Yours in Truth A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, Legendary Editor of The Washington Post

by Himmelman, Jeff

• ISBN13: 9781400068470
• ISBN10: 1400068479
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-08
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

"I hope we're as good friends when you finish your book as we are now," Ben Bradlee, the legendary former executive editor of The Washington Post,told Jeff Himmelman in March 2010. "But I don't give a [expletive deleted] what you write about me." So begins Ben,an intimate portrait of a fixture on the American scene for nearly half a century-close friend to John F. Kennedy, the center of D.C. social life, and a crusty, charismatic editor whose decisions at the helm of the Postduring Watergate changed the course of history. Granted unprecedented access to Bradlee and his colleagues, friends, and private files, Himmelman draws on never-before-seen internal Postmemos, correspondence, personal photographs, and private interviews to trace the full arc of Bradlee's forty-five year career-from his early days as a press attaché in postwar Paris through the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon's resignation, the Janet Cooke fabrication scandal, and beyond. Himmelman also unearths a series of surprises-about Watergate, and about Bradlee's private relationships with Postowner Katharine Graham and President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie. "Don't feel you have to protect me," Bradlee told Himmelman whenever the reporting started to strike close to home. "Follow your nose." Those instructions, familiar to any Postreporter, have resulted in this thoughtfully constructed and beautifully written account of a magnetic man whose career has come to define the golden age of newspapers in America, when the press battled for its freedom-and won.

Author Biography

Jeff Himmelman is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, where he has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award; his writing has also appeared in New York, GQ, Washingtonian, and The Washington Post. His work with a team of reporters at the Post helped the paper secure the national reporting Pulitzer Prize for its post-9/11 coverage. He is also a professional musician who writes, records, and performs under the name Down Dexter. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and three daughters.