'The Post:' A Once and Future America

Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham in 'The Post'

To count the number of films that have thrilled me more than The Post, I wouldn’t need more than one hand.

This intimate epic spotlighting the exposure of the Pentagon Papers features Tom Hanks shedding his gentleness to play likeable tough guy Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post. He watches in admiration as publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) transforms herself from an uncertain heiress to a courageous American journalist whose decision to publish helped end the U.S. government’s criminal waste of thousands of lives in the Vietnam War.

The moving drama — witty, urgent, humane — is deftly directed by Steven Spielberg, and who but John Williams could deliver such a suspenseful and heroic score.

The film, which bookends Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film All the President’s Men quite deliberately, has a strong and well-handled feminist vibe too, as all these all-knowing old white guys try to bully the one tentative woman on whom the fate of the nation now depends.

Bart and I had a frisson when we unexpectedly saw our friend Ben Livingston suddenly appear on screen in a key dramatic scene.

The audience was mostly people of a certain age, probably longing for a time when the American press could save this nation from itself. A time long gone.

But if that isn’t the once and future America up there on screen, it should be.

All the Post's Fears

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To Decatur With Contempt

In 1985, T.J. Malone of 444 West Wood Street in Decatur, IL, thought it would be a good idea to write a letter to Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post.

“Say, Cath, heard you and Ben B. were seen recently at a wild coke party, and someone noticed you both had a hammer and sickle tattooed in your butts.”

Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who never took kindly to insults to Mrs. Graham, favored Malone with a reply.

“I have a hissing snake tattooed on my butt,” the former naval officer wrote. “And I don’t have a clue what Mrs. Graham has tattooed on hers. The president of the bank in Decatur, Illinois, is an old classmate and friend of mine. I think I’ll ask him to foreclose on your mortgage.”

In his memoir, The Good Life, Bradlee commented, “Childish, no doubt, until you realize that the polls so often cited to show public trust in the press declining include the views of T.J. Malone, and thousands of other nut cases.”

The Papers vs. the Pentagon

Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee after winning a legal running in the Pentagon Papers battles

During June of 1971, in an unprecedented push for prior restraint censorship, the U.S. government had sued to block the New York Times from any further publication of the Pentagon Papers — documents which contained the real history of the Vietnam war that the American government intended to keep secret from the American people.

“The Justice Department went to court and got an injunction against the Times, restraining a newspaper in advance from publishing specific articles, for the first time in the history f the republic,” Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee recalled. The New York Times had been silenced.

Following a furtive conversation with his old friend Daniel Ellsberg at an untraceable pay phone, Washington Post National Editor Ben Bagdikian flew to Boston to meet with the Pentagon insider. On the flight back the next morning, Bagdikian had two first-class seats — one for himself, and one for the large cardboard box containing more than 4,000 pages of Pentagon documents Ellsberg had given him.

The Post’s journalists went into a frenzy of research, working out of Bradlee’s house, not the office, as they prepared to pick up one of the most important news stories of the 20^th century where the New York Times had been forced to leave off. Equally frenzied and confusing were the discussions with the Post’s lawyers.

“For the next 12 hours, the Bradlee library on N Street served as a remote newsroom, where editors and reporters started sorting, reading and annotating 4,400 pages, and the Bradlee living room served as a legal office, where lawyers and newspaper executives started the most basic discussions about the duty and right of a newspaper to publish, and the government’s right to prevent that publication, on national security grounds, or on any grounds at all, for those next 12 hours,” Bradlee wrote. “I went from one room to other, getting a sense of the story in one place, and a sense of the mood of the lawyers in the other.”

Finally a decision had to be made, and Publisher Katherine Graham had to make it. They got her on the phone and laid out the situation. She paused, and then said quickly, “Okay, I say let’s go. Let’s publish.”

“I dropped the phone like a hot potato and shouted the verdict, and the room erupted in cheers,” Bradlee wrote. “The cheers were instinctive. In those first moments, it was enough for all of us — including, let it be said quickly, the lawyers who had been arguing against publication — that Katherine had shown guts and commitment to the First Amendment, and support for her editors.

“But I think none of us truly understood the importance of her decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in the creation of a new Washington Post. I know I didn’t. I wanted to publish because we had vital documents explaining the biggest story of the last 10 years. That’s what newspapers do: they learn, they report, they verify, they write and they publish.

