Ben Bradlee, who as executive editor of The Washington Post steered the paper’s sensational coverage of the Washington scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, died on Tuesday at the age of 93.
The hard-charging Bradlee presided over the Post newsroom for 26 years and guided its transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, doubling the paper’s circulation and the size of its editorial staff.
The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-wining coverage of the Watergate episode became the subject of the best-seller book and then a blockbuster movie, both titled “All the President’s Men”.
Bradlee was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, last November.
Hailing Bradlee as “the architect and builder of the modern Washington Post”, the paper commented: “His conviction that even the most powerful should be held to a standard of truth-telling inspired journalists well beyond The Post. His exuberance at work and in life served as a model well beyond journalistm.”
President Barack Obama, who was just a 10-year-old boy when the Watergate scandal erupted with the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex, lauded Bradlee as “a true newspaperman” for whom journalism was more than a profession – “a public good vital to our democracy”.
“With him at the helm, a growing army of reporters published the Pentagon Papers, exposed Watergate, and told stories that needed to be told – stories that helped us understand our world and one another a little bit better,” Obama noted.
The Washington Post, which ran a five-page obituary on Bradlee, said: “From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.”