Over the years, criticism had regularly forced me into thinking about our business, as well as the Post’s performance in that business. The press’s vision of itself had changed drastically with the Vietnam War and the rise of the Counter-Culture, and with Watergate itself. The best newspapers were still involved in the pursuit of truth with conscience, and newly determined to be interesting, useful, and entertaining in the process. But at the bottom of the barrel, the stain of the tabloids was spreading with the help of television into what could be called “kerosene journalism.” In this genre of journalism, reporters pour kerosene on whatever smoke they can find, before they determine what’s smoking and why. The flames that result can come from arson, not journalism.
I’ve always had trouble developing theories of journalism that were much more sophisticated than the motto of Miss Fiske at Dexter, my old grade school: “Our best today; better tomorrow.” Put out the best, most honest newspaper you can today, and put out a better one the next day. Or more productive than my old high school motto: “Age quod agis”—Do what you do. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.
But theories of journalism are a pale imitation of journalism itself. Stories are for reporters and editors. Theories are for critics, and teachers. And it was occurring to me every now and then that I was spending more time on the principles and process of journalism than I was spending on the practice of journalism. And that made me tired.
Cruising through my fifties, I had thought little of retirement. Why should I quit the best job in journalism? But soon after Quinn was born, and especially after his heart surgery, I began to realize that I had already had the best story I’d ever be involved with, that no matter how many other great stories were coming, we weren’t going to do better than Watergate. Sometime in early 1984, I had received a notice announcing that under certain circumstances I would soon be eligible for Social Security. I said a couple of holy shits, and talked to Sally and to Don Graham.
Fortunately, neither one was interested in my quitting—especially Sally—but Don and I agreed to talk about it every so often until the right time became the right time. When Len Downie was picked to succeed Howard Simons as managing editor, the paper finally had someone the right age to succeed me. And it became increasingly obvious that he also had the right skills, including talents that made him the first really good administrator to be managing editor in anyone’s memory.
I felt great. Weekend tennis matches with Sy Hersh and Cody Shearer were still fun and satisfying, especially when I could persuade friends like Bo Jones, the Post’s lawyer and a great player—now president and general manager—to be my partner. Or like reporter Art Brisbane, now vice president and editor at the Kansas City Star. Or like reporter David Ignatius, now the Post’s business and financial editor. My life with Sally was exciting and full of surprises. Fatherhood had turned out to have no down side. Going home at night was as satisfying as going to work.
Then one day at our regular Tuesday breakfast when I was sixty-seven, Don asked, “How about working until you hit seventy?” and he had a deal. Probably because Downie was so supportive of the deal, I started looking forward to a change. Downie as my successor was not quite a done deal, but my job was his to lose. And he won it in a walk. The announcement of my retirement was made on June 20, 1991, effective September I.
On July 31, 1991, the day had finally come, after almost twentynine years in The Washington Post’s newsroom. If the first ten thousand days or so were unrelievedly wonderful, that last day was fantastic: the first in a memorable series of goodbyes which I have managed to prolong as something called Vice-President-at-Large to a point where “Forgotten, but not gone” may no longer be funny.
I don’t remember much until story conference, when everyone showed up in Turnbull & Asser shirts with the white collars I favored at the time. At almost $100 a shirt, few of them sported the genuine article, but the Art Department had provided ersatz white collars for the cheapos. Instead of reporting on real stories being considered for the August I front page, the various editors described stories calculated to make fun of certain prejudices they claimed I had developed. From National editor Fred Barbash came the offer of a story combining both the Big Bang theory of the earth’s origin and the ozone layer, about which I had been sometimes skeptical. Mary Hadar talked about an upcoming National Gallery exhibition on “the Phalluses of Phoenicia,” reflecting my concern about what I believed to be the Style Section’s increasing preoccupation with erotica. Business editor David Ignatius reported the “sad news” that Turnbull & Asser had been acquired by Washington’s own Mattress Discounters. And on and on.
A little later a considerable crowd assembled around the news desk for a “program,” which lasted so long Don Graham cracked that Liz Kastor’s newborn son had grown old enough during the speeches to say a few words himself. The proceedings still read unbelievably flattering three years after the fact.
