Remembering Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee

Last week, I had the rare experience of not only seeing a historical film whose principal players I had known, but also hearing the audience applaud the history they made as the movie ended.

The film is Stephen Spielberg’s  “The Post,” the story of the role The Washington Post and its publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, played in affirming the press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment against a powerful opponent, the Nixon Administration.

It recounts the 1971 battle over publication of the Pentagon Papers, the massive history of American involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, commissioned by Kennedy and Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara for future historians, not curious journalists.   

The film depicts how the top-secret papers were obtained by The New York Times and then by the Post when a judge ordered the Times to stop publishing news from the papers after only one report had appeared.  

The Post was then a typical big city newspaper, no better or worse than many others. But it was also about to offer its stock for sale to the public, and faced financial jeopardy if the government was able to prove it had broken the law by publishing the papers.

In defiance of sound business and legal advice, Graham sided with  Bradlee and his news staff.  She was vindicated when the paper’s right to publish was upheld by a 6-3 vote of the Supreme Court, a decision that changed the course of history and transformed the Post into the great national newspaper it is today. 

That was in 1971. I met Graham and Bradlee three years later when the newspaper bought WTIC, the television station I worked for in Hartford, from the Travelers Insurance Co. and renamed it WFSB after Frederick S. “Fritz” Beebe, the Post company president seen in the film telling Graham he wouldn’t defy the court order.  

The station’s sale, which required the approval of the Federal Communications Commission, had been put on hold late in 1973 when Nixon allies had (unsuccessfully) challenged the licenses of two Post TV stations in Florida.

I was talking to Graham at a get-acquainted reception at the station when Bradlee sidled up to his boss and said, “Katharine, I’m sorry to tell you the word ‘s__t’ is on the front page of your paper this morning.”

Graham smiled and asked, “Oh, President Nixon again?”

The Post was then in the midst of its next history-making reporting, the Watergate investigation, and was publishing excerpts from tapes of Oval Office meetings of Nixon and his closest aides, which led to Nixon’s resignation and the confirmation of Graham and Bradlee’s iconic place in American journalism.  

Over the years, I would frequently see both the publisher and editor, and the movie brought back some pleasant memories. Just after Watergate, at a dinner in Washington with the state’s congressional delegation, I asked Graham how the then-young Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were adjusting to fame.  

“Just as you’d expect any young guys who suddenly find themselves with a million dollars,” said their boss.

She was very loyal and supportive of the two and especially of Woodward, who remained with the newspaper during his long career as an author of sometimes controversial contemporary histories. This was especially true of 1987’s “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA.” 

I was at a Sunday night dinner in Graham’s Georgetown home with other company newspeople the night Woodward was being interviewed by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes.” The subject was a deathbed interview Woodward had with former CIA chief William Casey about the illegal sale of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. Woodward asked Casey why he had allowed the diversion of the sale of Iranian arms to the revolutionaries, to which Casey replied, “I believed.”

CIA officials claimed that Woodward had been turned away from Casey’s hospital room by CIA security personnel, but Woodward said the room wasn’t guarded around-the-clock. The CIA admitted the reporter had had 43 interviews with Casey.

As Wallace grilled Woodward, Graham looked at us and asked, “You believe him, don’t you?”

Bradlee, who had a summer home on the northern end of Long Island and could watch WFSB, once told me, “I like your news but why do you give so much time to that bleeping golf tournament?” That was the Greater Hartford Open or whatever it was called then.

And once, at breakfast before he was to speak at Central Connecticut State University, he needled me about a dumb flub on that morning’s newscast.  Introducing a story on a drug designed to reduce swelling caused by comas, the anchor ad-libbed, “Here’s good news for coma victims.”  

Bradlee repeated the anchor’s obtuse observation and added, “There’s nothing we coma victims like more than a little good news in the morning.”

It was a good time to be in the news business.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.