The Bradlee Swagger

Everyone who knew my father mostly knew him for his role as Executive Editor of The Washington Post during the Pentagon Papers and, of course, the Watergate scandal, in which a President of the United States resigned because of my dad’s editing of his two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. However, it seems to me that most people feel he was raised by wolves, in part because I don’t think he ever really talked about his heritage or his upbringing, and because I feel that people were afraid to question him about his upbringing. So that is what I will explain today, and I can assure you he was brought up by people and not wolves. 

My father was born Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee in the Roaring Twenties on August 26, 1921 in the Back Bay section of Boston, Massachusetts. He was the first person in the Bradlee family to be named Benjamin because before him everybody in his family was named Frederick, Josiah, Samuel or Nathan. His father, Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr., traced the family all the way back to Nathan Bradlee, who was born in Dorchester, now a town in Boston, in 1631. Nathan was the Sexton of Dorchester, and on the side he legally sold cider to make money -- I have always presumed it was hard cider. The lesson here is that right when things are looking really grim for you and you might even be thinking about taking your own life, which is what my grandfather almost did, don’t do it, because the tables can turn for you at any time. And they turned for him. 

My dad, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, who graduated from Harvard by the skin of his teeth as he would say, also had a close call with death when he became ill with Polio as a young teenager. One day, he woke up and said he felt like he had the flu, except that when he tried to get out of bed, he noticed that his legs were as stiff as a stick and he couldn’t move them at all. His father got my father’s coach at the time to come over to help my father’s rehabilitation every day until my dad was able to walk again. The other action that my grandfather did to help my dad was to take him into the woods, as my dad later did with me. My father was lucky that he made it out from under polio, a deadly disease that was actually an epidemic. One day, my father was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital and my father’s best friend at the time was right next to him. He died next to my father on the way to the hospital; my father survived. After surviving polio, he also survived five years in World War II on the destroyer fletcher class DD498. He survived thirteen naval battles and one of them was the Battle of Latay Gulf, the biggest naval battle in history. Years -- and two wives later -- my dad married my mother and had me. 

The war is where I have always really thought that my dad got his taste of journalism because he was a CI, or intelligence officer, where his job was to go from destroyer to destroyer. He landed on the USS Carrier Enterprise for a while, giving those ships commanders information that he had acquired about the enemies location. That’s why I think he went from being a CI in World War II to a crime journalist, and from there eventually landing a job at The Washington Post. So I just wanted to thank my dad for making all of the decisions that he made and choosing the path that he chose to follow, because if he didn’t, I might not have been born. 

But then there’s how he treated me. As a child growing up with Learning Differences, he was my best and, for a long time, only friend. He spent hours with me in the woods and taught me to believe in myself by never giving up. He always told me how he admired me more than anyone he had ever known because of my resilience and courage living with so many medical problems and being LD. He was never ashamed or embarrassed by my illnesses or problems. Just the opposite. He told me that he learned so much from me about how to love and overcome adversity. On his death bed, the last words he spoke to me were “I have a good feeling about you.” Coming from him, that’s a lot to live up to, and I’m trying to do just that every day. And so Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there who chose their paths in life that led them to being a father.