An HBO docu - The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee
Always wanted to watch that, if only to try to stop thinking of Jason Robards when Bradlee's name is mentioned. It was easy to start pasting Robards over Bradlee after one had watched All the President's Men a few times.
But... Robards really did have Bradlee's ways down cold for that Watergate era flick, as it turns out, so I'll probably still end up thinking of Robards when bumping into references to Bradlee. That's comical, really, since I lived through that era and did see the real Bradlee on TV news interviews a few times, at the height of both the Watergate and Pentagon Paper brouhahas between Nixon and the Washington Post. There was no internet back then and no cable TV, so it was about just newspapers and broadcast television news in the morning and evening, with radio bulletins for breaking news in the interim hours.
Of course we know a bit more about Bradlee, Nixon and the Kennedys as well by now --and Bradlee's conflicts of interest in the JFK era-- because there's a bit less of a good old boys' club nowadays about behind-scenes behavior of not only politicians but also journalists and editors who can become too cozy with the subjects of their news articles. Still, even back then the WaPo publisher Kay Graham was concerned that Bradlee was too close to JFK to have an objective view of his administration.
The docu is pretty good. Scrapes some of the varnish off the legend of Bradlee, but also highlights how tenacious he was during the fight to publish the rest of the Pentagon Papers after the Nixon administration took the NYT to court for printing some of them. It was a pretty daring move considering that at that very time, the then family-owned Washington Post was in the middle of an initiial public offering. There was a lot on the line there financially --maybe everything-- had the Supreme Court gone the other way on the case, but it went 6-3 in favor of allowing the papers to continue printing the rest of the stories based on the Pentagon Papers. One can wonder about the current court and how some First Amendment cases might fare nowadays.
slate.com
