Free Republic

Of the making of Washington movies, there is no end. Kohelet said this in Ecclesiastes, I think. Or maybe it was Gene Shalit on the Today Show. It’s a truism in any case. Steven Spielberg’s latest entry in the genre, The Post, is for many Washingtonians the most powerful example in the long line. When the movie opened here in late December, there were reports of audiences cheering lustily and even dissolving in tears at the movie’s end, as if they were watching a speech by President Obama. The local paper ran news articles about it, along with numberless feature...

Tom Hanks plays famed newspaper editor Ben Bradlee in Steven Spielberg's upcoming drama The Post. Here, the two-time Oscar winner discusses the man he plays (and also knew); the issues the film raises; and why he would refuse to go to the White House for a screening of his movie. You knew Ben Bradlee? He said: "You don't get it. We're covering the stories that are changing the world... And then, of course, the Nixon administration, the Justice Department, says: "If you print these papers, you're going to be traitors," which complicated absolutely everything, because it happened in the week...

-snip- On September 28, 1980, ... “Jimmy’s World” was published on the front page. Cooke’s story, about an 8-year-old heroin addict, created an instant sensation—the 1980s equivalent of “going viral”—reprinted around the country and around the world. As DC Mayor Marion Barry and city health and police officials hustled to find the child and prosecute his guardian-tormentors, the Post stood fast behind its First Amendment right to protect its reporter from having to reveal the boy’s whereabouts. For this, the paper was heavily criticized, especially by black residents in the then-majority African-American city. - snip- On April 13, 1981, Cooke...

A longtime Washington socialite is raising eyebrows with her new book on spirituality as she claims the hexes she put on three people in the past may have led to their deaths. Sally Quinn – a journalist who was famously married to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee – admits to being an Occultist in her new "spiritual memoir" titled Finding Magic. Quinn says she feels guilty about her hexes and won’t do them anymore. She also says she refuses to cast a spell on President Trump as some of her friends have asked.

You and I, meaning Normal People, we look at our Thought Leaders, our Media and Cultural Overlords, our Ruling Class, and oftentimes wonder how they can be so venal and dishonest in pursuit of what they want — and what they want most of all is control over the lives of us Normal People, those of us who do not want to control anyone. We just want to be left alone. How many times have we asked, How do they live with themselves? All the lies they tell, the innocent people they destroy, the fake news they publish, the character...

Half-baked Barbara By John McCaslin October 7, 2005 It's not easy being the master of ceremonies for a roast when half of the roasters don't show up. Ask political commentator Mark Shields, who found himself in that uncomfortable position Wednesday evening as the Spina Bifida Association attempted to put TV personality Barbara Walters in the "hot seat" at the Hyatt Regency Washington. "This is more like a bake-off," a visibly embarrassed Mrs. Walters said after the roasting, expressing disappointment that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and fellow roaster Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana were no-shows. As it...

Like all charming and physically imposing persons, Ben Bradlee had an enormous head. There. I said it: the last original observation not already to be found in the three billion words of tribute that poured forth after the death last week of Bradlee, the great editor of the Washington Post and an essential figure in the late-20th-century American establishment. And itÂ’s true, when you met Bradlee and spoke to him, the thing that really overwhelmed you, more than the face-famous good looks and the booming voice inflected with Beacon Hill lockjaw, was the sheer scale of that melon rising up...

I was staggered by something that had long been lurking in my old brain and now becomes crystal clear. But, here comes the best part: he was a spook (Bradlee), a full-scale CIA operative for much of his life. He worked for the CIA in Europe and throughout the world. Now, they say he did PR work for the Agency, and why not? But in Washington, we have a saying: Once CIA, always CIA. A brilliant man named Fred Thompson wrote about how Watergate was a giant CIA-organized frame-up of Richard Nixon by CIA people who hated him. But what...

The former editor of the Washington Post who led the paper's coverage of the Watergate scandal and made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers is dead at 93. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2802484/ben-bradlee-washington-post-editor-led-coverage-watergate-dies-93.html#ixzz3Gpfgm5Gb Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93. From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift...

WASHINGTON, D.C. The last time Ben Bradlee was cruising through the islands near Guadalcanal in the South Pacific was in 1943, aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer. Enduring some of the worst combat of World War II, the Navy spent months battling through the waterway known as "The Slot." "It was where cruisers and destroyers met up with the Japanese and played bang-bang at night," Bradlee describes it today. Nearly 63 years later, the legendary journalist is ready to return. This time, however, the destroyer is being replaced by a leisurely cruise ship, and his youngest son, Quinn, will accompany him....

The White House announced that President Barack Obama will award the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, to 16 recipients including television star and businesswoman Oprah Winfrey, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and former President Bill Clinton. “The Presidential Medal of Freedom goes to men and women who have dedicated their own lives to enriching ours,” Mr. Obama said in a statement released by the White House. “This year’s honorees have been blessed with extraordinary talent, but what sets them apart is their gift for sharing that talent with the world.” Mr. Obama will award the medals...

It was, they said, the crime of the century. An attempted coup d'etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from The Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor. The 1976 movie, "All the President's Men," retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate? In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee," Bradlee himself dynamites the myth: "Watergate ... (has) achieved a place in...

The Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer by Jacob G. Hornberger, April 11, 2012 In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964. The...

There’s an exemplary scene in the movie version of “All the President’s Men” that goes basically like this: Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein have been working their asses off on one of their stories about the Watergate scandal. They are pushing to have the story put on the front page of the paper. Ben Bradlee, the Post’s editor, reads the story and asks them a few questions. He then crosses out some words and adds some others and orders the story to be run, but to be buried inside the paper. Bernstein goes ballistic, arguing that it’s a front...

On Wednesday evening The Daily Caller spoke to Washington Post Executive Editor Bob Woodward, and Washington Post vice president and former executive editor Ben Bradlee, about Chris Matthews’ new book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” — and about the sexual harassment allegations facing GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. Video at link

Sally Quinn, whose first novel was titled “Regrets Only,” doesn’t have any second thoughts about writing of her “dysfunctional family” drama in The Washington Post last week. “I have absolutely no regrets at all,” Quinn told POLITICO. While Quinn isn’t sorry about writing it, others — from family members to online critics to the paper’s top editor — are. Quinn said Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told her that if he’d seen it first, he wouldn’t have run the column explaining the “dueling weddings” of her son and stepson’s daughter and squabbles among family members. And now Brauchli has decided “The...

As Dracula fears a cross, so a liberal media doyenne is terrified by Sarah PalinIt is, you know, rich. In the middle of the firestorm created by the liberal media over the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the first woman vice-presidential nominee in the Republican Party, a familiar voice is heard. Comes word in the last few days that Sally Quinn, doyenne of the Washington Post and the Georgetown social set as well as the wife of legendary former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, has taken out after Governor Palin. The moose-hunting, snowmobiling Palin is not a regular...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

WASH POST's Ben Bradlee Claims Plame Leaker Was Richard Armitage Mon Mar 13 2006 10:48:34 ET THE WASHINGTON POST's famous Watergate editor Ben Bradlee claims that it was former State Department Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage who was the individual who leaked the identity of CIA official Valerie Plame. In the latest issue of VANITY FAIR: "Woodward was in a tricky position. People close to him believe that he had learned about Plame from his friend Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's former deputy, who has been known to be critical of the administration and who has a blunt way of speaking. 'That...