Bradlee, Ben. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. 514 pages.

Autobiographies are usually too self-serving to qualify for inclusion in NameBase. Then we digested Seymour Hersh's "The Dark Side of Camelot," and spotted Bradlee's book on remainder. In our view, Bradlee and the Washington Post are more important for the stories they missed (they hyped the "glamour" of Camelot and fed its corruption, and they ignored the late sixties and Vietnam), than for the story they got (if one can believe, even for a moment, that they got, instead of were given, the Watergate story).

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee is a Boston Brahmin (St.Marks and Harvard) who still can't resist an opportunity to drop the name of an upper-class acquaintance. (Of the nearly 600 names in this book, over 100 are present or recent members of the Council on Foreign Relations, and more than a few have intelligence connections.) Forget the image of the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed reporter from those 1930s movies, who risks all to go after corruption at City Hall. Bradlee sees himself that way, and the movie "All the President's Men" still feeds this myth of American reporting. But after running Bradlee's friends through NameBase, it's clear that short of Watergate, the Washington Post was close to expiring from irrelevance and obsolescence -- due to their chummy association with the rich and powerful, and with the secret state lurking behind them.
ISBN 0-684-80894-3

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