Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee

Dear Ben:

On your 80th I want to say some of the things that seem never to get said. For reasons of maleness, and maybe time, I’ve rushed by too much that is important, the really, truly important. These things become too important to discuss. Let me try.

The letter was dated August 26, 2001, typewritten on Bob’s personal stationery, with “AS SENT” jotted diagonally across the top left-hand corner in Bob’s trademark scrawl. He pulled it out of an expandable manila folder marked “BRADLEE” and pushed it across the table toward me.

We were sitting at the back of Bob’s living room on Q Street, at the same round table where hundreds of government officials have said things that they eventually regret saying into Bob’s tape recorder. My own tape recorder was there now. It was still early on, before I knew Ben very well, and I had been making the rounds of the ten or fifteen people who knew him best in search of good stories. I had saved Bob for last.

I’ll begin with memory—my first of you. It was the first Friday in September 1971. I was waiting outside your office in the old Post. This was the last interview before being hired: Bradlee meets all the new hires; he almost never says no, but he might or he could. The rule was watch your ass, be careful and don’t get into stray talk. Bradlee’s got a short attention span. (At about this very same hour on this same day, unknown to both of us at the time, two guys named E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were boarding a plane at Dulles to Los Angeles so they could burglarize the office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg.)

Could it be that you did not have a window in your old office? In any case that is what I remember. Maybe some renovations were underway? So the office seemed smaller than it should have been. You were already known as this energy force at the paper, and why should this force have such a small, cramped office, I wondered. For about two seconds. Then you turned on the lights—your face, eyes, the undivided focus—not exactly the short attention span of legend. The truth is that your strength is your attention span, when something is worth paying attention to. You were not particularly interested in what I had done at the Montgomery County whatever-it-was newspaper. You honed in on one thing. My time in the Navy, five years, not hard war years but a long time. You had been in the Navy, you said, as if it were the brotherhood.…

Everything after the Navy was easy, we agreed. After the Navy there could be running room. But somebody had to give you a job—a profession in which to run.

So that’s what you gave me first—running room. It was a magnificent gift. I felt it every day, and it came directly from you. There was this huge sense that we were your boys, or girls or people—the entire newsroom—turned loose. Running room was a matter of pride and obligation. We didn’t understand fully what it was, but we recognized daylight and went for it because that is where you were pointing. Daylight: news, the unexpected and surprising, and the daily folly and occasional generosity of mankind, that endless buffet.

Bob doesn’t normally write like that. He tends toward the straightforward, the objective, the simple. When I worked for him, he would sometimes encourage me to “swing from the high vines,” to take a chance, to go for it in terms of language or synoptic complexity, but he was always hesitant to do the same. It could be hard to tell how Bob really felt about anything, what it meant to him.

Evidently the occasion of Ben’s eightieth had brought him out. The letter continued, going even deeper:

And when I screwed up in some well publicized and some less well publicized ways, what did you do? Never a harsh, judgmental word. Not one. Only human understanding and that wonderful motion with your arms in the air, shoulders in a shrug, and the tilted head and the momentary grimace that said, well, that’s over, let’s move on. No doubt there were times when you were angry or disappointed. Other than Elsa you are the only person who always stood by me in good or bad times.

Bob wondered what might have happened if Nixon had stayed in office, had the Watergate scandal never occurred. What would have come of the FBI, the CIA, “the habits and practices of concealment,” the war in Vietnam? “Watergate upended a lot of things,” Bob wrote. “You made it possible with goading and love and all of yourself, never a partial effort.”

A few paragraphs later, the letter drew to a close. “The brotherhood lives,” Bob wrote. “I feel connected to you like a son.”

The way you and Sally have extended your family to ours in recent years is a cornerstone of our life. I’m feeling older. If the running room is a little less, and the rear end doesn’t move as fast, the old fires of deep appreciation, deeper admiration and the deepest love still burn for you.

Sincerely,
[signed] BW

Dear Bob:

A light will go out in this place, if or when you leave. A light that never flickered, and generally burned strong and clean. That’s for openers. You are quite simply the best investigative reporter I’ve ever met, or imagined. A team of investigative reporters [led] by you can reach levels of impact and importance that can hardly be conceived. (And without you, that team will probably disband.)

