And with his gray hair slicked back, his eyes actually twinkling, and his chest fairly bursting from a Turnbull & Asser shirt, Bradlee, too, had the self-confident carriage of an emperor. Bradlee’s mother, Josephine deGersdorff, was at the end of a long line of European kings, queens, and counts. This sort of stuff was especially entertaining when you remembered that Bradlee’s family was a concoction of seventeenth-century Yankees and semi-comic Vanity Fair-like European royalty. “Look, I have to ask you something,” she said. One day, Regan approached the house grammarian, an editor named Tom Lippman, and admitted that she was perplexed. His secretary, Debbie Regan, was, in turn, careful to reflect precisely his language when transcribing his dictation. Bradlee was, by today’s standards, unchallengeable, and he was expert in the art of florid dismissal. In his era, there may have been demands by isolated readers for greater transparency, for correction or explanation, but there was no Internet, no Twitter, to amplify them. He was given neither to self-doubt nor to self-restraint. His letters in no way resembled those of Emily Dickinson.

Let’s get at least one good one out of the way:ĭuring his reign, from 1968 to 1991, as the executive editor of the Washington Post, Bradlee took time periodically to dictate correspondence into a recorder. Bradlee stories almost always relate to his glittering surface qualities, which combined the Brahmin and the profane. Among his many bequests to the Republic was a catalogue of swaggering anecdotes rich enough to float a week of testimonial dinners. Supreme Court decision permitting publication of the Pentagon Papers, June 30, 1971.īenjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, the most charismatic and consequential newspaper editor of postwar America, died at the age of ninety-three on Tuesday. Bradlee, its executive editor, review reports on the 6–3 U.S. Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and Benjamin C.

A good life by ben bradlee