By: Tom Wicker

September 24, 1995

A GOOD LIFE

Newspapering and Other Adventures

By Ben Bradlee

Simon & Schuster. 514 pp. $ 27.50

WHEN BEN BRADLEE was writing this memoir, he asked David Halberstam to suggest a title. Halberstam replied, "You've had a good life, Bradlee. Why not call it that?" Bradlee had, and he did, and justifies the title in this exuberant life story by a great editor who believes he was "put here on earth" to be a newspaperman.

Bradlee survived two usually lethal early experiences -- a childhood bout with polio and a Navy officer's berth on a World War II destroyer in the Pacific. Then, as he tells it, he lucked into successive jobs as Washington Post reporter, press officer of the U.S. Embassy in Paris, Newsweek correspondent first in Paris, then Washington, next as the magazine's Washington bureau chief.

By the late '50s, he was living on the same Georgetown block as Jacqueline and John Kennedy and had developed a boon-companion relationship with his neighbor, who happened to be running for president. The friendship lasted, overcoming differing interests in Kennedy's White House years, until the president's death.

In fact, luck had less to do with any of this than Ben Bradlee writes. He was an enterprising reporter from the beginning of his career on a long-dead New Hampshire newspaper, and he was the kind of irreverent, sophisticated, knowledgeable man JFK was likely to take to. Neither set much store by solemnity.

Indeed, Bradlee writes, it was "after a couple of shooters" that he brashly proposed to the late Philip Graham that Graham should buy Newsweek. Graham did so, creating the Post-Newsweek empire, and Bradlee made an invaluable connection with the Graham family. He soon became managing, later executive editor of The Post.

The rest is not just journalistic history: Watergate, the ground-breaking Style section, the bold follow-up printing of the Pentagon Papers soon after the New York Times disclosed them, the historic court decision that favored publication, the transformation of the staid old Post into a remarkable newspaper.

When Ben Bradlee retired in 1991, Donald Graham summed up how well he had served The Post: "With verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story, and the number one desire . . . of getting the best staff of reporters and editors and photographers in the United States to join him in putting out a great newspaper." I can count on two or three fingers the editors I have known who deserved such tribute.

A Good Life is consistently interesting, of course, to anyone who lived through the times it recounts, and should be particularly so to journalists. Three passages gripped me more than most:

--A detailed account of how Bradlee, a magazine journalist, prepared himself to edit (and transform, as he always intended) a daily newspaper. Night and day, from top to bottom of The Post building, from the publisher's office to the blue-collar press room, he worked to learn the business, not just his own duties but what everyone did or should do, how the complex -- sometimes miraculous -- business of putting a newspaper on the streets is accomplished night after night, even on holidays. Those who always wanted to edit a newspaper will envy the experience.

-- A sad account of how The Post covered the wreck of Gary Hart's presidential campaign in 1988. It led Bradlee to this reflection on how his close friend John Kennedy would have fared had reporters applied the same rules of coverage to him: "I have concluded that he could not have withstood the pressure of publicity. If the American public had learned -- no matter how the public learned it -- that the President of the United states had shared a girlfriend, in the biblical sense, with a top American gangster, and Lord knows who else, I am convinced he would been impeached. That just seems unforgivably reckless behavior."

-- Bradlee's ultimate conclusion on politicians' "national security" threats to newspapers: "Patriotism is not exclusively the province of administration officials . . . more often than not, in my experience [they] use the claim of national security as a smokescreen to cover up their own embarrassment. Those of us who heard Richard Nixon claim he could not explain Watergate because matters of national security were involved will never automatically accept claims of national security. Those of us who were taken all the way to the Supreme Court . . . for the Pentagon Papers . . . remember the Solicitor General of the United States eighteen years later writing that the national security was never threatened by publication."

Amen to that -- a good lesson for all journalists and due warning to the public.

A Good Life may be too irreverent for some, too frank for others and discounted by many who apparently believe newspapers and newspapermen are without scruple or honor. Ben Bradlee's memoir recounts a good life in journalism that nevertheless exhibited both -- as well as the talent, the energy and the courage to act on them.

Tom Wicker retired in 1991 as a columnist for the New York Times.

Copyright © 1991, The Washington Post