Big Ben.

Ben Bradlee left behind a fine newspaper, and a lot of good stories, but he didn't understand why journalism needs to explain

A Good Life Ben Bradlee, Simon & Schuster, $27.50

During the 25 years in which he personified and dominated The Washington Post, from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s, Ben Bradlee was known for two main traits.

One was having made the Post a plausible national contender to The New York Times. The Times still has fundamental advantages--nationwide circulation, a more extensive foreign staff, more plugged-in coverage of New York-based activities like finance, publishing, culture, and art. Yet the Post is more plugged into Washington politics. And it now seems perfectly natural to say "the Post and the Times."

Thirty years ago, when Katharine Graham lured Bradlee from Newsweek to the Post, it would have been a stretch to compare the two papers. It is true that the rise of the Post depended on a string of shrewd business decisions by Graham, who took over the paper after her husband's suicide in 1963 with almost no management experience. Yet Bradlee was the one responsible for recruiting and then motivating waves of talented reporters, writers, and editors. Bradlee describes his excitement in bringing to the Post David Broder--then a rising-star political reporter, and the first prominent journalist ever to leave the Times for the Post. Even before the Woodward and Bernstein era of the 1970s, the Post was becoming a sexy destination for ambitious reporters.

Bradlee's second claim to fame was his personal style. Dapper and dashing, with a face often described in print as that of an international jewel thief, Bradlee charmed many people in his orbit. The most significant charmee was no doubt Graham. In his book, Bradlee describes her as making all the crucial go/no-go decisions on publishing the Pentagon Papers and the touchiest Watergate stories, but these decisions were no doubt easier for Graham because of her faith in Bradlee. The cult of Bradlee at the Post did have its excesses, as when in the late 1970s, ambitious editors there imitated his British-tailored clothes. But he seems to have gone through life leaving people grateful for their contact with him.

Bradlee's autobiography is a surprisingly charming work that sheds light on both aspects of his reputation. The book's greatest success, and the source of the surprise, is how clearly it conveys his personality. Because journalists live so fully in the "now," their memoirs are often disappointing. Details that seemed so compelling on deadline often lose their sparkle when retold a generation later. Moreover, colorful personality traits often come through poorly in autobiographies. Lyndon Johnson's real effect on his contemporaries was completely lost in his stiff autobiography, The Vantage Point.

Bradlee has written a book that, as best as I can judge from slight acquaintance with him, gives a realistic, vivid sense of his character. This is especially so in the first half of the book, which describes his adventures before he joined the Post. (The second half is less fresh, perhaps because the events themselves, notably Watergate, are so familiar.) In one photo-caption, Bradlee writes that, late in life, he has tried to look pensive when being photographed, befitting his role as an elder statesman. In that one picture he does indeed look somber--but the pose has to have been an act of will, for in the other photos he has a more natural "I love life!" grin. Some of the episodes Bradlee describes are unpleasant--his bout with polio as a child or the failure of his first two marriages. But this man does not seem to suffer many blue days.

Bradlee has of course made much of his friendship with his Georgetown neighbor, John Kennedy, who became president while Bradlee was Newsweek's Washington bureau chief. Superficially Bradlee and Kennedy seem quite similar: good-looking young men from Boston and Harvard, both with a roving eye, both with the mixture of high-mindedness and maturity that came from naval duty in the South Pacific. Yet, in retrospect, Bradlee seems a far warmer man. Time and again, and with no irony, Bradlee refers to people as his "pals." The term dates him as a World War II character but also suggests a genuine comradeship. The warmth that comes through in this book even makes the reader forgive one real oddity: Bradlee's trait of quoting, at length, people's favorable comments about him. He reprints not one but three favorable fitness reports from his naval superiors, and he ends the book with extensive excerpts from the laudatory speeches his Post colleagues gave when he retired.

Bradlee's personality mattered not just to the Post but to journalism in general, in a way that is comparable to Kennedy's effect on the image of government. Each man made it seem glamorous, noble, and fun to join him in his enterprise; on balance, both journalism and government work better with this spirit than without it.

Although it makes me feel like the humorless weenies that dapper young Benjy Bradlee would have mocked in his prep school years, I must say that Bradlee's account also explains what was wrong with his tenure at the Post. Bradlee is obviously intelligent (he got good grades at St. Marks, and tells us so), but he is no intellectual. His adventures as a reporter touched on many of the world-changing events of his lifetime--World War II, the re-emergence of Europe after the war, the anti-colonialist fight in Africa and Asia in the 1950s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of Nixon and Carter and Reagan. But with the exception of discussing the ways that World War II affected him and the country, there is very little sign that Bradlee viewed these events as anything more than great stories. He barely says what he thought about any of them. He mentions, for example, that his pal Teddy White had success with two books in the 1950s, Thunder Out of China and Fire In the Ashes. These books made important arguments about how Asia and Europe, respectively, would change after the war, but Bradlee treats them mainly as nice windfalls for his buddy.

The breaking-news mentality is of course a necessary part of a reporter's equipment, and it is connected to the sense of verve and fun that characterized the Post's Bradlee years. But his patent lack of interest in "policy" is part of the reason for the dutiful, wood-chopping nature of the Post's "explanatory" journalism in his era and to a degree even now. Under Len Downie, the steadier, plainer, more "issues-minded" successor to Bradlee, the Post tries harder to tell big, non-breaking stories in interesting ways. But it still bears the mark of Bradlee's legendary excitement about exposes and scoops about inside politics, and his "Oh, Jesus, another series" fatalism about projects that would tell people how an industry or government agency actually works. When the Post produces such a series, it often seems to bear the invisible headline: "Maybe this will be long and worthy enough to win a Pulitzer Prize." Bradlee also passes along a revealing joke: the Post's in-house acronym SMERSH, which stood for stories on "Science, Medicine, Education, Religion, and all that Shit." The point is not that the paper fails to cover big issues but that it often does so in the spirit of Sunday confessional, having spent the other six days doing what it really enjoys.

James Fallows is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly.