Wise Words from Two Old Warriors   

A Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures
By Ben Bradlee
Simon & Schuster

A Good Life: Newspapering
and Other Adventures
By Ben Bradlee
Simon & Schuster
499 pages; $27.50

Here's the Ben Bradlee you may not know: the ex-jailbird with a snake tattoo on his rump, the sometime dope smoker who took John F. Kennedy to a porn movie one election night, the lusty inamorato who romped through flings and flirtations on several continents.

Or maybe this all corresponds to the Bradlee you do know: the kinetic, magnetic, live-in-the-moment operator, foul-mouthed and cantankerous, inspiring and endearing, perhaps his journalistic era's Last Action Hero, Old Guts and Gonads in the flesh.

ýs the retired executive editor of the Washington Post insists from the start, this is "a memoir, pure and simple." Bradlee lets everything hang out, writing as he talks, in a breezy, salty, no-baloney style. The book is crammed with spicy episodes and recollections, with little attempt at introspection and analysis.

Yet it is punctuated, too, by those pithy Bradlee-isms that underlie his reputation for straight shooting and shrewd judgment. By force of example, if not reflection, "A Good Life" presents an instinctive leader in his natural habitat.

The book is "called 'A Good Life' because that is what I've had," Bradlee writes. Good luck and fortune did seem to follow him from birth through prep school and Harvard (where the tattoos and a couple of boozy nights in jail happened), naval combat in World War II, high-profile reporting jobs with the Post and Newsweek (where the occasional pot and flings are recorded), and leadership of the ever-rising Post through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era.

Yes, there's luck here. Bradlee got his first job at the Post because a reporter had quit the day before. He got one of his early big stories, an eyewitness account of two extremists opening fire on President Truman's residence, because he happened to be on a passing trolley.

But there's also a fighter here whose intensity and intuition kept aiming him straight at action central. Bradlee contracted polio at age 14 but stubbornly fought it off and returned to school the next term. As a novice reporter, he crawled out onto a ledge 110 feet over Pennsylvania Avenue to watch police talk down a man threatening to jump.

Throughout his career he magically attracted an extraordinary collection of friends, from Edward Bennett Williams and Walter Lippmann at the start, to John F. Kennedy (luck again, they were neighbors) and Norman Lear later on. He was, and remains, one of those people others want to be around.

Bradlee rolls through the big scenes, including the ethically touchy ones: the palship with JFK ("We talked nervously about what we should call him... He asked modestly, 'What about Prez, for now?' "), publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the Janet Cooke "Jimmy's World" hoax.

And, of course, he retraces Watergate, vividly recreating the Post's fragile and isolated position as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein painstakingly dragged the scandal into the open. Don't look for stunning revelations here (not a clue about Deep Throat,€except that he's a living male). But Bradlee's insider report is still gripping, and he does add some dimension to the record.

One surprise to me was his defense of what is widely assumed to be a huge Woodward and Bernstein misstep: trying to question sitting Watergate grand jurors. "After being told it was not illegal..it was worth a shot," Bradlee writes. "In the same circumstances, I'd do it again. The stakes were too high."

Through all this, it seems vintage Bradlee that he seldom stops for more than a graf or two of contemplation. But he tosses off some wonderful thoughts in passing:

l On Woodward and Bernstein: "Carl loved the midnight glitter. Bob loved the midnight oil."

l On management: "You can't do any better than surround yourself with the best people you can find, and then listen to them."

l On today's "kerosene journalism": "Reporters pour kerosene on whatever smoke they can find... The flames that result come from arson, not reporting."

Bradlee seems harder to peg politically than you might think. Though he pushed hard on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, he also withheld "many stories" on national security grounds, and he often gave government officials the benefit of the doubt.

In a way it's disappointing not to get more philosophy and rumination from this titan, but those qualities aren't Bradlee trademarks. As the book testifies, he's someone who follows his impulses, makes things happen and leaves the stargazing to others.

Something he writes about Vietnam seems to capture his temperament: "By instinct and habit, I was more interested in the whatness of the war than in the rightness or wrongness." Here, the whatness of Bradlee's story proves interesting enough.

Still another Big Ben is publishing memoirs: Bagdikian, former reporter and editor turned media critic and author.

In titling his excellent book "Double Vision," Bagdikian emphasizes the journalist's dual role as insider and outsider, and his own twin role as both tough critic and fond friend.

He also stresses how heritage influences the way journalists view, and present, the world, a point his life story dramatically personifies.

Born Ben-Hur Bagdikian (after the fictional hero) "in the middle of a Turkish massacre of Armenians," he and his family found themselves fleeing for their lives when he was four months old. His father, an Armenian minister, at one point dropped his son in the snow, thinking the infant had frozen to death. But baby Ben let out a yelp on hitting the snow, and he was picked up to resume the harrowing but successful exodus to America.

Affectionately, Bagdikian credits his family for his abiding sympathy for underdogs and distrust of elitists. His uncle and grandfather, he writes, taught him "the virtues, the varieties, the pleasures and the special pains of working-class life," and heúhas been faulting journalism ever since for presenting a "lopsided picture of society" by catering to the affluent middle class. His 1983 book, "The Media Monopoly," remains the leading documentation of big business domination of modern journalism.

This autobiography logs his childhood in Massachusetts and his rise through the Springfield, Massachusetts, Morning Union, Providence Journal and Saturday Evening Post. Eventually, he moved to the Washington Post, where he played a central role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers and was one of the paper's first ombudsmen. Later he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and reigned as perhaps the country's foremost media critic.

In "Double Vision," as in his earlier works, Bagdikian firmly criticizes what he regards as an excess of top-down journalism.

"Despite conservatives' perpetual complaint of a 'liberal bias in the news,' " Bagdikian writes, "all of broadcast and printed news is pulled by a dominant current into a continuous flow of business conservatism... The daily news tends to limit itself to the views of the movers and shakers of society... The result is that American news is overwhelmingly the world as seen from the top down."

He takes the media to task for their hostility toward labor unions and a "long history of..indifference to reporting general workplace dangers."

Additionally, he suggests the need for another kind of double vision. "We need the cold-eyed reporting of the factual realities," he declares. "But we need constantly to measure how this cold-eyed vision helps or hinders the achievement of true democracy and genuine social justice."

Somehow he stops short of seeming too preachy in these judgments, weaving them naturally into his autobiographical narrative and showing how they derive from his own experiences.

With warmth and humor, he describes his failures as a vacuum cleaner salesman and short-order cook, and how as a kid he deftly dodged an apparent recruiting attempt by the Mafia — gathering street smarts and compassion as he grew.

But it does seem apparent that Bagdikian isn't always easy to live with. He got into hot water for trying to bring a newsroom union to Providence, and he reports a falling-out with Ben Bradlee, over some critical comments Bagdikian made in public, that took years to heal.

Read together, the Bagdikian and Bradlee memoirs are powerful medicine, wise words from two old warriors, different though they may be, with raw passion for the business. "I can fill this book with criticism, without diminishing my love of the work," Bagdikian writes. "If I were choosing my life work all over again, would I be a reporter[?] ..you bet I would." l

Stepp, AJR's senior editor, teaches at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.