ALL the President’s Men changed everyone’s idea of what a good journalist should be. Henceforth, reporters would be scruffy anti-establishment rebels with film-star good looks. And editors would be growling craggy-faced titans, in turns terrifying, charming, inspiring — and fun.

For most of the time, newspaper life isn’t at all like that. Few reporters look like Robert Redford, or even Dustin Hoffman. Most journalistic careers don’t offer the opportunity to bring down a president. Most stories are fuelled more by coffee than adrenaline. But Ben Bradlee will remain for all time everyone’s idea of what an editor should be.

The Watergate story portrayed in All the President’s Men was — at least in retrospect — an uncomplicated one. The journalists were unequivocally the good guys, the politicians were found to be 24-carat liars and cheats. But if the moral balance was simple, the story was anything but. It needed stamina, ice-in-the-veins bravery, cunning, cool judgement and brute determination. Bradlee had them all.

He also had a remarkable owner behind him in the The Washington Post’s proprietor, Katharine Graham — famously warned early on in the saga by the White House that she would “get her tit caught in a big fat wringer”. That so-rare combination — brilliant owner, editor and reporters — produced journalism that changed American history and inspired generations of journalists to believe in their craft as something that could be aggressively and honourably pursued in the public interest.

Bradlee’s editorship of The Washington Post changed American history.

The Washington Post’s obituary of Bradlee argued that while Watergate was the most compelling story of his career, the Pentagon Papers was the most important. In the summer of 1971 The New York Times published six full pages of stories about the decision-making process behind the Vietnam war, based on thousands of documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst.

For the first time in the history of the American republic, the government obtained an injunction against a newspaper, barring it from continued publication on grounds of the damage being caused to national security.

Bradlee’s response to the injunction against The New York Times was to decide that he would publish the documents in The Washington Post. The newspaper company was about to go public with a $35m stock offering. He was surrounded by lawyers urging caution. Together, Bradlee and Graham decided they had no choice. “That’s what newspapers do,” he wrote later. “They learn, they report, they verify, they write and they publish.” Simple.

The decision, he wrote, changed the entire ethos of the paper. “A paper that stands up to charges of treason, a paper that holds firm in the face of charges from the president, the supreme court, the attorney general … a paper that holds its head high, committed unshakeably to principle.”

The Washington Post was immediately hit with accusations that it had breached the Espionage Act. The Nixon administration argued that publication “could clearly result in great harm to the nation, bringing about the death of soldiers, the destruction of alliances, the greatly increased difficulty of negotiation with our enemies, the inability of diplomats to negotiate.”

The Supreme Court disagreed. No American government since has dared to threaten prior restraint against any news organisation.

The Washington Post, newly confident, expanded abroad and at home, becoming a truly great national and international paper to rival The New York Times. The case maddened Nixon, who redoubled his efforts to bug, track and smear anyone he considered to be in the liberal elite, or a threat to him — multiplying the seeds of his own destruction. And by the time Woodward and Bernstein picked up the first nibbles of the Watergate story, The Washington Post had at its helm a battle-hardened editor ready for anything the state would throw at him.

The Washington Post obituary noted that 18 years after the Pentagon Papers hostilities, the man who had argued the government’s case before the Supreme Court, former solicitor general Erwin Griswold, admitted that the national security argument mounted was phoney. “I have never seen any trace of a threat to national security from the publication,” Griswold wrote in The Washington Post op-ed column in 1989.

“Mr Bradlee loved that article,” noted the obituary, “and he carried a copy in his jacket pocket for weeks afterwards.”

The obituary also carried a statement from today’s president praising Bradlee for showing that “journalism was more than a profession — it was a public good vital to our democracy.”

Forty-odd years after being accused of treason, damaging national security — and subsequently bringing down a president with the power of the written word — Bradlee was summoned to the White House to be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The subsequent history of The Washington Post has not always been such a glorious one — though it has recently been revitalised with another crusading editor at the helm and a new owner, the internet billionaire, Jeff Bezos.

The subsequent story of journalism has certainly had its lows. But Bradlee was a reminder of the heights it can, and does, reach.

“As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences,” he wrote in a letter 40 years ago. “The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.”

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2014