WASHINGTON — Benjamin Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.
From the moment he took over The Washington Post newsroom in 1965, Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.
The most compelling story of Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Washington Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history.
But Bradlee’s most important decision, made with Katharine Graham, The Washington Post’s publisher, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish them.
The Washington Post’s circulation nearly doubled while Bradlee was in charge of the newsroom — first as managing editor and then as executive editor — as did the size of its newsroom staff. And he gave the paper ambition.
Bradlee stationed correspondents around the globe, opened bureaus across the Washington region and from coast to coast in the United States, and he created sections and features — most notably Style, one of his proudest inventions — that were widely copied by others.
During his tenure, a paper that had previously won just four Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was for reporting, won 17 more, including the Public Service award for the Watergate coverage.
“Ben Bradlee was the best American newspaper editor of his time and had the greatest impact on his newspaper of any modern editor,” said Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher of The Washington Post and Bradlee’s boss.
“So much of The Post is Ben,” Katharine Graham said in 1994, three years after Bradlee retired as editor. “He created it as we know it today.”
President Barack Obama saluted Bradlee’s role at The Washington Post when giving him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013: “He transformed that newspaper into one of the finest in the world.”
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born into the old aristocracy of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Boston on Aug. 26, 1921. His father, Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr., known as “B,” could trace his American ancestry back through 10 generations of Bradlees. B was an all-American football star at Harvard who became an investment banker in the booming 1920s. He married Josephine deGersdorff, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and a New England aristocrat named Helen Crowninshield.
Bradlee got his first real job in journalism after World War II, working with a St. Mark’s friend, Blair Clark, to create the New Hampshire Sunday News. After it failed in 1948, family friends offered to help Bradlee find a new job.
Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a friend at the Baltimore Sun about Bradlee; Christian Herter, the congressman and former governor of Massachusetts, wrote to The Washington Post. When Bradlee’s overnight train reached Baltimore, a heavy rainstorm discouraged him from getting off, so he decided to go first to Washington. The day before he arrived for an interview, a Post reporter had quit, creating a vacancy. Bradlee charmed The Washington Post’s editors, who offered him a job for $80 a week, starting Christmas Eve.
He liked writing for The Washington Post, but he wanted to cover big national stories, and it became clear to him that he wouldn’t get a chance to do that for years. So when an old friend said he could help him become the press attache at the American Embassy in Paris, he jumped.
After 2½ years, he went back to journalism as a European correspondent for Newsweek. “The sheer joy and romance of being a foreign correspondent is hard to explain, even harder to exaggerate,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. In four years, he covered wars in Algeria and the Middle East, peace conferences in Geneva, the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in Monte Carlo.
Bradlee returned to Washington in 1957. As a 36-year-old junior reporter in the capital, Bradlee began conspiratorial conversations with Osborne Elliott, another well-born WASP, also in his 30s, who was Newsweek’s managing editor. They knew the magazine was likely to be sold.
“One night, after a bad day of brooding and a few shooters, I called Elliott in New York and told him I was damn well going to pick up the phone — it was almost 11 p.m. — and call Phil Graham right then,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. And he did.
Within days, The Washington Post Co., owned by Philip Graham, husband of Katharine Graham, bought Newsweek for $15 million in March 1961.
Bradlee joined The Washington Post as a deputy managing editor in July 1965. He became managing editor on Nov. 15 of that year and in 1968 was named to the newly created position of executive editor.
Watergate made Bradlee’s Post famous, but the story that probably made the Watergate coverage possible was the Pentagon Papers, initially a New York Times scoop in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, a disaffected former government official, gave the Times a compilation of historical documents about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but after three days of stories, the Nixon administration successfully sought a federal court injunction blocking further publication, the first such “prior restraint” in the nation’s history.
Ellsberg then offered the documents to The Washington Post. Two days after the court order, Post editors and reporters were plowing through the Pentagon Papers and planning to write about them.
