Last post for resolute Bradlee

Ben Bradlee died last week at the age of 93.

If the name sounds vaguely familiar, then you probably associate him with Watergate or, more likely, the movie All The President’s Men, which describes the events of that tumultuous time. Bradlee was the editor of The Washington Post, which broke the Watergate story, and a central figure in the paper’s pursuit of the facts.

The movie depicts him as wielding flinty integrity and a withering glare with much success and enshrined the notion of Bradlee as the platonic ideal of a newspaper editor — erudite, experienced, supportive — though how much of this stems from Jason Robards’ brisk portrayal is up for debate. If you read the book on which the movie is based, though, you can see that Bradlee’s sometimes-cranky loyalty to his reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was genuine enough.