THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510050489
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KERRY DOUGHERTY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
A GOOD LIFE
Newspapering and Other Adventures
BEN BRADLEE
Simon & Schuster. 499 pp. $27.50.
In an understatement of almost epic proportions, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee has titled his autobiography: A Good Life.
From his birth 74 years ago to a blue-blooded Boston family, through his remarkable friendship with John F. Kennedy, to the Watergate investigation, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee has led a charmed - if not truly astonishing - life.
What else but unfathomable good fortune could account for the Bradlee family's survival of the Great Depression, when millions of Americans were hungry and out of work? Indeed, Bradlee's father lost his $50,000-a-year job with a Boston investment house when the stock market crashed, but the clan managed to hold on to the trappings of wealth. Young Ben continued his education at the exclusive St. Mark's prep school and even Harvard was not out of the reach of the freshly impoverished Bradlees.
``To keep us children in private schools, my father and mother depended on the charity of still rich old relatives, whom they didn't really like, but to whom they now had to suck up,'' Bradlee recalls.
And surely it was serendipity that found Bradlee living in the 3300 block of N Street in Georgetown in 1957 when a young senator, his beautiful young wife and baby (as luck would have it, nearly the same age as the Bradlees' youngest) moved into the same block. Thus did Ben Bradlee and Jack Kennedy embark on their extraordinary friendship - while pushing prams through the narrow streets of Georgetown.
Bradlee's intimacy with Kennedy provides some of the most fascinating reading in the book as the newspaperman explores the ethical dilemmas encountered by journalists who become too chummy with their subjects. ``Kennedy and the press were made for each other,'' he writes, ``using each other comfortably, enjoying each other's company, squabbling from time to time the way real friends squabble, understanding the role each played in the other's life.''
A Good Life chronicles Bradlee's progression from prep school, to Harvard, into the Navy and World War II, through a brief stint at The Post, as press attache to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, to Newsweek and finally back to The Post, where he served as executive editor from 1968 until his retirement in 1991.
Bradlee led what had been a sleepy, establishment-oriented newspaper into international prominence, then in 1981 survived one of the most devastating scandals to hit journalism: the Janet Cooke affair. Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize for a feature story about an 8-year-old heroin addict that it was later learned she had made up.
Writes Bradlee: ``. . . the words `Janet Cooke' entered the vocabulary as a symbol for the worst in American journalism, just as the word `Watergate' went into the vocabulary as a symbol for the best in American journalism.''
Bradlee also touches on his personal life: his two early marriages and his union with the Post's flamboyant Style writer Sally Quinn, whom he married in 1978. He treats his ex-wives with deference, blaming the failure of his marriages on his own immaturity and work habits.
A Good Life is a curiously courtly account of the man who has arguably done more to change newspapering in America than anyone. In a breezy style, Bradlee ruminates about changes in journalism during his lifetime, many precipitated by his own decisions.
He was at the helm of The Post during the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate stories, and the reporting that ultimately led to the withdrawal of Gary Hart from the Democratic presidential primaries. Yet Bradlee seems almost nostalgic for the days when newspapers shielded the private lives of public figures.
``I'm less sure today . . . that the public is best served by knowing everything the second an incident happens,'' he writes.
Bradlee's memoirs are those of a man near the epicenter of so many major events: the assassination of one president, the resignation of another, race riots that left chunks of Washington charred and the emergence of The Washington Post as a force to be reckoned with in American journalism.
Yet Bradlee is unflinchingly self-deprecating - portraying himself as simply a hardworking man thrust unwittingly into the midst of history by the friendly hand of fate.
A good life indeed. by CNB