Ben Bradlee

executive editor, Washington Post

Ben Bradlee, born in 1921, vice president and executive editor of the *Washington Post* when that newspaper published the Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that initially exposed the Watergate scandal. Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1942. He began his journalism career in 1946 as a reporter at the New Hampshire Sunday News. From 1948 to 1961 he wrote for the *Washington Post* and *Newsweek* magazine, working variously as a Washington, D.C., bureau reporter and as a European correspondent. While a reporter for *Newsweek*, Bradlee lived near then-Senator John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C.