Ben Bradlee and the Cubans, a genuine passion for getting it right

Ben Bradlee, the great Washington Post editor of Watergate fame who died Tuesday at the age of 93, may have been the country’s first major mainstream journalism giant who questioned whether his newspaper was treating Latinos fairly.

It’s not something you’ll read about in any of the obituaries, tributes and remembrances about Ben Bradlee that are now flooding the Internet about a good life well lived. For Bradley truly was a brilliant editor who took a courageous stand that few others dared in allowing two young reporters – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – to break open the investigative story that ultimately brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

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In 1972, I was a young reporter working for the “Dallas Morning News” but spent more time writing about Texas politics and the like for the national desk of The “Washington Post.”

What happened with the Cubans and Watergate?

As the country was fixated that summer on Watergate, I was surprised to get a phone call from Ben Bradlee himself. I’d met him in Washington and had no idea he would even remember me. He likely didn’t; the people on the national desk probably had mentioned me to him.

Bradlee said he assumed I’d been keeping up with the reporting on Watergate and flat-out asked: “Has The Post been unfair to the Latin community in the way we’ve reported about the Cubans?”

From the day The Post began covering the story, it had reported that three of the men arrested trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building were native-born Cubans and another was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The climate in parts of the country was such, especially after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, that Cubans had been stereotyped as fanatic extremists intent on pushing the U.S. into a war to drive the communist government of Fidel Castro out of their homeland.

The Post rightly followed-up on the so-called Cuban and Florida connection to Watgergate, which was important to linking the money trail to the break-in, but also only deepened the curiosity and fun-poking of the Cuban involvement.

Even the 1976 Robert Redford-Dustin Hoffman-starring movie about Watergate, based on the Woodward-Bernstein book “All The President’s Men,” treated the Cuban connection like a joke with a line about “crazy Cubans,” as have other films such as Oliver Stone’s 1995 Nixon.

Breaking with stereotypes

Those portrayals don’t make the stereotype any more legitimate, and in 1972 Bradlee appeared to sense that in the conversation I had with him.

I got the impression he’d already taken some flak over this. It wouldn’t have compared to the criticism he was getting from the Nixon administration and its supporters, but that wasn’t the point. His concern about offending a minority group without intending to was honest and sincere.

I told him I didn’t think the reporting had been unfair, but that I would go back over the copies of “The Washington Post” in the library and morgue (the place were old newspaper clippings are stored) of “The Dallas Morning News”, as well as talk to some people, and then get back to him.

A few days later, I called Bradlee. His assistant said Bradlee wanted me to write up a memo and send it to him via Telex, a Western Union system that delivered stories and messages straight into The Post’s offices.

I wrote that while the reporting on the Cuban involvement in Watergate appeared to be accurate, it possibly could leave the impression that somehow those men represented the entire Cuban community – and that I didn’t think that was either correct or could be proven. I suggested that perhaps a story or stories about Cubans in America a dozen years after the revolution might offer some badly needed perspective.

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I’m not sure what, if anything, Bradlee and The Post did on the issue. I did see a story about the Cuban-American reaction to the Cubans arrested at Watergate but not much else.