Yours in Truth Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Jeff Himmelman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO THE FOLLOWING FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED MATERIAL:

  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from Personal History by Katharine Graham, copyright © 1997 by Katharine Graham. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Benjamin C. Bradlee: Excerpts from Conversations with Kennedy by Ben Bradlee, copyright © 1975 by Benjamin C. Bradlee. Electronic rights throughout the world are controlled by the author. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Benjamin C. Bradlee.

  Simon & Schuster, Inc., and Benjamin C. Bradlee: Excerpts from A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures by Ben Bradlee, copyright © 1995 by Benjamin C. Bradlee. Rights throughout the world, excluding North America, are controlled by the author. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and Benjamin C. Bradlee.

  UCLICK Universal Uclick: DOONESBURY © 1974 G. B. Trudeau. All rights reserved. Used by permission of UNIVERSAL.

  Image credits can be found on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Himmelman, Jeff.

  Yours in truth: a personal portrait of Ben Bradlee / Jeff Himmelman.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60364-1

  1. Bradlee, Benjamin C. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.B6615H56 2012

  070.92—dc23

  [B] 2011044180

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1_r1

  For my grandparents

  To understand perfectly a new country, new situation, the new characters you confront on an assignment, is impossible. To understand more than half, so that your report will have significant correlation with what is happening, is hard. To transmit more than half of what you understand is a hard trick, too, far beyond the task of the so-called creative artist, who if he finds a character in his story awkward can simply change its characteristics.… It is possible, occasionally, to get something completely right—a scene, or a pattern of larceny, or a man’s mind. These are the reporter’s victories, as rare as pitcher’s home runs.

  —BCB memorandum to himself, for

  “How to Read a Newspaper,” a book he

  imagined but never wrote, November 14, 1990

  (quoting A. J. Liebling from The Press)

  When Alan Pakula, who was the director for All the President’s Men, was assembling the cast, he and the actors decided that they wanted Jason Robards to play Bradlee. He said they would pay him $50,000, a lot of money for Jason Robards at that time, and they gave him the script. And Robards was delighted. He went home and read it, and then he came back to meet with Pakula and the actors and said, “I can’t play this part. Have you read the script?” And they said, “Yes, we have, what’s wrong?” And he said, “Ben Bradlee, all he does in the script is run around and say ‘Where’s the fucking story?’ ” And they said to him, “What you’re going to have to do is figure out fifteen ways to play that so it’s different, so it’s elegant,” and that’s actually what he did.

  The genius of Bradlee will never be reduced to a sentence or a paragraph, but it is: he understood that that’s what the executive editor does. He runs around and finds different and elegant ways to say, “Where’s the fucking story?”

  —Bob Woodward, at the awards ceremony for

  the Illinois Prize for Lifetime Achievement

  in Journalism, October 24, 2008

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Opening

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Impact

  News

  Fate

  Prez

  Mums

  Impact

  Substance

  Gemstone

  Woodstein

  Beginning

  Go

  Fall

  Z

  Doubt: (Part One)

  Doubt: (Part Two)

  Mountain Top

  Coda

  Jewel Thief

  Queens

  Fame

  His Nibs

  Christmas Afternoon

  Supernigger

  Junkies

  Defense

  Prize

  Fallout

  Full Circle

  Ben

  Acknowledgments

  Image Credits

  About the Author

  Letters

  News Clippings

  OPENING

  I

  I first met Ben years ago, when I was working as a research assistant for Bob Woodward. One spring night Bob and his wife, Elsa, threw a book party for a friend of theirs and invited me to join them when I knocked off work.

  By the time I finished up, the party was in full swing. I walked out of my third-floor office, past the framed apology from Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, that Bob keeps at the top of the circular staircase, and then down two swirling flights to the ground floor. The living room, study, and kitchen of the house were jammed with journalists of all stripes and sizes. I had grown up in Washington and should probably have known who everybody was, but I didn’t. I was twenty-five years old and green in almost every way, a kid wandering through a grown-up dinner party.

  I took some wine off a tray and looked for a familiar face. After a while I spied Bob standing next to the island in the middle of the kitchen. He was talking with a group of people, one of whom, an older guy, had his hand on Bob’s shoulder. They were laughing.

  When I got closer, I realized that the older guy was Ben Bradlee. I may not have known who anybody else at the party was, but I knew who he was. I’d seen All the President’s Men, and, like most people who saw that movie, I came away with the impression that Ben was the living avatar of old-school journalistic integrity and rough-hewn charm. I’d also read his memoir during a slow day or two on the third floor, lingering over the pictures, marveling as much at the stories of women throwing themselves at him in the dimly lit arcades of Paris as at his descriptions of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.

