. >> i am bradley graham, co-owner of politics and prose. i would like to welcome you. as those of you who attend our events no, we try to have an off her come as soon as possible after his or her book is released. most times the authors will have appeared in one or two other places or will have given interviews to news organizations but tonight we actually have a world exclusive. this is the first time jeff himmelman is speaking publicly about his new biography of former washington post editor ben bradlee. his book "yours in truth" has generated heated controversy. the controversy flared last week when a portion of the book was excerpted in new york magazine and the fallout has much to do with another great washington post legend, bob woodward as it has with ben bradlee. i will leave it to jeff to talk about the substance of the dispute. let me just say the biography is nearly 500 pages long and contains considerably more than the news stories so far have covered. i found the book quite engaging and certainly captures the much celebrated bradlee and all his energy, fir

after phil graham, kay graham's husband died. she heard that bradley might be leaving or thinking of leaving. she want to keep them so she had a much longed and family said he would give his last went to the managing editor and then came to the paper. what is always sad when he came to the paper and the first thing he wanted to do was remove the agendas from the post reporting and he wrote a memo to the reporter. he wrote a mobile to a foreign correspondent and laid out exactly what he is trying to do in the newspaper. we're not trying to make this paper flatter appeared which are to make it flare. from the flavor and individuality and dilution is in fact an effort to remove the veil stands. they make their position clear when they caught the news. a colorless smash the response. we want flair, audacity and a flashing quality. you've got those qualities. their value, for which i care about something entirely different. toth was the effort we make to become a newspaper by flavor come individuality and pollution will be above all, fair. so that was trans

bradley, bob, myself. >> and did you feel the pressure that was being put in terms of the paper itself and journalism itself and katherine graham and ben bradley? >> no, because we were kind of operating in a bubble. >> that's right. >> go get the story. what's the next story? and there was an absence of that pressure. we knew -- we could turn on the television and see ziegler, for 15 minutes, scream and denounce us and the campaign manager for nixon and so forth. there was a point in october, october 10th, 1972, when we did a story that essentially was the dna of watergate. it said, look, it was part of a basic campaign, spying and sabotage, directed at the democrats. and if you look at what, in all of these five wars of watergate, the most insidious one was nixon and his people saying we're going to hire saboteurs and we're going to pick who nixon runs again. they derailed and helped destroy senator muskgee and pat buchanan wrote a memo saying this is great. our strategy paid off. so, the idea -- you think about this. we've talked at some length about it's really an attack on the free electoral process to say, oh, i'm running