A Good Life

...A Good Life is presented in slow, methodical, chronological order, with all the cocktail stories intact, memories tinctured with a mildly scurrilous tone, the product of decades at the finer dinner tables...

...He talks about their tender, protracted romance in terms that would delight Sally Jessy Raphael...

...Toward the end of the book, when Bradlee seems rushed to furnish all details of his life in retirement, his thumbnail sketches of a host of famous friends sound like Oscar night in Washington...

...The New York Times executive Sydney Gruson was "one of the delights of my life, funny, smart, not pompous, and a man who did not take himself too seriously (a quality which has always attracted me...

...She would, she said, and she did...

...David" Calley...

...T his is most evident in Bradlee's famous friendship with Kennedy...

...And when All the President's Men was turned into a movie, the part of Bradlee was played by Jason Robards, "known by all as a great actor...

...He misspells McPherson Square, which is three blocks from the Post building...

...But except for the occasional excesses of a Bubba-like Bert Lance, the small-town Georgia banker and Carter friend who resigned . . . as Budget Director in a controversy over his tangled financial affairs, there was still remarkably little smoke to suggest much of a fire to reporters...

...He reflects on the My Lai massacre and Lt...

...He is at pains to draw an admiring portrait of his third wife, the "one and only Sally Quinn," with whom he lived while serving as her mentor/editor...

...First in a series by Sally Quinn...

...But it is obvious that the present book was spoken into a tape recorder, and transcribed by some gratePhili Terzian writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal.ful underling, of whom there have been many...

...And hug him...

...This is, of course, a standard criticism of the "liberal media...

...Mark's to Harvard to the Navy and then out into the world, with scarcely an instant of reflection or discernment...

...Bradlee claims that he and his wife were unaware of this fact—indeed Bradlee, of all people, pleads ignorance on the subject of Kennedy's philandering—and so entrusted the diary to CIA deputy director James Angleton for destruction...

...The second is his (probably unconscious) partisan bias...

...No doubt, reminiscing into a microphone makes things easier for a 74-yearold ex-newspaperman with a short attention span, but it's snow to be shoveled out of drifts for his readers...

...A product of the New England WASP upper middle class, he narrates his existence in step-by-step form, yanking his audience like a stubborn wisdom tooth from home to St...

...The amorous aristocrat, the buccaneer reporter, JFK's boon companion, the scourge of Republican presidents—it has all evolved into a tiresome late-night talk show guest...

...Best of all, in retrospect, is his tribute to the TV sitcom producer Norman Lear: The man is warm and smart and funny and generous, and loyal and kind...

...This is a world of comfort and coincidence, of family connectionsand fortunate friends, of tennis in the mornings and highballs at night, of square-jawed Boston women who "didn't f---," and a skimming of the surface of the human condition...

...And the more you see him or talk to him, the more you want to see him and talk to him...

...My friend Norman is an All-Pro hugger...

...p erhaps not surprisingly, Bradlee is entirely devoid of an interior life...

...His first job after the Navy was to catalogue the library of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...And in one remarkable sentence, he asserts that Jackie Kennedy "was the first president's wife to have lived abroad and to speak a foreign language fluently, the first president's wife to have graduated from college"—each element of which is absolutely wrong...

...Bradlee is at pains to remember very nearly every copulation in his life outside of marriage, including sex with a French woman who was his escort around Paris in 1973: "I didn't want to sleep alone . . . and wondered if she would be interested in sleeping with me...

...So Bradlee can be fatuous: Many great editors have been fatuous, and worse...

...Antagonists are "jerks," "assholes" and "dickheads," naval vessels bombard "the s--t out of Saipan," parents "suck up" to older relatives, and when told that he is eligible for Social Security, Bradlee pronounces "a couple of holy s--ts," and contemplates retirement...

...Bradlee lives in a Democratic world, surrounded by Democratic colleagues and friends...

...And therein lies a tale—the "good life" is a series of fortuitous events, a mixture of luck and charming ingenuity, sheltered by the gambler's code of decent conduct: Watch out for your friends, castigate your enemies, and all in the name of freedom of the press, anoint it with an ink-stained odor of sanctity...

...Bradlee is no exception...

...This is a chronicle of bowel movements, vomiting, intercourse, and girls with "absolutely spectacular" bodies...

...Nor, as he acknowledges, is he much of a writer—a fact sadly evident to any reader of these memoirs...

...Richard Harwood, a Post editor, is "primitive in his search for truth, impossible to deceive, and without peer in his ability to write a declarative sentence...

...Stricken with polio in early adolescence, he wonders if he will ever masturbate again—a concern that recurs in the course of these memoirs...

...A GOOD LIFE: NEWSPAPERING AND OTHER ADVENTURES Ben Bradlee Simon & Schuster/514 pages / $27.50 reviewed by PHILIP TERZIAN 72 The American Spectator November 1995 0 ccasionally, of course, this is fun...

...After thirty-two years, it is hard to discern who manipulated whom, and to what extent their personal and professional lives were mixed...