Len Downie, who has risen to every occasion he has faced for the last thirty years with natural grace, started things off by saying that “Ben created the newspaper we work for now . . . he has a way of approaching journalism and life that will remain inside all of us for as long as we work in this room. So, long after today, Ben, this is still your newsroom.”
Walter Pincus, whose infamy as a convoluted after-dinner speaker is well known and well deserved, followed with convoluted but warm and emotional words about “how much fun we’ve all had doing what you think you love for somebody who you love doing it with.” A truly Pincus sentence.
Meg Greenfield, whose humor and wisdom I had fallen for thirty-three years earlier when she was working for The Reporter magazine as an editor-writer, said, “The Lord made only one Ben Bradlee, and as we editorial writers say, on balance, that was a good decision, because . . . what would be left for the other Ben Bradlee to do?” I loved it deep down when she said, “The one thing Ben did that I think was the greatest . . . is that Ben made the Post dangerous to people in government.”
Dick Harwood told the assembled crowd that he had decided he’d like us to work together when he’d first met me at a Newsweek cocktail party before a White House Correspondents’ dinner. “Ben was in the middle of the room—standing on his head, and I thought . . . that guy’s going to go somewhere,” he said, before closing with something about “a great editor and a great pal.”
Tom Lippman was a great general assignment man wherever he had been—from Cairo to Chevy Chase—and our resident expert on grammar and usage. He told about a day when the fabulous Debbie Regan, then my secretary, approached him after taking some dictation looking extremely uncomfortable. “She hemmed and hawed a little bit,” Tom reported, “and said, ‘Look, I have to ask you something. . . . Is dickhead one word or two?’ “
Tom Wilkinson, in charge of newsroom hiring at the time, remembered an instance when he sent a prospective candidate in to me to be interviewed. “This guy had done well in other newsroom interviews and had good, solid clips, but he was a hesitant, softspoken, reticent type,” recalled Wilkinson. “I went in after the interview, expecting a discussion about the nuances of the guy’s clips, his strengths and weaknesses, things like that. What I got from Ben was: ‘Ehhh. Nothing clanks when he walks.’ End of the discussion.”
Sally Quinn is the kind of woman who takes your breath away, mine anyway, or at least she makes you hold your breath. That’s what I was doing when she got up and reminded everyone that at her goodbye party in the Style Section eighteen years early (“At that time I called him Mr. Bradlee,” she revealed with only a trace of triumph), I had toasted her with “Forgotten, but not gone,” and she returned the compliment, with more than a trace of triumph.
Bob Woodward and Richard Cohen added their own compliments, and then Mary Hadar got up and recited a list of my favorite Style headline (“You Can Put Pickles Up Yourself”); my favorite Style story: a spelling bee story in which we misspelled the name of the winner (topped the next year by a spelling bee story in which we listed the wrong spellings for the winning words); my favorite White House party guest list (two of the “guests” were dead). To combat my reputation as someone who couldn’t keep a secret, she “revealed” that I had had triple bypass surgery “many years ago.” Not!
By the time David Broder and Haynes Johnson, whose decision to join us had meant so much to the Post, got through, Don Graham was plainly worried that we would miss the Capital edition deadline. He got up and started: “In a game scheduled for 27 innings, I feel all the excitement of the guy called in to work the top of the 22nd.” Then he added, “Thank God the person making [the] decisions in the last 26 years showed us how to do it with verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story, and the number one desire, the day he walked in here, of getting the best staff of reporters and editors and photographers in the United States to join him in putting out a great newspaper. It’s Bradlee’s paper, that’s what anybody would say about us today and hopefully, Benjy, they’re going to say it for a long time to come.” I feel reasonably sure that if I owned The Washington Post I would never say it was somebody else’s paper, but I loved it.
