The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
HBO’s ‘Newspaperman’ hits hard
In age of fake news and attacks on press, Bradlee doc is a good watch
“The Newspaperman,” the new documentary about the iconic editor of The Washington Post Ben Bradlee, seems to be coming out at just the right time considering the White House’s attitude toward the press.
During his career, the colorful Bradlee found himself having “a ringside seat at some of the biggest stories of the century.” At least three of them have had a lasting impact on journalism and continue to echo strongly today: the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal, and the Janet Cooke disaster.
The first two were battles over the basic Constitutional right of freedom of the press; the third was about the press not doing
its job.
Much of the documentary from director John Maggio (“Looking for Lincoln”) is taken from the
newspaperman’s memoir, “A Good Life.” Bradlee himself talks about events from his life with the narration taken from a recording he
made of the book.
The rest of the film is archival footage and interviews with those who knew him, including Bob Woodward,
Carl Bernstein, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Henry Kissinger, Ben Bradlee Jr., Jim Lehrer, John Dean, Norman Lear, Richard Cohen, Robert Redford, Sally Bedell Smith, Tina Brown, Tom Brokaw, and Bradlee’s third wife, Sally Quinn.
Born in 1921, Bradlee was a dashing and crusty New Englander. A Harvard grad, he loved Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.” He saw it as a glamorous profession and eventually made himself one for Newsweek in the mid1950s It was around this time he became friends with another Bostonian, the slightly older Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy.
Bradlee would later gain unprecedented access to the JFK White House. Kennedy tipped him on the swap of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for imprisoned American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962 while they were both at a party. The journalist, working for Newsweek at the time, dictated the breaking story to a sister publication, the Post, as dinner music played in the background.
He and his second wife, Antoinette “Tony” Bradlee would pal around with Jack and Jackie, and in fact, spent a weekend with them shortly before JFK was assassinated. It was only later that Bradlee wondered if he had gotten too close to his subject.
In the memoir, the journalist also revealed his wife told him that Kennedy had been aggressive while making a pass at her in 1963. Bradlee admits later he might not have even been friends with JFK if the president hadn’t been attracted to Tony.
A year later, Tony’s sister was mysteriously shot to death, and it was found that she was having an affair with Kennedy from a diary she kept. The diary ended up in the hands of CIA with the help of Bradlee, as he turned the Washington Post, once an undistinguished local paper, into a national powerhouse.
The documentary doesn’t overplay the JFK material — there is a whole documentary or two there. It’s an important point. The newspaperman felt he had been wrong to cozy up to Kennedy, though that was very much the game in Washington politics then.
“It’s been my experience in Washington that a lot of people lie,” he says toward the beginning of the documentary, and that skepticism he learned served him well in the two major news crisis that highlighted his career.
There has already been a movie made about the Post’s investigation of the Watergate break-in that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, “All the President’s Men.” In it, Bradlee’s is played by Jason Robards, who won an Oscar for the portrayal.
“The Post,” starring Tom Hanks as Bradley and set to open in Northeast Ohio Jan. 12, chronicles its fight to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study that revealed the U.S. was losing the Vietnam War. The Nixon White House tried to quash the Post’s and New York Times’ efforts to publish.
The fight eventually ended up at the Supreme Court and a victory for freedom of the press.
Both events are covered extensively in “The Newspaperman.” There is not a lot new there, but it’s interesting to hear it from Bradlee’s perspective.
During the Pentagon Papers and Watergate crisis, news organizations were under attack not only from the Nixon White House but from other politicians and many in the public.
When asked about what the press should do, Bradlee is seen in an interview saying that it was the press’ job to “hunker down and go about our business, which is not be loved but go after the truth.”
It is a philosophy that legitimate news organizations still live by.
The documentary also covers Bradlee’s biggest failure, when in 1980 a young reporter, Janet Cooke, wrote a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. It won a Pulitzer Prize, but other newspapers soon found it had been entirely fabricated.
The Post had gotten cocky, Bradley would admit, and while it had been checking on the government had become lax in checking themselves. However, he ordered an investigation into how it happened, and he says it made determined to make the newspaper more diligent.
That still seems to be a legacy that’s adhered to. Earlier this week, a woman tried to pass off a false story about Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore. The Post soon sniffed out the deceit and even videotaped the woman going into a rightwing group known for trying to discredit the news media.
It’s something to keep in mind when watching “The Newspaperman.”