Sometime during Watergate—it could have started a few months before or after the break-in—I started getting anonymous notes, maybe five or six in all, written in pencil on scrap paper. The handwriting was almost illegible, but no matter how much I tried to come up with another description, they were plainly flirtatious—short, cryptic messages suggesting a crush that was getting harder and harder to handle, not to say out of control. They were reserved, proper in every way—and rattling.
My fantasy life is healthy and vivid about persons of the opposite sex, but I wasn’t ready to admit that this was a fantasy that might develop into something else. I have identified with Thurber’s Walter Mitty ever since the book was published, and to this day, for instance, I am unable to walk across a bridge over the Seine River without looking down and fantasizing, however briefly, about tearing off my shoes and jacket and leaping in to save the life of some damsel in distress. It seemed unlikely that any Post journalist, trained as all of them were to be direct, liberated, and outspoken, would feel comfortable with anonymous notes. It felt even more unlikely that anyone would target me, still widely if erroneously assumed to be one half of a latter-day Darby and Joan couple.
And the Post had recently gone through a spell of unpleasant anonymous letters, to me, to Katharine Graham and others, asking insider questions calculated to sow dissent and raise suspicions. We had turned these anonymous notes over to Ed Williams, even though we thought they were the work of a secretary who had been canned.
The mild paranoia which infected us all during Watergate suggested that the people who brought you the Canuck letter, who tried to sell grass to Bernstein at 16th and K streets at high noon, and who had perfected their dirty trick skills, were certainly capable of phonying up some mash notes to the editor of the despised Post. And so I pretty much put them out of my mind a few days after receiving them.
But not before I spent some private time going through an alphabetized staff list for possible authors. Like Walter Mitty before me, I lingered occasionally here and there, wondering. The names are no longer important. Enough to say that when I got to the Qs, I lingered over the name of the enchanting and talented Sally Quinn, the new star of the Style Section, with whom I now realized I had been flirting. But she was too young, and the latest rumor had her quitting us to become the first woman anchor on the “CBS Morning News.” CBS president William Paley was under pressure to name a female anchor for the morning news show, and he had charged my old friend Gordon Manning with finding one.
I had long since perfected the art of “hanging out” in the newsroom—schmoozing my way from one group to another, listening, gossiping, encouraging, asking reporters what the people they were writing about were really like. Hanging out was the best part of my day, maybe even the best part of my job. The Style Section was particularly fertile territory for hanging out. The reporters were brasher, less respectful of any authority, less impressed with the paper’s—and their own—power. Sally Quinn and Phil Casey sat at adjoining desks and it was an especially productive place to hang out. Quinn was prettier, Casey was funnier. Together they were always intriguing to talk to, even though Sally insisted on calling me “Mr. Bradlee,” and did until the day she quit the Post for CBS in June of 1973.
I had first met Sally when Phil Geyelin introduced her to me after he interviewed her for a job as secretary to the editorial page editor. I advised him against hiring her, and not just because she couldn’t take shorthand. Speaking for myself, I suggested to Phil that anyone that attractive could make work difficult.
But a month or so later, when the Post was desperately looking for someone to cover the parties that form the backbone of the anthropology of Washington, Sally Quinn’s name resurfaced. She was perfectly suited for the job, except for one small problem: she had never written a word in her life. She was a young Army brat who had worked as the social secretary for the Algerian ambassador, Cherif Guelal. She had worked in Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, and she knew everyone in town. It was reported that I said, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” when she revealed her complete lack of experience. Actually, Phil Geyelin said it when I told him that this time I was thinking of hiring her.
Anyway, she was hired, and soon had patented the sassy, irreverent, insightful profile, where the interviewee provides the ammunition and the interviewer pulls the trigger. Under Tom Kendrick, and later Shelby Coffey, the Style Section had gathered under one roof a unique collection of young “new journalists,” like B. J. Phillips, Myra McPherson, and Nick von Hoffman, to name just a few, who wrote with vitality, imagery, and humor. They knew their subjects, and they shared their insights with great flair.
Sally wrote some memorable profiles of people enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame, and some signature pieces about Washington institutions—high and low—with irreverence, insight, and wit. She had an amazing ability to get people to talk about themselves. Henry Kissinger once said he felt like killing Maxine Cheshire after she wrote about him, but he felt like committing suicide after Sally Quinn wrote about him.
Here are takes from some of Sally’s most memorable profiles:
On stripper Sally Rand: She’s a tough old broad, and she’d be the first to say so. She has a healthy respect for herself, and pride in what she does, a deep understanding and acceptance of the good and the bad, a certain simplicity that belies her sophisticated demeanor and a well-developed ability to laugh. She is tiny (size 7, junior petite) and makes many of her own clothes. She wears backless stiletto heels, short, short skirts to show off her still extraordinary legs, and a lot of make-up which doesn’t quite hide the extensive face-lift scars. She is vain, exercises constantly when she is not working, and won’t sunbathe except in the nude. “Otherwise my tits look like headlights.”
On “Big Ruby” Folsom Ellis Austin, George Wallace’s mother-in-law, after her daughter Cornelia had said, “Ah got the only bachelor in Montgomery, and ah’m scared to death Mama’s gonna go after George.” Replied Big Ruby: “Ah been lookin’ for a husband for two years, ever since Dr. Austin died, but there’s slim pickins in Montgomery. There ain’t nothin’ here. Shoooot, honey, [George] ain’t even titty high.”
