Rieder: The greatness of Ben Bradlee

Ben Bradlee was a giant.

He was a giant in the days when newspapers were at the top of their game, when a newspaper editor could be a dominant figure.

Bradlee, who died Tuesday at 93 after years of struggling with Alzheimer's disease, played a huge role, in a remarkable and wonderful partnership with Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, in taking the paper from nothing special to an elite and important publication.

Bradlee, the Post's longtime executive editor, was, of course, immortalized in the book and movie All the President's Men as the courageous editor who oversaw and supported the Post's controversial but so-on-target coverage of the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal. He was a force in the Post's publishing the Pentagon Papers, a devastating study of the United States' role in the Vietnam War, after The New York Times was enjoined from doing so.

He was also the critical player in dramatically raising the Post's ambitions, making it a world-class newspaper, and assembling the world-class talent it needed to realize them.

Bradlee had the gift of inspiring people to do great work. He set the bar high. And people wanted to reach it and surpass it, not only to fulfill their own ambitions, but because Ben wanted them to. As is the case with all the great editors, his people wanted to please him.

This was a very different era, way before the digital revolution, when newspapers were in their ascendancy. Newspaper editors didn't have to worry about transitioning to the digital age, about page views, about monetizing content – about survival. They just had to put out great newspapers.

My first contact with Bradlee was unforgettable. My friend Larry Kramer, now the president and publisher of USA TODAY and then the assistant managing editor for metro news at the Post, wanted to hire me as his deputy.

But Larry knew I was very happy as city editor of The Miami Herald, a terrific newspaper at the time, and was on track to run a newspaper in the great, long gone Knight Ridder newspaper chain. So Larry called me one day and said, "Bradlee wants to have lunch with you. Which day are you coming?"

Bradlee didn't know me from Rod Stewart. But he knew Larry wanted me on the roster. So I got the full Ben treatment. He took me to lunch at the expensive room at the Madison Hotel across the street from the Post. "This is where we go when I'm serious," he told me with the trademark Bradlee growl.

We had a cocktail. He told me about his son. I got the full Bradlee treatment. And I was done.

"Let's get this over with," he said as we crossed 15th Street on our way back to the Post. I had thought I was a man of the world. But by then, it was a case of "do with me what you will." I was ready to sign on the dotted line.

Not long after I got to the Post, Leonard Downie Jr. became the managing editor, and Ben ceded much of the day-to-day responsibility for running the paper to him. But Bradlee certainly made his presence felt when he wanted to.

If you wondered what the definition of "charisma" is, all you had to do was watch Bradlee walk across the Post newsroom. He'd glance at the top of someone's story, kibitz with a couple of people, punch someone else in the arm – and the place was electrified. His mix of patrician glamour and down-to-earthness was, as Robert Palmer might say, simply irresistible.

My favorite Bradlee moment: I looked out over the newsroom one morning and watched him roll up his sleeve. This was before all the cool kids had tattoos. But Bradlee had encountered a news aide, a young woman, who had a tattoo on her upper arm. And Bradlee was comparing his World War II vintage tattoo with hers.

And Bradlee could be scary. Early one Saturday morning, I got a call from his secretary saying Bradlee wanted to see me in his office. Turns out the city desk, part of the metro desk's empire, had dropped the ball on a tip Bradlee had given it. Bradlee wasn't happy. He was very not happy.

You can be sure I summoned two of our very best reporters, and that story was in the Sunday paper.

Ben Bradlee was a great journalistic force and a very compelling human being. We are much the poorer without him.