IMPACT
On April 15, 1969, a man named George Vaillant met Ben at a coffee shop across from the Post building for breakfast. They had never met before. Vaillant was a young psychiatrist working for the Harvard Study of Adult Development, known colloquially as the Grant Study after one of its founding funders. He had come to interview Ben.
The Grant Study is still ongoing today, tracking the lives (and deaths) of 268 Harvard students from the classes of 1939 to 1944. Ben and the others in his cohort were selected because they looked like winners, no small feat in the narrow slice that was any Harvard class in those days. The founders of the study had set out to determine the factors that led to “intelligent living” and successful aging, and its researchers sought bright, well-adapted young men to track over the course of a lifetime. Ben was an obvious choice, from a good Brahmin family, the fifty-first Bradlee to go to Harvard, quick and good-looking and already, per a Grant Study intake form from his sophomore year, apparently quite self-assured:
HAS THE STUDENT:
ANY FEELING OF INFERIORITY ABOUT HIMSELF IN ANY WAY? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIMSELF? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIS FAMILY? No.
ANY WORRIES ABOUT HIS WORK? No.
The subjects endured rigorous physical examinations and psychological evaluations while they were at Harvard. After college, they filled out questionnaires roughly every two years and sometimes met with researchers from the study for face-to-face interviews. Ben’s 1969 interview with Vaillant, who would later become the director of the study, was his first such interview in twenty years.
Ben was forty-seven years old. He had been the executive editor of the Post for a little less than a year. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate lay just ahead, unseen over the horizon; Ben’s friendship with Kennedy,1 and the access and prestige that he had derived from that relationship, still largely defined his public reputation. He had been a naval officer on a destroyer during World War II, a reporter for multiple newspapers, a press attaché in the American embassy in Paris, and a foreign correspondent, Washington correspondent, and Washington bureau chief for Newsweek magazine. Now, in 1969, he had just started in on the job that would change his life forever, and he knew it:
He said that the three years he had spent as managing editor were the hardest three years he had ever spent. He had not known anything about daily journalism and had showed up at the office at eight, worked until eight in the evening, and then often after supper came down to the office and worked until one in the morning. He continued doing this six days a week for two years. He said at Newsweek, where he’d been bureau chief, he’d been able to do it with “my left hand.” Joining the Post was “a watershed” in his life.
… [B]eing the editor of the Post interrupted his life but was the greatest job in the world—“there’s nothing I’d rather do.” He then said that he was an over-achiever, that he’d always operated at 100%, that he possessed no unused talent.
Vaillant took the interview along a pretty standard trajectory: work history, family history, medical status, psychological status. In addition to talking about how much he loved his job, Ben dug into some complicated feelings about his family—his love for his father despite his father’s problems with drink, his conflicted relationship with his mother, his first and second wives. He spoke with such frankness that he seemed even to be surprising himself. “I’m letting it pour out,” he remarked to Vaillant at one point, after stating that of the three Bradlee kids he had been the closest to his father. “That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?”
It was. But the most revealing part of Vaillant’s report isn’t his summary of what Ben told him. What’s most revealing is the effect that spending time with Ben had on Vaillant himself.
At first, Vaillant records what Ben says without adding much commentary of his own. Gradually, though, as the report progresses, Vaillant begins to include some of his own observations. He notes parenthetically that Ben speaks in a “charming and urbane way,” then later that Ben is “dressed in a dapper fashion.” When the conversation veers into the relationship with Kennedy, Ben gives Vaillant a copy of “That Special Grace,” the prose poem he filed for Newsweek the day after Kennedy was killed. “I had the feeling not of an artist pushing his wares,” Vaillant writes, “but of someone giving me a profound gift.”
In the final section of the report, entitled “Description of the Man,” Vaillant tries to summon a more clinical assessment of how being around Ben has made him feel:
[I]n walking over to the office there was a contagious quality about him that made me feel bigger than life just to be with him. It stemmed partly from his being completely generous with his own feelings, combined with a social gracefulness that must have been largely habit.…[H]is facial expression conveyed both tenderness and seriousness while making me laugh. He said many things that were funny, but never at his own expense and never to lead me off the track from something that was emotionally relevant to him.…
He also possessed a contagious enthusiasm and constantly saw the positive aspects, not because he defended against them but because there were many things that he really enjoyed. I could easily understand why a President would have picked him as his closest companion during the Presidency.
The final paragraph takes it yet one step further:
This was a man with a great capacity to focus his attention. He was a man who cared about things only as they related to people. Thus he gave up golf when he stopped playing it with Jack Kennedy. What he admired most about the latter was Kennedy’s ability to love and his gracefulness. I left the interview feeling that I had greater capacity as a human being just from having known him.
That’s the end of the eighteen-page typewritten report. Even Vaillant seems a bit stumped by the intensity of his own feelings; written in, by hand, is a concluding question, appended perhaps after he has read the report through and his inner clinician has had a chance to right himself. “An illusion, yes,” he writes in a neat print, “but what in a personality creates that illusion in others?”
Reading through the final bewildered sentences of Vaillant’s report is like watching a laboratory experiment in the real-time effects of charm and charisma, with a trained psychiatrist as the subject. It’s hard to talk seriously about somebody being “bigger than life” without sounding like a fool, like a rube with stars in your eyes. In fairness to Vaillant, it’s easy to imagine why he might want to pencil in a qualifying sentence about illusions before handing the typewritten report to his superiors.
But if I have learned anything about Ben over the time I’ve spent with him, it’s that “illusion” is the wrong word. What happened to Vaillant was a real, observable phenomenon, part of Ben’s primary functioning as a newspaper editor and as a person. Anybody who has spent much time with him will tell you that, even the people who don’t particularly like him. This is not to say that he was perfect, or that he didn’t hire the wrong people or have lapses in judgment or leave some emotional and professional carnage in his wake. He did all that, too.
But the truth at the heart of Ben’s time at the Post is the infectious sense of possibility that he created for himself and for the reporters and the newspaper that he led. When you were around him, and when he focused on you, you were included in it, too. You can call that quality in Ben “larger than life,” you can call it “charisma,” you can call it “genius” or “instinct” or “focus” or “verve.” Whatever it is, the most important thing to know about him is that he had it, and he knew it, and he used it.
1 Not surprisingly, another Grant Study subject, three years ahead of Ben.