Legendary former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, who oversaw the reporting that exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down President Richard Nixon, is in hospice care in his home, suffering from severe dementia.
The revelation that the 93-year-old Bradlee is nearing death came in a C-SPAN interview with Bradlee’s wife, 73-year-old author and journalist Sally Quinn. The interview was taped September 18 and published September 28. Watch the full interview in the video above.
Quinn said Bradlee has been suffering from dementia for years and now sleeps 20 hours each day, though he knows who he is and who Quinn is.
From Quinn:
He does know who I am, yes. We actually have called in hospice care this week. It’s interesting because I thought “this is going to be not so hard, because Ben is going to be, he’ll just gradually lose his memory and he’ll ask me to repeat things, and it’ll just be …” But it’s been the most horrible experience I’v ever had up until recently. He’s still at home. And I still have him sleeping in the bed with me and I will until the end.
But a certain peace has come over me and this feeling of serenity because what I thought was going to be horrible — the caretaking part of it — has really become something almost sacred about it. That’s not drivel. I didn’t expect that. I just expected I would be having a nervous breakdown and it would be too horrible. But I don’t think we’ve ever been as loving with each other as we are now. We spend a lot of time together and we hold hands, and he knows me and he loves having me there. And it’s just extremely rewarding to be able to be there for him now to try to make him happy and to give him as much love as I can until he dies.
Bradlee was editor of the Post in its glory days from 1968 to 1991, leading the paper’s publication of the Pentagon Papers and the reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that exposed the Watergate scandal. He left his first wife and married Quinn — whom he hired as a reporter at the Post but who had since left to go to CBS — in 1978. The two have a son, Quinn Bradlee, who was born in 1982.
In 2013, President Barack Obama honored Bradlee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Quinn said she initially hid Bradlee’s diagnosis with dementia until Bradlee appeared at a forum with journalist Jon Meacham and couldn’t remember basic details of his life.
The first thing you do is to hide it. That’s what everybody does. That’s what I did. I hid it for years. “Oh Ben’s just forgetting his glasses and his keys.” And it wasn’t until he was speaking in front of a group. He was doing a conversation with Jon Meacham at this group in front of a group of CEOs in New York, and he’d had sort of a blackout the night before, and I said to him that morning “are you OK? Do you think you want to do this, because we can always cancel it. (And he said) “no, no I’m fine.” And he got up on the stage with Meacham and he couldn’t answer a question. He didn’t know when he’d been in the war, he didn’t know when he’d gone to the Post, he didn’t know … And I was sitting there just dying. I just had a knot in my stomach. At one point he just looked absolutely panicked and he turned to me and said “Sally, help me out.” And I just died.