...In his old age, Bradlee has become a caricature of sorts...

...All of this has led, at the Post and elsewhere, to the triumph of "investigative" reporting at the expense of explanatory journalism, the preference for chronicling the politics of government—who's up, who's down, who deserves to be up or down, who's sleeping with whom—instead of the process, or the policies driving executives and legislatures...

...Nearly six pages are devoted to the various tributes, telegrams, speeches, and poems composed in his honor when he stepped down from the Post...

...The first is Bradlee's apparent conviction—confirmed by the successful pursuit of Richard Nixon—that the purpose of a newspaper is to treat the local franchise as a license to govern, to use the power of the press to inform and persuade as a bludgeon to enact a political agenda, or to challenge politicians who displease the media...

...Much is made of Bradlee's growth out of the "hopeless, inherited and thoughtless conservatism" of his youth...

...But was Bradlee a great editor...

...The Carter administration," he writes, "fascinated the Washington press corps for its regional stamp and religiousquality...

...The murder has never been solved...

...The great editor sees nothing peculiar in any of this, and gallantly defends the destruction of the evidence...

...As a consequence, irritating little mistakes abound...

...Nevertheless, this is Bradlee's third book...

...Shortly after her death, however, a diary was discovered which revealed that she had been one of JFK's numerous lovers...

...A talk on the telephone with Norman Lear should be bottled and consumed regularly, and every shrink in the world would go out of business...

...That's the underlying premise of this memoir, of course: In Bradlee's frame of reference, wealth, fame, and a sense of satisfaction make the question seem rhetorical...

...His second, Conversations With Kennedy (1974), was a tribute to his not-sorecently-deceased friend John F. Kennedy...

...Edward Bennett Williams is dead...

...Yet even Benjamin Bradlee seems to harbor second thoughts: He devotes several pages to airily dismissing the complaints of right-wing critics—suggesting, in his fervor, he suspects they have a point—and is particularly disturbed by the indefatigable Reed Irvine...

...This is real eminence, in the modern sense of the term...

...As awkward as it may be to entertain Bradlee's version of events, it is nonetheless astonishing to contemplate details of the story as he tells it...

...Alas, Mr...

...Of course not...

...Harvard blew my mind," he says of his undergraduate career, and he was and remains no scholar...

...It is also a world of arrested development...

...Such complaints, of course, have a basis in fact, as these memoirs affirm...

...Of course, editing a newspaper is not a creative but an administrative task, and the skills of the great editors are executive, not scholastic...

...Now he has written his memoirs...

...Bradlee's fame was at one time of such celestial magnitude that he used to lunch regularly with humorist Art Buchwald and superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams—first at the Sans Souci, later at the Maison Blanche, "and sometimes at Duke Zeibert's," he tells us—joined on occasion by Katharine Graham, proprietor of the Post...

...0 The American Spectator November 1995 73...

...But that was twenty years ago...

...Ward Just, a Post reporter, "is one hell of a novel writer today...

...In the mid-1970s Bradlee was offered the anchor perch on ABC's "20/20," long before Hugh Downs...

...This, in conjunction with Miss Quinn's garrulous style, led to a famous joke: What are the seven most feared words at the Washington Post...

...Art Buchwald ceased being funny during the Johnson administration...

...Can anyone imagine such principled forbearance, such rigid separation of private travail and public sensation, if anyone other than his friend had been involved...

...The vigilance with which he and his journalistic allies pursue Nixon and Ronald Reagan is unaccountably relaxed for Kennedy and Jimmy Carter...

...He locates the Army-McCarthy hearings in the wrong year...

...But Bradlee recounts one interesting story...

...And Bradlee stepped down as editor of the Post in 1991...

...His first, That Special Grace (1964), was a tribute to his recently-deceased friend John F. Kennedy...

...Bradlee calls the Block, Baltimore's famous tenderloin district, the "Strip...

...Still, the question is worth asking, and in attempting an answer, two themes emerge...

...By the end of his career he is playing tennis on the weekends with his pal Seymour Hersh...

...And pages are devoted to Quinn's latest talent: Buying mansions on Long Island, in Georgetown or Southern Maryland, and converting them to "glorious expressions" of her taste...

...Everyone agrees that Democrats are Good, Republicans are Bad (or harmlessly eccentric), and the mission of the press is to nurture the editor's political agenda while keeping a vigilant eye on the GOP...

...Yet Angleton, for whatever reason, seems to have failed to do so...

...As a child, Bradlee "gagged and barfed" his cod liver oil...

...I have not read either of these two volumes, and so cannot tell whether his skills have been sharpened, or grown dull with age...

...Lear's telephone number is not furnished...

...His thoughts are banal, his insights puerile, his wisdom self-evident...

...A few months after Kennedy's assassination, Bradlee's sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was shot to death along the towpath of the C&O Canal in Georgetown...

...several years later, Bradlee's wife retrieved the diary from Angleton and burned it herself...

...However, he continues, "the press did investigate Iran-Contra to a fare-thee-well . . . and still never managed to engage the nation's attention or conscience...