On the Washington Affair: For the mistress there is the pleasure of having and exerting power over a man who is powerful himself. For the wife, there is the title, the social status and the money. And for the man himself, there is the satisfaction of having his needs met by two women. In the Washington Affair there is something for everyone.
On President Carter’s friend and Budget Director Bert Lance: You’ve seen Bert Lance before. At first, you can’t remember where. Then it comes to you. It was somewhere in the Middle East in the market place. He was dressed in a djellabah and turban, standing behind his stall. He was trying to sell you a camel. Cheap. And you were in the process of haggling with him until it occurred to you that you didn’t actually need a camel. So you bought a rug from him instead. Very cheap. He was losing money, he was going to the poorhouse. His family was going to starve because of the low price he was giving you. His eyes were dancing as he rubbed his hands in mock despair. You paid him the money, much more than the rug was worth. He beamed and blessed you as you walked away. Strangely, you felt good, even though you knew you’d been had.
On ballet star Rudolph Nureyev: [He] has those high Tatar cheekbones, the slightly slanting eyes, the full cruel mouth slashed by an old scar, the taut muscular body, strong but gentle hands, tousled brown hair, and a provocative half-mischievous, half-soulful look in his eye. And, of course, there is his behind. He has a fabulous behind.
I watched her get better with each piece, surer and surer of her skills, as she became one of the paper’s brightest new stars. Until on June 23, 1973, she announced that she was leaving the Post to take the CBS job. She would join the wonderful Hughes Rudd as the CBS answer to Barbara Walters and “The Today Show.” As hard as I worked to attract the talented people to the Post, I hated to see any of them leave, and so I asked her if I could try to dissuade her at lunch. She agreed, still calling me “Mr. Bradlee.”
It was a difficult lunch for both of us. Before I could even begin my spiel, she asked me if I knew why she was leaving . . . she was the author of the anonymous notes and she was in love with me. And I was stunned, but flattered. And vulnerable. Tony had come to feel that much of journalism was shallow, dwelling as much as journalism does on the sudden and dramatic, in preference to the meaningful and the good. She was more and more involved with The Work. I had all but lost any real hope of recapturing the delight we had shared. And I had never seen any chance to fall in love with Sally.
My efforts to persuade Sally to stay were ardent but unsuccessful. She left for New York the next day.
But her career as the “CBS Morning News” co-anchor with Rudd was doomed from the start, from a combination of her inexperience and CBS’s decision to throw her into this high-profile slot without giving her that experience. The message I got was simple: The sisters want a woman anchor? Okay, here’s one, and let’s see how she does. I thought Hughes Rudd was superb—crusty, funny, original—and I thought the chemistry between them was great. Sally floundered a little at the start—she had a temperature of 104° the first morning—but the comfort level seemed to me to improve every day. When the plug got pulled just a few months later, their ratings were 1.6 and a 14 share. More than twenty years later, the “CBS Morning News,” now called “CBS This Morning,” still rates the lowest of all the networks’ morning shows.
But I had reached another one of those critical forks in the road. One way involved staying with Tony, the woman I had once loved, the mother of two of my children, and trying to rekindle happiness. The other way involved recognizing that I had fallen in love, and that meant exploring a different life with Sally—a life that promised excitement, mutual enthusiasms, and all the rewards of shared goals. It didn’t help much to understand that this fork in the road was not so different from the one I had faced nineteen years earlier in France. Or that people were going to be sad again. Tony had said she wished I had not come back from Vietnam and Japan two years earlier, but that didn’t mean she wanted me to leave now.
My solution was to move into a hotel for a month and then into an apartment in the Watergate complex. Sally joined me there, after her CBS gig was terminated in October 1973. She had decided to turn her ill-fated tour as a network anchor into a funny book, called We’re Going to Make You a Star, and had found another job—in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. I thought this was a rotten idea; I felt the Times was too stuffy to take advantage of Sally’s special skills. I dreaded reading her pungent social commentaries and profiles in the competition, especially that competition. But hiring a girlfriend, even rehiring a girlfriend, carried its own special baggage.
And I was right about the Times. When their managing editor, Clifton Daniel, hired Sally, she told him she had agreed to write one last piece on a freelance basis for the Post, a profile of Washington’s super-quotable grande dame, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Daniel agreed, but then just after the story appeared, he called her to say that “we at the Times are shocked” at what he called her lack of sensitivity for having accepted the Post assignment. Their relations would never again be cordial. The story appeared on a Tuesday, too long and too juicy for the Times, everyone agreed—Mrs. L. talked at some length about lesbianism, and “dear old men’s things,” meaning penises—and the town talked about nothing else for days.
That left the girlfriend problem. I told Howard Simons I had to recuse myself, but if he and Shelby Coffey, the Style editor, wanted to hire her, they could be my guest. On Tuesday afternoon, Simons called Sally in to say it was ridiculous for her to work for the Times, offered her her old job back, and she accepted. That solved the girlfriend problem, though she was invariably described as “Bradlee’s live-in girlfriend” by the Washington newspapers, especially the Washington Star’s gossip column, “The Ear.”