“What I didn’t understand, as Katherine’s ‘Okay … Let’s go. Let’s publish’ rang in my ears, was how permanently the ethos of the paper changed, and how it crystallized for editors and reporters everywhere how independent and determined and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post had become. In the days that followed, these feelings only increased. A paper that stands up to charges of treason, a paper that holds firm in the face of charges from the president, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General… A paper that holds its head high, committed unshakably to principle.”

Source: “A Good Life” by Ben Bradlee

Ben Bradlee, Ace Reporter

Young Ben Bradlee, who would become a legendary American editor

Ben Bradlee’s first journalistic triumph at the Washington Post did not require the diligence of a Watergate reporter.

In 1948, fresh from a destroyer and his first newspaper job on a defunct New Hampshire weekly he had helped found, Bradlee landed an $80-a-week job on the Post starting Christmas Eve. Russ Wiggins, who was to be one of his three great mentors, was editor.

“My first real break came when Russ Wiggins was giving vent to one of his regular tirades against the evil and prevalence of gambling, which he regarded as a sin against common sense, especially among the poor who gambled with grocery money,” Bradlee recalled. “Why not take the new reporter, he asked Gilbert, and sic him on the bookies and numbers kingpins? No one in town knew me yet, Wiggins figured, and I could poke around unnoticed. I had received my first investigative assignment for the paper.

“Not a betting man myself, I knew enough to start looking for the answers in the Sports Department, particularly with my new buddy there, Morris Siegel. Mo was great company, funny, disrespectful and warm. He was the particular favorite of Sara Bassin, who ran the restaurant next to the Post, cashed our paychecks and told us to go home before it was too late.

“When I asked Mo for the names of the 10 biggest bookies in Washington, he grabbed a piece of copy paper and started scribbling some names: Snags, who did numbers, too. Gary, who ran the Atlas Club, an after-hours joint upstairs in the building between Bassin’s and the Post. Mo checked with his pals and made one phone call, and gave me a list with 10 names, plus addresses and phone numbers.

“I didn’t feel I could get back to Russ Wiggins that fast. He had given me the assignment less than half an hour before. So I waited a day, typed the list out on regular Post stationery, and gave it to him two days later.

“Wiggins looked at the list, shook his head in apparent admiration, and told Gilbert, ‘We’ve got a damned good man in this new fellow, Bradlee. I’ve been trying to get that list for years.’”

Source: “A Good Life” by Ben Bradlee

All the Director's Men

Katherine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Howard Simons and Ben Bradlee in the Watergate era.

Dustin Hoffman, Redford, Robards, Jack Warden and Balsam
in the 1976 Alan J. Pakula film "All the President's Men"

You’d think that having the great actor Jason Robards portray you in a film would be an unalloyed pleasure, but Ben Bradlee said the experience cost him a long-time friend.

In the 1976 Robert Redford production All the President’s Men, the story of the Washington Post’s exposure of the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced President Nixon to resign, Robards played Bradlee, then executive editor of the newspaper.

Bradlee said he doubted that the film should be made at all, but — realizing that it would be produced with or without him — he cooperated, thinking it “made more sense to try to influence it factually.”

Bradlee teased the publisher, Katherine Graham, about who would play her in the film. “Names like Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal were tossed out — by us — to make her feel good,” Bradlee said. “And names like Edna May Oliver or Marie Dressler, if it felt like teasing time. And then her role was dropped from the final script, half to her relief.”

However, managing editor Howard Simons wasn’t amused. Portrayed by character actor Martin Balsam, Simons “…felt that he and his role in Watergate were fatally shortchanged in the script (and that I and my role were exaggerated), and he never really got over his resentment,” Bradlee said.

“Our relationship, which had been such a joyous one, so congenial and close we could literally finish each other’s sentences, was never the same after the film.”

Bradlee couldn’t know, at the time, how the semi-fictionalized film would overshadow the real history of the Post’s reporting. “No idea, for instance, that all that generations to come would ever know about Watergate would be in that 147-minute film,” he said.

Still, Bradlee had hoped that the movie would reflect well on American journalism, and that it did. Today the film retains a 98 “fresh” percent rating from the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator website, which calls it, “A taut, solidly acted paean to the benefits of a free press and the dangers of unchecked power, made all the more effective by its origins in real-life events.”

Source: “A Good Life” by Ben Bradlee