Opinion | Sally Quinn: When Ben Bradlee was in decline, I protected him

September 02, 2024

A story for Jill Biden:

It was a beautiful summer day. My husband, Ben Bradlee, was sunbathing out by the pool shortly after his 85th birthday. The photographer Annie Leibovitz had just shown up at Grey Gardens, our house in East Hampton, N.Y., to take Ben’s picture for Vanity Fair.

I was on the phone when Ben called out to me with urgency in his voice: “Sally!” I rushed to see what was wrong. Ben was standing by the pool looking helpless. “Annie wants to take a picture of me with no shirt,” he said. “No way!” I said, grinning at her. But I didn’t blame her: He looked great without a shirt. Annie and I had a brief discussion, but I was adamant. Ben was wearing white jeans, and I got his blue shirt. He put it on, and I buttoned it up all the way. He seemed uncharacteristically docile.

After a few shots, Annie suggested they walk down to the beach. “Don’t let her persuade you to take off your shirt,” I whispered to Ben. They came back laughing. We kissed Annie goodbye, and off she went.

When I asked Ben what happened, he was clearly upset and said that Annie had “made” him unbutton his shirt. The idea that anyone could “make” Ben Bradlee do anything he didn’t want to do was ludicrous. But it was Ben’s demeanor — his fragility, his vulnerability — that led me to believe something was wrong. I hadn’t paid much attention to the changes he was exhibiting until then, but they suddenly became impossible to ignore.

Vanity Fair came out with a gorgeous picture of Ben, looking rakish and devastatingly handsome. He was thrilled, but he didn’t remember posing for it.

I don’t pretend to know what ails Joe Biden. I do know what it is like to walk the hard road of age with someone you love.

That fall, Ben was diagnosed with dementia. He tried to joke about it, but it wasn’t funny to me. What was coming was driven home to me soon after at a cocktail party when I was talking with Sandra Day O’Connor, whose husband, John, had died of Alzheimer’s disease. She grabbed me by the hand, piercing me with her translucent blue eyes. “It’s horrible, horrible, horrible,” she said with such vehemence I was shocked. As if to prove her point, just then someone shouted from the hallway that Ben had collapsed in another room and they had already called an ambulance.

Except for rare incidents like that one, Ben still seemed much the same. One time, he accepted an invitation to speak at a luncheon in New York. It was given by PathNorth, an organization for CEOs seeking to bring greater meaning to their lives, led by investment banker Doug Holladay and venture capitalist Steve Case. Ben would be interviewed by our dear friend, the historian Jon Meacham.

The day before the lunch, we went to see an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As we were walking up the stairs, Ben blacked out. I let him rest, and with the help of a bystander got him up and in a cab. He slept for the rest of the day and night.

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The next morning, I told him he shouldn’t do the lunch. He insisted he was fine and charmed everyone at the table, brimming with energy and confidence. When it was time for the program, I asked him again if he felt he was up to it. Absolutely! We moved to the next room, where the audience took their seats. I was in the front row beneath the platform, which held two armchairs for Ben and Jon.

Things got off to a rough start. Jon asked Ben a softball question he couldn’t answer, then another. He couldn’t remember anything — about his service in the Navy during World War II, his time in Paris as a reporter after the war, his tenure at The Post. Poor Jon was struggling, and we looked at each other in alarm. Jon began to answer the questions he was asking Ben, but at one point he asked Ben something he himself didn’t know the answer to. Ben looked stricken, paused for a moment and then looked down at me. “Help me, Sally,” he said.

I’d had a knot in my stomach since the beginning, but this did me in. Thankfully, Doug dashed up to the stage, thanked Ben and Jon for a wonderful interview, and ushered them off the platform. I kissed Ben and left him in Jon’s care as I hurried to the ladies’ room. I barely made it into the stall before I burst into tears and couldn’t stop sobbing. How could I have let Ben be humiliated?

A few weeks later, Ben and I went to a book party for a friend. When we got there, we saw five chairs lined up against the wall. In the chairs were five very old, frail men. Their wives had dumped them to mix and mingle. “Don’t ever do that to me,” Ben pleaded. I never did.

A year later, Tom Brokaw, an old friend, called me to say that a Watergate anniversary was coming up and he wanted to do a film interview with Ben for NBC. “It’s not going to happen,” I told him. He begged. He had already interviewed Woodward and Bernstein, and he really needed Ben. I finally agreed, after he assured me I could trust him.

The interview was a nightmare. Ben was making no sense and couldn’t answer a single question. Tom left in despair. But after reviewing the tape, the producers found one line of Ben’s that made the cut: There he was, jaw jutting, saying something profane like, “Screw ’em.” That was fine by me.

The last time this happened was when another close friend, Andy Lack, the former chairman of NBC News, was making a documentary about the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Naturally, he wanted to include Ben. They were filming at Bob Woodward’s house. I told Andy I trusted him not to embarrass Ben. Bob and Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford, who was producing, waited on the sofa while Andy did the interview. It was hopeless. Andy shook his head at me as he ended the interview, and I concurred. Andy then led Ben over to the sofa, where he joined the guys. Soon they were joking and laughing and teasing each other, and it was as if Ben had risen from the dead. He was smart and funny and feisty — he was Ben! Seeing the change, Andy grabbed him for one more question: “What’s the job of being a journalist?” Ben, now energetic and lucid, cocked his head and responded: “The job is to find out what is the truth. What is the truth. What happened. What really happened.” Andy ran it and had it made into a plaque for his wall.

During Ben’s last year, happily, he never forgot who I was. About a week before he died, as we were going to sleep he took my hand and thanked me for taking such good care of him. “And thank you,” he said, “for protecting me.”

Ben died with his dignity intact. And his legacy as well.

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