Benjamin C. Bradlee, is currently vice president at-large of The Washington Post. He was executive editor of The Post from 1968 to 1991 and managing editor for three years prior to that. His career at The Washington Post began in 1948 as a reporter covering the federal courts. He left The Post in 1951 to become press attache' for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Leaving that assignment in 1953, Bradlee joined Newsweek's Paris bureau, where he spent four years as European correspondent. He returned to Washington in 1957 as Newsweek's political correspondent and was later named Washington bureau chief. During this period he began intensive coverage of presidential campaign and covered the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns in 1960. In 1965 Bradlee rejoined The Post as managing editor and became executive editor in 1968. In 1971 The Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, as secret history of the Vietnam war. This was a prelude to the Post's investigations of the Watergate scandal starting in 1972, exposing a cover-up scheme by the Nixon administration that resulted in President Nixon's eventual resignation. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures, a book of his memoirs was published in September, 1995 by Simon & Schuster. He is also the author of That Special Grace, a tribute to President Kennedy, which was published in 1964 (Lippincott) and Conversations with Kennedy, published in 1975 (W.W. Norton).
2003 Benjamin C. Bradlee
Benjamin C. Bradlee / The Washington Post