In 1995, when Ben’s memoir came out, Kay threw a book party for him. In its aftermath, Ben realized that he hadn’t thanked her for the party, and also that he hadn’t ever given her a “properly dedicated” copy of the book. He wrote her a letter to apologize, and this is how it ends:
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That’s it, all of it. You can call it whatever you want to.
* * *
1 As Cohen tells it, when Ben offered him the column he said, “Make sure you’re accurate. Don’t make a mistake.” Cohen replied, “I get it. So if this thing succeeds, you take credit, and if it fails it’s over for me.” And Ben said, “You got it.”
2 As I was leafing through the box of Kay Graham’s letters at a desk outside Ben’s office in the summer of 2010, he happened to walk by. He reached into one of the various piles I had made and blindly withdrew this particular letter; after scanning it for a few moments he humphed and said, “Business side Watergate, you might want to look into that.” True to form, he had instinctively picked out three of the most interesting words in that entire box.
3 During the middle of Watergate, an advertising executive told Kay that automotive advertising was down $3 or $4 million in that particular quarter because the Republican owners of the local car dealerships weren’t thrilled with the Post’s Watergate coverage. “They don’t like what we’re doing about Nixon,” the man had said. And apparently Kay had looked at him and said, “Well, it’s a good thing we can afford it.” Told that story in 2008, Ben said, “We ought to just say a silent prayer for her, because they could.”
4 After Watergate, Ben had promoted Harry Rosenfeld from AME–Metro to AME-National. Every single person I interviewed who mentioned that promotion characterized it as a failure.
5 In February of 1977, Ben and Kay had shared a plane ride together, and on an American Airlines boarding pass they predicted their retirement dates. Kay predicted June of 1979, missing by six months. Ben predicted August of 1981, missing by ten years.
SUPERNIGGER
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God, I wish this shit would finally go away. People do less time for homicide.
—Janet Cooke, via an intermediary, December 4, 2011
October 16, 2007, seventh floor, The Washington Post, 3:15 P.M.:
Me: I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
[Ben stands in the doorway of my temporary office, laughs, and then moves off toward his own office. Suddenly he stops, turns halfway back toward me. Over his shoulder:]
B: You could. Just don’t.
In July of 2010, I met David Maraniss for lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the National Cathedral. Maraniss is a tall, loping man with a kind face and a gentle Midwestern demeanor that doesn’t quite conceal the sharpness underneath. As we looked over our menus, we talked about how he came to the Post, and about the relationship between Howard and Ben.
I kept asking questions in their proper order, chronologically, focusing on him, trying to establish a rapport. After about ten minutes, he turned to me and said, “I know you mostly want to talk about Janet Cooke. That’s fine.” He laughed. I protested a little, but it was true and he knew it.
If Watergate is the great achievement of Ben’s career, then Janet Cooke is the great failure. Ben has said on numerous occasions that his nightmare is that the Janet Cooke incident will occupy the second paragraph of his obituary. In his journalistic life, whether he likes it or not, it’s the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and then, after the doldrums of the late seventies, it’s Janet Cooke.
Cooke was a young reporter at the Post who fabricated a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. Her story, “Jimmy’s World,” ran on the front page on Sunday, September 28, 1980. Immediately suspicions arose that the piece wasn’t fully accurate—inside and outside the newsroom—but for a variety of complicated reasons the Post stood by its story. So much so that the editors decided to submit “Jimmy’s World” for a Pulitzer Prize. So much so that the piece won the prize for feature writing.
After Cooke’s victory was announced in April 1981, the Associated Press and other news outlets began to check the biographical facts that Cooke had submitted as a part of her Pulitzer nomination package. Alarming discrepancies emerged. She said she had studied at the Sorbonne, for instance, but a prior copy of her résumé made no mention of it. She claimed that she had graduated from Vassar, but officials there said they’d only had her for a year. These falsehoods, once discovered, loosed a torrent. Two days after the Pulitzer had been awarded to Janet Cooke, Ben found himself in the unenviable position of returning the prize.
A friend of Ben’s once told me that Watergate was a “particularly rich mirror” for who Ben is: his support for his reporters, his ability to stave off criticism, his adrenaline on a good story, his nose for the jugular. That’s all true. But the stakes during Watergate were so cosmic, so existential not just for the Post but for America’s system of government and faith in elected officials and all the rest, that it’s hard to isolate Ben’s particular piece of it.
Janet Cooke was also an aberration, but a smaller one. The universe of the Cooke story is the universe of the Post itself. The currents and processes that Janet Cooke was a product of, and those that she in turn unleashed, mostly played out within the confines of the Post building on 15th Street. There are no governmental conspiracies to decode, no complex transactions. Janet Cooke fabricated a story, and she got away with it. Not only did she get away with it, but she won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The incident and its aftermath tell you a lot about Ben, about the newspaper that he ran and the culture he helped create. How “Jimmy’s World” happened is the flip side of the great golden coin of Watergate. It’s a rich mirror for Ben, for the Post, and even, in unexpected and powerful ways, for Watergate itself.