The Post’s attorneys were extremely nervous that the paper might publish stories based on material already deemed sensitive national security information by a federal judge in New York. The Post was about to sell shares to the public for the first time, hoping to raise $35 million. And the government licenses of The Post’s television stations would be vulnerable if the paper was convicted of a crime.
Bradlee initially told Graham that he didn’t think he would publish. She disagreed. “I say let’s go,” she told Bradlee. “Let’s publish.”
That moment, Bradlee wrote in his memoir, “crystallized for editors and reporters everywhere how independent and determined and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post had become.” Defying the government in printing those stories proved that The Post was “a paper that holds its head high, committed unshakably to principle.”
The Nixon administration argued that publication of stories based on the Pentagon Papers could undermine national security, an argument that infuriated Bradlee. But the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the government could not restrain the newspapers.
The sense of independence earned in 1971 was critical to The Washington Post’s pursuit of Watergate, which began the next June. At every stage, it was a compelling yarn, from the days when Woodward and Bernstein established connections between the burglars and President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign to the amazing weeks, more than two years later, when it became clear that the president would not survive in office.
“Newspapering deals with small daily bites from a fruit of indeterminate size,” Bradlee wrote later. “It may take dozens of bites before you are sure it’s an apple. Dozens and dozens more bites before you have any real idea how big the apple might be. It was that way with Watergate.”
Bradlee called it “the story that put us all on the map.” Neither he nor The Post was ever the same again. The recognition grew after the movie made from “All The President’s Men” appeared. Bradlee was relieved that director Alan Pakula made a good and essentially accurate movie that seemed to capture the real spirit of The Post and the story.
Bradlee’s tactics as an newsroom manager were simple: “Hire people smarter than you are” and encourage them to bloom. His energy and his mystique were infectious.
“It was hard to explain the full force of his personality to people who never met him,” said Ward Just, the reporter-turned-novelist whom Bradlee sent to cover the Vietnam War for The Post in 1966-1967. “He really was one of those guys you’d take a machine-gun bullet for. You only meet three or four of them in an entire lifetime.”
But his strengths sometimes became weaknesses. The editor who could inspire his troops also fell for an artful hoax by a young reporter, Janet Cooke. Cooke invented an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy and wrote a moving story about him. After the story won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, Cooke was exposed as an impostor who invented not only Jimmy but also her own life story.
When they realized that Cooke had concocted an imaginary resume, Bradlee and his editors interrogated her and extracted a confession. Bradlee quickly returned the Pulitzer, then encouraged The Post’s ombudsman, Bill Green, to investigate and report how the incident could have happened. This was the biggest assignment ever given to the in-house reader’s representative. Bradlee had created the position in 1970, making The Post the first major paper to employ an independent, in-house critic.
Green produced a detailed, embarrassing report about a newsroom where the urge for journalistic impact overrode several experienced reporters’ doubts about Jimmy’s existence. “Bradlee was really hurt” by the Cooke affair, recalled Peter Silberman, who served under Bradlee as a senior editor.
Bradlee retired in 1991, on the eve of his 70th birthday. In retirement, Bradlee wrote his highly successful memoir. He and Quinn raised millions of dollars for Children’s National Medical Center, which had done so much for their son, Quinn, who was born with serious disabilities in 1982. He also gave money away, endowing the Bradlee Professorship of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Besides his wife, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Benjamin Bradlee Jr. of Boston; two children from his second marriage, Dominic Bradlee of Hydra, Greece, and Marina Murdock of Purcellville, Virginia; a son from his third marriage, Quinn Bradlee of Washington; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
The late David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times and devoted much of his book “The Powers That Be” to Bradlee’s Washington Post, offered this valedictory in an interview:
“He took The Post, then affluent and filled with underutilized potential, and made it a formidable national newspaper worthy of a head-to-head competition with the [New York] Times. He did it in a way that made the paper itself a joyous place to work. The paper reflected his personality. He was exuberant, competitive and combative if challenged. He made The Post a magnet for young reporters looking for a chance to play in a very high-stakes game.”
Robert G. Kaiser is a former managing editor of The Washington Post.