Mike Getler closed the proceedings—and brought me to tears—by reading a telegram from the valiant Nora Boustany, our great correspondent in wartorn Beirut:
Whenever I found myself alone on the streets of Beirut, I would just shrug off the shelling, the gunmen, and the dark corners, telling myself there is this distinguished eminence up there who really appreciates and understands the true meaning of courage in journalism. I always made it to my destination safely and with the story. I find myself in Beirut again. The streets are a little calmer now, but for me you will always be the grand brave man of the news who watched over me and made me want to give a little more. Thank you for giving us all something so special to believe in. (CBK: Your fan forever). Nora
Sally and I spent August in East Hampton, preparing for the official retirement ceremonies when we returned. In our absence, the stylish and thoughtful—and poetic—senior senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caused the following to be inserted in the Congressional Record for August 2, 1991:
MR. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, It appears that Thursday was Ben Bradlee’s last day as executive editor of the Washington Post. We shall not see his like again. But the standards he set, and the things he did, will be with us in song and story for ages hence.
O rare Ben Bradlee,
His reign has ceased.
But his nation stands.
Its strength increased.
I ask unanimous consent that it be ordered that a flag be flown from the Nation’s Capitol in honor of Ben Bradlee and that the same be presented to him.
I am embarrassed to say how much I loved that gesture then—and now.
Readers may be getting sick of all this good stuff, and if they are they can skip ahead, but damned if there wasn’t another goodbye—for all Post employees—six weeks later, after everyone returned from vacation. Poor Graham, Downie, and Woodward had to get up again for repeat performances. Don said he had spent his summer reading War and Peace and “all Bradlee’s exit interviews.”
Len described the closing moments of the first farewell: “After a couple of hours of raucous and teary farewells, Ben tried to walk quietly from his office to the elevator. Without planning or instigation, first a few, then more and more reporters and editors stood and applauded until everyone was on their feet joining in the ovation. . . . We would follow this man over any hill, into any battle, no matter what lay ahead.”
Woodward read a letter from Bernstein (“It was the excellence, the fun, the decency, the toughness and the empathy”), noting gracefully that “Carl could always say it better.”
Then Buchwald brought everyone back to earth.
First, he welcomed everyone to “the 1,756th farewell party for Ben Bradlee” and announced that American Airlines was offering frequent-flyer miles for every Bradlee farewell party people attended. He could sing Bradlee’s praises, but that would be done at future ceremonies staged by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Burning Tree Anti-Defamation League, the Estonian-American Editors Association, etc.
My longtime hero (and predecessor) Russ Wiggins knocked me out with this: “Public opinion fastens upon the image of a public man the way people hang their hats on a hat rack. They often fasten on his idiosyncrasies, and Ben has some—pretty bizarre some of them. And they have sometimes put into eclipse the great abilities he really has as a professional newspaperman, and I will not add an extensive tribute except to say these too few words: this is a great newspaper editor.”
I was more than ready to quit when I was so far ahead, but poor Katharine Graham, who had missed the newsroom bash, had to stand up and be counted. She weighed in with fantastic talk about “eternal optimism,” “unyielding commitment to the highest ethical standards,” “independence, outspokenness, humor and . . . most of all . . . courage.”
“It’s outrageous to say,” she wound up, “that I was ever in love with Ben. The only editor I ever was in love with was Russ Wiggins.”
What was outrageous was the not-so-secret pleasure I got from all these kind words. Man can’t help but seek evidence of his own effectiveness, and there is no measure of effectiveness—not titles, nor salaries, nor prizes—equal to the esteem of one’s peers.
Even before the ringing in my ears from all this had stopped, I had begun to equate “retirement” with “moving out,” and “moving out” with “moving on.” Maybe this was simply more of the excessive optimism which I have always shared with Pollyanna. More likely, this was more of the coping mechanism sublimation, which was identified by the Grant Study psychologists as one of the strengths that otherwise normal people use to great advantage.
In his book Adaptation to Life, Grant Study director and psychologist George Vaillant describes a character he named Frederick Lion, who I have been told is me in camouflage. He describes Lion variously as “someone who combined dignity and arrogance with infectious warmth,” someone who learned to cope by sublimation—the expression of things that are personally unacceptable (retirement?) in constructive and acceptable forms.
