Anyone who is or ever has been anyone in Washington DC journalism has probably been to dinner at the home of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, so it is to be expected that Bradlee’s death would bring out a waterfall of laudatory reminiscences and unrestrained praise.
Personally, for all Bradlee’s accomplishments, and he had many, I find it impossible to divorce him and his salon from some of the worst pathologies of our nation in the postwar era. It’s hard to express how much contempt I have built up over the years for the Beltway consensus on American power and American politics, and Bradlee was literally the eye of that hurricane, the figurative lodestar around which that consensus condensed and revolved.
The way I feel right now, I want to honor people’s legitimate grief and acknowledge Bradlee’s greatness in many respects, but I also feel like something contrary needs to be said.
The permanent leadership in Washington has been failing us on a pretty consistent basis for so long that I can only wish that the passing of Bradlee might mark some kind of end point for hubris and banality.
Sadly, the Washington Post is a shell of the paper that Bradlee created, meaning that things have devolved far beyond the point that Bradlee could even be justly held responsible. Everything good he built has died, leaving us with a legacy of only his worst contributions.
I’ll let others praise him. I hope to bury him and find something arising from the ashes.
Except Bradlee admitted he took a dive on Iran-Contra because he was worried about bringing down two GOPers in a row. Even Charles Pierce’s piece admits that much.
A brief shining moment. And predictable. First Phil Graham and Ben had been in the JFK camp. Kay and Ben didn’t like many JFK big name supporters embrace Nixon. Second, NYTimes got the Pentagon Papers first.
Actually Phil Graham, WaPo publisher, was in the LBJ camp against Kennedy at the 1960 Dem convention. Later at the convention he supposedly was one of the Johnson insiders trying to put forth LBJ to go on the ticket as VP.
(Your next to last sentence is unclear.)
Sorry, I don’t buy that CT stuff, take a look at his career and personality. Don’t judge him by names of persons who are “friends of a friend.” Yes, he was in intelligence during the war in the Pacific and it earned him a start with USIE for almost two years, so what? The USIE or the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Smith-Mundt Act) has been amended recently by the Obama administration. USA propaganda is now legal to disperse domesticaly, disinformation for the general public. Nice civic lessons!
I rarely turn off Rachel Maddow in mid-show but I did last night because I really had heard enough about Bradlee. Thanks for saying what you did, and much better than I could have.
Didn’t see her last night but let me guess: She got all sloppy and weepy about Bradlee, took the corporate media line about him, and brought up none of the more serious controversies about him and his background except to note the brief embarrassment on the Janet Cooke affair.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2801102/radicalized-canadian-muslim-convert-runs-two-young-s
oldiers-car-shot-dead-police.html
CNN blames today’s stock market drop on this. Too bad he didn’t start shooting at the NYSE. Don’t know what the beef was with Canada. They are pretty much doves. Maybe just being unbelievers was enough.
Nope, it was this attack: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/futures-flat-four-day-rally-112825488.html
Can’t keep all the violence straight. I thought it was only the big bad USA.
The Qu’ran does not say to kill unbelievers. Just the opposite, in fact, it says that God could have made everyone of the same religion or the same tribe and chose not to. It instructs us not to create separation but to come together across our differences. It says one should not argue over religious doctrines but just love everyone and leave it to God to work out what was in each person’s heart when that person faces God at the conclusion of life in this world.
There are other passages that can be misread as supporting violence but to me it’s a clear inability to comprehend the meaning of the text. I can provide more details if anyone’s interested. It’s unfortunate that so many misunderstand their religions. It’s unfortunate that so many who claim to be Muslim don’t know the very basics. I’d only add that it’s not a lot different from when KKK members, terrorizing and murdering black folks, claimed to be good Christians. Like the old bumper sticker says, “Who would Jesus bomb?”
Muhammad’s life was an example of how to treat others well. He was known for treating women as equals. He was also known for speaking out against violence except when one is defending oneself or one’s people. The whole Qu’ran is a study in how to stand up against those who are trying to kill you without turning into the very monster you oppose.
If you’re nutty enough, a holy book can say whatever you want it say. They’re like truth serum.
It’s said that the Qu’ran has seven layers of meaning. I find that it meets me where I’m at. If I’m in an egoic place, it can seem really strong and harsh. When I’m in a more spiritual space, I find insights and previously hidden meanings in the very same passages.
I’m guessing books like the Bible and the Torah were originally quite similar but they’ve been revised and revised over the centuries, often for political ends. Thus they’ve lost much of their impact.
On Arabic radio in Jerusalem, someone will recite Qu’ran and even those who are not religious will listen. It reads like poetry in Arabic. People find it really beautiful even if they can’t access its deeper meaning.
Is it any different from today’s GOP and their relationship to the Bible, and specifically The New Testament?
Very much the same principle.
According to Deborah Davis’ book on Katharine Graham: In the fifties Bradlee worked for Voice of America (i.e., the CIA) in promoting the US government’s side regarding the Rosenberg trials and executions to the Europeans. He actually worked out of the CIA office in Paris.
So he gets a cub reporter named Bob Woodward who’d recently been discharged from the NAVY (in the Office of Naval Intelligence) with top secret security clearance, who manages to scoop the world through “Deep Throat” (who happens to be an FBI muckety-muck whom he claims to have met in the basement of the White House while delivering a briefcase full of top secret documents from the Pentagon to Nixon).
Nah, never mind that the burglars had a long history of work in CIA black ops, or that most of the most damaging witnesses in the Watergate hearings had formerly been employed by the CIA. I’m not going down that road. It would be conspiracy theory, and there are no conspiracies in America, just heroes of the counterrevolution.
Let’s add some meat to those old Bradlee bones.