In 2006, Jim Lehrer conducted a series of long interviews with Ben that aired on PBS as a program called Free Speech. Lehrer found himself frustrated by Ben’s refusal to say much that he hadn’t already said before. The way Lehrer put it to me, when I asked him about it, was that Ben “doesn’t think in the voice of God. He thinks in the voice of Ben. It’s a very different perspective.”
There was, though, one moment in the interviews where Ben addressed a difficult subject directly. “One of the reasons the Janet Cooke story got through the system at the Post was that the Post editors and the Post reporters, people who were supposedly supervising her, came from elite or very different backgrounds,” Lehrer said. “They didn’t live in those neighborhoods or whatever. Is that a problem?”
“Let’s say the obvious,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” Lehrer said, knowing what’s coming.
“That Janet Cooke was black,” Ben continued. “The people she was writing about were black, and she was writing about blacks who lived in a slum neighborhood. I don’t get there often and neither do the people—I mean, that was a very unspoken dimension of that and I don’t see why people can’t speak about it.”
In the wake of the scandal, some of the white people at the Post contorted themselves into uncomfortable shapes in order to avoid the impression that Cooke’s race had anything to do with what happened. The purpose was honorable—they wanted to prevent a backlash against other black reporters—but, as is often the case when people protest that something obvious had nothing to do with an outcome, one can generally assume that it in fact had everything to do with that outcome. Janet Cooke didn’t fabricate her story because she was black. But how she got to the Post, and how she was treated once she got there, is a different story altogether.
Nobody I’ve ever come across has called Ben a racist, but certainly by birth and education and opportunity he was born among the white elite and stayed there. His use of racial terminology is reflective of his era, certainly not progressive in any way. In the seventies, Harry Rosenfeld told me, “Political correctness was already setting in, and Ben didn’t get the memo.” Even in the eighties Ben didn
’t have much trouble referring to various people as “the hardest-working white man I know.” But he was also at least semi-aware of his shortcomings in that regard:
Memoir Interview, slug “War,” January 3, 1990:
B: There was a total awakening for me about blacks because I had known no blacks in my life. There just weren’t many blacks in my life. Growing up there were no blacks in my preppie boarding school I went to, obviously. There were probably three blacks in my class at Harvard of 1100. And the blacks on the destroyer were all mess boys and they were called mess boys. And they had all been absolutely screwed over by the recruiters. The recruiters had said join the Navy and you’ll be a machine gunner, you’ll be a this, you’ll be a this, you’ll be a that. Whereas in fact, they did have battle stations on guns, short of action, they were serving soup, making beds, shining shoes. It was a disaster.
BF: How did you feel about it?
B: I was appalled by it. In the first place I didn’t know it until somebody talked to me about it. They got harassment, I mean I’m sure I didn’t know the half of it.…
BF: Was that the first time you thought about race?
B: Surely. Probably. I’m slightly embarrassed I didn’t think about it more.
In a long, uncharacteristically reflective letter to Kay Graham in 1998, long after both of their eras at the paper were over, Ben wrote that he had never considered himself a racist. “But the point is that none of us had any personal experience with racism. We literally didn’t know what blacks were talking about when they used the word, unless they were talking about a lynching, or a Klan cross burning.”
When I got to the Post, I knew that I wasn’t a racist—I just knew it—and therefore I could not get my arms around the concept that intelligent people thought that I was. And of course from their point of view, I was. Because of my totally white perspective, because of my total removal from the black experience, because of my unawareness of the common denominators of the black experience—like poverty, like inferior educations, like unequal opportunities.… I began, just barely began, to grasp the fact that there was a white version of the truth and a black version of the truth, and they had damn little to do with each other.
During Ben’s first stint at the Post, in the late forties, one of the assistant city editors monitored the police radio, and when something occurred in a black neighborhood he would wave his hand dismissively and say, “That’s black, don’t worry about it.” The Post employed a pair of photographers known as the Jonas brothers, one of whom picked up the head of a black man who had been decapitated by a trolley car and asked his brother to snap photos of him holding it aloft like a trophy, with the Capitol in the background. And there had been Ben’s reportage of the riots over the integration of the pools that Phil Graham had buried after making a backroom deal.
But it wasn’t until Ben’s tenure as executive editor at the Post—Ben assumed the editorship of the paper five and a half months after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis—that race became a pressing internal issue in his professional life. By June of 1969, trouble was clearly brewing: “I hate very much to have to add up our black employees,” Steve Isaacs, the city editor, wrote to Gene Patterson, the managing editor, in response to a query from above. “We don’t keep statistics on this sort of thing, any more than we keep statistics on green employees, Jewish employees, employees against the war, etc.” Isaacs noted that over the previous five or six years editors had made a concerted effort to hire black reporters. “If anything, I suppose, we have discriminated in favor of blacks, hiring those who seemed to have potential and who could be developed into first-class newsmen. We have had some success at that.”
In November of 1970, a year and a half later, Ben received a letter from a white reporter indicating that things were getting worse:
I’ve come up with two broad observations: a few of the blacks appear to be using race as a crutch for some of their own shortcomings as journalists; and serious racial problems exist at The Post. The major issue is how to deal with both without causing a blow-up with the blacks that would certainly hurt The Post and prevent an embryonic white back-lash from burgeoning and damaging the operation of the newsroom.
