On Ben Bradlee, and why editors still matter

Here’s what I think. Everyone in my profession — working on a newspaper, or in some form of journalism — should read All The President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, if they haven’t already done so as a requirement in journalism class.

They should read it because it’s funny as hell, with the two journalists rendering themselves as characters in the most game-changing story ever to hit the news world. The fact that Carl and Bob are giving their own account, full of their own pet peeves and private irks, is funny enough.

It’s funny, too, because the top guns of The Washington Post — publisher Katharine Graham and chief editor Ben Bradlee — come to life in these pages as only real journalists could. They’re larger than life, and Woodward and Bernstein are just there, notebooks in hand, writing down the golden nuggets.

Woodward and Bernstein recount a reporter telling how Bradlee — a mix of upper crust education and street fighter instincts — would routinely grind his cigarettes out in a demitasse cup during formal dinner parties: “Bradlee was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.”

He delighted in displaying his street savvy, the two reporters write, “telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants behind a desk; then rising to meet some visiting dignitary from Le Monde or L’Express in formal, flawless French, complete with a peck on each cheek.”

When told that a Watergate source was soliciting monetary bids to tell his version of the story, Bradlee raised the middle finger of his right hand: “I bid this.”

With his rolled-up sleeves and no-BS approach to reporting, Bradlee was the compass that kept Woodward and Bernstein veering deeper and deeper into the Watergate story, though always with this caveat: “I want proof.”

Anyone in journalism should be lucky enough to have a Ben Bradlee type looking over his or her shoulder.

And that’s the thing. I was recently rereading All the President’s Men, and realizing that few people have that kind of guiding light anymore. Some of us at newspapers might feel a paternal (or maternal) hand showing us the way, but those who toil online? Not so much. And here’s another thing: more than Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, this is the volume that everyone who considers him or herself a “reporter” — whether for a blog, an online news site, or an daily newspaper — needs to have thumbed through a thousand times.

Why? Because every single page offers a useful lesson in the rules of journalism. Whether it’s the need to cross-check one another’s sources (as Woodward and Bernstein do) or the importance of letting the better writer craft the final copy (as Woodward reportedly let Bernstein do), it’s all there, in black and white, every single page: how to be a good, solid journalist.

And that’s something that a generation of online writers have often disregarded. Wait for three sources before going online? Nah… why should we, when one is available to us now? We have deadlines that don’t wait for the slow news train to come around, Mr. Old Journalism.

There are countless reminders in All the President’s Men about the need to be airtight in your reporting. (Granted, Woodward and Bernstein jumped the gun a few times, pressed too early, got burned. But they learned from those mistakes, and became more meticulous — another priceless lesson of this book.)

Some of the more valuable lessons are:

• Follow your sources. Bernstein thought nothing of flying down to Miami to get statements from pols said to have benefited from a “secret fund” set up by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). You can’t always just send emails and wait.

• Protect your sources. Countless times, Woodward and Bernstein are pressured to reveal the sources behind their scoops — but never by chief editor Bradlee, who understood how important confidentiality is to keeping a press “free.”

• A good editor has your back. So many times we have seen this in action, whether from our STAR Lifestyle Editor Millet Mananquil or Editor in Chief Amy Pamintuan,  taking a bullet for her team. The wisdom behind it is that reporters not only develop trust in their editors, but will then want to do better next time.

• Learn to read upside down. Woodward claims this old journalism trick helped him read documents on people’s desks that tipped him off to other Watergate sources.

• Master the follow-up question. The endless rounds with White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler in the book show how effective a brick wall can be in protecting a president from difficult questions. Reporters can’t be satisfied with the brick wall; they have to chip away at it with quick follow-ups.

• Parse every statement. Woodward and Bernstein became expert at finding the weaknesses in White House press releases — squishy-sounding  phrases like “no one employed by this committee at this time has used any funds for purposes that were illegal or improper” actually hid the fact that erring employees had already been cut loose.

 • Get it on record. Woodward had problems with Henry Kissinger retroactively claiming information in interviews was “on background” — meaning off the record. It’s a slippery move by officials who want to say something and then pretend that they didn’t.

• Even competitors work together to break a story. Bradlee nearly got an ulcer whenever the New York Times scooped him on Watergate. But unlike today, the reporters during Watergate shared info with one another; they helped each other dig deeper in new directions, because the story was that important. It’s hard to imagine this level of sharing in today’s cutthroat environment.

• Have a Deep Throat. For years, people speculated that Woodward simply invented his inside source, “Deep Throat.” Turned out to be the FBI’s number two man, Mark Felt. This source didn’t confirm or deny anything about Watergate on record; he simply guided Woodward down the right paths.

• Sometimes you get lucky. The two reporters were nearly silenced by a dogged President Nixon, whose legal men promised to destroy the Post in his second term. Instead, they got lucky: their stories laid a foundation for others to come forward and buttress their reporting. Eventually, Watergate all came crashing down.

All this stuff is embedded in a story that, while difficult for the non-Watergate buff to fully grasp, is a fascinating look at the journalistic process in action. Woodward and Bernstein had their good days, and they had days when it all went wrong — they also had days when they felt their phones were being tapped, the FBI was about to arrest them, and a judge was threatening to throw them in jail for interviewing grand jury members. Doesn’t matter. They lived through it. They understood — just as Ben Bradlee, who recently passed away at age 93, understood so well — that the press is still an important firebrand out there, despite its diminished capacity in hard print, and its brain-dead incapacity in broadcast form. The press is still the “fourth estate,” essential to revealing all the dirt out there, and it’s necessary for it to always retain a strong, well-respected voice, even in an overcrowded, over-noisy marketplace. 

Definitely a tall order, in these challenging times.

Still, a young reporter could do worse than to pick up a copy of this classic how-to guide, and apply its lessons to his or her own inquiries.