Ben Bradlee

Ben Bradlee, born in 1921, vice president and executive editor of the Washington Post when that newspaper published the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that initially exposed the Watergate scandal. Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein tied the 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., to high-ranking officials in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974). The newspaper's reports led to government investigations, criminal proceedings, and Senate hearings that eventually forced Nixon to resign the presidency.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1942. He began his journalism career in 1946 as a reporter at the New Hampshire Sunday News. From 1948 to 1961 he wrote for the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, working variously as a Washington, D.C., bureau reporter and as a European correspondent. While a reporter for Newsweek, Bradlee lived near then-Senator John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C. The two became close friends, and their relationship provided ammunition for Republicans who later cited it in attempts to discredit the Post's Watergate coverage as a political vendetta. Bradlee worked as a senior editor at the Post from 1961 to 1965.

After becoming managing editor of the Post in 1965, Bradlee immediately began recruiting well-known reporters in an effort to create a national newspaper in the same category as the New York Times. He encouraged the type of in-depth investigative reporting that would later drive the Watergate coverage. In 1968 he became vice president and executive editor of the Post. On June 18, 1971, the Post became the second newspaper, after the New York Times, to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a collection of top-secret documents that detailed the development of United States policy in Vietnam beginning with the administration of President Harry Truman (1945-1953).

Exactly one year later, the Post printed a lengthy story about the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate hotel, apartment, and office complex. Throughout the coming months, Bradlee was resolute about pursuing the story, despite personal attacks by members of the Nixon administration. Bradlee retired as executive editor of the Post in 1991, but continued as a vice president at-large. In 1995 he published his memoirs, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.