I encountered this sentiment frequently in behind-the-scenes memo traffic between the (white) editors, many of whom felt that the paper had, in a knee-jerk way, simply hired as many black people as they could, not all of whom belonged there.
Another year later, Ben received a thoughtful but ominous memo from a black reporter named David Hardy. “I have been doing some long and hard thinking about the tone and content of our conversation last Thursday,” Hardy wrote to Ben on November 3, 1971. “I was particularly distressed by a couple of things you said, such as ‘I have some things I’m trying to do and I don’t need anybody putting obstacles in my way.’ ” He went on:
Mr. Bradlee, not once on the few occasions when I felt it necessary to approach you to discuss internal problems have I done so with the intention of presenting you with any obstacles. (I have been in the newspaper business long enough to know and respect what you have done to make the Washington Post the newspaper that it is.) …
I am not an alarmist; but I know trouble when I see it and came to you only so that something could be done before conditions sparked an incident and added to the polarization between the races inside the company.
He made reference to “reactionary white supervisors (who still don’t feel blacks are capable of performing certain jobs) and cynical blacks (many of whom are content to sit back and wait for an incident ‘so we can get the shit on’).”
“You may not want to admit it,” Hardy wrote, “but these attitudes among the races are just as pervasive on the fifth floor1 as they are in other parts of the paper.”
I remember encountering Hardy’s memo for the first time in Ben’s archives, and being surprised by it. It wasn’t that Ben only saved things that were favorable to him. He seemed always to relish letters from people who disagreed with him or called him an idiot. But this was different. Hardy had clearly made a reasonable approach and been rebuffed. How could Ben have blown David Hardy off, a man who seemed—on paper, anyway—so eminently reasonable?
Then I flipped the page and saw Ben’s reply:
Dear David:
I had so many obstacles thrown in my path last week—everything from anonymous, obscene letters to trouble-making crap leaked to that bible of the newspaper business, Women’s Wear Daily—you’ve got to forgive me, please, if I reached out wrongly to include you as an obstacle. I don’t. I value your advice. I think you are now in a position to do this newspaper that I love a great deal of good, and I would like to offer you any help I can. I suspect the most effective help I can offer is to listen to you.
The only obstacle I feel you could put in my path would be to let some relatively minor irritation inflame itself into a major crisis. As you point out, too many people would like that.…
I’d also like to know everything you can tell me about the “reactionary white supervisors” on this floor.
Can we talk about all this—and more?
Every year, starting in 1969, Ben invited the top editors at the Post to a retreat at his country house on the Cacapon River in West Virginia. They called it, with some irony, “Pugwash,” after the nuclear disarmament conferences started by Bertrand Russell in the fifties. It became a yearly and much larger tradition over time. A look at the proceedings from one of the early Pugwashes gives you some sense of what black reporters at the Post were up against:
That’s Eugene Patterson with his hands folded at his mouth, then Phil Geyelin, then Ben, then the cup, cigarette, and glasses of Howard Simons. Note who’s dealing.
During the Pugwash of 1971, one of the major topics that the editors took up was the issue of race at the paper. Thankfully, somebody brought a tape recorder and used it.
“Certainly on the question of blacks Gene and I have been deeply involved and deeply depressed,”
Ben said at the start of the discussion. “I had a black news aide that the fourth floor ran out because they kept calling him a nigger.” A pretty concise description of the problem.
Others had similar experiences. Harry Rosenfeld said simply, “I want to see some white faces doing the menial jobs.” Howard Simons: “I also find that we are racist in the sense that we regard the blacks at the Washington Post in a monolithic way. We talk about them as blacks. We don’t talk about the whites that way—we talk about the whites as individuals.”
Everybody agreed that they needed to offer more and better training for black reporters, and then a debate ensued about newsroom culture. Should reporters be allowed to wear black power necklaces and that kind of thing? “If a guy goes out with a black fist or a button, he’s telling people what he thinks, he’s taking a position,” one editor said. “I don’t think he should.”
“More than an Afro hairdo and those sharp flared pants?” Ben interjected. “My God.”
It sounds like what it is, a bunch of World War II–era white guys talking about black people as if they were Martians. But reading through the whole transcript, I was struck by how genuine and thoughtful the debate was, despite the cultural barriers and some of the paternalistic terminology. They weren’t saying “nigger,” and they were deploring the people who did. They didn’t have the answers for the racial problems at the Post, but their effort to try to figure it out feels sincere. “We were all trying very hard,” Gene Patterson told me, “but we were learning together, and we were learning very slowly.”
On Monday, February 7, 1972, seven months after the final triumph of the Pentagon Papers and a little more than four months before the break-in at the Watergate, Ben received a letter signed by nine black Metro reporters. Addressed to “B. Bradlee,” the letter laid out twenty questions that the reporters wanted written answers to by that Friday. The first question: “Why in the past has there never been more than one black reporter assigned to the National reporting staff?” The fifth: “Why are there no blacks in top editorial management positions?”
Yours in Truth Page 34