In any event, as soon as I had settled for “moving on,” I began to wonder about the amount of time I had spent with problems I had almost no capacity to fix. The environment, for instance. I had no real understanding of the threat to the environment until I took an incredible journey in January 1989 to the Brazilian rain forest with Dr. Tom Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution and a congressional delegation led by Tim Wirth. That sensitized me, but it didn’t do much for the environment. I had sensitized myself to other great issues, too, like Vietnam. Overpopulation and its concomitants, abortion and birth control. Communism. Human rights, and the incredible abuses of human rights. And permeating everything that isn’t right about our society, the eternal, apparently unsolvable problems of race. They resisted solution, in spite of my enlightenment.
And I began to wonder why certain milestones of a normal Washington year were beginning to blur in my mind, run together like watercolors on cloth. When the history of the world is definitively written, what’s the difference between the State of the Union message and the economic message to Congress? I could still recognize some difference in politicians’ characters, but less and less in their utterances.
And truth to tell, the truth itself was getting harder and harder to find. Vietnam and Watergate had encouraged people to lie whenever the truth became uncomfortable. And no one was immune. Good people, moral people were corrupted by circumstances over which they exercised substantial control, but no responsibility. The more I looked for the truth among newsmakers, the more obfuscation I found, the more questions I had.
For all these reasons, I was drawn to thinking small, attracted to problems I could do something about, drawn to projects I could conceptualize, measure, and complete. Nothing helped me to this conclusion more than Porto Bello, a point of land on the St. Mary’s River seventy miles south of Washington, across from St. Mary’s City—the first capital of Maryland, the first Catholic community founded in the new world by the British (1634) and, after Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Plymouth, the oldest.
In 1990, when Sally heard about it at dinner one night, Porto Bello was also the ruined shell of an eighteenth-century house, open to the elements on two sides. She was sitting next to Ted Koppel and heard him describe a ruined manor house across the St. Mary’s River from the early-eighteenth-century house that he and his wife, Grace Ann, had fixed up. Unbeknownst to me, Sally and her mother drove down to southern Maryland the next morning, found Porto Bello, even found the mother and father of the owner. That night, casual as can be, she told me she had seen this interesting house and wanted me to take a look at it. No pressure, no threats. I felt we needed another house like we needed holes in the head, given Grey Gardens in East Hampton and the cabin in West Virginia, remote as it was. But I went down to see it, and I was a goner.
It quite simply blew my mind. This gorgeous wreck, looking down the St. Mary’s River, across the Potomac into Virginia, surrounded on three sides by water. Now, five years later, the manor house has two small wings, a sunroom on one side, a kitchen on the other. Two deteriorating buildings have been converted into a guest cottage and a study (for me). A dock has been rebuilt. Two crumbling barns have been given glorious new life by Amish craftsmen; a chicken house and corncrib have been transformed into the caretaker’s house.
With Sally’s creative skills concentrated on the house, my more pioneer abilities have been spent on the land, gone literally to seed and ruin. With all my toys—tractor, bush hog, chain saw, axe, grub hooks, and the like—every morning I am there I take off for the site of the day. I clear hedgerows, pull down vines clinging to high trees, root out brambles that choke dogwoods, tulip poplars, holly trees, pecans, walnuts, cedars, locusts, beech, and oak. I burn mountains of brush whenever the wind and the weather are right. I find remnants of barbed-wire fences (too often with my chain saw) deep into wooded areas, the boundaries of old fields that have been unplowed for twenty years. I comb half a mile of shoreline almost every weekend, looking for the good and the bad stuff left by high tides, just as I comb catalogues for things to plant and tools to plant them with. I find trees to transplant whenever we are flush enough to rent the required giant tree spade in the fall or the winter. I empty my head—not to concentrate on anything, just to get it empty, to free it from concerns that occupy my week. Now, more often than not, young Quinn is working by my side, as I worked by my father’s side in the Beverly woods more than sixty years ago. We collect objects—mostly discarded from old farm equipment, like plowshares, or harness equipment and, every now and then, an arrowhead or hand-forged farm gadgets. We have a museum of these objects on a barn wall.
One morning right after I left the city room, I got a call from the gruff-talking Maryland governor, William Donald Schaefer, whom I barely knew.
