Personal History (71 page)

“No,” I responded, “what is it?”

“He’s dead,” was the reply.

I was crushed and disbelieving. He had been walking with Marietta in the rare late-afternoon British sunshine when he just fell to the ground with a fatal heart attack. Eric Sevareid arrived as I stood there, as did Marietta and Phil Kaiser, minister at the embassy, who were returning from the hospital; they had gone there in the ambulance with Adlai. Eric told me that he thought Adlai had looked unusually tired—several times during their conversation the night before, Adlai had leaned back and closed his eyes. Not exactly how I had found him later, I ruminated, thinking guiltily of the glasses and tie at his door.

Adlai had spoken to me, as he did to many of us, about wanting to resign from his position at the United Nations to take a rest and then go back into private business, but I had no idea how tired he must have been. In many ways, he was an unhappy man. Eric Sevareid said on the CBS Evening News a few days later that Adlai had told him, “For a while I would just like to sit in the shade with a glass of wine in my hands and watch people dance.”

Marella’s father had also died while we were in London, and she had to be in Italy a week longer than expected, so our plans changed, and Truman and I flew to Athens and departed in lonely splendor on Marella’s beautiful boat, the
Sylvia
, stocked with a great deal of my favorite Italian wine. Truman had with him the galleys of
In Cold Blood
, in the four sections that were to appear first in
The New Yorker
. Sitting for hours on the back deck of the boat in the balmy air, we discussed it all in detail, section by section—why he had done what he’d done, what the murderers were like, what Garden City, Kansas, was like, the characters of the detective and the judge, his own life while in Kansas.

We finally met up with Marella and the other guests and set off on a route based partly on a book by Freya Stark,
Lycean Shores
. Our goal was to go down the southern coast of Turkey, at that time almost undeveloped. The boat wasn’t big enough for all of us and on top of that was un-air-conditioned,
which made life somewhat difficult in the extreme heat that set in. But Marella herself was casual and generous and uncomplaining, and the entire voyage was a happy interlude of R and R in an otherwise turbulent year.

W
HEN
I
HAD
first gone to work at the
Post
, I assumed that things would carry on as they always had. One area that, surprisingly, started to shift under my feet was the
Post
’s editorial quality. I hadn’t realized that the
Post
wasn’t perfectly okay as it was. I had great faith in Al Friendly as managing editor and in Russ Wiggins as editor, leading the editorial page, and basically believed that all was well. In fact, almost a year to the day after Phil’s death I wrote Al a personal letter saying, “You must know, without this word—but I want to say it anyway—that you’ve done so well for this year, and been so great.”

One of the first people to put into my head the idea that the paper wasn’t all that it should or could be was Scotty Reston, who, on a visit to Glen Welby, asked, “Don’t you want to leave a better paper for the next generation than the one you inherited?” This may not seem like a startling question, but it was to me. I had not considered that we weren’t making the kind of progress that we had in the past, or that what we were doing wasn’t good enough for the 1960s.

It’s difficult to recall how I eventually became seriously concerned about what was happening on the editorial floor, on the news side, but there were many signals, and I certainly was beginning to think about the direction the paper should be taking. The two people I talked privately to about the future were Walter Lippmann and Scotty. In truth, I felt I needed Scotty, who was such a close personal friend, to help me move the paper forward, and in the summer of 1964 I met with him several times to discuss the possibility of his coming to the
Post
. One of the things we talked about was his concern over Phil’s overstepping his bounds as publisher, and we agreed that working with me would be different. Finally, with Fritz’s help and after consultation with Walter and Russ Wiggins, I offered him the rather ill-defined job of advising the paper editorially while continuing his column. This was completely impractical, but I was unwilling to disturb Russ and Al, to whom I remained devoted and grateful.

