Rieder: What made Ben Bradlee a great leader?

It was a send-off befitting a larger-than-life figure.

Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee's funeral was classic high Washington. It was held before a massive throng at Washington National Cathedral. Vice President Biden, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and Secretary of State John Kerry were among the celebs in the house. The event was televised on C-SPAN.

Bradlee, the pre-eminent newspaper editor of his era who died last week at 93, deserved no less.

He received warm, not to say gushing tributes, from close Post associates, from former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and from two of his sons, Ben Jr. and Quinn. Some of it was so thick that if Bradlee had been there, he may well have started to play his imaginary violin, as he was wont to do when someone was pitching a story overly sentimental for his taste.

But those tributes were clearly heartfelt — and they were on target.

The picture they painted was of an inspirational, indomitable journalist and a man in love with life, full of zest for the sheer act of living.

Bradlee's funeral was also a bit of a reunion, as Posties recent and from long ago reconnected before things got started.

It also was a seminar on leadership.

Great leaders are not easy to find, and Bradlee clearly was one of them. A great leader makes people believe in the mission. A great leader makes you want to please him (or her). A great leader gets you to play at a higher level than you knew you could. And a great leader has your back.

So what was it about Bradlee that allowed him to do all of these things?

Walter Pincus, a longtime Post intelligence reporter who was close to Bradlee, got the conversation started.

Bradlee was, Pincus said, a stellar motivator and cheerleader. "And," he added, "he pushed us with a competitive spirit that was infectious."

Bradlee also believed journalism should be fun, a belief that has been close to my heart during the many years I've been in the field.

Once, when Pincus asked for a raise, Bradlee responded, "You ought to be paying me for all the fun you're having."

And, Pincus readily conceded, the boss was right.

Carl Bernstein, half of the Watergate team that led the way in coverage of the Watergate scandal, in the process helping to take down a president and putting the Post on the map, picked up the conversation.

What made Bradlee different? "He was not afraid," Bernstein said.

He recalled when, during Watergate, Nixon campaign honcho and former attorney general John Mitchell made dire threats about what would happen if the Post published a certain story. Mitchell promised the administration would do its own stories on the Post personnel and that a sensitive part of then-publisher Katharine Graham's anatomy would be caught in a wringer.

Bradlee's response? Satisfied it was solid, he greenlighted the story, including most of Mitchell's quotes. Today, Bernstein said, "We live in an era when too many of us run afraid."

Bob Woodward, Bernstein's Watergate partner, said Bradlee made you feel better about yourself. He made you want to be better. He made you want to have more fun. And, Woodward continued, he could make you feel that your enterprises were the most important in the world. That is, if you explained them quickly; Bradlee had a notoriously short attention span.

Those who worked for the editor, Woodward said, belonged to an exclusive society: Club Bradlee.

Post columnist David Ignatius cited the classic movie Casablanca to explain why Bradlee was so special. He mentioned Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), the idealistic resistance fighter who asks the band at Rick's to play the Marseillaise to drown out the music of the Nazis, and roguish saloon keeper Rick (Humphrey Bogart), who gives the band the go-ahead. Bradlee, Ignatius said, was both characters.

It seems only fitting to give Bradlee himself the last word. Brokaw recalled a conversation Bradlee had with the stellar writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

"If you think I'm cocky now," Bradlee told the spouses, "you should have seen me when the Bradlees had 4 e's at the end of their name."