USA | Watergate editor Ben Bradlee dies at 93

In this June 11, 2012 file photo, Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, listens during an event sponsored by The Washington Post to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Watergate

Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor who transformed the Washington Post into a leading U.S. newspaper with the pursuit of the Watergate break-in story, which culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, has died. He was 93.
Ever the newsman and ever one to challenge conventional wisdom, Bradlee imagined his own obituary years earlier and found something within it to quibble over.
“Bet me that when I die,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, “there will be something in my obit about how The Washington Post ‘won’ 18 Pulitzer prizes while Bradlee was editor.” That, he said, would be bunk. The prizes are overrated and suspect, he wrote, and it’s largely reporters, not newspapers or their editors, who deserve the credit.
Yet the Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal is an inextricable part of Bradlee’s legacy, and one measure of his success in transforming the Post from a sleepy hometown paper into a great national one.
As managing editor first and later as executive editor, Bradlee engineered the Post’s reinvention, bringing in a cast of talented journalists and setting editorial standards that brought the paper new respect.
When Bradlee retired from the Post newsroom in 1991, then-publisher Donald Graham said, “Thank God the person making decisions in the last 26 years showed us how to do it with verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story.”
With Watergate, Bradlee himself became a big part of a story that epitomized the glory days of newspapers — back before websites, cable chatter and bloggers drove the talk of the day.
Actor Jason Robards turned Bradlee into a box-office hit with his Oscar-winning portrayal of the editor in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” which recounted the unraveling of Watergate under the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Bradlee’s marriage in 1978 to Post star reporter Sally Quinn (his third) added more glamour to his image.
He was one of the few to know the identity early on of the celebrated Watergate source dubbed Deep Throat, revealed publicly in 2005 to be FBI official W. Mark Felt.
“I think he did a great service to society,” Bradlee said after Felt’s role finally came out.
In enduring partnership with publisher Katharine Graham, Bradlee took a stand for press freedom in 1971 by going forward with publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War broken by The New York Times, against the advice of lawyers and the entreaties of top government officials. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of newspapers to publish the leaked papers.
The Post’s decision to publish helped pave the way for all of the smaller, difficult ones that collectively produced the newspaper’s groundbreaking coverage of Watergate.
Bradlee “set the ground rules — pushing, pushing, pushing, not so subtly asking everyone to take one more step, relentlessly pursuing the story in the face of persistent accusations against us and a concerted campaign of intimidation,” Katharine Graham recalled in her memoir. Kathryn Harris, AP/Bloomberg