The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee

This feature documentary tells the fascinating story of one of America’s most influential and celebrated newspaper editors, utilizing rare home movies and photos, archival material spanning over 70 years, interview footage with family and colleagues, and voice-overs of passages from Ben Bradlee’s 1995 autobiography A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures, to chart the career and personal life of a man who freely admitted he had been “dealt an awfully good hand.” A Harvard-educated scion of a prominent Boston family, Bradlee found himself at the center of many of the 20th Century’s most seismic storms, including: World War II (he was a Navy officer in the Pacific theater); the ascension and assassination of John F. Kennedy (Bradlee and his wife were extremely close with Jack and Jackie); the First Amendment fight to publish the Pentagon Papers (detailing secret strategies of the U.S. military in Vietnam) in The New York Times and Bradlee’s newspaper, The Washington Post; and the fall of Richard Nixon after the Post’s electrifying Watergate revelations. As a result, Bradlee was cast as the country’s most prominent (and possibly only) celebrity newspaperman, apologist (he had to admit a 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning Post story was bogus), and elder statesman preaching the gospel of good journalism: “not to be loved, but to go after the truth.”Show more