Distinguished journalist and former executive editor of the Washington Post Benjamin Bradlee will be visiting the College as one of Spring term's Montgomery Fellows May 17 and 18.
Bradlee, who presided over the Post during the Watergate controversy, will speak about the presidency of Richard Nixon as part of the "Power and the Presidency" lecture series in Cook Auditorium on May 18.
Shortly after receiving a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, Bradlee began his journalism career in 1948 as a reporter for the Washington Post covering the federal courts.
Bradlee left The Post in 1951 to become press attache for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, and two years later, joined Newsweek's Paris bureau, where he spent four years working as a European correspondent.
During this assignment, Bradlee traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, reporting on the Anglo-French invasion of Suez and the Algerian rebellion, Geneva Conferences and North Africa.
He returned to Washington in 1957 as Newsweek's political correspondent and was later named Washington bureau chief.
During this period he began covering presidential campaigns, among them the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns in 1960. In 1965, Bradlee joined The Washington Post again as managing editor and became executive editor in 1968.
Bradlee authored a book of his memoirs, "A Good Life: Newspapers and Other Adventures," and is also the author of "That Special Grace," a tribute to President Kennedy, which was published in 1964 and "Conversations with Kennedy," published in 1975.
He also serves as chairman of the Historic St. Mary's City Commission in Maryland, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of St. Mary's College of Maryland. Bradlee recently completed a successful five-year campaign as chairman of the Capital Campaign at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
