Ben Bradlee

He married his first wife, Jean Saltonstall, in 1942, when he was commissioned as a naval officer. The couple had a son - Benjamin C. Bradlee Jr. of Boston, who served as the deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe.

While working in France, he divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot Pittman in 1957. The couple gave birth to two children - Dominic Bradlee and Marina Murdock. He divorced Antoinette in 1975.

He developed a close relation with Sally Quinn, a young reporter 20 years his junior, recruited in The Post’s Style section. He divorced Antoinette in 1975 and married Sally three years later in 1878 and had a son - Quinn Bradlee.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born into the Boston Brahmin Crowninshield family on August 26, 1921, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a well-to-do family, dating back to three centuries in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

His father, Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr., was a banker, while mother, Josephine de Gersdorff, was an awardee of the French Legion of Honor.

In 1929, the family’s smooth life was suddenly halted, when the stock market crashed, along with the family’s wealth. His father took to odd jobs during the Great Depression to financially support his family.

He began his early schooling at Dexter School, and later joined St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he experienced another life-changing tragedy.

In 1936, he was diagnosed with polio, which left his legs paralyzed for a short period, but he fought back and developed strong arms, legs and chest, with regular exercise.

He graduated in 1942 and joined the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he worked as a communications officer for three years on the destroyer USS Philip during the World War II, taking care of classified and coded cables.

When the war ended in 1946, he forayed into journalism, launching the New H.ampshire Sunday News, working as a reporter.

He sold the paper to William Loeb III in 1948, and began working as a crime reporter in The Washington Post, which changed his and the newspaper’s life forever.

He found a friend in Philip Graham, an associate publisher, who helped him secure the job of an assistant press attaché in the American embassy, Paris, in 1951.

In 1952, he joined the US Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), where he broadcast the CIA-directed European propaganda, leading to the controversial spying and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953.

In 1971, he and Katharine Graham, who headed the paper after her husband Philip Graham’s suicidal death, printed the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and won the case in the Supreme Court.

In June 1972, he supported two young journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who covered the burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex of the White House.

As a result of the investigations revealing his involvement to win a second presidential tenure, Richard Nixon was forced to step down and resign from the office in 1974, thus becoming the first president to do so in the US history.