It was the fall of 1973, spang in the middle of Watergate, the most important newspaper story of the generation. I was fifty-two years old, the father of three: Ben, Jr., age twenty-five; Dino, about to be fifteen; and Marina, about to be thirteen. Sally was twenty years younger, never married, but just finishing a long-term relationship with a New York newspaperman. Once again, explaining my new situation to my children was painful beyond description. I remembered reading somewhere that the best way of dealing with children’s anger in these circumstances was to encourage that anger, to expose yourself to it. And I did. Dino was the angriest. At least he expressed his anger the most, when I went out to see the children one evening. He was down in a basement workshop, making quality leather purses, briefcases, and wallets. He hammered, and cut and smoothed and oiled, almost in silence, as I tried to explain about happiness, how wonderful it was to enjoy, and how sad it was to live without it.
Dino and I worked it out in a matter of months. He was so sad, but I think he understood. Marina pretended to understand from the beginning. Friendship with Sally—true friendship—came later, but it came. It took Tony and me five years to become friends again: the day she called out of the blue to say that whatever had happened between us was as much her fault as it was mine.
But before that, Sally and I had started an exciting life. Watergate was resolved. Nixon was gone, and part of me looked at the future with some apprehension.
Sally Quinn electrified my private life the minute she stopped calling me “Mr. Bradlee.” She brought a sense of excitement and a sense of humor with her, plus a refreshing, feisty conviction that life should be contested and enjoyed, as well as shared. She found the all-consuming nature of my involvement with the Post natural, even exhilarating. When she returned to the Post, she brought her unique talent to the Style Section, sweeping into uncharted waters with confidence and style.
We lived together for a year on the fourteenth floor of the Watergate complex, overlooking the Potomac River. There was something right about the address, I thought. Then Sally figured she would rather have me be a guest in her house than be a guest in my house, in case our relationship disintegrated. That sounded unthreatening, even appropriate, to me. I liked the combination I sensed of feminine and feminist at the same time. Using money earned from her book, Sally bought a great house on 21st Street, off Dupont Circle, in the middle of the neighborhood where our friend and colleague Larry Stern was the unofficial mayor.
Sally and I went quietly about our new life of discovery and excitement, and involvement in each other’s work. At first there was no talk of marriage, and hence no rush to divorce. Sally had bought into that part of the feminist rhetoric that said a relationship didn’t depend on a piece of paper. But eventually, the question of marriage did arise, carefully at first, then insistently. I found it harder and harder to say I would not give to one person I loved, what I had given to two other women I had once loved. And deep down, I was head over heels crazy about Sally Quinn and our life together.
As my profile had inched upward, the gossip magazines became inordinately interested in our relationship. Once, confronted for the umpteenth time by some goddamn reporter, I said I would marry Sally when they elected a Polish pope, which of course could never happen. Five years later, the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected pope on October 16, 1978, the first non-Italian pope in 456 years. (And true to my word, Sally and I were married four days later.)
Just as Sally and I began to realize that we might have an exciting future, it began to dawn on me that my professional future would probably not include anything as exciting as Watergate. Stories like that show up once in a career. But how were we collectively going to get it up for the bread-and-butter stories that newspapers must give their readers? How were we going to keep reporters and editors down on the farm, after they’d seen Paree. Not just Woodward and Bernstein, or Bradlee and Simons, but the whole staff wore the Post’s achievements, our new eminence, on its sleeve. Now, it seemed as if we were back to county council meetings, and Boards of Education sessions, routine crimes and legislative actions.
I felt the need of a new project, tackling something completely different, and during one of the many times I thought of how much John Kennedy would have enjoyed Watergate, and my involvement in Watergate, I wondered if writing about Kennedy might be that something completely different. I didn’t have the access or the inclination to do a scholarly account of his presidency. Sorensen and Schlesinger had done the definitive biographies, but I did have notes of conversations with the president, dictated in stream-of-consciousness form. Over a period of five years, but more scrupulously during his 1,000-day presidency, I had scribbled down notes of what we had talked about during more than 125 conversations. Some of them, one- or two-minute telephone calls, some of them over two- and three-hour dinners with Tony and Jackie in the White House, and some of them during weekends at Newport, Palm Beach, or Camp David. I had dictated from these notes as soon as possible, generally the next morning, re-creating our conversations, and they totaled about 35,000 words. I had used most of what we talked about in my weekly files to Newsweek. I had not looked at them since the assassination. I looked at them now and I began to wonder if they might make a book.
Haynes Johnson read the notes and said encouraging things. He also put me in touch with his publisher, Eric Swenson of W. W. Norton & Co. Before too long, there was a $100,000 contract for Conversations with Kennedy. (Sometimes I wish I had called it Notes for the Kennedy Biographers, which it certainly has become.)
After Watergate, Katharine Graham had given Howard Simons and myself three months off—with pay. So, two days after Nixon resigned, I took off for the foothills of West Virginia to Seldom Seen, the log cabin I had bought in 1966, overlooking the Cacapon River 100 miles west of Washington. It was called “Seldom Seen” because it was seldom seen by anyone—two miles off a state highway down a dirt road, more than occasionally under water. There by myself and increasingly with young Dino, I had rediscovered my love of working in the woods, bush-hogging, brush-burning, and chainsawing my way to an empty mind. I didn’t just unclutter my mind. I emptied it, and found peace.
Now, I was alone—even the telephone wasn’t working—and I began to review my notes. I expressed my judgment of Kennedy in November 1974, eleven years after his death, in the last paragraph of the Introduction to Conversations.
