All Intensive Purposes

My grandmother gave me a copy of Ben Bradlee's A Good Life some years ago, and I just got around to reading it. Bradlee grew up in comfortable WASP circles in Beverly, Massachusetts, attended St. Mark's and Harvard, and graduated right into the U.S. Navy in 1942. He spent the war on destroyers in the Pacific. After the war, he found his calling in journalism, and some years later became the managing editor of The Washington Post. Bradlee is as responsible as anyone for the Post's ascent from mediocrity. The key seems to have been that he had the sense to hire a whole lot of good people (David Broder, Walter Pincus, Ward Just, the list goes on and on). In the late 1950s, Bradlee and his wife became friends with the neighbors and fellow parents, the junior Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, and his wife Jackie. The friendship continued during JFK's presidency. (Not long after JFK was killed, so was Bradlee's sister-in-law, and it turned out that she and he had been having an affair. Bradlee writes about his slow realization that he had not known JFK as well as he thought he did.) Famously, Bradlee was also on the scene as Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and a host of other Post reporters not portrayed by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman made the Watergate story.

His memoir is full of interesting stories, delivered in the brisk, efficient prose you would expect. What he is not is introspective. Bradlee recounts that after he left the service, he

enrolled in a couple of night courses in the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, one of them in fiction writing, taught by James T. Farrell, the author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Just in case the great American novel was locked somewhere between my belly and my soul. I was keeping all options wide open at that time in my life. But this option soon closed. Twice a week, our assignment was to write 1,500 words of fiction, and I couldn't write 15 words that I had to make up. I could exaggerate my own experience a little, but exaggeration made me feel untruthful. My "fiction" was without exploration of motive or emotion, and in a brief student-teacher session Farrell put me out of my misery. There was a certain facility for describing what I had seen, he said, but nothing interesting when it came to describing emotion. He was not the last to make that observation.

A Good Life 96-97 (New York 1996).

Indeed, Bradlee's accounts of his first two marriages and his third marriage to Sally Quinn are not particularly illuminating. But A Good Life has much more to offer. For example, with the ongoing debate about the Downing Street Memo and how we got to this point in Iraq, Bradlee's account of the fight over the publication of the Pentagon Papers is a worthwhile reminder that the government will often use the pretext of national security interests to hide embarrassing facts. Bradlee writes -- and I had not realized -- that 18 years after the Solicitor General of the United States, former Harvard Law School dean Ernest Griswold, argued to the Supreme Court that publication of the Pentagon Papers would threaten national security, he confessed that the government's case was specious. (Griswold corrected the record in an Op-Ed piece in, where else, The Washington Post. See page 323 of A Good Life.) Good thing for all of us that Bradlee's newspaper had the moxie to keep fighting.