Bradlee had more influence on American journalism and politics than perhaps any other editor of his time. Under his leadership, the Post became one of the most renowned newspapers in the country and his enthusiasm and curiosity — and sheer unmatched ability to motivate his journalists — produced some of the best reporting of the era. In overseeing the paper’s coverage of Watergate, he helped force the only resignation of an American president and forever reshaped the relationship of journalism and government.

Bradlee had been in declining health for years, but began a downward spiral not long ago. In late September, in an interview with C-SPAN, his wife, Sally Quinn, revealed that her husband had been suffering from dementia, was in hospice care, and didn’t have much time left.

“He was diagnosed a while ago, but it became obvious that he had a serious problem about two years ago,” she said at the time. “It’s been the most horrible experience I have ever had up until recently. He’s still at home, I still have him sleeping in the bed with me, and I will until the end.”

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In interviews with POLITICO, Bradlee’s friends, colleagues and contemporaries painted a portrait of a man who had an infectious love of the story and an unwavering reverence for the truth. They described him as the consummate newspaper editor, both in style and substance, and one who transformed the very profession of journalism.

“No one compares. He was the editor of the 20th century,” Bob Woodward, the veteran Post journalist, said. “His passing, in a way, marks the end of the 20th century.”

“He is responsible for huge changes in the profession itself, in the craft of journalism, as well as transforming The Washington Post into as important a newspaper as there was in the world, and into the great institution it became,” said Carl Bernstein, who along with Woodward led the paper’s Watergate coverage, which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

“Ben deserves all of the words that are used to describe him: Icon, the ultimate newspaper man, the ultimate editor,” said Jim Lehrer, the longtime anchor of PBS NewsHour. “He was a man who focused on the story. As a journalist that was his obsession: Get the story, get the story, get the story — and get the story right.”

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“Everything a great editor should be; curious, fair, a great leader and most of all, courageous,” said Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “He also had a wonderful sense of irony and a deadly sense of humor which made him fun to be around. All of us in journalism owe him for the example he set and all of us as citizens owe him for the difference he made.”

“In the new forms of journalism we’ll not likely see his kind again — just as there will never be another Babe Ruth, Sinatra or Hemingway,” said Tom Brokaw, the veteran NBC News anchor.

Bradlee was born on Aug. 26, 1921, in Boston, the second son of Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr. and Josephine deGersdorff of the Crowninshield family, Boston Brahmins with ancestral lines stretching back to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and various other European royalty, as well as the early settlers of colonial Massachusetts. His family had roots in journalism, as well: His great uncle, Frank Crowninshield, was the founding editor of Vanity Fair.

He enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Boston, but was diagnosed with polio as a teenager. He overcame the disease and went on to attend Harvard College. On the day of his graduation, in 1942, Bradlee signed up for the Navy and married his first wife, Jean Saltonstall, the daughter of a former Massachusetts Republican governor and senator, Leverett Saltonstall. Bradlee fought in the Pacific theater of World War II on the USS Philip.

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“Ben had been influenced tremendously by being in the Navy,” Lehrer said. “Having polio as a kid, he realized he’d gone through something very difficult, he realized that he could join the Navy, and he loved it.”

With Saltonstall, Bradlee had a son, Ben Bradlee Jr., who would grow up to serve as an editor at The Boston Globe. Bradlee would go on to marry twice more: to Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot, with whom he had Dino and Marina (and four stepchildren), and later to Quinn, a fellow Post journalist who was his partner on the busy Washington social circuit and gave birth to the youngest of Bradlee’s children, Quinn.

In childhood, Bradlee worked as a paperboy and contributed to the small local paper in his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts, but his first professional brush with the field was in 1946, when he co-founded the New Hampshire Sunday News with some fellow veterans. When the paper was sold to the Manchester Union Leader, Bradlee went on the job hunt with introductions at The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. Due to rain in Baltimore, Bradlee decided at the last minute to stay on the train till Washington and start with the Post, where he was hired as a crime reporter.

But Bradlee soon went off to Europe to work at the American Embassy in Paris until 1953, when he became the France correspondent for Newsweek. Soon, Bradlee returned to Washington, still with Newsweek, and became close friends with his neighbor, an up-and-coming politician named John F. Kennedy. Two of Bradlee’s three books are about Kennedy.

