuff—but as he was being pushed toward Robards he felt suddenly how public his life had become, and how dangerous that could be for a newspaper editor. “This isn’t what I do for a living,” he remembers thinking. He has always located that precise instant as the beginning of the celebrification of Ben Bradlee, the moment when he realized that they were all going to be bigger than they had ever imagined.

  “It is people putting a spotlight on you,” Ben told an interviewer in 1991, “and then very soon afterwards, that spotlight is not to illuminate, but it’s to fix you and to start examining your flaws … to attribute other things to you.”

  “Did Robards do a good job?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “The way you feel about yourself.”

  “Considering two and a half years condensed into an hour and forty minutes, yeah. He didn’t do anything that made my flesh crawl,” Ben said. Then: “The whole thing made my flesh crawl.”

  If you ask people in my generation who Ben Bradlee is, many people know. But some will stare at you blankly until you say, “Jason Robards from All the President’s Men,” and then the recognition usually comes pretty quickly. Few Hollywood portrayals of real people have had as lasting an impact, or formed as lasting an association, as All the President’s Men did with Ben and Jason Robards. Ben knows it as well as anybody else. In a speech in October of 1991, just after he retired from the Post, he put Robards on a level of importance to his own life that only one other man shared:

  Think of it, for a minute. All because of two men: Richard Nixon, and Jason Robards. Without them—in this age where celebrities have replaced heroes—it might have been Geraldo Rivera telling you about his sexual conquests. Without them, it wouldn’t have been Bradlee.

  Ben’s original joke was that Redford should play him instead of Woodward—true enough—but the casting of Robards proved to be particularly fortuitous, in a way that Ben and even Pakula himself didn’t foresee. Pakula initially worried that Robards had played too many losers too convincingly, that he couldn’t carry Ben’s easy elegance and command authority. Ben initially recommended George C. Scott for the role,1 and he was somewhat unimpressed when Robards showed up at the Post for a part of one day to spend time with Ben and develop a feel for the newsroom. Hoffman had spent weeks at the paper, shadowing Bernstein, and Redford had been in and out with relative frequency; all Robards had to give was a day. Ben made only one request of Robards in advance of the shoot: “Just don’t make me look like an asshole.”

  He needn’t have worried. In May of 1976, after the movie had premiered and the critical raves for Robards-as-Bradlee were in, Robards sat down with Dinah Shore for a televised interview. Right at the top, she told him that the film critic at her station “felt that you stole the picture. I thought you’d like to know that.”

  “Not true,” Robards said.

  “You gon’ be modest?” Shore asked, all Southern flirt. Then:

  DS: The editor in the motion picture is a gentleman, a very dynamic man called Benjamin Bradlee, who is played by my friend Jason Robards here. And I read somewhere that he’d like to get away from the glamour, he’d like to get away from being Jason Robards and go back to being Ben Bradlee for a change. [laughing]


  JR: I suppose so. Running a big national daily like that, they have to keep their credibility in a way. They don’t want to be thought of as some movie hero or something, and actually we didn’t hype this at all. We didn’t try any of that. I think they were very pleased about that. But he is a celebrity whether he likes to be or not, you know. He can’t help it.

  DS: Did you spend a lot of time with Bradlee? Did you get to know him?

  JR: No. I had known him, I used to hang around with newspapermen years ago and I had met him in New York a few times at parties, but I never got inside of him or knew him in that way at all. In fact I knew him better after I finished the film—and I still don’t know him that well, because his life—he works about eighteen hours a day. You can’t get to him. He’s always jumping around on all kinds of things all the time.

  DS: They really never stop.

  JR: No, they never stop …

  DS: Bradlee was happy with the way you portrayed him, I’m sure.

  JR: I guess. He never mentioned a word to me about it. I could tell by his attitude, though. He introduced me to all of his family. Now, I know that it was okay.

  DS: But you know there is a resemblance, in the carriage and the attitude …

  JR: We never strived for it.

  Whether he strived for it or not, his resemblance in the film to the essential Ben is uncanny, all editorial flint and casual cool, with the slightest tinge of menace when Bernstein starts to run his mouth. Nobody else on the screen holds a candle to him, even though Hoffman is fantastic and all of the minor characters are flawless. The famous statistic is that Robards is on screen for less than ten minutes, but still it was enough to win him the Academy Award for best supporting actor.2

  Robards nailed a basic element of Ben’s character—that an operative part of Ben’s persona consists of the public performance of Ben’s persona. “We wanted to illustrate how different Bradlee was from normal editors,” Redford once said of Ben’s opening scene in the film, where Robards strides across the newsroom and callously shoots down one of Woodstein’s early Watergate stories. “His self-confidence, his kind of abrasive gamesman style, his sense of joyful competitive instinct, but tough. He also liked to perform the toughness, which most people liked.” Larry Stern, the zany genius of an editor and a reporter, put it this way: “When Jason Robards arrived to play him, you realized he’d been playing himself the whole time. And later you wondered if Ben was playing Jason Robards playing Ben Bradlee, or what.”

  After the movie, whenever Ben strode across the newsroom, it wasn’t just Ben’s walk across the newsroom anymore. He’d been doing it for years, but now even other reporters and editors couldn’t help but experience it in part as Ben’s “Jason Robards walk across the newsroom,” as the reporter Scott Armstrong put it to me. People thought about it.

  “It was in their minds,” Ben told me, “but I hadn’t changed.”