Scotty quite rightly rejected this offer, firmly but kindly, and very constructively. We carried on without him, but gradually I had to acknowledge that there was a problem. How could I tell? I certainly didn’t have a sophisticated judgment about the quality of our news product, but I was observing a great deal of indecision among the executives, followed by some odd decisions, especially about people. I sensed a certain lack of
adrenaline, and through the grapevine I heard talk of stagnation in the city room. One report that reached me said that you could swing a dead cat around the city room after nine at night and not hit anyone.

Then there was Al himself. Bob Manning, who was working for the government, came to see me with the idea that he replace Al Friendly; that he was what was needed to revitalize the paper. I rejected the suggestion out of hand, but that episode, too, left a seed of doubt. By 1965, Al had been managing editor for ten years, and people were commenting on how he was aging. He did seem to be getting tired, and he was clearly growing hard of hearing, which made difficulties for him on the job. He himself must have felt some concern, since he decided he should take two months’ vacation every year—he and Jean had bought a place in Turkey and wanted to spend time there. Al was my friend, but the managing editor is a key figure who gets the paper out each day, and the idea of two months off worried me.

All these were clear warning signals, but I was puzzled about what to do about them. Not only had Al done a fine job with meager resources over many years, but he and Jean were such close personal friends that it was unthinkable to upset him. When I tried to suggest to him that the paper could use some energizing, he seemed to dismiss my feelings and obviously didn’t take my judgment seriously. So I conceived the idea of asking him to talk with others, particularly Walter Lippmann, to find out what they thought of the paper and what he might do to move it forward. He agreed, but by then Walter had gone to Maine, and they couldn’t get together at that time.

In the meantime, I had learned that Ben Bradlee had twice been offered promotions by
Newsweek
which would have entailed his moving to New York, but had turned them down. Although I had gone back and forth to New York with him on various trips for
Newsweek
and had had a few meetings and lunches with him, I didn’t know Ben very well. I still associated him with Phil’s bad period, when I thought he had taken sides. But I knew that he ran a good bureau, had good people working for him, and was generally well regarded. And I realized that he was eminently hirable and worried about losing him from the company, especially to some television network, which I feared might recruit him since he was good-looking and appealing.

Because I wanted to discover what his ambitions were, I invited him to lunch. I had never done such a thing before. In those days, it was still a little awkward, I felt, for a woman to take a man to lunch and to pay the check, so in December 1964 I took him to the F Street Club, where I could sign for the bill (those were the pre-credit-card days) and avoid a scene about who would pay—so odd to think of now.

Our talk meandered around. I asked him why he hadn’t gone to
Newsweek
in New York, although I knew that he and his wife, Tony, had six children living with them—four of hers and two of theirs, apart from Ben Jr., Ben’s son from an earlier marriage—which would make changing cities difficult. He told me he liked running the bureau here in Washington and was in no hurry to move on.

“But what would you like to do in the long run?” I asked.

“Well, since you asked,” Ben responded, with his typical picturesque language, “I’d give my left one to be managing editor of the
Post.”

I was stunned. This was neither the question he expected nor the answer I anticipated—or even welcomed. However, given the context of my concerns, it was certainly a thinkable thought. What I said to Ben was that we could discuss the idea, but not right now or at any time soon. Ben, however, saw his opening and pursued it—hard. I’d see him around and he’d say, “When are we going to talk some more? What are we going to do next?” I was surprised by his tenacity.

I used the time to check out the idea with Scotty, who didn’t know Ben personally but thought it might work out. Walter Lippmann, who did know Ben, reacted favorably, saying he thought Ben could do great things for the paper. Encouraged by that, I took the idea to Fritz, who heartily approved, and to Oz, who of course did, too.

Ben and I met several more times in the course of the next few months. He made it clear that he didn’t want to give up a job he loved in order to sit around the
Post
waiting for Al to retire in two or three years. He was, however, willing to come to the paper and wait one year. I didn’t like that prospect. Part of me thought, “What gall this guy has to be so pushy when he doesn’t even have the job,” but part of me thought, “Maybe this is exactly what we need and what I’m looking for.”