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As Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Bradlee helped negotiate the sale of the magazine to the Graham family, and in 1965 became assistant managing editor at the Post. Three years later, having impressed Publisher Katharine Graham, Bradlee was named editor of the paper, a position he held until 1991, when he was made vice president at large.

The irrepressible Bradlee infused the Post with a sense of joy and purpose, longtime staffers said. He inspired reporters by putting his complete trust in them and convincing them that they could “get the story” even when they didn’t believe that themselves.

“He made the Post the best time anyone ever had in journalism,” said Walter Pincus, the Post’s veteran national security reporter. “He did that essentially by being the greatest cheerleader. He hardly edited anything, but he made you feel like you had to do the best you could do.”

Said Bernstein: “There was no cynicism to Bradlee. He could be a terrific skeptic but not a cynic. His only intolerance, aside from sloth, was for not being truthful.”

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“He had a combination of charisma and courage that was unique, even at a time of great editors,” said Dan Balz, the Post’s veteran chief political correspondent. “From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate and beyond, Ben had an enormous amount of courage as an editor to do the right thing as a journalist and pay the consequence of that.”

An oft-repeated story about Bradlee is actually about Jason Robards, who played the editor in the 1976 film adaptation of “All The President’s Men.” After reading the script, Robards told director Alan Pakula that he couldn’t play the part because all Bradlee did was “run around and say, ‘Where’s the fu—— g story?’” Robards was told, “What you’re going to have to do is figure out 15 ways to play that so it’s different, so it’s elegant.”

“That was his genius: Finding a way to push people,” Woodward told POLITICO. “He’d say, ‘What have you got for tomorrow?’ or ‘I know you can do this’ or ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this.’ One of the lines he used often was ‘Run that mother.’ That was his clarion call.”

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The reporting on Watergate, by the 20-something Woodward and Bernstein duo, started with a Saturday break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by burglars with governmental connections, including one who worked for the CIA. The story piqued Bradlee’s attention when Woodward and Bernstein reported that one of those burglars had received a $25,000 check for Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign.

The Post stuck with the story even as it fell from the pages of other papers after Nixon’s reelection in 1972. Woodward and Bernstein disclosed that John Mitchell controlled a secret fund to gather information on Democrats when he served as attorney general. FBI agents then established that the Watergate bugging incident was from a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.” With each disclosure, the Watergate break-in inched closer to Nixon.

The Watergate coverage was not without its faults. One story, about how top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman had access to the Nixon campaign slush fund, had some key elements wrong, including what was told to a grand jury and whether the Nixon staffer had been interviewed by the FBI.

“I watched the shit hit the fan on the ‘CBS Morning News’,” Bradlee wrote in his book “A Good Life” about the day he found out the paper’s story contained significant errors. “No one can imagine how I felt. We had written more than 50 Watergate stories, in the teeth of one of history’s great political coverups, and we hadn’t made a material mistake.”

After Nixon was reelected in 1972, the White House put the Post into a “black hole,” Bradlee wrote, effectively blocking its reporters from any information. But soon, the paper got its legs back. When the news broke that Haldeman, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, and top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had all quit, “Bradlee’s mouth dropped open with an expression of sheer delight,” wrote James McCartney, in the Columbia Journalism Review. “Then he put one cheek on the desk, eyes closed, and banged the desk repeatedly with his right fist. ‘How do you like them apples?’”

Just before a Senate committee on Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein reported that former counsel to the president, John W. Dean III, had already told Senate investigators that Nixon knew of the coverup. In a later hearing, another top White House aide, Alexander Butterfield, revealed that the president had taped his Oval Office conversations.

On Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon resigned. Bradlee wrote that when the moment came, he folded his hands together between his knees and lay his forehead down on his desk for a “very private ‘Holy Moly.’” Two days after the resignation, Bradlee went to his cabin in West Virginia for 23 days to “exorcise” Watergate and work on one of his books about Kennedy.

Bradlee, who was known to give his reporters unusual independence, never learned the name of “Deep Throat,” Mark Felt, until after Nixon had left office, which he said in later interviews was not a tactic he would repeat. In fact, four decades after Watergate, Bradlee revealed to his biographer Jeff Himmelman that he harbored “a residual fear in my soul” that Woodward’s version of his clandestine meetings with Felt wasn’t “quite straight.”

