Opening up the Post

MOST journalists writing in English on this side of the Atlantic could probably name half a dozen of their celebrated American colleagues living and dead, serving and retired - James Reston, Art Buchwald, Jimmy Breslin, William Safire, David Broder and perhaps one or two others. Yet few could name a single American newspaper editor of the post war era other than Ben Bradlee. A remarkable circumstance, for: there are other newspapers at least as influential as the Washington Post and there have been other editors who have been no less courageous and no less far seeing than Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee.

Bradlee is no longer editor (or executive editor, as the Americans style it) of the Washington Post; he retired in 1991 after nearly 29 years at the newspaper. Today he has a roving ambassador role for the Post ("Vice President at Large" in Americanese), he givers much of his time to various pro bono publico activities and he sits on the board of the "charismatic (Bradlee's word) Dr Tony O'Reilly's Independent Newspapers. In his own phrase, all this plus writing his autobiography has pretty much filled up his dance card.

The Bradlee phenomenon has been unique in American journalism. Never before and not since has an editor achieved international celebrity status on this scale. But then again, no other editor has found himself portrayed as a central hero character in a multi million dollar Hollywood drama culminating in the resignation and disgrace of the President of the United States.

Bradlee cheerfully acknowledges the debt he owes to Richard Nixon. Arguably he owes no less to the actor Jason Robards, whose Bradlee in All the President's Men became a role model for a whole generation of American newspaper executives. Robards's Bradlee is tough but caring, principled but pragmatic, fatalistic, cynical, enough of a bastard to be feared, respected if not always liked by colleagues and all the while a scourge to the Establishment. The executive editor that Bradlee describes in himself is not too dissimilar. Art imitating life or life imitating art?

He devotes no more than 60 pages out of about 500 to Watergate and its aftermath. But the whole phenomenon of his celebrity - along with that of publisher Kay Graham and the reporting team of Woodward and Bernstein - derives from the episode which began with "a third rate burglary" and ended with the fall of Richard Nixon. Neither his inside track with President Kennedy nor the Pentagon Papers saga had the effect of lifting the Washington Post out of its second league position vis a vis the mighty New York Times. But there is, in fact, little if anything in Ben Bradlee's account of the Watergate saga which has not been pretty well documented elsewhere. No new revelations here.

There is a saw among Irish journalists that if Watergate had happened in this country Nixon would have remained President, Woodward and Bernstein would have gone to jail and everyone in Dublin would know the identity of Deep Throat. It is a convenient way to shorthand some of the disabilities under which Irish journalists are obliged to operate by comparison with their US counterparts - yet while Bradlee's account of the Watergate investigation details some use of the United States's more favourable public information laws, it dwells more tellingly on the routine use of the telephone and the expenditure of reporters' shoe leather. Much of the success in journalism is akin to success in selling brushes door to door. Most calls gets most sales.

Bradlee's book differs from the memoirs of many journalists in one important respect. It is a book about newspapering, not about statecraft. It is a newspaperman's account written, one feels, more for fellow newspaper practitioners than for anyone else. There is little insight into the affairs of the nation, little of the I then told the President what he ought to do next type of thing. The most instructive dimension of the book is where he narrates the gradual development and strengthening of a great newspaper and the remarkable series of linkages of trust and mutual support which must underpin that process.

In the case of the Washington Post those linkages extend from the editorial staff, through the editor and the corporate management to the Graham family, now in its third generation as publishers of the newspaper. The confidence between publisher and editor is a constant theme. And it is a two way process. Bradlee keeps Kay Graham firmly in the picture as major developments take place ("If you want me there for the landing I'd better be in for the takeoff," she enjoins him as the Post gears up for a legal battle). Conversely, Bradlee is fiercely supported by Graham as he sets about the shaping of the Washington Post of the future.

After the triumph of Watergate the Washington Post went through the humiliation of the Janet Cooke affair, in which an apparently gifted young journalist landed a Pulitzer prize for her heart rending series on the life and times of a six year old crack addict in Washington's slum district; the problem was, the six year old never existed and Janet Cooke's talents were for fiction and deceit rather than reporting. Bradlee is searingly self critical in setting out the newspaper's failure to verify Cooke's credentials and to check and supervise her story. The criticism is not unwarranted. Simple procedures for verification of sources which would be normal in good newspapers in Europe were not in place and were only introduced at the Post in the aftermath of this debacle.

Bradlee has written a hugely enjoyable, rumbustious book. It truly is the tale of a good life and it is presented with gusto and an earthy verve. The language is free and strong. And original. What editor would not wish to have been the one to describe a senior politician as a retromingent backwoodsman"? I couldn't find it in the dictionary either. Bradlee insists it describes a sub species of ant that urinates backwards.