Managed profile Not claimed by Ben Bradlee

Ben Bradlee has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.

Is this you, or is something wrong?

BB

Ben Bradlee

Executive editor of The Washington Post, 1968–1991

United States · 1921–2014

American newspaper editor who ran The Washington Post for twenty-three years, publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and backing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. The paper won eighteen Pulitzer Prizes during his editorship.

1 answer 0 followers reference

Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
We made one mistake in a story in which we said that — Woodward and Bernstein said — that there was a slush fund of $300,000 set up in the Committee to Re-elect the President, and it was controlled by Haldeman, and that one of the witnesses had testified to that slush fund to the grand jury investigating Watergate. ... It turned out that he hadn’t been asked, and that interested us a great deal, because if the prosecution wasn’t asking him those interesting questions, that suggested that there was a reason they weren’t, and the reason might be that they were trying to cover it up. Anyway, it took two days, and we got confirmation that there was, and in fact there was a slush fund of $750,000.

Recorded Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 1 May 2003 source ↗

Every quotation above is reproduced from the source shown beside it and has not been edited. Ben Bradlee did not write these answers for FLAPSS. Request a correction or removal.