Last week, American journalism lost one of its most profound and influential newspaper editors, Ben Bradlee.
After serving in U.S. Naval Intelligence in World War II, Benjamin “Ben” Crowninshield Bradlee became a reporter for Newsweek. A Bostonian distantly related through marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, Bradlee developed a friendship with John F. Kennedy in the 1950s and followed his presidential campaign in 1960 as well as the campaign of his eventual adversary, Richard M. Nixon.
The Washington Post bought Newsweek in 1965 and Bradlee became executive editor of the Post in 1968, serving until 1991. He influenced generations of reporters and editors at newspapers around the country by combining aggressive investigative journalism with in-depth feature reporting.
As an editor, he led the Post during what would become the most important years of not only the paper but also journalism itself.
In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. After U.S. senators refused to make them public, uncertain if they would be protected from treason charges, Ellsberg gave them to The New York Times and The Washington Post, which began publishing stories. Although the Pentagon Papers only covered unconstitutional acts by administrations before Nixon, the president and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger realized the risk of a precedent and sued to stop the presses.
Federal Judge Murray Gurfein denied the injunction, writing “A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.” The Supreme Court agreed a few days later, with Justice Hugo Black writing, “Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
In 1972, Bradlee’s reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began investigating a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Within days, they knew one of the men had ties to the FBI and CIA and by the first two weeks, had ties to the White House.
Woodward and Bernstein pursued connections in their news stories, which reached to the highest levels of government. The Post was ostracized and threatened by the Nixon administration for months, but Bradlee and Publisher Katherine Graham refused to yield. By the end of the scandal 69 government officials would be charged and 48 would be convicted.
Woodward and Bernstein inspired an entire generation of young people to become reporters — including a few who work at Larson Newspapers — but it was Bradlee’s unwavering trust in his reporters and their trust in him that churned out story after story documenting corruption.
In the last line of the 1976 film “All the President’s Men,” based on the book Woodward and Bernstein wrote about Watergate in 1974, Bradlee [Jason Robards] tells Bernstein [Dustin Hoffman] and Woodward [Robert Redford], “Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys [mess] up again, I’m gonna lose my temper. I promise you, you don’t want me to lose my temper.”
Throughout his career, Bradlee proved that no man or woman, no matter how powerful, is above the law. But in the end, history will ironically remember Bradlee for the two sentences which his reporters did not write but he and they were ultimately instrumental in producing:
“I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.”
