when asked about Bob’s depiction of his relationship with Deep Throat—the garage meetings, the flag in the flowerpot—Ben had said, among other things, “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.” For the editor of The Washington Post during Watergate to have had these kinds of doubts in 1990, while he was still the executive editor of the paper, deserved further exploration.
Jeff Himmelman: The Storm Over My Ben Bradlee Book, ‘Yours in Truth’
May 14, 2012
thedailybeast.com
In April 1974, a few months before President Nixon resigned, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post, gave one of the most thoughtful speeches of his life. In it, he talked about the fact that journalism is produced in “an adversary environment where the goals of the reported inherently conflict with the goals of the reporter and the reader.”
“It is this daily conflict that gives concrete importance and meaning to the First Amendment, to freedom of the press,” Ben said. “Without that freedom there is no conflict, and without that conflict there is no truth.”
During the past two weeks, my former boss Bob Woodward has compared me to Richard Nixon, referred to me in the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times as “dishonest,” and generally attempted to discredit me and my authorized biography of Bradlee, Yours in Truth, which was released by Random House last Tuesday. The prevailing narrative in nearly every description of my work thus far, much of which has been influenced by Bob, is that I “betrayed” my former mentor to write a cheap “tell-all.” The New York Times, in a Styles section piece published Sunday, compares my book, a 473-page, deeply researched portrait of Bradlee, to the novel The Devil Wears Prada.
Bob and others are after me not because I violated agreements or published things I didn’t have “approval” to publish, but because of where the story led me and what I felt obligated to report. In 2000, in a dedication to his book Maestro, which I helped to report and write, Bob wrote of me: “His standards of accuracy and fairness are the absolute highest ... No one ever did more or better in the crucible of book writing.” Those standards have not changed; it’s just that I uncovered some information that Bob Woodward happens not to like, and he is doing everything he can to distract attention from it. If there is any lesson that Ben Bradlee taught me in the four years I spent working with and studying him, it is that powerful people rarely welcome the truth and will often go to great lengths to keep it from coming out. Ben dealt with that throughout his career, and I am seeing it firsthand right now.
 Ben Bradlee (left), former executive editor of The Washington Post, and former reporter Bob Woodward talk during the program “Remembering Watergate: A Conversation” in April 2011 at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif. (Chris Carlson / AP Photo)
Let’s address this “betrayal” narrative head on. Bob Woodward was my full-time boss from 1999 to 2002. In 2007, when I was back helping him out for a few months, he introduced me to Ben and his wife, Sally Quinn, for a possible book project of Ben’s. In 2008 I coauthored a book with Ben and Sally’s son, Quinn—and in that same year, Ben and Sally gave me permission to write a book about Ben, with no strings attached.
In 2010, while digging through some newly arrived boxes from Ben’s archives, I came across an interview that Ben had done in 1990. In it, when asked about Bob’s depiction of his relationship with Deep Throat—the garage meetings, the flag in the flowerpot—Ben had said, among other things, “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.” For the editor of The Washington Post during Watergate to have had these kinds of doubts in 1990, while he was still the executive editor of the paper, deserved further exploration.
I brought Ben’s comments, and a follow-up interview that I conducted about them with Ben in 2010, to Bob’s house in March of last year to get his reaction. Four days later, as I recount in the book, Bob came to Ben’s house and made an impassioned plea, first to Ben and then to me, to leave that material out of my book. Bob, the champion of free speech and a reporter’s right to report the truth, directly commanded me not to use material that he thought might make him look bad: “Don’t use the quotes, Jeff.” Why? Because doing so would, as he said, “give fodder to the fuckers” out there.
This is the danger of writing about powerful living people. Nobody has alleged that anything I’ve written is untrue; they can’t, so instead they’re trying to impugn me and my motives.
I was faced with a choice: obey my former boss and ignore a historically relevant comment made by the subject of my book purely to please Bob or stick to my reporting. Any journalist knows that this is not actually a choice. When I asked Ben about it again, in the wake of Bob’s reaction, Ben stood by his comment from 1990 and repeatedly expressed his support of my decision to report it.
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