Ben Bradlee - RIP

I can't find any reference to this in any of today's obits with the exception of one short line from Reuters saying that "the Post also uncovered details of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Ronald Reagan's White House", which doesn't sound useless to me

He went on record saying he had no intention of pursuing the charges to their obvious conclusion.

don't rock the Gipper, it's bad for ad sales

Pierce:

Ben Bradlee was someone in a newspaper office that the country needed at a very dark time for democracy. He rode the Watergate story when nobody else wanted it. It's hard now even to imagine how very far out on the limb Bradlee went on that story. It was in the middle of a presidential election that was transforming itself -- or, as we came to discover, was being transformed -- into an historic rout. Richard Nixon was ending the Vietnam War right on his own selfish timetable, just in time to get himself re-elected. Nobody wanted to know what a venal horror the man really was. Nobody wanted to touch that story. Bradlee did, and he stood by his reporters because that's what you did when you were a newspaper editor in the days when newspapers had room for giants....

But the dead hand of American corporate power has reached in and fashioned from what was a scruffy, noble craft a "business model" in which content-producers do what they can to improve and maintain "the brand." When distant historians write about America in the 21st century, they will write that it lost its soul somewhere between Silicon Valley and the Harvard Business School. That is, if there actually are historians in the distant future. Perhaps they'll all be too busy producing content to notice that, when the life of a country is rendered small, being larger-than-life is no great achievement, and that Ben Bradlee, take him all in all, was larger than life when that really meant something in a land built on the idea that there always is a new frontier, somewhere.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/RIP_Ben_Bradlee

I've now seen three screen portrayals. Not too difficult:

1. Jason Robards
2. Tom Hanks
3. Whoever played him in The Front Runner

Oops, embarrassing--it was Alfred Molina! (Which I did realize as I watched.) He's okay.