By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — When a funeral was recently held in Washington for the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, his wife Sally Quinn arranged a traditional Episcopal service at the Washington National Cathedral, and according to news reports, over 1,000 people attended.
Famous for his role helping to bring down a president in the wake of the infamous Watergate scandal, Bradlee was 93 when he died of natural causes. A long life, well lived.
Quinn created a special atmosphere at the funeral. She arranged to have Bradlee’s friend and doctor, Michael Newman, recite the ”Kaddish” in Hebrew inside the cathedral. She also arranged for “Ave Maria” which is performed at Roman Catholic funerals to be featured at the Episcopalian service as well. In addition, Barbra Streisand’s popular song “Evergreen” was performed along with the Navy Hymn, the ”Battle Hymn of the Republic’and ”America the Beautiful.”
Nice touches all, and very 2014
Like a lot of young journalists in the 1970s, I lived in Washington for a spell, doing freelance work for the Washington Post and the New Republic, and even landing a very part-time freelance gig at the Post as an editorial page cartoonist. I never saw Bradlee or ”Woodward and Bernstein” in the hallways when I went in to the Post building to submit my work. But one day I gathered up my courage — I was 26 — and wrote a snail mail letter to Bradlee asking for an interview for a writing job at the Post. This was before email, of course, and I sent the letter in the mail and waited for a reply. A week letter, Bradlee’s secretary wrote to me and said “Mr. Bradlee will be happy to see you next Tuesday in his office.”
I went into his office, shook his hand and told me I was looking for an entry level job at his paper, something like a rookie obituary writer. I had heard that a good way to get a foot in the door at a major newspaper was to volunteer to write the obits, something that most seasonsed reporters did not want to do. So I pitched the idea to Bradlee.
He was very friendly and you might say avuncular, and in his gruff, profane voice he asked: “Bloom, what the eff do you know about death?”
I told him that my father was a doctor in the Boston area and that I was familiar with a lot of medical terms and with death, but Bradlee just shook his head and smiled and said; “Bloom, get out of my office!
Come back in five years with some clips from small papers and we can talk then.”
My five minutes “interview” was over. Out the door. But given a friendly send-off, with a warm handshake and a kind of “don’t give up” salute from Mr Bradlee. I loved it.
So off I went to find some smaller papers to write for, and life took me to Alaska for 12 years and then to Japan and Taiwan and I never made it back to Washington. Still, I always cherished my brief meeting with Ben Bradlee and followed news of his work via news reports and later the Internet.
When I heard via a CNN report on my TV in Tawian last month taht the newspaper legend had died, I had no idea he was 93 now! He always seemed to me like a man who was eternally 55.
Ben Bradlee. They don’t make people like that much anymore.
*
Bloom is a freelance writer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com