His brief time in power seems to me now to have been filled more with hope and promise than performance. But the hope and promise that he held for America were real, and they have not been approached since his death.
I still believe that. But thirty years after his death, and after hundreds and hundreds of revelations, and scores of assessments and appreciations, new material has convinced me
• that Kennedy screwed around. A lot. That is interesting, particularly to those of us who were unaware of this proclivity during his lifetime, and to those of us who know something about screwing around, but it is hardly disqualifying.
• that Kennedy was sicker with various stomach and back ailments than I had ever imagined.
• that Kennedy had fewer convictions than I thought. As Richard Reeves puts it, Kennedy “had little ideology . . . and . . . less emotion. What convictions he did have . . . he was often willing to suspend, particularly if that avoided confrontation . . . or the risk of being called soft.”
• that Kennedy compartmentalized his life, more than I had known. No one of his friends—or biographers—knew all about him.
• that the truth about Kennedy, like all truths, emerges slowly, revealing itself more to the next generation than the last, more to the last researcher than the first. I suspect that will continue. It always has.
Alone in the woods, I fell into a simple routine: Up at six, a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, and at the typewriter on the front porch by seven-thirty. I worked straight through until one o’clock, typing so hard and fast that my fingers hurt. After a sandwich, I’d head for the woods with ax and chainsaw to attack the clearing project of the day. This was a primitive country cabin, and the clearing projects were endless. I worked in the woods until I was exhausted. Then a shower and supper about six, generally a can of corned beef hash, a glass of milk, and a fresh tomato. In the sack in full daylight, listening to Chuck Thompson, the Orioles baseball announcer, for at least a few innings.
I stayed up there for twenty-three days, the longest I had ever been alone, going a little bit stir crazy in all that silence, stir crazy enough to feel the need to go down to Melvin McDonald’s country store ten miles away, even if I didn’t need provisions. But I was getting four or five thousand words of prose a day out of those notes—and I was clearing a lot of land.
Halfway through one sunny work morning, I got the scare of my life, literally. Typing away, I suddenly saw something move in the woods to my left, about 50 yards away. A deer, I thought at first. But suddenly, I realized the “deer” was wearing a black Amish-looking hat, walking slowly up the hill toward me, and carrying a rifle, broken over his left forearm. I remember thinking with mild apprehension that it wasn’t hunting season for any critter I knew about, as if hunters up there gave much of a damn about hunting seasons.
He drew nearer and nearer without saying a word, until finally I broke the silence with my most casual “Howdy.” He grunted, and I asked him what he was looking for.
“Squirrels,” he said.
“Haven’t seen many for a year or two,” I countered, my eyes on that gun. And then he asked:
“You Ben Bradlee?”
What the hell was he doing up there, poaching on my land? A stranger who knew my name. There wasn’t a living soul within two miles of us, and my heart began to speed up.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m writing a book. It’s so nice and peaceful around here; I can get a lot of work done.”
“A book about Watergate?” he asked. By now he was about ten yards away, just standing there.
“No, it isn’t. It’s about President Kennedy,” I told him, but I didn’t feel much better. If this guy didn’t like what happened to President Nixon, he probably didn’t care for President Kennedy much.
Long silence.
“Well,” he went on, “I might as well say it. I hated everything you guys did to Nixon.” And right then I felt I was going to get drilled between the eyes. They wouldn’t find my body for weeks, and by then it would have been picked clean by the racoons, or the bears. (One had been seen recently, hadn’t it?) I didn’t own a gun. Never had. There was nothing on the porch I could use to defend myself except a half full cup of cold coffee. All I could do was talk.
What did he do for a living? Just been laid off at the Mack Truck assembly plant in Hagerstown. Know my friend (and Seldom Seen neighbor) Bob Harden, an assistant night foreman up there? No. Know anyone up here? The postman who owned a cabin across the river.
He told me that he and his friends at work were members of something that sounded a lot like the Ku Klux Klan. Not reassuring, I thought, and started talking about how so many juries had found wrongdoing. It wasn’t just The Washington Post. All the congressmen, Republicans and Democrats, on the committee who had voted to impeach the president. He just stood there. Not moving. And then he started to walk slowly behind the cabin and on into the woods, never to be seen again.
Ten days later I packed it in, drove back to Washington, stopping off at the barber’s to remove three weeks of beard, and the book was substantially done. But it hadn’t been a relaxing time, and Sally and I were looking forward to a trip to the one place in the world we figured no one had ever heard of Watergate . . . the Brazilian jungle.
The editor of the Jornal de Brasilia, a new liberal daily in the incredible new city carved, from nothing, out of the surrounding savannah, had asked me to inaugurate a lecture series in February. He wanted the Watergate editor to talk about freedom of the press to an audience with no track record of devotion to freedom of the press. The fee was two round-trip first-class tickets on Varig Airlines, and that focused our minds on Brazil. That and the fact that it would be Carnival time. My friend Hector Luisi, the Uruguayan Ambassador to the United States, put us in touch with a remarkable professor of cultural anthropology in Bahia. He showed us his wonderful world, and we danced in the streets with strangers-turned-friends for days and nights. I think Bahia is the only place I’ve ever been where blacks and whites lived in what appeared to us joyous harmony. (There are more than seventy words to describe different degrees of blackness in Bahia.) We had to go to Rio to get to Brasilia, so we danced in the streets there one night, too, and were almost crushed to death.
