Bradlee doc shows why journalism matters
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was a titan of journalism, and many people, including those interviewed for the HBO documentary “The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee,” say he was the last of his kind. The question we’re left with, though, is whether journalism itself has evolved so much in just the past few years, for better and worse, that there might not be a place for a Ben Bradlee today.
The film, directed by John Maggio, will air on HBO on Monday, Dec. 4. Although Bradlee, who died in 2014, was most identified as the editor of the Washington Post when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward got the goods on the real story of the “third-rate break-in” known as Watergate, there are aspects of Maggio’s film that seem all too contemporary — specifically, the Nixon administration’s skulduggery designed to undermine the credibility of the press. At one point, President Richard Nixon ordered press secretary Ron Ziegler to make sure no reporter for the Washington Post was allowed to enter the White House. Does that ring a more current bell? It should. You almost expect Nixon to start throwing the term “fake news” around.
But Bradlee wasn’t to be cowed, nor was his more reserved boss, Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post. Graham was left in charge of the paper after the death of her husband, Philip. At that time, the Post was very much an also-ran in the D.C. media world. But Graham was smart when she gave Bradlee all but free rein to make the Post count, and he succeeded. While Watergate put the Post on the map, Bradlee made other changes to modernize the
paper, including empowering Shelby Coffey to make the paper’s Style section matter almost as much as its front page. Although Coffey isn’t credited in the film, he was named Style section editor in 1976 and had a lot to do with the Style section becoming a model for features coverage in other papers. One of the section’s most powerful voices was that of reporter Sally Quinn, who became Bradlee’s third wife in 1978.
Bradlee was born into the upper crust in Boston, went to Harvard, married a Saltonstall, became a foreign correspondent and got a job at the Post, where he became friendly with Philip Graham. After a stint with the forerunner of the U.S. Information Agency, he returned to journalism as a reporter for Newsweek.
In the 1950s, Bradlee and his second wife, Antoinette Pinchot, became friendly with Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline. When Kennedy ran for president, Bradlee was often on the campaign plane with him. Bradlee’s chummy, insider relationship with Kennedy raised eyebrows at the time. The Kennedys and Bradlees partied together, sailed together, and dined together frequently. Journalists are supposed to keep a professional distance from potential sources and not display bias in any way, or even the appearance of bias. It’s not always easy, especially since Washington is a small, professionally incestuous town. In our time, we might think of Sean Hannity’s ideological symbiosis with the current president.
Maggio’s film is narrated by Bradlee himself, reading from his own memoir. The list of contributors all but ensures the hagiographic nature of the film: Quinn, Donald Graham (Katharine and Philip’s son), Woodward, Bernstein, Quinn Bradlee (Bradlee and Quinn’s son), TV journalist Jim Lehrer, TV producer Norman Lear, Robert Redford, historian Sally Bedell Smith and others. Henry Kissinger grumbles about the Post endangering national security, but no one brings up other shortcomings. If the film were about someone else, Bradlee might insist on a script rewrite.
To its credit, “The Newspaperman” talks about the Janet Cooke mess in 1981, when the Post simply took the word of ambitious reporter Cooke that she had found an 8-year-old heroin addict in Washington, D.C. She won a Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s Story,” but other reporters questioned the veracity of the story from the beginning. Eventually, Bradlee ordered a full-scale investigation, which proved Cooke had invented the character. The Bradlee film deals with the story much as the recent Rolling Stoneproduced film on Jann Wenner dealt with that publication’s failure to check the facts of a story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia: factually, but quickly.
Later this year, Bradlee will be portrayed by Tom Hanks in the Steven Spielberg film “The Post,” with Meryl Streep playing Kay Graham. Jason Robards, at least, bore a physical resemblance in “All the President’s Men” to the roughhewn real thing.
It is true that they don’t make ’em like Ben Bradlee anymore. He was brash, fearless and driven. He wasn’t perfect, by any means, although the only regrets he can come up with in his life are the possibilities he caused pain to his first two wives.
How would Bradlee navigate journalism in the 21st century? When social media anoints even the most absurd claim as valid information, when cable news includes both channels that attempt to adhere to standards of fairness and accuracy and others that display unabashed and obvious bias, in story choice and commentary. And most of all, could a Ben Bradlee reverse the declining fortunes of many oncepowerful newspapers in the U.S.?
The Washington Post brought down a crooked president in 1974. The New York Times exposed previously unknown facts about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, including expanded bombings in Cambodia and elsewhere, and outright lies by the Johnson administration, in its initial publication of the Pentagon Papers, as did the Post when it published even more of them itself.
Legitimate journalists continue to crusade for truth and accuracy, but the landscape has changed dramatically, making it harder to trust that truth will out. Sadly, even if a Ben Bradlee were out there, it’s difficult to imagine how he or she could counter the flood of misinformation, pathological lying and social media bullying that has become a weak stand-in for real journalism in 2017.
Fortunately, though they may not be titanic, there are real journalists still fighting the good fight in the business, in TV, social and digital media, and in newspapers. All of them to one extent or another embody the legacy of Ben Bradlee.