Woodward accused Himmelman of being selective with Bradlee’s words and ignoring a more recent interview in which the editor was more supportive of Woodward. Bradlee also threw his support behind Woodward after his doubts had become public, saying in a statement, “I always trusted him, and I always will.” Sally Quinn added: “There was nothing specific that Ben had doubts about. Everything that Bob and Carl Bernstein reported was absolutely the truth. The story stands up. No one is questioning Bob’s veracity.”

However history looks at the Watergate coverage, one of Bradlee’s longtime goals had been achieved: The Post was being mentioned in the same breath as The New York Times by those in power. “That had been a secret, unspoken goal of mine ever since I had returned to the paper,” Bradlee wrote in “A Good Life.”

Bradlee’s achievements at the Post go far beyond Watergate. His handling of the Pentagon Papers, too, stands as a testament to his ability to bring his paper in on a story even when it had initially been beat by its competitors.

In 1971, the Times published an explosive exclusive on a top-secret study called, “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy, 1945-1967.” The Post, Bradlee wrote in his memoir, found itself “in the humiliating position of having to rewrite the competition.” As the paper scrambled to get a copy of the Pentagon Papers, (“we were going out of our minds,” Bradlee wrote) the Times continued to churn out exclusives.

In time, Nixon and the Justice Department secured an injunction from the federal district court in New York to prevent the Times from publishing more stories based on the documents. The injunction gave the Post its window. The original leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, reached out to Ben Bagdikian, then the national editor of the Post. A disorganized pile of thousands of papers was given to Post reporters and editors, who pored over them at Bradlee’s Georgetown home.

There were doubts over whether their work would get anywhere – Post lawyers were concerned about potential legal repercussions for The Washington Post Co., which, to make matters worse, had just gone public. It came down to Graham, the publisher, to decide whether the paper would run the story or not. She made the call — “I say we print” — over the phone in the middle of a dinner party.

“Throughout 1973, I was asked to define the key moment in our coverage of the Watergate matters, the one moment when we took an irrevocable decision. The answer is plain to me: the moment when Kay Graham said, ‘I say we print’ the Pentagon Papers,” Bradlee said in a speech later, according to Himmelman’s book.

It may seem strange to recall it now, but Bradlee’s first big move at the Post was the creation of the paper’s Style section.

“It’ll probably last longer, sure. Watergate was a story. This was a way of interpreting society,” Bradlee said in a 1995 interview with the American Journalism Review.

Bradlee launched the Style section in 1969, the first major newspaper to transform what was traditionally the “women’s pages” — recipes, sewing patterns and party write-ups — into a serious, feature-heavy section. Bradlee told author Kay Mills he created the section “to treat women as people and not as appendages to men” and as a place separate from spot news, for features, profiles, wit, humor.”

Balz identified Style as one of Bradlee’s most significant contributions to the Post.

“Style was a revolution in newspapering,” Balz said. “He took what had been the ‘women’s pages’ and turned it into a very dynamic and aggressive and edgy features section that no other paper had really done. It was also a recognition of the transformation of the time, of women coming into the workplace in much greater numbers, and an understanding that the Post needed to look at this part of its coverage in a totally different way.”

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It was also through the Style section that Bradlee met his future wife. Sally Quinn had been hired to cover parties for the Style section — despite having “never written a word in her life.” In the middle of the Watergate saga, Quinn initiated the relationship by leaving Bradlee anonymous love notes on his desk. In 1973, after professing her love for Bradlee, Quinn took a short-lived position as an anchor with CBS in New York before returning to Washington, and to Bradlee. Bradlee was still technically married to his second wife when his relationship with Quinn began, but they soon divorced and Bradlee and Quinn were married in 1978.

Together, Quinn and Bradlee were a force on the Georgetown social circuit, Washington’s premier media power couple, throwing lavish parties and even clashing with some first ladies, such as Hillary Clinton, who was viewed to have snubbed Quinn by declining a party invitation.

“Ben and Sally were on the circuit all the time, gathering information — they’d call you and say, ‘I heard this or that’ virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Woodward said. “Anyone who thinks the Internet created the 24/7 news cycle didn’t know Ben Bradlee.”

“Ben used to bitch and moan about going to parties, but then he’d go and he’d just love it,” Lehrer said. “Katharine Graham once described Ben as the best guest you could possibly have at a dinner party because he always came to play. When he went into a room, everybody knew Ben Bradlee was there — he cared about it all. He loved the scene. He wasn’t in it to be seen, he just loved being present at things.”

Bradlee remained at the helm of the Post for 17 years after Watergate, revered for his enthusiasm, editorial judgment and ability to inspire the newsroom.

