Ben Bradlee obituary

As the brilliant editor who steered the Washington Post’s history-making exposure of the Watergate presidential scandal, Ben Bradlee, who has died aged 93, became the most lauded and influential American journalist of his era. Yet long after his departure from the job, he still worried about the one big blunder of his career.

In 2006, Bradlee brooded publicly in a long television interview about his dread that one name might appear “in the second paragraph of my obituary … and it still may”. The name: Janet Cooke, a Post reporter who brought the worst disgrace upon the newspaper in its history – and Bradlee’s 26 years as editor – over her 1981 Pulitzer prizewinning article about a black male heroin addict, aged eight. She had invented the entire story.

Cooke had to relinquish the prize and resign. Bradlee apologised to the police chief and the mayor for the bogus article, headlined Jimmy’s World, which had outraged the capital. The editor admitted that part of the reason for the scandal was that he and almost all his senior executives were so hopelessly unworldly about the city’s large African-American population that they could not judge the veracity of Cooke’s article.

The affair came less than a decade after Bradlee’s great Watergate triumph. Through months of indifference from rival media about what President Richard Nixon described as a minor burglary at the Democratic party offices in Washington in June 1972, Bradlee had consistently supported two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their hunch that it would lead to the White House. It did. Just over two years later, Nixon resigned and several aides were jailed for what had been an organised subversion of the democratic process.

Watergate hurt Washington, but was also cited as proof that its political system worked – eventually. It made stars of the two reporters and thrust newspaper journalism into a heroic new mould. The episode became a successful 1976 Hollywood film, All the President’s Men, with Jason Robards playing Bradlee. The editor who transformed the Post from an undistinguished local sheet into an international name was now the pre-eminent example of how fearless pursuit of truth could still restore integrity by unseating its abusers, however powerful. Bradlee embraced the truth theme fervently after retiring as editor in 1991 to become the Post’s goodwill ambassador. He taught courses on truth at Harvard and Georgetown universities, and in his autobiography, A Good Life (1995), described himself as “instinctively pro-sunshine, against closed doors, pro-let-it-all-hang-out, and anti-smoke-filled rooms. I believe that truth sets man free.”

It was a curious stance for someone who spent many years undercover as a counter-espionage informant, a government propagandist, and unofficial asset of the Central Intelligence Agency. It started publicly enough with his Pacific war posting as a navy destroyer intelligence officer. Thereafter it became much more more clandestine.

Bradlee was born in Boston into a distinguished family that went back three centuries in Massachusetts. Ben was the son of Frederick, a banker, and his wife Josephine (nee De Gersdorff); 51 relatives went to Harvard, as did he himself. On the day he graduated in 1942, he joined the navy and married his first girlfriend, Jean Saltonstall, a US senator’s daughter. After the war he obtained work with a New Hampshire newspaper, but his break came in 1948 as a Washington Post reporter.

He befriended the newspaper’s associate publisher, Phil Graham, who had intelligence connections. In 1951 Graham found him a US embassy job in Paris and next year he joined its propaganda unit, the US Information and Educational Exchange (later the US Information Agency), which supplied exploitable news items to the CIA. During this period, according to a US justice department memo, Bradlee promulgated CIA-directed European propaganda urging the controversial execution of the convicted American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They were electrocuted in 1953.

That year, Bradlee became a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, later owned by the Post. He and Jean divorced in 1955 and the following year he married Antoinette Pinchot. Their circle in Paris included several key CIA men. One was James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counter-espionage chief from 1954, with whom Bradlee exchanged information. In 1957, his reporting on secret anti-French Algerian guerrilla fighters, in what some alleged was an intelligence operation, contributed to his leaving France. He returned to Washington with Newsweek, rejoined the Post, and became editor in 1965.

Bradlee began a friendship in 1959 with John Kennedy that lasted until the president’s assassination. He always denied knowing about Kennedy’s extensive philandering, even though Kennedy’s mistress at his death, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was Bradlee’s sister-in-law. She had divorced Cord Meyer, who ran the CIA’s secret news dissemination programme, Operation Mockingbird, to which Bradlee was reportedly a contributor. Her murder in 1964 remains unsolved.

In 1971 Bradlee quickly followed the New York Times in publishing the Pentagon papers, the secret US history of Vietnam disclosing unknown and embarrassing US involvements. The White House tried to prevent the publication of both, but was overruled by the supreme court in Washington. Both then and during the Watergate affair, Bradlee benefited from the close relationship he formed with Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher after the death of her husband, Phil.

Bradlee wrote two books about Kennedy, That Special Grace (1964) and Conversations With Kennedy (1975). In 2013 Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour.

He and Antoinette divorced in 1975, and three years later he married the reporter Sally Quinn, whom he had hired for the Post’s Style section. She and their son, Quinn, survive him, as do Ben, his son from his first marriage, and his children from his second, Dominic and Marina.