Benjamin Bradlee

Benjamin Bradlee was vice president and executive editor at the Washington Post when the newspaper published the Pentagon Papers and articles that exposed the Watergate scandal. Bradlee was a graduate of Harvard College. He began his career in journalism at the New Hampshire Sunday News. From 1948 to 1961, he wrote for the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine. In 1951, he left the Post for two years to become press attaché for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In 1953 Bradlee joined Newsweek‘s Paris bureau, where he spent four years as a foreign correspondent. He returned to Washington in 1957 as Newsweek‘s political correspondent and was later named Newsweek‘s Washington bureau chief. In 1965 Bradlee rejoined the Washington Post as managing editor and became executive editor in 1968, holding this post until his retirement in 1991. He remained vice president-at-large at the Washington Post until his passing in 2014. He was the author of Conversations with Kennedy and a memoir titled A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. He was a joint fellow at the Institute of Politics and the Shorenstein Center in the Fall of 2004.