HBO premieres the documentary The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee, about the famed Washington Post executive, Monday, Dec. 4. Referred to as the country’s “most dangerous editor,” Bradlee was largely credited with taking down President Richard Nixon in 1974 after the Post broke the Watergate story.
Told mostly in Bradlee’s own words, The Newspaperman is “an intimate portrait of this formidable man, tracing his remarkable ascent from a young Boston boy stricken with polio to the one of the most pioneering and consequential journalistic figures of the 20th century,” according to HBO.
The Newspaperman is a co-production of HBO and Kunhardt Films. It is executive produced by Peter Kunhardt and Richard Cohen, produced by Teddy Kunhardt and George Kunhardt, co-produced by Sophie Goulding & Quinn Bradlee, and directed by John Maggio. For HBO, Jacqueline Glover is senior producer and Sheila Nevins is executive producer.
Bradlee was a foreign correspondent for Newsweek in the ‘50s, covering wars in the Middle East. In Washington, he befriended Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy and later gained unprecedented access to the White House. By the ‘70s, he had transformed the Washington Post into a global powerhouse.
Says HBO, “The tough-talking, chain-smoking Bradlee came to epitomize the modern newspaper editor.”