“Bradlee,” he growled, “I got a job for you,” but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He made me come down to Annapolis for breakfast the next morning. His job offer was to be chairman of something called the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission, charged with promoting the development of the glories of Maryland’s first capital, which, as the first Catholic settlement, was also the first experiment in religious toleration in this country. As the plain old St. Mary’s City Commission, it was on its way to extinction—the legislature had abolished it, added the word “Historic” to signify meaningful change, and the governor had thirteen appointments to make. I asked Schaefer if he was going to load up the commission with a lot of folks in his political debt.
“Well,” he said, “I didn’t owe you a goddamn thing.” And I signed on. It was a tough job for someone used to having an idea one day and seeing it in the newspaper the next day. A state bureaucracy is close enough to an immovable object for the fainthearted to faint away. As usual, my solution was to find the very best person to do the heavy lifting, and we found Sara Patton, who was running Jamestown Settlement, a heavy lifter if ever there was one. We are determined to rebuild the first Catholic church in America, on the existing foundations in the middle of our 830-acre archeological site—an intriguing challenge for a twice-divorced WASP.
The chairman of the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission is, ex officio, a trustee of St. Mary’s College, and that has become an exciting bonus for me. St. Mary’s is a small liberal arts honors college, state supported but independent, with its own board of trustees, which includes Steven Muller, former president of Johns Hopkins University, as chairman; Paul Nitze, former Secretary of the Navy and special adviser to President Reagan; and General Andrew Goodpaster, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and retired commander-in-chief of U.S. European Command. I have become a fan of St. Mary’s College, especially during the times when Harvard is trying to raise another zillion dollars, and I think how important ten thousand dollars is to smaller, less wellknown institutions.
Moving out of the city room freed me from the restrictions which prevent editors from playing an active role in pro bono causes. The theory is that editors and reporters can’t be unbiased if they have to report on themselves. The treasurer of the school on whose board you sit runs off with the funds and the senior class president, for instance. For me, that meant a chance to pay back Children’s Hospital, first and foremost. I was asked, and quickly agreed, to chair a capital fund drive for $40 million in five years . . . the most money ever raised for a private charity in Washington. That is really heavy lifting, but with Sally as vice chairman, we had $28.5 million pledged after the first three years. I take potential donors through the hospital, always drawn to the intensive care unit, always drawn to the bed that Quinn occupied, with five or six tubes stuck into his eight-pound body, and always in tears.
My charitable giving has changed during my lifetime. First, when I was a journalist, all gifts were anonymous. I even endowed a chair at the Kennedy School at Harvard anonymously, trying—awkwardly, I now think—to pay back The Washington Post, whence the funds came, and to thank Kennedy, who was so involved with my interest in the intersection of the press and public policy. But in more than five years since the gift was completed, Harvard has not been able to come up with the right professor for the chair. Similar funds given to a smaller institution with at least comparable needs would have had a far greater impact.
All that plus writing this book had pretty much filled up my dance card when the charismatic Dr. Anthony John Francis O’Reilly made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. With one hat, Tony O’Reilly is the chairman and CEO of the multibillion-dollar H. J. Heinz Co. I knew him as a fellow Washington Post board member, along with his Irish CEO cronies: Jim Burke of Johnson & Johnson and Don Keogh of the Coca-Cola Company. With another hat, O’Reilly runs his own media company—and I joined the board—with major newspapers in Ireland and South Africa, nearly half of the Independent in London, plus newspapers and radio stations and outdoor advertising in Australia and a smaller share of the largest newspaper in New Zealand.
None of this has much to do with the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate, or national security, but highlights are only highlights, and these highlights are behind me. They are not a life. I miss the times when a story just plain consumes the readers, when people seem to talk about nothing else, whether it’s momentous, like Nixon resigning, or simply extraordinary, like Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband’s tallywhacker. But I don’t miss the administrative meetings—budgets, diversity, reengineering. I don’t miss the process stories: the President said, the Senate voted, the court ruled, the Pentagon announced.
I do hang out a little. That’s part of the Vice President at Large’s charter, so I don’t miss that too much. But I miss the excitement of the stories that quicken your pulse.
That’s when a newspaperman can get on with the job he was born to do. Not many of us were lucky enough to get that exhilarating opportunity. Again and again and again.