As we came down the ramp at Brasilia, we were greeted by two men, obviously reporters. Actually, they were new Brazilians, from East Germany. Their first question was intended to explore my feelings about whether the Germanic origins of Haldeman and Ehrlichman played a significant role in the Watergate scandal. I was stunned by the question, and by their inane interpretation of Watergate. Apparently there was to be no escape, and there never really has been.
The audience for my speech turned out to be all male, mostly the politicians who had nothing better to do at night in this sterile city. They seemed more interested in Sally, who had been reluctantly asked (she was the only female guest), than in my impassioned pleadings for any freedom which would include the possibility of bringing down a president. One of the guests was Senator José Sarney. When I saw him next on a trip to the Brazilian rain forest fourteen years later, he was president of Brazil.
From Brasilia we flew to Manaus, 3,000 miles up the Amazon River from Rio on the Atlantic coast, as far as Los Angeles is from Washington, and yet only halfway across this enormous country. Manaus had been the rubber capital of the world, until Goodyear invented synthetic rubber at the beginning of World War II. It had become a ghost town, its lovely Opera House, where the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, had come up the Amazon by boat from Australia to sing, now baking mostly empty in the sun. Manaus lies at the confluence of the crystal-clear Río Negro and the muddy Amazon, and we had hoped to board an African Queen-type tramp steamer to cruise up the Amazon toward Iquitos, on the Peruvian border, stopping to explore jungle villages along the way. But the African Queen-type tramp steamer had sunk without a trace, sometime between the day we made reservations and the day we were due aboard.
Instead, we boarded a 15-foot motorboat for a three-hour trip upriver, dodging giant teak logs, barely submerged, and giant floating islands of clotted hyacinth plants. Sally and I were still in the early stages of our relationship, and I was still learning critical truths about this relationship. All things considered, Ms. Quinn prefers to travel in a private plane, with many pilots, and many engines. Near the bottom of her list of preferred transportation would be a 15-foot motorboat, whose gunwales are only a few inches above a swiftly flowing, muddy river filled with unseen dangers (like piranhas?), untold miles from a Ritz Hotel.
And things were going to get worse. When we got to our “hotel,” it turned out to be a collection of huts with thatched roofs, in the middle of a lot of short, brown people, with hair dyed orange, in grass skirts. One hut was our “room,” with separate beds and an ominous rigging of mosquito netting. The toilet facilities consisted of outhouses down a path barely visible by day, but plainly impossible to follow at night. It was so bad, Sally almost laughed. But not quite. The sun was setting. There was no other “hotel” within miles. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but make the best of it: get drunk. But there was no bar; hence, no booze. There were however a dozen people sitting around a table, actually laughing. On close examination they proved to be Japanese tourists, and they were drinking Suntori Scotch whisky.
“Ask them if we can have some,” Sally nudged me.
“I don’t think they speak English, and I know I don’t speak Japanese,” I answered. In fact, I don’t like to ask strangers for anything.
“Well, I do,” she said, and walked over to the Japanese group, while I watched in awe. Pretty soon, the Japanese were all laughing with Sally. And in a minute they were even singing—what sounded like nursery rhymes. My wife does in fact speak some Japanese. When her father, Colonel “Buffalo Bill” Quinn, was fighting in Korea, the rest of the Quinns were living in Tokyo, surrounded by Japanese servants, and houseboys who taught the children pidgin Japanese. Good enough Japanese to return with her own bottle of Suntori which we consumed, first internally, and later externally to keep jungle-sized mosquitos big as Aichi-99s away. They were the first Japanese I had viewed without hostility since World War II. That’s a fact.
But Suntori or no Suntori, we were out of there ASAP, back to Manaus, and on to Lima and Machu Picchu in Peru, then a week in Yucatán and Cancún, and back to Washington. I get nervous after more than a couple of weeks of vacation.
Soon after we returned from South America, my mother died in 1975 in a private nursing home. “Hardening of the arteries,” they called it then. Alzheimer’s disease, today. The last time I saw her, well before she died, she had railed at me in German. The time before that she told me she had no son named Ben, or Benny or Benjamin. And it was more than I could take, looking at this shell of a woman, who had been so beautiful, so cultured, so bright. Brother Freddy could reach her long after my sister and I, by playing records of music from the twenties and thirties.
In the final stages of editing Conversations with Kennedy, I got a call from Jackie, the first time I had talked to her since the funeral train bearing Bobby Kennedy’s body on the way back to Arlington Cemetery. She wanted to know when I was going to let her read the book, mentioning she had heard I had shown it to Joe Kraft and some others. I told her I was waiting to get it in shape to show it to her, and I did send it off a week later. She didn’t like it, it was obvious when she called a week after that. “It tells more about you than it does about the President,” she said. And she didn’t like the bad language. She said she thought her children would be offended. I was not sure she was coming clean with why she didn’t like it.
Her criticism had hurt and baffled me. The critics would find the book interesting, but too admiring of Kennedy, not critical enough. I had no intention of writing a critical biography. I had wanted simply to tell what that president and his wife were like when they were relaxed and among friends. Someone I admired had once wished aloud for such a book by some friend of Lincoln’s.
