It was on a 14-hour flight from Washington to Tokyo back in 1993 that David Bradley had his midlife crisis. Although he had dreamed of becoming a Republican senator, Bradley spent those sleepless hours concluding he didn’t have the right stuff to be a politician. By the time the plane landed he decided to do the next best thing: run a media company that covered politics.
It took a number of years for the owner of two successful research companies to accomplish his new goal. But in 1997 he bought National Journal, a weekly on government and politics that caters to Washington insiders, and two years later he acquired The Atlantic, an old and proud title that had fallen on hard times.
“If I can’t take the course at least I can audit the course. If I can’t be in politics at least I can be around politics,” Bradley said in an interview in his eighth-floor office in the Watergate complex, which is the headquarters of his Atlantic Media Company.
For the past decade Bradley, 55, has had a great perch to watch the ongoing political dramas that have unfolded in the nation’s capital. But he also has been forced to grapple with the increasing challenges facing modern media. He upgraded the editorial quality of National Journal and made it solidly profitable. But even after spending liberally to improve The Atlantic, the magazine continues to spill red ink. Bradley said he hopes to break even on the magazine within a few years and “end a 50-year run of vanity owners.”
Meanwhile, he has moved aggressively to push his operations into the digital age. He noted with pride that the Atlantic website has seen its traffic jump from 1.3 million unique visitors a month in 2007 to 4.3 million this year. Determined to keep the trend line rising, he’s been recruiting major-league Web talent from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other news organizations.
To illustrate the need to move quickly into the Web world, Bradley sketched a landscape image on an index card. On one side of a river were arid, dusty farms that produce meager harvests; on the other side was a fecund jungle with exotic plants. He suggested that many in the traditional media were camped on the banks of the river near the parched crops, mulling whether to cross over to the lush side, which represents the Web era.
“I think what we need to do is get more people over the river,” Bradley said.
The soft-spoken Bradley has a courtly manner and self-deprecating wit. But the soft exterior conceals a steely will: He doesn’t hesitate to take tough or controversial steps to strengthen his company. Most notably, he touched off a wave of high-level staff resignations in 2005 when he moved The Atlantic out of Boston, where the magazine had resided since 1857.
He has also gone to great lengths to poach talent from competitors, including once showing up with a trailer of ponies at the Washington home of Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The New Yorker whom Bradley was trying to hire. Bradley, a financial supporter of Meadowbrook Stables in Chevy Chase, had heard that Goldberg’s daughters loved horses and offered to let them take a ride down the block.
“It utterly charmed my wife,” said Goldberg, who joined The Atlantic staff in 2007. Before he signed on, Goldberg said he was warned, “David likes to get his hand in the magazine and that can be annoying.”
But Goldberg said, “I haven’t found that at all.”
James Bennet, a former New York Times reporter whom Bradley tapped to be editor of The Atlantic in 2006, described his boss’s management style as “more standing back and articulating overall direction.” At the same time, Bennet said Bradley is well aware of what is going on at his publications, noting that he even gets feedback from Bradley on blogs published on the magazine’s website.
While Bradley clearly relishes overseeing his media empire, which also includes The Hotline, Congress Daily and Government Executive magazine, he bristles at some of the scrutiny that accompanies that role, complaining that internal memos about personnel issues or mistakes often turn up at lightning speed on gossip blogs.
Bradley, who is not affiliated with either party, also said he learned a lesson about political involvement. This election cycle he decided to show his impartiality by giving to any candidate who asked, including presidential contenders Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney.
“That turned out to not be a smart policy because way too many people asked,” he said. “So we have a new policy. I will give to no one.”
Outside of work Bradley lives a fairly low profile life in Northwest Washington with his wife, Katherine, who runs the family foundation and is involved in local education reform. The couple have three sons: Spencer, 19, Carter, 16, and Adam, 13 who have pushed their father to undertake daring expeditions such as helicopter skiing and rattlesnake hunting.
Born in Walter Reed Hospital in 1953, Bradley initially embraced the politics of his conservative parents. He said his views were repeatedly tested when his parents sent him to Sidwell Friends, a liberal-leaning Quaker school where many of the students disagreed with his support of Nixon and the Vietnam War.
“My parents had made me into a really strong Republican, a little Curtis LeMay,” he said, referring to the arch-conservative Air Force general and vice presidential running mate of George Wallace in 1968. Bradley also worked as a summer intern in the Nixon White House. His application to Swarthmore College was accompanied by a recommendation from John Ehrlichman, the former Nixon aide who later went to jail because of his role in the Watergate scandal.
Reacting to the downfall of Nixon, Bradley sought to establish a more independent reputation outside of politics. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he started up a business that did research for other companies. He worked from his parent’s apartment in the Watergate, where his mother still lives, and traveled up and down the East Coast in a red Volkswagon trying to drum up business.
After a slow start, his two enterprises, the Corporate Executive Board and the Advisory Board, became hugely successful, making Bradley a wealthy man. When he took them public between 1999 and 2001, he walked away with a cool $500 million, giving him the resources to underwrite his media operations.
Even while building his businesses, Bradley continued to harbor political aspirations. His sister, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, recalled that in the late 1980s her brother briefly auditioned for an open House seat on the Eastern shore of Maryland by showing up at a GOP event. He was armed with demographic information about the district, which he rattled off in hopes of impressing the local party pooh-bahs. Then another aspiring candidate stood up and won over the crowd by singing snippets from “The Music Man,” thus ending Bradley’s one-day House run. “He was outsung,” she laughed.
Bradley said that he lacked the qualities needed to succeed in politics. “I don’t have the leadership gift,” he said. “People don’t defer to me. I can’t carry a room.”
But Hagerty, who is now a reporter with National Public Radio, said her brother has a knack for motivating people. Haggerty said that when she was in high school her brother, who is six and half years older, would push her to study for her College Board exams.
“Every night at midnight he would walk into the room and turn on the lights,” she said. “And he would not turn off the lights until I had correctly answered 20 SAT questions.”
Hagerty said that her brother prefers the gentler approach of complimenting rather than criticizing to get the best from those around him. She and others say Bradley does not exhibit the temperamental behavior that is typical of corporate titans.
“He is a well-bred, considerate, polite man who is interested in other people,” said Goldberg. “That is not what your average mogul is like.”
