Like all charming and physically imposing persons, Ben Bradlee had an enormous head.
There. I said it: the last original observation not already to be found in the three billion words of tribute that poured forth after the death last week of Bradlee, the great editor of the Washington Post and an essential figure in the late-20th-century American establishment. And it’s true, when you met Bradlee and spoke to him, the thing that really overwhelmed you, more than the face-famous good looks and the booming voice inflected with Beacon Hill lockjaw, was the sheer scale of that melon rising up from the stiff white collar of his Savile Row shirt. No one failed to walk away impressed. I still haven’t got over it. Obviously.
So it goes when a famous person dies these days: The tributes were equally about the newly dead and the people paying him homage. There was the goopy exaggeration that always comes with graveyard prose—and always perfectly appropriate, too, under the principle De mortuis nil nisi bonum (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”) and its modern corollary: “If you say something nice, overdo it.”
“Ben Bradlee was someone in a newspaper office that the country needed at a very dark time for democracy,” overwrote one Esquire blogger earnestly. An old Bradlee protégé—there are scores of these, and last week it was all hands on deck—closed his tribute like so: “I for one often imagine Ben as a kind of journalistic King Arthur and we, his Knights of the Round Table. He was not only my gruff guardian angel, but the nation’s as well.” That’s a lot of metaphor for two little sentences, but grief can do that to a protégé. Here’s another one: “His passing, in a way, marks the end of the 20th century.” About time.
Many of the tributes were of the I’ll-never-forget-the-day-Ben-first-met-me variety, recollections of young reporters cowering before the great man and his massive desk as he bestowed his famous f-bombs upon them like papal blessings. (Bradlee was revered for his profanity.) They were more like pocket memoirs than obituaries, and the upshot seemed to be that Bradlee’s true greatness rested in his hiring of the memoirist and others just like him.
Twitter is particularly useful in getting this kind of daisy chain going. Michele Norris, the former NPR news reader, tweeted a tweet that read (my translation from the twitterese): “Careers shaped by Bradlee: John Harris, Peter Baker, Gwen Ifill, Mike Wilbon, Michel McQueen Martin”—all of whom are famous among themselves for being famous journalists. One of those mentioned, Peter Baker of the New York Times, instantly retweeted Michele’s tweet with this modification: “And Michele Norris!”
Indeed, Bradlee’s death may cement Twitter as the indispensable tool of the self-referential obituarist. You can do so many things with Twitter when someone dies. Consider this multitasking tweet from yet another no-longer-young protégé: “Last time I saw Ben Bradlee [who suffered dementia], he said, ‘I can’t remember who the f— you are, but it’s great to see you.’ Loved that guy.”
So much is going on here, all subtly serving to lift the tweeter into the circle of Bradlee’s supernal light. First, he gets to drop a personalized Bradlee “f—,” which titillates Bradlee’s admirers more than an ordinary “f—” would. Second, “Last time I saw him . . .” implies that such occasions were not infrequent and always informal. Third, “Loved that guy” is the kind of thing you’d say about a fellow towel-snapper at the country club locker room, establishing intimacy. There’s more, but that’s at least three tweets in one.
With so many words pouring out, there was bound to be some repetition. Bradlee, the New Yorker affectionately recalled, “had the attention span of a gnat.” Also, said the New York Times, “he had the attention span of a gnat.” Many writers noted that Bradlee would express his admiration for colleagues by noting—this is a metaphor, I’m sure—their brass testicles. Bradlee himself, the Times told us, “clanked when he walked.”
“Men were divided into two camps,” said a Post writer: “those whose private parts ‘clanked when they walked’ and those whose, alas, didn’t.” Bradlee of course was a member of the first camp. You could look it up in the Times. He must have sounded like a trolley car.
His fearlessness became the grand theme of the obituaries. “Bradlee,” wrote a blogger on the website Vox.com, “built his legend—and his paper—because he was willing to be hated.” The same Post tribute went on: “Nothing pleased Bradlee more than a piece that nailed the corrupt, pricked a narcissist, uncovered a creep, exposed a phony, felled a climber and really told it like it was.”
But not all such pieces pleased Bradlee, not if they were directed at him or other members of the establishment, among whom were plenty of creeps, narcissists, and climbers, though their creepiness, narcissism, and climbing skills were protected by virtue of being members of Bradlee’s class. I don’t mean the Brahmin class he was born into but the new class of elite journalism, academia, philanthropy, mass entertainment, and finance that remains, in its way, as oblivious and self-satisfied as the old elite it replaced. The obituarists, all members in good standing, filled their tributes with quotes and turns of phrase from Bradlee. No one mentioned my favorite, which came from the mid-1980s.
Bradlee was complaining that a lot of the fun had gone out of journalism during the Reagan years. The reason, he said, was that “there are so many of these asshole watchdog groups now.”
He was referring in particular to Accuracy in Media, or AIM, a conservative practitioner of the kind of ideological press criticism that is now a common feature of the media world, so greatly enlarged by cable TV and the Internet. These parvenus were crowding his territory, barbarians trying to breach the gates. He and his friends were the watchdogs, goddammit, and the watchdog didn’t need any watchdogs watching it.
But the new order allowed the watchdogs and other buttinskis an audience as large as his own paper’s. It made Bradlee churlish. AIM was founded by an earnest man named Reed Irvine, a sweet, slightly buffoonish drudge whose suit always seemed a size and a half too large and whose pinched appearance made him easily mocked, especially by men whose own suits were bespoke. Irvine’s great mission in life was to expose the pretenses to fairness and disinterestedness of a monolithic press—to “tell it like it was,” to borrow a phrase from the Post’s piece. He was a genuine subversive, nipping at the heels of an establishment that in its vanity considered itself “antiestablishment.”
Publicly, Bradlee called Irvine a “retromingent.” The word describes a kind of animal, one that urinates backward. The insult was funny and revealing in its casual cruelty.
These days their battle—asymmetric as it was—seems so long ago, a dispute from a vanished era. The tributes to Bradlee from his protégés had the same quality, voices assuming the authority of an order that is passing, that has passed away. Now that both men are dead, I hope it’s some consolation to the shade of Reed Irvine to know that, in the effort to dismantle and discredit a corrupt regime, he won and Bradlee lost.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