I saw Jackie twice after that conversation. Once, Sally and I were arriving at a party hosted by Arthur Schlesinger during the Democratic Convention in New York in 1976, just as she was leaving. I whispered to Sally that Jackie was coming down the street, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi, Jackie.” She sailed by us without a word. Sometime later, Jackie and her two children had the cabana next to us at La Samanna in St. Maarten. For a week we seemed to be staring at each other on the beach, but never ran into each other until one night, when we almost collided as we left our cabana to go up to the restaurant for dinner. From 12 inches away, she looked straight ahead, without a word, and I never saw her again.
One day soon after President Nixon resigned, Woodward sidled into my office to tell me that “Bob Redford is in town,” and would I like to meet him. That’s how I learned that the movie of All the President’s Men was “go.” Redford was charming and professional, and he had a critical advantage over me in our first discussions: he knew he was going to make the movie and I didn’t. And his wish list scared us all. First he wanted to call the paper “The Washington Post” With no clue as to where he was headed, never mind where the story was headed (there was no script, no director, and no cast), we said no. Next, he wanted to use all of our names. For the same reasons, plus a sense that what privacy we had was not long for this world, we said, “No way.” And finally, he wanted to shoot in the newsroom, promising to shoot “only” during the five hours (4:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M.) when a daily newspaper is not under active preparation. We said, “Out of the question.”
We kept them out of the newsroom, but we lost both other battles. We asked Joe Califano if Redford could legally use “The Washington Post,” and while he was at it, to see if our names belonged to us, as we thought. Califano, whom we accused of secretly wanting a cameo role in the movie, surprised us by telling us Redford could legally use any names he wanted. When we told Redford, he said only that his lawyers agreed with Califano.
And thus we embarked on a strange new adventure into the fantasy world of actors playing real people in a fictional version of real history. Nothing in my education had prepared me remotely to cope with these conflicts. None of us was prepared for the mines in that field of fame.
When Woodward told us that Redford had chosen Alan J. Pakula—director of Klute and producer of To Kill a Mockingbird—to direct the movie, we said, “Big deal. How does that help him do ‘Dick Nixon and the Boy Journalists’?”
We were wrong.
Alan Pakula only masquerades as a movie director. He is really a latter-day Freud. If it is the season for his reddish beard, he even looks like Freud, gently listening, analyzing the passing scene, quietly absorbing information and impressions from all around him with a glint in his eyes, and the trace of a quizzical smile on his lips. After it had sunk in that the movie was going to be made, with or without our help, it seemed smart to help wherever our help did not intrude on tomorrow’s newspaper. Redford wanted Pakula to hang around the Post “for a while” to absorb the business. “For a while” turned into a month or so, though before long he disappeared into the woodwork. He asked for three days by my side, sharing phone conversations, news conferences, talks with reporters and editors. He sat unobtrusively on the sofa, but I was really the one on the couch. He learned more about me, my mother, father, brother, sister, hopes and fears than any shrink (five, I think) I’ve ever consulted. And he spent similar time with all of the other Post types involved with Watergate. Post types not directly involved with Watergate watched the filming with mixed emotions. They shared the excitement of watching headline actors, but resented being on the outside looking in.
Redford was in and out of Washington, but he became more or less Woodward’s personal responsibility, once everyone realized that groupies in the Post Building made Redford’s visits overly disruptive. Dustin Hoffman showed up in the city room for a couple of weeks to learn first how reporters were supposed to behave, then how Bernstein did behave. He already knew what Bernstein was like. He could become Bernstein, mimicking his voice so that even Woodward was fooled.
Once, just as we were all leaving for lunch somewhere, the police radio announced that a “jumper” had emerged outside a window on the fifth floor of a building only a short walk from the Post. I took Hoffman with me to show him how one of these tabloid staples unfolded. (Jumper surveys scene. Crowd gathers. Crowd yells, “Jump.” Guy jumps, or he doesn’t jump.) The scenario was unfolding, just as the script provided—until the crowd spotted Hoffman. Then all eyes left the poor jumper to focus on the dashing young actor. Jumper is forgotten. (He didn’t jump.)
A perfect example of the newspaper variation on the Heisenberg principle, named for the German physicist who discovered that the act of measuring, even observing, subatomic particles actually changed the composition of the subatomic particles. The presence of Dustin Hoffman turned an event into a spectacle. Readers—and especially television viewers—must understand the Heisenberg principle before they can understand the news. What is actually happening that is being described by the media? Is Somalia being assaulted in the predawn dark by crack U.S. troops? Or are bewildered GIs being photographed by freelance photographers who have been waiting for them for hours? The difference is often critical.
But nothing about the making of the movie really hit me until there began to be some discussion about who might play Bradlee. There was talk about Richard Widmark, known to me only as the maniac who pushed a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs in Kiss of Death. There was talk about Robert Mitchum, who filled up a screen pretty good—and pretty macho. And then there was talk about Jason Robards, known by all as a great actor, but something of a question mark because of his battles with the bottle. He had just come through a terrible automobile accident, where he had plastered himself against a canyon wall.
When he got the job (for $50,000), he came into Washington for part of one day. A 45-minute lunch—without even a beer—at the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, an hour touring the Post city room, and a quick, early dinner with Sally and me in the kitchen of our Dupont Circle house. Again no booze, and damn little small talk. We found we were about the same age, had fought pretty much the same war in the Pacific Navy, and had the same gravelly voice. Robards and I became friends much later, but that first encounter was short and sweet.
