Ben Bradlee (cc photo: Miguel Ariel Contreras Drake-McLaughlin)
Ben Bradlee is gradually surrendering authority at the nation’s second-most influential newspaper. Although Bradlee will retain his title as executive editor, de facto power at the Washington Post has already passed to the paper’s managing editor of six years, Leonard Downie. The change may not bode well for those who find the Post already too close to governing elites.
Bradlee was recently heralded in Time (8/13/90) for promoting “provocative coverage that invigorated readers as much as it discomfited the White House and much of official Washington.” A different view of the editor can be found in Katharine the Great, the biography of Post Co. chair Katharine Graham, which Graham and Bradlee tried to suppress. Author Deborah Davis documented Bradlee’s US propaganda work in the ’50s (he helped the CIA promote the Rosenberg prosecution in Europe) and his promise to Graham in the ’60s that he would not hire any “‘son of a bitch reporter’ that wasn’t a patriot” to cover Vietnam.
If Bradlee’s Post was hostile to Nixon, its relationship with the Reagan and Bush administrations has been much cozier. What does it foretell, then, that Downie is seen as “less willing to take on the powerful” (Time, 8/13/90)? Or that the one editorial act that Time cites as making Downie a “stickler for down-the-middle objectivity” was his dubious charge that the paper was “lopsidedly biased against the pro-life side”? Or that publisher Donald Graham—Katharine’s son—is said to have promised his sister, hawkish Post columnist Lally Weymouth, that after Bradlee officially retires, “the Post will become much more conservative” (Spy, 6/90)?
