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Ben Bradlee 1921 – 2014


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 I hope people will be sorry that I’ve gone, will be appreciative of what I’ve tried to do, but I think it will be a blip

#156923892 / gettyimages.com


How the Washington Post said goodbye

Washington Post
Tuesday 21 October, 2014 Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.
From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.
The most compelling story of Mr. Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in US history.
But Mr. Bradlee’s most important decision, made with Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the US Supreme Court upheld the decision of the New York Times and The Post to publish them...
Read the full Washington Post article and see a picture gallery here


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Newspapers don’t tell the truth under many different, and occasionally innocent, scenarios.
Mostly when they don’t know the truth. Or when they quote someone who does not know the truth. And more and more, when they quote someone who is spinning the truth...And finally, when they quote someone who is flat-out lying

- The Independent has published a long extract from Bradlee's Press-Enterprise Lecture of 1997. You can read more of it here


James Naughtie
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James Naughtie
The second British journalist to spend a summer at the Washington Post under the auspices of the Laurence Stern Fellowship, set up in memory of the paper's former assistant managing editor
For those of us lucky enough to fall under the spell at close quarters, time with Bradlee was always exhilarating. Whether he was showing you a picture of LBJ's gall bladder scar, describing lunches with that weird guru of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, or enjoying the recollection of a phone call from Bob Haldeman or John Ehrlichman, life was rosier. At a table or in a bar, he was a magical presence.
Read more of Naughtie's memories here

Peter Maass
The investigative reporter recalls 
how a disastrous interview for a 
city beat ended with a posting
to eastern Europe to write
about the end of the Cold War 
Peter Maass
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Smart editors have a knack for calling bullshit on bullshit, and Bradlee was a pro at that. He had called bullshit on Richard Nixon several times, and he had even called bullshit on himself after the paper published a series of prize-winning stories that had been fabricated by its reporter, Janet Cooke; the Post’s apology was complete, and its internal investigation, which criticized Bradlee, was blunt. On this late November afternoon, Bradlee was calling bullshit on me.
Read more from Maass here

Peter Preston
Peter Preston
How would - or could - Watergate be covered today without the clickbait of sensational leaks and documents,
in a world where readers are editors
and editors are directors of content?
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Side by side with Katharine Graham, he turned the Washington Post from an average, struggling city daily into a phenomenon that, for a time, seemed to challenge the New York Times. But the Graham family didn’t have the ambition, or the money, to sustain it. So now the baton has passed to Jeff Bezos. Now the Post’s future, if any, depends on the Amazon billionaire’s fortunes...This is workaday history, not Hollywood history. This is ordinary, toilsome life in a bygone newsroom.
Read more from Preston here

Washington Post
Bradlee with Bernstein and Woodward


In his own words
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You never monkey
with the truth

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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them
to bloom

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If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism

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Maybe some of today's papers have too many 'feel-good' features, but there is a lot of good news out there

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There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate

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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits



Bob Woodward 
and Carl Bernstein
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Ben was a true friend and genius leader in journalism. He forever altered our business. His one unbending principle was the quest for the truth and the necessity of that pursuit. He had the courage of an army. Ben had an intuitive understanding of the history of our profession, its formative impact on him and all of us. But he was utterly liberated from that. He was an original who charted his own course. We loved him deeply, and he will never be forgotten or replaced in our lives

President Obama
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For Benjamin Bradlee, journalism was more than a profession – it was a public good vital to our democracy


Ben Bradlee's life in photos http://t.co/bfrqZmrqoB pic.twitter.com/KRDBCj3QKv

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 22, 2014

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