We had fun teasing Katharine about who might play her. Names like Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, and Patricia Neal were tossed out—by us—to make her feel good. And names like Edna May Oliver or Marie Dressler, if it felt like teasing time. And then her role was dropped from the final script, half to her relief.
Jack Warden played Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld, and Marty Balsam played managing editor Howard Simons. Howard, in particular, felt that he and his role in Watergate were fatally shortchanged in the script (and that I and my role were exaggerated), and he never really got over his resentment. Our relationship, which had been such a joyous one, so congenial and close we literally could finish each other’s sentences, was never the same after the film. The version of history he saw in the film made him seethe, and it was only after he left the Post and became curator of Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship program that he regained his full confidence, and we finally regained our friendship. *
Redford re-created the Post newsroom in incredible detail on the Burbank, California, lot. I had promised Marina, now fourteen, a candlelight dinner with Redford (with no idea how I could deliver) if she achieved some scholastic goal, which she theoretically could never attain but miraculously did. One morning we walked onto the set together, and I was stunned. There were the same desks as we had at the Post, in the same colors, and the same layout. The desks were covered with the same “dressing”—which had been swept off the tops of Post desks in Washington and shipped to California. The radiant Hannah Pakula saved the day for me by persuading Redford to dine with Alan and her—and including Marina and me.
When the movie was completed, Redford invited a bunch of us—Katharine, Woodward and Bernstein, myself, Simons, Rosenfeld, about ten of us in all—to a special screening. Each of us sat alone, afraid to react or to be caught reacting. And when it was over, no one said a word, until finally Redford pleaded with us, “For God’s sake, someone say something,” and most of us mumbled our general approval.
Anyway, I thought the movie was damned good. I thought the actors were great. I thought the director was great, and I am amazed that I had no idea at the time of the shadow that movie would cast. No idea, for instance, that all that generations to come would ever know about Watergate would be in that 147-minute film.
We still faced the ordeal of the formal opening in Washington, at the Kennedy Center. “Ordeal” because the goddamn reporters and TV types were determined to follow the actors around until they cornered them with the people they played and asked us the inane and inevitable questions. “Do you think Redford (Hoffman) (Robards) was accurate in portraying you? Is that what it was really like?” I developed a slew of different answers, and then felt like a jerk trying them all out, polishing them, to see which ones played the best.
Straight: “It’s hard to condense twenty-six months into two hours, but I thought it was really interesting.”
Facetious: “Pretty good, except someone always answered the phones.”
Self-deprecating: “It was hard to concentrate. I’d like to see it again, but you guys would spot me leaving the theater and tell everyone I was going over and over again.”
The Wiggins rule about staying off the stage was in shambles. There we all were in the audience, but we were really on the stage.
All the President’s Men certified star status for Woodward and Bernstein. They hadn’t spent much time basking in the Pulitzer, the book, and the movie, before starting in on book two, The Final Days. Carl had money in his pocket for the first time in his life, and he spent it as fast as he got it, and reveled in everything about fame. Bob bought a house, and socked every spare dime into investments. Carl loved the midnight glitter. Bob loved the midnight oil.
Woodward and Bernstein were still creating their legacy, but already new reporters coming on stream were plainly looking for the same kind of stardom, using what they thought was the same kind of brash persistence they’d seen in the movie. We joked about bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young Woodsteins coming back from covering a fire in Prince Georges County, reporting that the fire chief was anti-Semitic, there was gasoline in the hoses, and a guy who looked like Howard Hunt had been seen fleeing into the woods. Some of my colleagues in the business started making speeches about the need to rein in the young hotheads before they got newspapers into trouble. I think now we worried too much about the trouble and not enough about the newspapering. After all, good editors and good copy editors can prevent the excesses of exuberance; it is not that hard to take the elbows out of a lead like:
“Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the mayor today refused to admit that he had accepted sexual favors from the wife of an associate trying to sell the city a new health plan.”
But there is no question that the Watergate legacy did include a major infusion of bright, young, motivated and talented men and women, who might have drifted off into other professions. Scotty Reston, the dean of Washington journalists, gave a speech about this time, urging the press not to relax their investigative pressure just because the public was leery of going through another Watergate, and just because some editors were listening to vague complaints that the press had accumulated too much power. Just the opposite, he said. Now was the time to pour it on, turn up the volume. Take a look at everything government was doing. Watergate had proved they weren’t playing by the rules. He was right, but for the most part his peers were not listening.
However, it was neither the influx of hungry young journalists eager for notoriety nor the notoriety itself that made journalism forever different after Watergate. But journalism was forever changed by the assumption—by most journalists—that after Watergate government officials generally and instinctively lied when confronted by embarrassing events. “Look for the lies” replaced “Look for the woman” or “Follow the money” as the new shibboleth of journalism.
Most journalists working their way slowly up the ladder from cub reporter on small newspapers quickly learned that some public officials lie when cornered. I think back now to Jimmy O’Neil, the police chief of Manchester, New Hampshire (and later national commander of the American Legion), who lied to me rather than admit that a trap which had been set for a rapist misfired and resulted in another rape. But that involved only a small-town chief of police and, of course, the victim.
I think back now to the lies of Senator Joe McCarthy, but these were the lies of a mind gone manic.
I remember President Eisenhower authorizing lying about the U-2 incident in 1960, when the Russians shot down our supersecret spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers. I didn’t have any trouble rationalizing that lie, even as I wished for a world where such subterfuges were unnecessary.
