A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.

Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, considers himself a lucky man: he survived polio; he survived more than three years on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II; he bought a house in Georgetown a few months before the Kennedys moved in only a few doors away; and he interviewed at the newspaper The Washington Post instead of at the Baltimore Sun because it was raining so hard he didn't feel like getting off the train in Baltimore. No wonder Bradlee titled his memoir A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (Simon & Schuster, 514 pp.).

One can almost hear Bradlee's gravelly voice while reading about his early days as a novice newspaper owner in New Hampshire, his adventures as a Paris-based foreign correspondent and later Washington correspondent for Newsweek and his two tours at The Washington Post, the first from 1948 to 1951 and the second from 1965 to 1991.

About a third of the way into the book Bradlee starts to talk about the meaty topics: John F. Kennedy, The Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Since Bradlee was a friend of John Kennedy, Newsweek naturally assigned him to cover the Kennedy campaign trail. Bradlee's friendship with Kennedy prompted a lot of speculation about how much he actually knew about Kennedy and his womanizing. Bradlee writes: "My friends have always had trouble believing my innocence of his activities, especially after it was revealed that [my second wife] Tony's sister, Mary Meyer, had been one of Kennedy's girlfriends. So be it."

Mary Meyer was murdered shortly after Kennedy was assassinated. Much has been said about the diary she left behind that detailed her two-year affair with Kennedy. And much has also been said about Bradlee's justification of his wife's burning of the diary. Bradlee defends this action by saying that the diary was "a family document, privately protected by Meyer's thorough instructions to destroy it upon her death." However, critics contend that such a document no doubt would have been of interest to the police at the time of the murder and of great value to Kennedy biographers today.

While assigned to Kennedy's campaign trail during his tenure at Newsweek, Bradlee switched over for a couple of weeks to cover Nixon. Even before the Watergate scandal, Bradlee's dislike for Richard Nixon was evident. He writes: "I can get along with a variety of people, from watermen in southern Maryland to Hollywood producers, from Arab shopkeepers to Israeli officials, from professional athletes to concert pianists, but I struck out with Richard Nixon." Bradlee said that Nixon was so heavily guarded by his entourage that one had to conquer them before getting to Nixon himself.

According to Bradlee, "some stories are hard to see. Other stories hit you in the face. Like Watergate." No doubt the Watergate chapter is the most fulfilling for many readers. Bradlee discusses in detail the Post's investigative drive following the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and its exposure of the Watergate scandal.

Conspicuously missing, though, is the identity of the infamous Watergate source Deep Throat. Bradlee himself didn't ask for Deep Throat's name until after Nixon's resignation and the publication of renowned Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's second book. After Bradlee found out the name of the mystery man he never told anyone, not even Post publisher Katherine Graham.

"Just as the word 'Watergate' went into the vocabulary as a symbol for the best in American journalism, the words 'Janet Cooke' entered the vocabulary as a symbol for the worst in American journalism," writes Bradlee. Cooke, a Post reporter, confessed that her Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an eight-year-old heroin addict had been a total fabrication. Bradlee viewed this as the darkest chapter of his newspaper career. The Post returned the prize and investigated the fabrication thoroughly, leading to a total recovery from the fraud. The Cooke incident aside, under Bradlee's direction the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes.

Although he made some enemies (Richard Nixon, for one), Bradlee also made a lot of friends along the way; the legendary trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams and humorist Art Buchwald were among his best friends. And whether or not luck has anything to do it, Benjamin Bradlee will probably go down in the history books as one of the most famous newspaper editors of our time.