David Maraniss, the longtime Post reporter, tells a story about the 1980 Republican National Convention: “When all other journalists were writing and talking about how Ronald Reagan was going to make history and take Gerald Ford as his running mate or co-president, Lou Cannon, the Post reporter who knew Reagan better than anyone, insisted that it would be George H.W. Bush. Bradlee said he would kiss Sweet Lou on the lips if he was right. And when Cannon was right, Bradlee did kiss him on the lips, through Lou’s unkempt mustache, right in the Post’s workspace in Detroit.”

“He was the coolest cat who ever strolled a newsroom,” Maraniss said. “His clothes, his walk, his smile, his voice. Journalists are by nature a frumpy lot, but Ben single-handedly made up for the disheveled masses, without looking or acting corporate or fussy, just cool.”

The post-Watergate period was not without its setbacks, however. In 1981, the Post was forced to return that year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature writing after reporter Janet Cooke admitted to fabricating a story called “Jimmy’s World” about an 8-year-old heroin addict.

Bradlee said often that the Cooke incident would occupy the second paragraph of his obituary.

Cooke was a young reporter who had worked her way up from the one of the Post’s weeklies and into the main paper as a reporter covering what were then crime-riddled neighborhoods in D.C., like U Street and 14th Street. “Jimmy’s World” started as a tip Cooke received from a source, but after weeks of searching she couldn’t find the boy. Cooke ended up fabricating the notes to an interview with “Jimmy,” and the piece ran on the front page of the Sunday Sept. 20, 1981, issue. Almost immediately the piece was questioned by D.C. police. After the Pulitzer was awarded, news outlets began to check into Cooke’s biography, only to find that she had exaggerated or fabricated parts of her résumé.

It all led to a grilling in the Post newsroom, where Bradlee demanded Cooke speak to him in French, Italian and Portuguese, languages Cooke had claimed on her résumé that she could speak. “You’re like Richard Nixon,” Bradlee told her upon realizing she couldn’t speak any of the languages, according to Himmelman. “You’re trying to cover up.”

It took Maraniss to persuade Cooke to confess. She resigned and the Post returned the Pulitzer.

“It took us years to recover from that,” Bradlee said in a 1996 interview with Allan Gregg.

Bradlee’s handling of the controversy reflected what supporters said was his unwavering reverence for truth and transparency: He assigned Bill Green, the paper’s ombudsman, to write a full autopsy of how the Cooke affair had come to pass, and published it in the Post.

“Ben’s response to Cooke was as important as the way he handled Watergate,” Balz said. “‘He said, ‘OK, we messed up. And we’re going to let people know how and why it happened.’ He gave Bill Green carte blanche to report … how this mistake had been made.”

“I think it was indicative of Ben’s feeling that when you screw up you have to pay those consequences, you owe it to your readers to tell them why it happened,” he continued. “This was not somebody who was going to get down in a defensive crouch.”

In 1991, Bradlee stepped down as executive and became vice president at large, handing the reins to his managing editor, Leonard Downie. Bradlee remained a presence in the Post newsroom, but his era had passed.

“In his final years, when he was out of the newsroom and confined to the ninth floor as a vice president, he still loved to go down to the cafeteria for lunch,” Maraniss recalled. “Those of us who knew him from his editing days would sit with him if we saw him. It was always a great feeling to be around him. One day, the two of us were having lunch and there were about 20 young people at a long table nearby, eating, shouting, laughing. ‘Who the hell are they?’ he asked. I went over and asked. They were techies and Web people who had been hired to work on the Post website. I asked them if they knew the man sitting over there. Not one of them did. Bradlee had made the Post, and not one of these people recognized him. The ignorance of time and circumstance. It really ticked me off.”

Bradlee remained loyal to the Post and its former owners, the Grahams, till the end. He often pointed to the Grahams, especially Katharine, as the reason for the paper and his own success. “The beginning and the end of [a good editor] is a good owner,” Bradlee often said.

In 2013, when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family, POLITICO called Bradlee at his summer home in East Hampton, New York, for comment. He spoke for a few minutes and then began to trail off. Quinn picked up the phone and asked that Bradlee’s words not be published, because of his declining state of mental health.

Instead, Quinn offered to provide comment on her and Bradlee’s behalf: “It’s the end of an era, but life moves on. Between Ben and me, we’ve been at The Washington Post more than a hundred years.”

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