Ben Bradlee

The Bradlees had governesses, French lessons, piano, riding, the symphony and the opera, and then the crash of 1929 took his father's job in banking and sent him out selling deodorant and molybdenum mining stock for outfits his rich friends had floated. Wealthy relatives paid to keep the boy in school. At St. Mark's he caught polio and recovered well enough to walk without a limp. He read Greek and English at Harvard and signed up for Naval ROTC because he could see the war coming. On August 8, 1942, he graduated, married Jean Saltonstall and took his commission, all on the same day. Three years on a destroyer in the Pacific followed, through the Solomons, Saipan and Leyte Gulf.

He came home in 1946 to a Sunday paper in New Hampshire that could not sell enough advertising to live. When it folded into a rival he went south for interviews, and the train reached Baltimore in the rain, so he stayed aboard to Washington and the Post hired him. Paris followed, as an embassy press attache in 1951, then Newsweek in 1954, where he ran the Washington bureau and helped broker the magazine's sale to the Post's parent company. Katharine Graham made him managing editor in 1965 and executive editor in 1968. In 1971 he hid the lawyers, editors and writers working through the Pentagon Papers inside his own Georgetown house and printed them. A year later he backed two young reporters on a burglary at the Watergate. Nixon resigned in 1974.

He built a newsroom on the premise that the government lies, and he had been John F. Kennedy's friend and neighbor before that: golf at Newport, both campaign planes in 1960, and a book of their private conversations published in 1975. The harder trouble came later. In 1981 the Post ran Janet Cooke's profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict called Jimmy, it won the Pulitzer Prize, and there was no Jimmy. Bradlee was widely blamed for not checking. He and the publisher ordered a full public accounting of how the paper had been fooled, he apologized in person to Mayor Marion Barry and to the chief of police, and the prize went back. Cooke resigned. He was also one of four living people who knew Deep Throat's name, and he held it until Mark Felt gave it up in 2005.

He stepped down as executive editor in September 1991 and stayed on as vice president at large for the rest of his life. That same year, delivering the Theodore White lecture at Harvard, he argued that lying in Washington had reached epidemic proportions and that everyone had been immunized against noticing. He chaired Maryland's Historic St. Mary's City commission for 12 years. France made him a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2007. Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 20, 2013. Alzheimer's disease took the last years. He entered hospice in late September 2014, died at home in Washington on October 21 at 93, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Ben Bradlee's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Publication of the Pentagon Papers article
  Assembled the team in his own Georgetown house and ran it 1971
• The Post's Watergate coverage article
  Backed Woodward and Bernstein from the first arraignment onward 1972
• Conversations With Kennedy book
  His record of a friendship he kept while covering the man 1975
• Benjamin C. Bradlee Annual Lecture in Journalism other
  Endowed at St. Mary's College of Maryland 1991
• A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures book
  The autobiography 1995
• Free Speech: Jim Lehrer and Ben Bradlee television
  Cut from six hours of interviews and aired on PBS 2006

• 1929 aged ~8 The stock market crash costs his father his job His father sold deodorant and mining stock until the work came back.
• August 8, 1942 aged 20 Graduates from Harvard, marries, and is commissioned, all in one day
• October 1944 aged 23 Fights at Leyte Gulf aboard the destroyer USS Philip
• November 1, 1950 aged 29 Steps off a streetcar as gunmen attack Blair House Two Puerto Rican nationalists were trying to shoot their way in to kill Truman.
• 1951 aged ~30 Becomes assistant press attache at the American embassy in Paris
• 1965 aged ~44 Katharine Graham makes him managing editor of The Washington Post
• 1971 aged ~50 Hides the Pentagon Papers team in his Georgetown house and publishes
• 1981 aged ~60 The Janet Cooke Pulitzer is returned after the story proves invented Bradlee apologized in person to the mayor and the chief of police.
• October 21, 2014 aged 93 Dies at home in Washington after several years with Alzheimer's

• Katharine Graham 1917–2001
  Publisher who strengthened The Washington Post and backed its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. publisher who promoted him
• Bob Woodward b. 1943
  Investigative reporter whose coverage of Watergate with Carl Bernstein led to President Nixon's resignation. backed his reporting
• Carl Bernstein b. 1944
  Investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. backed his reporting
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. friend and subject
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. brought down by his newsroom