Remembering the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, a giant of American journalism

Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post from 1965 to 1991, died this week at the age of 93. Whenever journalism giants die, there are lots of stories around about their lives and careers.

I usually find it fruitful to read as many of them as I can find.

Bradlee, familiar to non-Beltway insiders as the character played by Jason Robards in the movie version of Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” was not a sportswriter or a sports editor. But he liked sports and, evidently, understood well the role of sports journalism. His obituary, linked in the lede above, notes that when he took over as managing editor of the Post in 1965, its most famous writer was a sportswriter, Shirley Povich.

Here’s NBA.com and TNT reporter David Aldridge, who got his start at the Washington Post, writing on Facebook:

Working at The Washington Post was the anchor for my professional life. All the lessons I learned about journalism came from my nine years there, and all those came with Ben Bradlee at the helm. He didn’t run the Sports section, but he was the undeniable boss of the paper. He loved Sports and was quite fond of our immediate boss, George Solomon (the feeling was mutual). So, while he wasn’t there every day, Ben would come back to the section quite often to see what was going on. He was not that interested in the score of the game last night. He wanted to know if anything big was cooking. (Per David Maraniss’s outstanding biography of Vince Lombardi, It was Bradlee who first found out Lombardi was coming to D.C. in 1969 to coach the Redskins, having been given the scoop by his close friend, the late owner of the team, Edward Bennett Williams. Bradlee told Sports, which printed the story. THAT was Ben Bradlee’s idea of a big story.)

New Yorker editor David Remnick was a Washington Post reporter from 1982 to ’92. In a thoroughly entertaining remembrance, he writes of Bradlee, “Among his many bequests to the Republic was a catalogue of swaggering anecdotes rich enough to float a week of testimonial dinners.” The piece ends with one of them.

Here’s a great letter Bradlee once sent to a PR flack from a circus who had complained that the Post’s Style section hadn’t published a story about someone’s retirement. The kicker is a nice statement of purpose when it comes to dealing with press agents: “I would like to be sure that you understand that we trust our editors’ news judgment and that we distrust yours.”

More reading:

Ben Bradlee Wrestled With Racial Issues by Richard Prince, Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Ben Bradlee: His sense of Style brought a new sensibility to features by Martha Sherrill, Washington Post. The headline refers to the influential Style section, which Bradlee introduced.

Post bigshots on Bradlee: Donald Graham. Leonard Downie.

A Story About Ben Bradlee That’s Not Fucking Charming by Peter Maass, The Intercept.

Journalists reflect on Ben Bradlee’s life and career by Benjamin Mullin, Poynter.org.