Benjamin C. Bradlee

Editor
1999Spring

Benjamin Bradlee was one of the most influential newspaper editors of our time. He was at the helm of The Washington Post during a period that covered the Kennedy assassinations, the murder of Martin Luther King, the war in Vietnam, and Watergate. During his tenure as executive editor, The Post emerged as a newspaper of towering stature and influence. He dispatched reporters to Vietnam to improve the coverage of the war. In 1971, despite the risk of legal censure by the Nixon administration, he ran the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. This was a prelude to The Post's historic investigations of the Watergate scandal starting in 1972, exposing a cover-up scheme by the Nixon administration that resulted in Nixon's eventual resignations.

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