One of the reasons why the Cooke thing was such a crashing blow was that everybody felt, well, look at the Post, they’ve stepped on it. Look at those guys, walking with their noses in the air, stepped on it. That was number one.
—Peter Osnos, October 9, 2008
[It was] a very big injury, and I can only imagine that Ben took it really very hard, even though, in the aftermath, they behaved in an exemplary way. But you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the blow and the level of the embarrassment. It wasn’t just a piece that had been made up by somebody that was pernicious. It was made up, they were told it was made up by the mayor of the city, and by a lot of other people, there was suspicion of the piece inside. And then it won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s like a Soupy Sales pie to the face.… And it came on the heels of the biggest journalistic triumph imaginable.
—David Remnick, October 26, 2009
Readers of the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for March of 1981 were treated, toward the back of the bulletin, to “Ben Bradlee’s Convention Preview.” Ben had been dragooned by his friend Tom Winship, the editor of The Boston Globe, into serving as the program chairman of the annual ASNE convention, which was to be held in Washington in late April of 1981. The title of Ben’s preview, written before the curtain fell on Janet Cooke, was “We’re Lookin’ Good.” “With lots of irons still in the fire,” the budding event coordinator wrote, “we have the beginnings of something pretty good, although much of the program is still to come.”
Prophetic words. The conference was held in Washington the week after the Cooke scandal hit the papers, and now all eyes were trained on Ben—for all the wrong reasons. At the reception that kicked off the convention, Winship told Ben that he thought they ought to have some kind of organized discussion of the Cooke episode. “There’s an awful lot of interest,” he told Ben, with a good deal of understatement.
And so an early morning session that was coincidentally supposed to be devoted to ombudsmen—“one of those early bird meetings normally attended by a dozen editors with insomnia,” as Ben put it in a letter to a friend—became the Janet Cooke session. According to Ben, seven hundred fifty people and five television cameras showed up. As Al JaCoby, the ombudsman of the San Diego Union, put it after the fact, “Everybody here today came looking for red meat.”
BCB with Barbara Feinman, May 24, 1990:
BF: How’d you feel?
B: I felt terrible. I felt so terrible. You know, I had to do it. I was performing. It’s always been, I’ve always understood that when I perform I perform. I know that I’m on, and it has been ingrained in me somehow not to fuck up: to be prepared, you can make it look casual if you can get away with it but you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it right. So I knew all of that and I didn’t have the strongest hand.…
BF: To say the least.
B: To say the very least. But there were sort of about fifteen or sixteen questions from the floor. I guess Winship was presiding and it was obvious that I had to get up and say my piece, which was essentially that we had acted quickly, I forgot what the hell I said.… The fucking television cameras were there. And to their great and everlasting credit [Don] Graham and [Russ] Wiggins were there by my side, never left my side.
In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Ben had gone to Graham and offered to resign. “If it’s the right solution for you, it’s the right solution for me,” Ben had said. “I’ll quit, or you bag me—it doesn’t make any difference. I leave.”
“I don’t think they considered it,” Ben told me. “Whether they should have or not is something else. But by that time I was locked into the furniture, for Christ’s sake. I was part of the place. And it might have been more costly to them than I thought, or than they thought it was.”
“I got all kinds of advice that we should change editors as a result of Janet Cooke, and I didn’t consider that a very close call,” Don Graham told me. Ben’s sixteen years of results as editor far outweighed the one mistake. There were a lot of other people along the line of authority over that story who were equally, if not more, culpable, and Graham didn’t fire any of them, either. “I made no change,” he told me, “and I’m glad I didn’t.”
That morning, at the ASNE meeting, the most important thing to Ben—the thing he has always said about it, since—was that Don Graham wrapped his arm around Ben for much of the panel. “Never said a word,” Ben would say later of what Don Graham did that morning, “but every time anybody looked, there was the publisher with his arm around his editor.”