I’m not going to belittle television, or demean this latest offer now in front of you.

Instead, I’m going to outline what the POST will do for you now, and what the POST will do for you over the next 18 months … sure that you will do what’s best in the long run.

Ben laid out a series of proposals—more money, more editorial responsibility (including weekend duty running the paper), management of Bob’s own “SWAT” team of investigative reporters. I had never understood when I worked for Bob that he had once dreamed of replacing Ben as the executive editor of the Post. I knew Bob as somebody who reported and wrote and wanted only to do those two things. From the tone and substance of Ben’s proposals in the letter, it’s clear that in 1982 there was still a chance that Bob might succeed him, even though the Janet Cooke scandal had effectively put Bob out of the running.

yours in truth,

I had read hundreds of Ben’s letters by then, but I had never seen that particular signoff before. It was a powerful way to close, so simple and pure and yet so loaded at the same time.

Bob showed me his response, composed four days later, on March 31, 1982, with “Personal” typed at the top of the printout. “Something will go out in me should I leave,” he wrote, picking up on the opening metaphor of Ben’s letter to him. “I don’t want to.” He would stay.

There were other letters, too, containing far more information than I was equipped at that point to understand. In the mid-eighties, when Bob was upset that some of his reporting on Libya and on Soviet secrets wasn’t making it into the paper, he wrote to Ben that he was again thinking of leaving:

There was no response from Ben to this one. When I asked Bob what Ben had done about it, he said, “There was a story I was working on, and it got in the paper the next day.”

“Maybe that’s one of the lessons,” Bob said. “Simple solutions. Somebody sends you a long, whiny, complaining letter, simple solutions. ‘Okay. Give me a story I can publish.’ And we did.”

But wasn’t there more to it than that? The language of these letters—the references to divorce, to departure, to love and truth—suggested currents that ran deeper than newspaper stories. Later I would mention these exchanges to the reporter Pat Tyler, who for a time was closer than most to Bob and to Ben. I said that I had been surprised to see such an outpouring of emotion—almost like love letters—between two guys who don’t talk about their feelings all that much.

“They’re both prisoners of very strong emotions,” Tyler told me. “But when they were still having their suits cut for dorsal fins, they didn’t show them. They suppressed them very strongly.”

“At what point did you become friends?” I asked Bob as the interview was dying down. “When did you make that transition?”

Bob paused, thought for a moment. “I mean, you know, it’s ultimately like another father,” he said. “Like with your father, you feel that you never close the deal.”

Bob’s father had recently passed away. I had never heard him talk much about him.

“In the sense of getting everything out on the table,” Bob said.

“I’m not sure that anybody feels that they know him that well,” I said.

It’s true. I’ve never met anybody who claims to have closed the deal with Ben, except maybe for Sally. There is always a tinge of mystery and distance. As one former reporter and close friend told me, “Ben always kept some of Ben to himself.” Earlier Bob had said that with Ben there was always “a sense that he’s got a lot held in reserve.” If these people hadn’t closed the deal, I couldn’t imagine that I ever would.

After we finished up, I went out in the garden at the back of the house to talk to Elsa. It was a sunny and slow Friday afternoon, with cicadas humming in the trees. Elsa agreed that it was hard to feel that you’d touched the bottom with Ben. “In a funny way, he’s actually quite distant,” she said, “for all of the bonhomie.”

About an hour into our session, Bob brought out a bottle of white wine, and the three of us gossiped for a while. I mentioned that I’d uncovered some information in Ben’s files that I didn’t know quite how to handle, old letters that were torn up—saved, but clearly not sent and (perhaps) never meant to be seen.

Bob’s ears perked up, as they always do when secrets get mentioned. He flashed a knowing smile and reached for the wine bottle.

“All biographers are concealers,” he said.

At that point I was still writing a book with Ben, not about him, but maybe Bob already knew intuitively that that was going to change. I had the first flicker of the realization that writing about your mentor’s mentor is a trickier proposition than it seems. The challenge hung in the air for a second or two, and then we clinked glasses and moved on to other things.

¹ Jim Lehrer, of PBS; Jim Wooten, of ABC News; and Shelby Coffey, a former Post editor.

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