  Bob always spoke of Ben reverently, respectfully. On rare occasions, which I always enjoyed, he would pause while talking about something we were working on to say what Bradlee might have done in a similar situation. We’d usually end up laughing, because a strategically placed “fuck” was involved most of the time. I was excited to meet him.

  Bob turned, saw me lurking, and when the conversational waters parted he introduced me.

  “Hiya!” Ben boomed. He was wearing a blazer and a shirt with an open collar, and he had a drink in his hand. As we shook hands, my mind raced back through his memoir, through everything Bob had told me, desperate for some nugget of casual conversational gold that would show him I was worth getting to know. The right phrase would identify me as a young writer of promise, and before long I’d be cozied up to the table at one of Ben’s legendary dinner parties in Georgetown, sucking down cocktails and lapping my peers.

  That particular bubble burst on contact. Before I could even get “It’s a pleasure to meet you” out of my mouth, Ben had turned back to the conversation he’d been in before I pulled up. I stuck around for a few minutes, hoping that some fortuitous short circuit might route the conversation back to me, but it didn’t. I finished my wine and went h
ome.

  It’s odd to me now, how well I remember it: my excitement, the flash of his greeting, the dreamlike feeling that a door had opened and closed before I even knew it was there. I had no idea then that I would ever come to know Ben. But, looking back on it, that first meeting—all five seconds of it—contained most of the basics. You remember him. He’s better-looking than you are. You want to please him. And if you hope to gain or keep his attention, you had better be quick on the draw. Otherwise, as he loves to say, the caravan moves on without you.

  I didn’t see Ben again until 2007, when Bob found himself shorthanded for a couple of months and asked if I could help him out. One day he poked his head into my office and told me that he and Elsa had been out for dinner the night before with Ben and his wife, the journalist Sally Quinn, and the topic of Ben doing another book had come up.

  “I told them they should hire you,” Bob said. “You should do it.”

  Ten days later, I pulled up in front of Ben and Sally’s exquisite home on N Street, in Georgetown, for an interview. The house and grounds take up almost an entire city block. As Evelyn, the maid, led me through the foyer and into the formal dining room, I tried to take in as much as I could without ogling. The phrase “Ben and Sally” has been synonymous with high Washington society and A-list parties for more than thirty years. The house, particularly the grand ground floor with its large foyer and cavernous living room, looked like a movie set.

  Ben emerged from a door off the den with the remains of that morning’s newspaper in his hand, and we all sat down at the table. Sally did most of the talking. Ben’s memoir, published in the fall of 1995, had been called A Good Life. As Sally imagined it, this book would be “Lessons from a Good Life,” filled with short and inspiring stories about Ben’s time at The Washington Post interspersed with some words of wisdom from the man himself. She had the entire book mapped out already, down to the cover art.

  “Ben’s a writer, so of course he wants to write his own book,” Sally said at one point, to be sure I knew what the rules were.1 Ben rolled his eyes.

  Two weeks later, I walked down to the Post building on 15th Street to meet with Ben at his office, on my own. On the phone, Sally had told me how thrilled Ben had been about our interview, how excited he was to get started, that he might huff and puff a little but that really he wanted everything exactly as she had described it to me. I didn’t believe her, but I wanted to, so I went.

  Ben’s secretary, Carol, picked me up in the lobby and brought me up to Ben’s office on the seventh floor. He was tilted back in his chair, reading a newspaper behind a great oval desk. A set of overstuffed bookshelves lined the wall behind him. The far wall, looking out over 15th Street, was set with large windows that let in surprisingly little of the afternoon sun. Carol knocked gently on the open door, and when Ben looked up she led me in and introduced me.

  To say that he had no idea who I was, or what I was doing there, isn’t quite true. Carol and Sally had prepped him, so in the most minimal sense he knew. But, basically, he had no idea who I was or what I was doing there. I could tell by how he said hello to me. I took a seat, sweat cooling palpably in my armpits. Carol left the door open and went back out front.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  I hadn’t been nervous at their house, but now that I was alone with Ben in his element my mouth had somehow become untethered from my brain. I recited the things Sally had told me to say: We can take it slow, I can do some preliminary work and see if it turns into anything, if there’s no book there then we won’t force it. I have a vague, uncomfortable memory of saying something about what an honor it would be to work with him.

  When I got done, he said simply, “I’ve already written one book. I’m not in any big rush to write another one.”

  I said I understood, which I did. I started to put my notebook away.

  But he wasn’t quite ready to kick me out yet. He asked me about my experience with Bob, and as I rattled on about it I hit on something funny and he laughed. The smile that the laugh brought with it completely transformed his face. It was like looking at a different person. His whole face sharpened, came alive. He leaned back in his chair.