As the panel began, Ben was sitting in the audience, but all assembled knew that he was the main event. Eventually he stood up and began to take questions from the audience. After a rueful joke about how he’d done more for the conference than any other program chair in history, he tried to modify expectations a little bit. “I haven’t had time to collect my thoughts and formulate rules, which I suspect we will do,” Ben said. “One conclusion I’ve reached is that you cannot legislate, you cannot make a rule that is going to prevent, preserve you, save you from a pathological liar.
“Eventually you are going to have to trust somebody,” he went on. “If you have a rule that has an editor check every single fact by every reporter, you are not going to put out a daily newspaper, you’re going to put out a monthly newspaper.”
On the matter of race, Ben said that any suggestion that the Cooke case should call into question the value of affirmative action programs was “just baloney.” He was right, though in a certain sense it was a dodge. Janet had been hired in large part because she was black, and everybody knew it. “I think where race came into this question had to do with the white editors,” Ben said. This is the part of the racial dynamic that he has always felt most comfortable addressing. “Editors have only a limited number of worlds in which they consider themselves well qualified. In this case, Condon Terrace in Southeast Washington is an area that I do not know anything about.…
“The fact that Janet Cooke is black and her immediate editor was black probably made me trust them more, not less,” he said.
“Isn’t there something wrong with watching a crime being committed?” Al JaCoby, one of the folks who had come looking for red meat, asked a bit later.
This was the main question that people wanted answered, and a fair one. Charlie Seib, who had once been the ombudsman at the Post, followed a similar line. When confronted with an eight-year-old being injected with heroin, “Do you wrap yourself in the First Amendment and your traditions and let the child die?” Seib asked. He said that if Ben and Bob and everybody else had “realized that they were dealing with a life and not just a good front page story,” they might have tried to find the boy and discovered the hoax before the damage had been done.
“You’ve got your point,” Ben conceded.
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Readers felt the same way Charlie Seib did. Ben could talk all he wanted about press independence and the difficulties posed by journalists who cooperate with law enforcement, but the basic point was that when they’d been challenged on the story they had fallen back on cold, idealized journalistic standards instead of real, human, and empathic ones. Cooke would later tell Phil Donahue that Howard Simons was the only person at the Post who ever asked her about Jimmy’s well-being or showed any interest in figuring out what the paper could do to help him. Everybody else was just worried about the story.
“It was a moral failure on my part,” Bob told me. “The kid was being tortured. An eight-year-old. You should protect children. And so if I’d just been thinking morally, ‘We have a responsibility to this kid,’ and said to Janet, ‘What’s the address? We’re dropping a dime, I am, personally, to the cops and a doctor, to save the kid, and then we’ll do the story,’ it would’ve exposed the fabrication, presumably …
“We were so caught up in this kind of muscular, First Amendment, ‘Don’t fuck with us’ [mentality],” he went on. “I kind of liken it to the Haldeman thing. There was almost a Shakespearean element to it. But you don’t get to the Haldeman story, you don’t get to the ‘Jimmy’s World’ story, unless you’re pushing the envelope. If there are ever kind of instructions from Ben, it’s push the envelope.”
“I don’t want to absolve myself in any sense,” Ben told me when I asked him about the moral dimension. “I mean, there it is. It happened. And it should never have happened.”
If other editors at lesser newspapers were taking a small amount of guilty pleasure in Ben’s and Bob’s difficulties, so, too, were readers of a certain persuasion. This, from a reader in Goldsboro, North Carolina, April 24, 1981:
Sir:
My, my how the mighty have fallen. Who has the last laugh now? Richard Nixon? At least he wasn’t hoodwinked, humiliated and made the laughing stock of the world by a 26 year old black woman!
Or this, from Washington, D.C., a few days later:
Dear Mr. Bradlee:
I find the Washington Post’s agonizing over the Janet Cooke affair both boring and hypocritical.… In fact, very few people were shocked by the affair. It was viewed as simply another example of the type of misrepresentation and fraud that one routinely expects from the media.…
No one has any respect for journalists anymore. The profession has destroyed itself. Many public figures flatter you, because they know you have the capacity to destroy those with whom you do not agree. But do not confuse fear with admiration or respect.…
I expect that Janet Cooke’s sense of ethics and integrity is about average for the profession. You should have considered firing Walter Pincus, for example, rather than Janet. At least Janet writes with style.