Ben kept pushing and I kept delaying until the early summer of 1965, when I finally brought up with Russ and Al the idea of bringing Ben over from
Newsweek
as assistant managing editor. They both reacted negatively at first. Russ said he should come in as a reporter like anyone else and work his way up. Al was on the ladder to be head of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in two or three years, and he very much wanted to do that, so he wasn’t in a great hurry to give up being managing editor and lose the opportunity. Ben actually told Al that he wanted to move up within a year, to which Al responded, “What’s your hurry, buster?” Ben finally came to the
Post
, agreeing to disagree.

On July 7, 1965, it was announced by Russ and Al that Ben would join the
Post
as deputy managing editor, with principal responsibilities in the area of national and foreign news coverage. He was young, forty-three, and had been
Newsweek
’s Washington-bureau chief for four years. Mel Elfin was appointed the new bureau chief, and served that office reliably and well for the next twenty years. At the
Post
, Ben Gilbert, one of the last
of the first-rate old-timers, was made deputy managing editor for local news and administration.

Ben was to take up his new duties on September 1, but he arrived on August 2, having taken no vacation: he left
Newsweek
on a Saturday and came to the
Post
on the following Monday. I had written him on July 20 saying I had had a nice note from Al telling me that Ben had learned more in spare half-hours than had others in months. Indeed, Ben hit the ground running.

Then and always, Ben was charismatic. He was good-looking in an unconventional way, funny, street-smart, and political—all of which stood him in good stead. What was also always important was how hard he worked. In his determination to learn, he worked into the night and on Saturdays, too, and what he quickly observed was that Russ was concentrating on the editorial page and that Al had indeed lost his energy. By default, Ben Gilbert, by “controlling all the screws and the screwdrivers,” really ran the paper. Ben saw Al as not knowing the basics of the paper—the various production departments and the unions, for example—and felt that his lack of knowledge had been to the detriment of the
Post
. From the beginning, Ben saw that, to be a good editor, it was important to know how things came together.

What I hoped was that the issue of timing would slide. I couldn’t see my way around the problem of moving Al out and wished the whole matter would quietly go away. But few things regarding Ben are ever quiet. That fall, after Al and Jean’s vacation in Turkey, Al and I resumed our talks about the future of the paper. He told me that he had made a lunch date with Walter Lippmann, as I had suggested. Walter called me, too, and asked, “How far do you want me to go?” I said as far as he felt he could at the time, suggesting he “just feel your way.” By this I meant—and thought Walter meant—talking to Al about the inadequacies of the paper and what we should do to improve it; I had nothing else in mind. The phone rang after the lunch, and it was Walter, who said, “Well, the conversation went so well I went all the way.” Having not heard that expression since high school, I anxiously asked, “What do you mean by ‘all the way,’ Walter?”

“Well,” he replied, “I told him that these administrative jobs wore people out and there came a time when they should think about giving it up and going back to writing.”

I was dumbstruck. I had no idea Walter was going to go to that point with Al. Ben had only been at the paper for three months, and I had no intention of dislodging Al that early. I thought that even Ben, who was pushing, was still assuming it would take a full year, while I was assuming even longer. Unbeknownst to me, Ben must have been pushing from other directions, too, and talking about the situation with Al directly. His impatience
is reflected in a letter Henry Brandon, correspondent for the
Sunday Times
of London, wrote to his editor, Denis Hamilton, on October 12: “Ben B. told me that the situation with Al still in the chair and him assigned to kill the sacred cows cannot endure, that he will press for a decision within the next two months.”

Press he may have done, but I couldn’t have faced my old and dear friend and asked him to step aside that abruptly. However, because Walter had indeed gone “all the way,” and because I really knew by then that it was best for all concerned, I went ahead with the change. So much for my alleged courage.

I had barely hung up from talking to Walter when Al came into my office, looking stricken and pale, and said, “Is this what you want?” There was no going back. The awful deed had been done for me, so I just said, “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Al, with justice totally on his side, sadly said, “I wish I’d heard it from you.” I can’t remember whether I tried to explain, but I do remember the pain we both felt.