Description
"On August 8, 1942, 1 graduated from Harvard by the skin of my teeth at 10:00 A.M. At noon, I was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve with orders to join a new destroyer being built in Kearny, New Jersey. And at 4:00P.M., I married Jean Saltonstall, the first and only girl I had been with. I was not yet twenty-one. I had never been west of the Berkshires or south of Washington, D.C., and I was on my way to some place called the South Pacific, which was not yet a musical. The education of Benjamin C. Bradlee was finally under way."
This is the witty, candid story of a daring young man who made his own way to the heights of American journalism and public life, of the great adventure that took him at only twenty years old straight from Harvard to almost four years in the shooting war in the South Pacific, and back, from a maverick New Hampshire weekly to an apprentice- ship for Newsweek in postwar Paris, then to the Washington Bureau chief's desk, and finally to the apex of his career at The Washington Post.
Bradlee earned a front-row seat on this exciting journey, first as a general assignment reporter, then as a foreign correspondent in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and finally back "where I belong" in Washington. He has been an eyewitness to most of the seminal events of the second half of the twentieth century, from Guadalcanal to Japan during World War II, all the way through the end of the Cold War and the political revolution of the 1990s. He watched and talked to most of the heroes and villains who were making such vivid history so fast.
Some of them became friends. The legendary trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams and humorist Art Buchwald were his best friends. Jack Kennedy was first a neighbor, before he moved out of Georgetown and into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then a friend.
Some became foes. His best foe was Richard Milhous Nixon, whose worst moments in Watergate gave journalism especially The Washington Post-its finest hours.
Either way, Bradlee was a player. A good friend, a tough foe. On playing fields where the first rough draft of history was written.
Bradlee took the helm of The Washington Post in 1965. He and his reporters transformed it into one of the most influential and respected news publications in the world, reinvented modern investigative journalism, and redefined the way news is reported, published, and read. Under his direction, the paper won eighteen Pulitzer prizes. His leadership and investigative drive following the break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the downfall of a president, and kept every president afterward on his toes.
Bradlee, backed every step of the way by the Graham family, challenged the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers-and won. His ingenuity, and the spirited reporting of Sally Quinn, now his wife, led to the creation of the Style Section, a revolutionary newspaper feature in its time, now copied by just about every paper in the country.
ISBN:9780684808949