  I remember his being immaculately turned out that day: black sweater, gray slacks, shoes that revealed themselves to be leather ankle-zip boots when he put his feet up on the desk, glasses just so, hair swept back in a hard part. He was the most attractive eighty-five-year-old man I’d ever seen. Bob once described Ben as “Kirk Douglas as a submarine commander,” and that’s exactly it. His voice sounds like it comes from the bottom of Boston Harbor.

  After a couple of minutes of back-and-forth, Ben mentioned that he had a bunch of boxes in storage someplace but had no idea what was in them.

  “Would you like to look at those?” he asked.

  It was an opening, a small one. Woodward had vouched for me, and now I had passed some sort of threshold. “I would love to look at those,” I said.

  “Carol knows where they are.” He waved his hand, and that was it. He went back to his newspaper, and I saw myself out.

  Ten days later, Carol called to tell me to come back down to the paper. The boxes were coming, and there were a lot of them.

  * * *

  1 In ghostwriterland, that meant that only Ben’s name would be on the spine, and I would be expected to be tactfully vague about my own contributions.

  II

  Click here to view a plain text version.

  They came in tranches of four, seven, and nine—brown legal boxes, numbered sequentially and marked “Bradlee.” Courteous custodial workers wheeled them out of the elevator and through the chiming glass doors that mark the entrance to the seventh-floor executive suite of the Washington Post building. I looked on with no small amount of apprehension as box after box dropped with a thunk, stuffed to the gills with the accreted professional life of one of the most famous newspaper editors in the world.

  The first box I opened was so thoroughly filled with onionskin copies of Ben’s correspondence that its sides were bowed. There were hundreds and hundreds of letters in this one box alone. I had to start somewhere, so I sat down at a desk in the temporary office the Post had given me and pulled one of the folders at random. The papers inside were so old and fine that I could see my fingers through them.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but after a few minutes I came across a letter to Kay Graham, then the Post’s owner and publisher, from a man named William H. Dodderidge:

  October 17, 1977

  Dear Mrs. Graham:

  Messrs. Eugene Meyer and Philip L. Graham must be turning over in their graves because of the way you are dragging down what used to be a wonderful newspaper.

  In my humble opinion, I think the persons really responsible for The Washington Post’s decline are Benjamin C. Bradlee and Philip L. Geyelin.1 I hope the day is not far off when you fire those two peckerwoods …

  Beneath it was Ben’s response:

  Dear Mr. Dodderidge:

  Your letter to Mrs. Graham reminded me of the story about W. C. Fields sitting with a drink in his hand in his garden one afternoon.

  His secretary interrupted him repeatedly to tell him that a strange man wanted to see him and refused to say what he wanted to see him about. Finally Fields told his secretary to give the man “an equivocal answer—tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Sincerely,

  This was going to be fun.

  Many of the letters were to and from people with ordinary complaints—“You forgot the box scores,” “I’m canceling my subscription,” “You’re clearly a Communist.” But some of them sang. Ben, to an undergraduate who wanted to go into journalism but wondered what to major in:

  I would major in something other than journalism. You could be taught how to structure a story pretty fast. You can’t be taught the really valuable things like judgment and ethics and priorities and compassion and sensitivity. You’ve got to experience those or read about people
who have experienced that. Journalism wants you when you’re wise, not when you know how to structure a story.

  And then there was this, also from 1977, which distills an entire (foolish) debate into its essence:

  It is almost impossible to keep personal values out of a story. Don’t think of objectivity; think of fairness. You can be fair while expressing values. A fire is big or it’s small or it’s tall or it’s puny. You’re still fair.

  To one person who wrote in complaining about something he’d read in another publication, Ben wrote simply, “I can only conclude that you are an idiot.” To another, who blamed Ben for everything that was wrong with American journalism and threatened to spit in his face if he ever “had the displeasure” of meeting him, Ben wrote back, “The trouble with American journalism is readers like you. If you spit in my face, you would regret it.”

  The publisher of The Pueblo Chieftain, in Pueblo, Colorado, wrote to Ben in 1985, taking him to task for his recent appearance on a panel at a publishers association meeting. “How ironic it was to watch Ben Bradlee and Don Hewitt,2” the man wrote, “… display their arrogance as they criticized a media credibility study which reveals that the public views the press as being arrogant.” After another paragraph of thinly veiled sanctimony, he signed the letter “Cordially and sincerely.”

  This is Ben’s response, in full:

  To the Publisher:

  Editors do run the risk of appearing arrogant if they choose to disagree with anybody who calls them arrogant.

  You sound like one of those publishers who aims to please his pals in the community and give them what they want.

  No one will call you arrogant that way. No one will call you newspaperman, either.

  Cordially and sincerely,

  He was willing to stick it to pretty much everybody, from his friends and colleagues to larger public figures. He began one letter to Jesse Jackson, “You are one mean dude,” and then proceeded to ream Jackson for his consistent attempts to influence the Post’s coverage of his agenda: