Ben Bradlee On Journalism: Be 'Fair' And 'Honest,' But Don't 'Back Down'

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. We're going to listen back to an excerpt of the interview I recorded with Ben Bradlee. He died yesterday at the age of 93. Bradlee was the executive editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to '91. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, described Bradlee as the most charismatic and consequential newspaper editor of his time. In a 1995 New Yorker profile, Remnick wrote, Bradlee arrived at a mediocre paper, and with publisher Katharine Graham's money and support made it great. The biggest story covered under Bradlee's watch was Watergate, which forced the resignation of President Nixon. The first big risk Bradlee took was publishing the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret documents that revealed the history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The New York Times had already published several installments, but the Justice Department got an injunction against the paper, preventing it from publishing further excerpts. Then, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the Post. In 1995, I asked Bradlee why it was important for the Post to publish the Pentagon Papers.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

BEN BRADLEE: Failure to publish after The New York Times had published would have relegated the Post to a status of a kind of a pro-government establishment organization which didn't want to take on the government, didn't want to fight for its constitutional rights. And it seems to me it would have forever relegated us to sort of second-class citizenship. It wasn't my decision - I mean, I wanted to publish from day one, moment one. It was Katharine Graham's decision, and she was - it was a great decision. And it made all future decisions of an editorial nature at The Washington Post kind of automatic and easy.

GROSS: Well, what were the risks?

BRADLEE: Well, there were some interesting risks because if we had been - this was a civil suit - if we had been enjoined - and mind you, no newspaper in the history of the country, which was then 190-some years old - had ever been stopped from publishing something it wanted to publish beforehand, prior restraint. So that was a wonderful principle to fight for.

The other thing is that if we had been convicted of that, if the judge had stopped us from publishing something, the Nixon administration was - it was quite obvious - was going to go after us on criminal violations, violating the code against publishing confidential and national security manners. If had we been convicted of that, you cannot own television stations if you are a convicted felon, and we had about $100 million of television stations that we would have lost. The Post had just gone public in the New York Stock Exchange. Shares in the Post were offered for sale for the first time to the public. And that was seriously threatened. So it was no casual decision that was involved.

GROSS: So how much of the decision to publish was so that the Post could become a more respected player? And how much of it was all the lofty principles about freedom of the press?

BRADLEE: Well, that's a good question, too, because, you know, in the last - it was 7,000 pages, although we only had 4,000 of them - we got them at 10:30 in the morning, and we published at 10:30 that night, our first story. No one ever read the Pentagon Papers. They really didn't, you know? We could only read - each of us read sections of it, then we - for about eight hours we read and then had a news conference and decided what we could publish.

The Pentagon Papers ended with matters and the decision-making process in Vietnam before President Nixon took office, and therefore, he was talking about the Johnson administration and the Kennedy administration and the Eisenhower administration. That's what the Pentagon Papers were about. I think, you know, it was - it dealt with the origins of the most important event in the middle of the 20th century, and therefore, it had an intrinsic importance to it. But we also - it was a principle that is really fundamental to a free press. We've got to be able to publish what we want, then get punished if we did wrong, then get pursued by - privately by people that we may have libeled or publicly for violating the law.

GROSS: Getting back to the question, how much do you think your decision was based on making The Washington Post a player and how much was based on the loftier principles of freedom of the press?

BRADLEE: Well, we wanted to be a player. That's for sure. And we felt that we wouldn't be if we didn't publish. So it was an important factor - a very important factor. It was not probably the overriding one. The overriding one - that we had a news story. We had a news story. And that's what we're in business to do, publish it.

GROSS: Now, give me a sense of what your style was like when you were making your case to Katharine Graham and to the lawyers. Did you make speeches about freedom of the press?

BRADLEE: No (laughter).

GROSS: Did you insult your opponents in the newsroom? What was your style?

BRADLEE: No, I had no opponents in the newsroom. I had the lawyers to worry about.

GROSS: The lawyers. Yeah. OK.

BRADLEE: We had this - all of this was taking place in my house in Georgetown, and we had two fairly large rooms. And one of them was sort of a temporary city room, where a bunch of reporters and a couple of news aides and a copy editor or two were actually reading the documents - making up their mind what story to run - what story could they get into shape to run that night.

And in the other room, we had the lawyers and the representatives of the owners and a couple of editors from the editorial page. And I shuttled between the two trying to make up my mind and learn the content and then trying to steer the conversation to the verdict I wanted. There was no point in trying to say, we've got to do it and threaten to quit because then - even if you won that, you'd win it leaving great scars and wounds in personal relationships. So we had to do it sort of gently and listen to everybody and listen to their arguments and then try to counter them.

GROSS: Do you thrive on making these complicated decisions, or are these like Maalox moments for you? You'd be reaching for the medicine.

BRADLEE: Well, there's a wonderful quality of journalism. If you make a mistake, it's out there for everybody to see.

GROSS: Yeah.

BRADLEE: And it stays there, and, you know, it goes right - bang - into the history books. And there are - no known device that you can erase a daily newspaper. I love it. Yeah, I do love the - that sense that you're dealing with important issues and that you're going to be fair. And you're going to be honest. But you're not going to back down.

GROSS: No headaches, ulcers, upset stomachs?

BRADLEE: I never had an ulcer. The guy - my doctor - once told me, you'll never have an ulcer, Bradlee.

GROSS: (Laughter) Well, good for you.

BRADLEE: And I never have.

GROSS: Let's move on to Watergate. What was the first sign that your reporters were on to something pretty spectacular?

BRADLEE: Well, let's start with five Spanish-speaking persons in the Democratic National Committee wearing dark glasses, rubber gloves and carrying walkie-talkies and crisp, new $100 bills in their pocket at 2 o'clock in the morning. That's what got our attention. And you'd have to be lobotomized not to see that that was interesting.

In a matter of a day, we knew that one of them had a CIA and a White House connection. And in a matter of two weeks, we knew that that money came from a political gift to the committee to re-elect President Nixon at which point, you know, you couldn't have turned back if you tried. There was too much - there was too much left too unexplained, and the more you dug into it, the more there was to explain and the weaker the explanations became.

GROSS: Ben Bradlee recorded in 1995. He died yesterday at the age of 93. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.