http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/business/media/ben-bradlees-charmed-charming-life.html 2014-10-22 13:41:22 Ben Bradlee’s Charmed, Charming Life Most journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who do things. But the man who helped run The Washington Post for 26 years actually did things. === Civilians, normal people who don’t think the toppling of a sitting American president with newspaper articles is one of humankind’s lasting achievements, will read encomiums to Ben Bradlee like this one and wonder: What’s the big deal? After all, he didn’t report the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. He didn’t write the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Mr. Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential things. People who worked for him would go through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which actually altered it. The newspaper business can be a grand endeavor, but most of the people who commit journalism would never be mistaken for larger than life. Journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who actually do things. But Ben Bradlee did things. He went to war, loved early and often, befriended and took on presidents, swore like a sailor, and partied like a movie star. Now that he is gone — He took over an also-ran newspaper and turned it into a battleship like the one on which he served in World War II. Once the newspaper he ran gained steam, there was only the relentless effort to beat the competition, to find and woo talent, to afflict those that The Post deemed worthy. In the more than quarter-century he helped lead the newsroom, from 1965 to 1991, he doubled its staff and circulation, and “I had a good seat,” he said to Alicia C. Shepard in a Mr. Bradlee had the attention span of a gnat — stories of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common — but he was completely hypnotized by the chase of a good story. Early on his first tour at The Post, as a reporter, he saw a suicidal soldier on a ledge at the Willard hotel one night in 1949. According to his book, “A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures,” he tore across the street, took the elevator up to the ninth floor, where the soldier was contemplating ending it all, and got out on the ledge himself. He inched along until he was just around the corner from the soldier and the cops who were trying to talk him into coming back inside. He stood there, unseen. “For once, I had copy paper and a pencil with me,” he later wrote, and chronicled every word of the unfolding drama until the police pulled the soldier inside. He added, “I knew I had one hell of a story.” His life and persona make for a pretty fair story. I only knew him in the mid-'90s, when he was vice president at large of The Post, but he was still large, still engaged, perpetually on the hunt for political gossip or newsroom intrigue. He was a decent, if relentlessly loyal, source when I covered The Post as the editor of the Washington City Paper. But even though I barely knew him, he was hilarious to bump into. “I like your paper a lot,” he’d deadpan, “whenever it doesn’t have its,” insert sailor adjective, “finger in my eye.” Cue big roar of laughter, dancing eyes, deep pleasure at his own riposte. Anybody who has ever watched Mr. Bradlee enter a room knows that whatever “it” is, he had a lot of it. There was the smile, a flash of white teeth matching the white collar of the custom striped shirts he wore without fail, and a voice that was a mix of gravel and gravitas that had a hearty (and generally profane) word for everybody. In a town notorious for big entrances — Bill Clinton, Marion Barry, Ronald Reagan, you name it — Mr. Bradlee tilted a room just by being himself. “He was one of those people who could make you feel like a superstar just by being in the same room with him,” David Von Drehle, a longtime Post writer now at Time, told me on the phone on Tuesday. “Every woman in the room wanted to be with him, and every man in the room wanted to be him.” ( He was a durable celebrity in Washington and beyond, in part because he was the rare person who got more handsome as he grew older. A photo that ran with a Post piece from just two years ago shows a remarkably good-looking 90-plus-year-old, a patrician pirate still working his good looks. Few newspeople could suggest that they were better looking than the movie stars who played them, as Jason Robards did in the film about Watergate, “All the President’s Men,” but Mr. Bradlee could have claimed as much. He was more Clark Gable than Clark Kent. Even before Watergate, his back story seemed improbably perfect. A Boston Brahmin who was to the manner born: His maternal great-uncle, Frank Crowninshield, was the founding editor of Vanity Fair; he overcame polio; attended Harvard; and got to work early and often. Mr. Bradlee served on the deck of a destroyer in World War II as a junior naval officer. After the war, he worked his way from an obscure stateside reporting job to serving as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek and, for a time, as a press attaché in the American Embassy in Paris. (There were unconfirmed rumors along the way that some of his informational ops were of the covert kind, which only added to his allure.) It was quite a run: Paris in the ’50s, friend of the Kennedys, tormentor of Nixon, he was Zelig-like in his ability to appear at critical junctures in American history. By some estimations, including his own, his most enduring accomplishment had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers or Watergate. After he became editor of the Post, he watched with envy as The New York Herald Tribune and magazines like Esquire and Playboy were using a different vocabulary, a so-called New Journalism, to expand the ways in which stories were told. In 1969, he conjured Style, a hip, cheeky section of the newspaper that reflected the tumult of the times in a city where fashion and discourse were rived with a maddening sameness. The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar. He expanded the vernacular of newspapering, enabling real, actual writers to shake off the shackles of the hack and generate daily discourse that made people laugh, spill their coffee or throw The Post down in disgust. He had nothing of the commoner about him, hosting and grilling much of the world’s elite at the Georgetown home he shared with Sally Quinn, a Post party reporter who became his third wife. But although he grew up in Boston, not even knowing anyone who was black, he managed to make a credible newspaper in a majority-black city. His efforts to cover the black community in deeper ways led to the Mr. Bradlee could be almost cartoonishly ambitious. Asked by Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, about his interest in the top job at the paper, he immediately replied that he would “give his left one” for the opportunity. He probably would have gotten along fine on the remaining testosterone. A player of favorites and an admirer of bravado, he famously vetoed the hiring of a reporter who had already been vetted and all but hired, because “nothing clanks when he walks.” Ben Bradlee clanked when he walked.