Ben had given his critics a stick to beat him with. But, Ben being Ben, there was only so much he was going to take. In June of 1981, a Yale student wrote to remind Ben of an answer that he had once given to a question addressed to him at an event on campus. Somebody had asked Ben who holds the media accountable when they make mistakes, and Ben’s response had been “our readers.” “The brevity of your reply to such an earnest question was amusing to many in your audience, who let you escape to other issues,” the student wrote.
Other members of your audience, however, remained uneasy with that answer, because it is not believable.… The American people will not soon forget the Pulitzer hoax at The Washington Post. They will remember it as an early chapter in what may someday be called “Mediagate.” Just as important, I hope you will remember this lesson and think a bit longer before answering the next time someone asks you, “Who keeps the press honest?”
Very truly yours,
Ben’s response, dated June 22, 1981:
Dear [student with incredibly WASPy sounding name]:
My God, you have gotten pompous at an early age!
Your paraphrased question asks how often do we see the media admit to inaccurate reporting? In the Janet Cooke case, you saw The Washington Post admit to inaccurate reporting. You saw The Washington Post do it before anyone else. You saw The Washington Post do it on the front page. You saw The Washington Post apologize in an editorial. You saw The Washington Post—unasked—return the Pulitzer Prize. There quite literally was no other step I could have taken in the department of autocriticism. Unique in the annals of American journalism. Really.
I am speechless at your injunction that I should remember this lesson and think a bit longer. Before you settle down as a stockbroker or whatever, and join the racquet club or whatever, try to think for yourself, if I may give you a piece of advice.
With the editors at the ASNE and in his correspondence, Ben stuck out his chest and tried to take it like a man. He did the same thing with me. When I asked him how long Janet Cooke hung over his head, he said, “You know me well enough to know that those things don’t hang on me very long. It’s not that I shrug ’em off, but you can’t sit there and moan about it for the rest of your life.”
Ben has never been one to moan about anything, to be sure, but I don’t think he moved on from it as quickly as he says. Pat Tyler, who was close to Ben at the time, remembers riding over to Ben’s house to play tennis in the aftermath of the scandal. “He said that he thought that his career was over,” Tyler told me. “He wasn’t certain that he was going to recover from it.… He really thought that he’d been devastated by Janet.”
Memoir interview with BF, May 24, 1990
BF: Were you real depressed?
B: Oh! Terminal.
B: It sort of convinced me that I’d been flying awful high and been very lucky. I think in effect that I’d—it was a story that I didn’t pay enough attention to.
BF: How can you pay attention—
B: You can.
BF: You can?
B: Sure. Early on. I thought Woodward and Maraniss, there were no two better people in the fucking plant that could have done that, passed their standards. It just didn’t occur to me that it was going to fail in any way. I didn’t see how it could. But you know it was also, you don’t quite understand that there were probably seventy-five phone calls a day for a week from people, from reporters all over the country. The determination that you were going to answer every one. That I was going to answer every one. That I wasn’t going to slough it off on anybody else, and that I would take the blame, I had to. There was no point in—the first time I would have said well, what I just said to you about Woodward, Woodward was in charge, implying that it was his fault.
BF: Did you ever lose your temper at anybody through this?
B: I don’t see what good that does.… I was ashamed. I was ashamed vis-à-vis the paper, I had gotten the paper in terrible trouble. I let the Grahams down. The Grahams had been so incredibly supportive.
BF: So you really felt responsible.
B: I was responsible. You can’t ride it up and not ride it down. I mean you can’t take all the credit for everything …
BF: I know but there’s a difference between taking the credit and taking the blame and what you really feel and it sounds like you really feel …
B: I don’t take the credit. But you are the editor of the paper and what happens in the news columns is your fault.… I am an extreme pragmatist—I don’t spend any time at all on “what if’s.” None at all … I don’t need to lay blame anywhere.
BF: That’s the mark of a secure person.
B: Well, it’s also the mark of a realist. What good does it do when the scars are there?