  Robards’s performance also benefited from the fact that the conventions of Hollywood make the story of Watergate easier to tell. You can convey the powerful core truths without concern for the prickly edges of facts that don’t quite fit. The movie compresses time, elides events, omits important characters—Kay Graham and city editor Barry Sussman most prominent among them—and inflates the roles of others. Not surprisingly, Ben, as Robards portrays him and as the filmmakers conceived of him, comes in for particularly hagiographic treatment: he’s essentially God with a blue streak. The game of journalism, as presented in the film, can well be described as learning Robards’s standards, discussing Robards’s standards, trying to live up to Robards’s standards, and then feeling terrible when you fall short of Robards’s standards.

  “The movie gave everything to Ben,” Kay Graham wrote in her memoir, “largely because that made for a simpler story line and because he was played by Jason Robards, but of course that wasn’t Ben’s fault.” It’s easy enough to see why the filmmakers, and the film, would gravitate toward Ben. Even before Watergate he was already a star in the journalism world, the outsized personality at the helm of the Post. Print pieces referred to him routinely as “the most powerful newspaper editor in the world,” and The Wall Street Journal had long since run its now legendary and constantly regurgitated description of Ben as “the Hollywood version of an international jewel thief.”

  When Hollywood actually came calling, he was ready. He spent days with Pakula, and I can only imagine the pixie dust amalgam of dirty jokes and sudden, intense honesty that Ben must have rained down on that unsuspecting man. Pakula got to know the other higher-ups, but the power in the paper was clearly with Ben and Pakula sensed that immediately.

  Whenever I think of how the movie turned out, I think of two minor incidents that Ben mentions in passing in his memoir. Twice in his life, once in college and once in the war, casual gambling games with friends turned suddenly serious, with Ben’s friends ending up many hundreds of dollars in the hole to him, well beyond their ability to pay. Ultimately, with some prodding from his father and his captain, he forgave the debts. But it is a hallmark of Ben’s personality that he won, and that he never lost track of the stakes. With little overt effort Ben always seems to have won competitions that other people didn’t realize, or realized only too late, that they were in.

  One of the main tensions that the movie and its aftermath magnified at the Post was how difficult it was to serve as Ben’s number two, as the managing editor of the paper. Though the movie’s distortions would have the most wrenching impact on Howard Simons, the truth is that even before the movie came out Ben’s subordinates struggled to find roles for themselves within a universe that Ben dominated so completely.

  These issues arose as soon as Ben got the top job, in 1968, when he hired Eugene Patterson, the former executive editor of The Atlanta Constitution, to serve as his first managing editor. Patterson had been a tank platoon commander with General George Patton’s Third Army during World War II, but he had also won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1967, for a series of thoughtful editorials aimed at pushing Southern whites to accept racial equality. He was a top-tier and courageous journalist but, as he put it to me, he “never gained traction” at the Post. He was well-liked, and he did his best to make the trains run on time, but eventually he tired of the internal power struggles and realized that a subset of his talents wouldn’t ever see the light of day. He left in 1971, spending a year at Duke before moving down to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he had a long and successful run as the executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times.

  In the late seventies, Patterson sat down with David Halberstam for a series of in-depth interviews for The Powers That Be. He saw Ben up close but left before the reputation jockeying that the aftermath of Watergate wrought, and so his critique of Ben rings with a kind of purity that later criticisms don’t:

  Says Patterson, I have come in my years to believe finally that every person’s strengths in fact bring his weaknesses, and that Bradlee is so strong a figure, so dominates the paper, he wants to have impact, he’s so powerful a figure that in effect everybody becomes a kind of minor Bradlee-like creature, everyone plays to him. You know, he is such an absolute chief, that editors under him play to him, rather than to their own instincts … because you want to get points on his board, and that’s the only board that counts there.…

  He will not lose his temper, but he will never talk in moral terms; he’s exactly like Jack Kennedy in that way, if there’s a moral undercoating he’s loath to show it.

  He is one of the most sensitive men I’ve ever met, he has extraordinary radar, and he has very real humanity. But says Patterson, he controls his humanity ruthlessly, you know, he protects himself rigorously against himself.…

  It is very easy to underestimate Bradlee. When I first [got] there I thought he was kind of a clever dilettante, but he is ruthless and he is tough and he is smart and able and very much in charge of the paper. I made the mistake of thinking that he needed me, and he did not.

  Patterson’s famous res
ponse, upon being asked why he was leaving the Post, was that “Bradlee needs a managing editor like a boar needs tits.”

  Pat Tyler was a reporter under Patterson at the St. Petersburg Times before coming up to the Post in 1979, so he knew both Patterson and Ben pretty well. “Ben was a competitive shark in those days, and you can’t soften that, though we all love him and think of him as a big cuddly teddy bear today,” Tyler told me. “Ben was a mako shark as a manager, as a newsman, as a person. Tough guy. And he defeated Gene, drove him off, didn’t want him.”

  When I played this back to Ben, Ben said, “Patterson was very deceptive. He was like a major, and he barked and was small and therefore like many people who are small he threw his weight around a little bit. Totally different from Howard. And they didn’t get along at all.” Tyler had told me that Patterson was the kind of guy who would rally the troops in martial terms, “We’re going to take this hill!” that sort of thing. Ben agreed. “And that doesn’t work at The Washington Post,” he said. “He didn’t have the support, that hard-to-define support that makes people want to work for you.”

  Unmentioned was the fact that Ben hadn’t given him that support himself.

  After Patterson left the Post, he and Ben maintained a high regard for each other. In 1995, as part of his national book tour to promote A Good Life, Ben made a stop at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. Patterson introduced him. “He ran the paper,” Patterson said, “and he was pretty good at it. I was a paper pusher, basically, and I was pretty punk at that. I had a nice title. But would YOU like to manage the Yankees under George Steinbrenner? …