In Paris for WAPO, he was a Project Mockingbird (CIA) asset. A bit murky if that was at Phil Graham’s direction or he just knowingly looked the other way. Cord Meyer had a hand in creating Mockingbird, but not much operational power until the mid-fifties. About that time, his wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and her sister Toni went on a European vacation and Bradlee wined/dined them in Paris. Toni and Ben dumped their spouses and married. (She had four children and he had one and together they had two more.)
Cord and Mary divorced a couple of years later (after one of their children was run over and killed). Mary allegedly had an affair with JFK when he was POTUS. She was shot and killed Oct 1964 while on a mid-day walk. Never sensed that Bradlee, Angleton, Truitt, and their wives and Meyer expressed enough curiosity or honesty about Mary’s alleged affair and death. If they knew or had good reasons to suspect more, they probably took it with them.
Thanks for the tip on Mary Pinchot Meyer. I thought I knew that period pretty well but that was a real eye-opener.
Angleton was everywhere.
The professional and personal relationships among these people were so intertwined that they can’t be unraveled by those from the outside. Mary and/or her sister was close to Angleton’s wife, and Angleton apparently generously shared his love of fishing with the Meyer boys.
Including at Mary Pinchot Meyer’s house the day after her unsolved murder:
Sometimes American history gets uncomfortably creepy.
iirc, Mary allegedly confided in Truitt and/or his wife that she kept a diary. They were living in Japan when Mary was killed and called Angleton to tell him to find it and put it away for safekeeping. Some or all of that story may be bogus.
Like Wisner and Phil Graham, Truitt later went nuts and later still committed suicide. Alcohol, spying, secrets, and rabid-anti-communism does not lead to psychological health.
Jim DiEugenio pretty much destroyed the alleged affair between JFK and Pinchot Meyer. All the stories about these affairs began surfacing in the 70s when the Congress began asking questions about JFK’s murder. There’s an essay in THE ASSASSINATIONS called, I believe, “The Posthumous Assassination of JFK.”
People need to realize that the founders of the CIA were the Wall Streeters and the elite. It didn’t change. It was created by and for the same people. Overthrowing Arbenz and Mossadegh (and all of the others after them) was not for the benefit of the USA and its citizens. It was for the benefit of the investment class. And things like truth and justice take a backseat to profit.
Personally, I’m skeptical of the Mary Pinchot Myer/JFK affair, but wouldn’t put it in the category of “no way; no how.” It just didn’t offer her much that she couldn’t get without a sexual component to her relationship with JFK and it also would have complicated her friendship with Jacqui.
Partially wrt the former and totally wrt the latter. But would add that they were educational and intellectual snobs and drunks. Sort of excludes LH Oswald doesn’t it?
I never had much to say one or the other about Tim Russert, but when I heard the quote from him that his default setting when he picked up the phone was “off the record,” I lost all respect for him as a journalist. If you’re serious about the profession, you’re always on the record unless there’s a prior arrangement.
In the same vein, Ben Bradlee showed remarkable courage in following the Watergate mystery. But in the next decade, when even worse crimes were being committed by the White House, he lost his nerve. He didn’t want to be accused of bringing down another popular Republican president. The Reagan administration got a free pass because of the sins of the Nixon administration, and lawbreakers had been punished enough. The bitter fruit of that decision continues to poison our political scene to this day.
There won’t be another like Bradlee again. In some ways that’s a damn shame. In other ways, it’s not. And that’s a damn shame.
Thank you for a most necessary corrective on Bradlee’s life and times. His CIA ties alone have always troubled me.
Ben Bradlee.
His Washingtoon Post was the paper of record for the left wing of the right wing, and he was without a doubt a CIA asset par excellance.
RIP?
I don’t care how he rests.
His legacy lingers on.
As do we all.
AG
I’m 49 years old, and I keep sticking on the question, “How scary was it, really, to go after Nixon?” And it occurs to me that Watergate was as much a beltway shunning of Nixon as the Clinton impeachment was. Bradlee found his nerve by keeping Sally’s finger on the pulse of Beltway society, and learning where it really stood on the matter of Dick Nixon.
Even though Nixon had been a DC creature from the time he was elected to Congress in 1946 until JFK took office in 1961, I have never gotten the sense that he was a Washington insider. He was socially awkward and prone to be annoying, traits that wouldn’t endear him to the villagers. In 1973, the villagers decided that they shouldn’t have him trashing “their” town anymore, if they could help it, and Watergate gave them the opening they needed and wanted.
The difference between Nixon and Reagan is that the Villagers adored Ronnie. He wasn’t just one of them, he was a hero to them. There was no way that they were going to permit him to be forced out of office in disgrace. The fix was in both times.
So, I don’t think Bradlee ever had concern about fighting Nixon. He knew his back was covered. He knew that the Villagers held more power than Nixon ever could. He was a hero, but only by the accident that the Villagers’ wishes matched most of the country’s wishes. That he never took the people’s side in any important debate ever again reveals the consistency of his siding with the Village, not of any great courage gone soft.
Probably no scarier than prosecutor Bugliosi going after Manson, to cite another criminal case from the era.
I recall reading (somewhere, years ago) two lines of speculation about why the establishment WaPo, normally rather sleepy and uninterested in going after the big boys in Washington, decided to investigate Watergate so aggressively.
And on Reagan, two reasons come to mind about why the WaPo might have been in the tank for him:
1) he followed Jimmy Carter, who was rather cool and distant towards the Washington establishment and Graham at least early in his term, something which probably wasn’t forgiven or forgotten, and 2) Reagan seemed to ideally match and represent the conservative tenor of the times, and the WaPo, reverting to its former pro-establishment institutional self, seemed willing to go along with the conservative tide.
Bradley was certainly a fine example of an amazing person. I really feel sorry for his death.
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