And in that same category I remember Kennedy suddenly returning to Washington in October 1962, “with a bad cold,” when in fact he had returned to cope with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Almost forgivable, I felt when I learned the truth, two weeks later.
But in Watergate, President Richard Milhous Nixon lied over and over again with intent to deceive the American public and thereby save his ass from the consequences of his crimes.
In Watergate, Attorney General John Mitchell, the chief law enforcement officer of the republic, lied with intent to obstruct the justice he was charged with imposing. He, too, lied to save his ass from the consequences of his crimes, and he went to jail for it. The only U.S. Attorney General in American history to go to jail.
All of these lies were on-the-record lies, before television cameras, before reporters, on the telephone, before large audiences, in front of grand juries, and in front of each other. These lies marked a generation of Washington reporters, generally considered by every generation of editors to be the finest reporters in the land.
The liars went to jail, and spent the rest of their lives trying to live down their disgrace. But the reporters went on to report tomorrow’s news, with permanently jaundiced eyes.
Twenty years after Watergate, at some Twentieth Century Fund conference on journalism, I remember telling Republican Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa, a man full of common sense and compassion, that I found it easier to cope with Washington by assuming that no one ever told the complete truth in Washington. At least the first time. I was exaggerating to make my point about the new skepticism of journalists when I said that Vietnam, followed by Watergate, had changed the rules forever. Leach was appalled.
No matter how many spin doctors were provided by how many sides of how many arguments, from Watergate on, I started looking for the truth after hearing the official version of a truth. And it didn’t make much difference whether it was George Bush telling the world that Clarence Thomas was the best-qualified Supreme Court candidate in the land, and that his color had nothing to do with his appointment. Or Ronald Reagan saying he knew nothing about Iran-Contra. Or Tonya Harding saying she knew nothing about the knee-capping of Nancy Kerrigan . . . to widen the circle beyond governmental lies.
Journalism after Watergate changed in another important way, more subtle and harder to define. And I realize I may be speaking about myself, here, although I believe I am speaking about my colleagues, too. I had already declined an invitation to join the newspaper establishment’s Valhalla, the Gridiron Club. I felt that newspaper people and newsmakers should keep a civil distance from each other.
Watergate marked the final passage of journalists into the best seats of the establishment. This trip had begun long before when men such as Walter Lippmann and Arthur Krock separated themselves from the rough-and-tumble, hard-drinking journalists made famous in the 1920s in Hecht and MacArthur’s Front Page, and emerged in the 1930s as leaders of a new tribe of intelligent, educated, eminently presentable newspaper people, mostly male. In their wake came the Scotty Restons, the Alsop brothers, Marquis Childs, Ed Lahey, Roscoe Drummond, and finally the pioneers of television like Murrow, Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite, who mixed easily with leaders of government and business. If they all weren’t making Wall Street money yet, they were well on their way to respectability. Watergate was the last leg of this trip, bestowing the final accolade of establishmentarianism, or the semblance of it, on the daily press.
With membership in the establishment went a heightened sense of responsibility. At least I began to feel subconsciously that what the world did not need right away was another investigation that might again threaten the foundations of democracy. What the newspaper did not need right away was another fight to the finish with another president—especially a Republican president, and especially a successful fight. Without the suggestion of a formal decision, I think the fires of investigative zeal were allowed to bank. There wasn’t all that much to investigate, nor that much time to investigate it, during the Ford administration. (In the story conference room on the news floor of The Washington Post hangs a large framed color photograph of a smiling President Ford, superimposed with the caption: “I got my job through The Washington Post.” It originally appeared in a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” and it is cheerfully signed: “To Ben Bradlee and all my friends at The Washington Post . . . Jerry Ford.” I can’t think of another president who would have done the same thing.)
The Carter administration fascinated the Washington press corps for its regional stamp and religious quality. But except for the occasional excesses of a Bubba-like Bert Lance, the small-town Georgia banker and Carter friend who resigned in September 1977 as Budget Director in a controversy over his tangled financial affairs, there was still remarkably little smoke to suggest much of a fire to reporters.
It wasn’t until the arrival of Reagan and Bush that the post-Watergate caution of editors was again visible. At last there was plenty to investigate: the scandals in public housing, the collapse of the savings and loan industry, and especially the Iran-Contra scandal. Lieutenant Colonel Ollie North’s erratic zeal led the White House into some unconstitutional adventures that threatened democracy more than Watergate.
The press, to its discredit; never tumbled to the housing or the savings and loan stories, and editors have to take the blame. The press did investigate Iran-Contra to a fare-thee-well, however, and still never managed to engage the nation’s attention or conscience. The public’s throat was never seized by Iran-Contra as it had been seized by Watergate. Ronald Reagan was popular; there was no one to impeach him on the Hill. He was near the end of his term.
Nothing had bugged me more during and right after Watergate than the know-nothing charge that the press had gone after Nixon because he was a Republican and the press consisted of a bunch of liberal Democrats. “You guys would never have gone after Kennedy,” went the dreary charge, “if he had been involved in Watergate.” Truth is, at the Post anyway, we were always praying for good Democratic scandals. . . and found more than our share. But that criticism, that suggestion of bias, wore me down over the years, I now think, and I know we walked the extra mile to accept the official versions of events from the White House—explanations that I doubt we would have accepted from the right-hand men of Democratic presidents. And the public was glad to go along.