Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (August 26, 1921 – October 21, 2014) was an American journalist who served as managing editor and later as executive editor of The Washington Post, from 1965 to 1991. He became a public figure when the Post joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers and gave the go-ahead for the paper's extensive coverage of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. He was also criticized for editorial lapses when the Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it discovered that its award-winning story was false.
After his retirement, Bradlee continued to be associated with the Post, holding the position of Vice President at-large until his death. In retirement, Bradlee was an advocate for education and the study of history, including his role as a trustee on the boards of several major educational, historical, and archaeological research institutions.
Ben Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr., who was from the Boston Brahmin Bradlee family and who was an investment banker, and Josephine de Gersdorff, daughter of a Wall Street lawyer. His great uncle was Frank Crowninshield, founder and first editor of Vanity Fair.
Bradlee was the second of three children; his siblings were older brother Frederick, a writer and Broadway stage actor, and younger sister Constance. The children grew up in a wealthy family with domestic staff. They learned French from governesses, took piano and riding lessons, and went to the symphony and the opera; but the stock market crash of 1929 cost Bradlee's father his job, and he took on whatever work he could find to support his family, including selling deodorants and molybdenum mining stock "for companies founded and financed by some of his rich pals", according to his son Ben Bradlee. His father's career improved later: he served as a financial consultant to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was appointed to the Massachusetts State Parole Board in 1945, of which he was president for ten years until his retirement in 1957.
With the help of wealthy relatives, Bradlee was able to continue his education at Dexter School, and to finish high school at St. Mark's School, where he played varsity baseball. At St. Mark's he contracted polio, but sufficiently recovered to walk without limping. He attended Harvard College, where his father had been a star football player, and graduated in 1942 with a combined Greek–English major.
Like many of his classmates, Bradlee anticipated the United States would eventually enter World War II and enrolled in the Naval ROTC at Harvard. As a result, he received his naval commission on the same day he graduated. He was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and served as a communications officer in the Pacific. He was assigned to the destroyer USS Philip based off the shore of Guam and arriving at Guadalcanal with the Second Transport Group, part of Task Group 62.4, commanded by Rear Admiral Norman Scott. Bradlee's main battles were Vella Lavella, Saipan, Tinian, and Bougainville. He also fought in the biggest naval battle ever fought, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines Campaign, in the Borneo Campaign, and made every landing in the Solomon Islands campaign.
At loose ends after the war, Bradlee was recruited by a high school classmate in 1946 to work at the New Hampshire Sunday News, a new Sunday paper in Manchester, New Hampshire. The paper struggled to develop advertising revenue and circulation for two years, but was finally sold to the Manchester Union-Leader, the competing daily newspaper. Bradlee appealed to family friends for job leads, and gained interviews at both The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. According to Bradlee, when the train arrived in Baltimore it was raining, so he stayed on the train to Washington and was hired by The Washington Post as a reporter. He got to know associate publisher Phil Graham, who was the son-in-law of the publisher, Eugene Meyer. On November 1, 1950, Bradlee was alighting from a streetcar in front of the White House just as two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to shoot their way into Blair House in an attempt to kill President Harry S. Truman. In 1951, Bradlee became assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. In 1954, Bradlee took on a new job as European correspondent for Newsweek. He remained overseas for another four years until he was transferred to Newsweek's Washington D.C. bureau.
As a reporter in the 1950s, Bradlee became close friends with then-senator John F. Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard two years before Bradlee, and lived nearby. In 1960, Bradlee toured with both Kennedy and Richard Nixon in their presidential campaigns. He later wrote a book, Conversations With Kennedy (W.W. Norton, 1975), recounting their relationship during those years. Bradlee was, at this point, Washington Bureau chief for Newsweek, a position from which he helped negotiate the sale of the magazine to The Washington Post holding company.
Bradlee remained with Newsweek until he was promoted to managing editor at the Post in 1965. He became executive editor in 1968.
Under Bradlee's leadership, The Washington Post took on major challenges during the Nixon administration. In 1971 he hid a team of lawyers, editors and writers led by him and Ben Bagdikian in Bradlee's own Georgetown home, and supervised the team's resulting publication of the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times and the Post successfully challenged the government over the right to publish the Papers.
One year later, Bradlee backed reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they probed the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. According to Bradlee:
You had a lot of Cuban or Spanish-speaking guys in masks and rubber gloves, with walkie-talkies, arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at 2 in the morning. What the hell were they in there for? What were they doing? The follow-up story was based primarily on their arraignment in court, and it was based on information given our police reporter, Al Lewis, by the cops, showing them an address book that one of the burglars had in his pocket, and in the address book was the name 'Hunt,' H-u-n-t, and the phone number was the White House phone number, which Al Lewis and every reporter worth his salt knew. And when, the next day, Woodward—this is probably Sunday or maybe Monday, because the burglary was Saturday morning early—called the number and asked to speak to Mr. Hunt, and the operator said, 'Well, he's not here now; he's over at' such-and-such a place, gave him another number, and Woodward called him up, and Hunt answered the phone, and Woodward said, 'We want to know why your name was in the address book of the Watergate burglars.' And there is this long, deathly hush, and Hunt said, 'Oh my God!' and hung up. So you had the White House. You have Hunt saying 'Oh my God!' At a later arraignment, one of the guys whispered to a judge. The judge said, 'What do you do?' and Woodward overheard the words 'CIA.' So if your interest isn't whetted by this time, you're not a journalist.
Ensuing investigations of suspected cover-ups led inexorably to congressional committees, conflicting testimonies, and ultimately to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. For decades, Bradlee was one of only four publicly known people who knew the true identity of press informant Deep Throat, the other three being Woodward, Bernstein, and Deep Throat himself, who later revealed himself to be Nixon's FBI associate director Mark Felt.
In 1981, Post reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for "Jimmy's World", a profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict. Cooke's article turned out to be fiction — there was no such addict. As executive editor, Bradlee was roundly criticized in many circles for failing to ensure the article's accuracy. After questions about the story's veracity arose, Bradlee (along with publisher Donald Graham) ordered a "full disclosure" investigation to ascertain the truth. Bradlee personally apologized to Mayor Marion Barry and the chief of police of Washington, D.C., for the Post's fictitious article. Cooke, meanwhile, was forced to resign from the Post and relinquish the Pulitzer.