Ben Bradlee: a lion of US journalism

US president Barack Obama and secretary of state John Kerry were among those to pay tribute to renowned former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, a lion of American journalism, on his death at the age of 93.

Bradlee famously steered the Post's coverage of Watergate, a scandal that cost president Richard Nixon his job and made heroes of the inimitable editor and the young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whom he trusted with the biggest political story of their generation.

He died at his Washington home of natural causes, the Post reported on Monday evening.

"For Benjamin Bradlee, journalism was more than a profession – it was a public good vital to our democracy," Mr Obama said.

"A true newspaperman, he transformed the Washington Post into one of the country's finest newspapers, and with him at the helm a growing army of reporters published the Pentagon Papers, exposed Watergate, and told stories that needed to be told – stories that helped us understand our world and one another a little better."

The charismatic, raspy- voiced editor transformed the Post from a middling home- town title into a national institution and one of the world's leading newspapers during more than decades as editor.

A second World War navy veteran from Boston, Mr Bradlee joined the Post as deputy managing editor in 1965 after reporting for Newsweek in Paris and Washington, where he was a friend and neighbour of then US senator John F Kennedy. He was appointed executive editor of the Post in 1968 and held the position until 1991.

Pentagon Papers

In 1971, Bradlee and his supportive publisher,

Katharine Graham

, ignored a court injunction obtained by the Nixon

White House

and decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government study of US involvement in

Vietnam

, after the

New York Times

broke the story.

The supreme court later ruled in favour of the newspapers’ right to print the leaked documents in a victory for press freedom.

Mr Kerry described Bradlee as “America’s editor-in-chief”, calling him a “courageous and fearless, gutsy and gritty”. His brand of journalism was “big, bold and unapologetic”, he said; he invented the modern newsroom.

Watergate was the trailblazing story of Bradlee's tenure. The scandal, sparked by the Post's dogged investigative reporting from a burglary at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex in Washington in June 1972 to a host of illegal activities and subsequent cover-up, grew to a political inferno resulting in the only US president ever to resign.

"If you were told – any editor of the Washington Post since the beginning of time – there was going to be a story that 40 people would go to jail and the president of the United States would resign, he'd say: 'Thank you, Lord,'" Mr Bradlee once told an interviewer.

He became a household name when he was played by actor Jason Robards in an Oscar- winning role in All the President's Men, the Hollywood film on Woodward and Bernstein's reporting of Watergate.

Story fabricated

The low point in Bradlee’s career was in 1981 when the newspaper had to return a Pulitzer prize after a young reporter,

Janet Cooke

, was found to have fabricated a story about an eight-year-old drug addict. The editor offered his resignation but it was declined by the

Post’

s publisher.

Bradlee was praised by former colleagues who recalled his courageous editing, brusque style and penchant for short, expletive-filled orders and British tailored white-collared, bold-striped shirts.

“Ben was a true friend and a genius leader in journalism,” Woodward and Bernstein said in a joint statement.

“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.”

A theme running through the recollections was of an editor who supported his reporters in the face of strong outside political and corporate pressure with his only condition that their stories be accurate.

Leonard Downie, who succeeded him as editor, recalled Bradlee telling him as a young reporter in the 1960s that a number of savings and loans associations threatened to pull all their ads over articles he was working on about the financial exploitation of black homeowners.

“Just get it right, kid,” Bradlee told him. He later learned that they pulled their ads for a year after his series ran. His editor did not tell him.