EmailMy enduring memory of Ben Bradlee, years on from his courageous stand over Watergate, concerns an incident in Belfast.
He was in the city as guest of honour at the 2001 Society of Editors conference and decided to take a car trip around some of Belfast's trouble spots.
It was at the time when children were being abused as they made their way each morning to Holy Cross primary school in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast.
At one point, Bradlee saw a group of people on the Ardoyne Road and - against the advice of his companion, Brendan Hopkins, the then chief executive of the UK arm of Independent News & Media - he started to get out of the car to confront them.
Hopkins restrained him as he opened the car door and began to address the gaggle of angry loyalists from the back seat. Bradlee, then 80 years old, demanded to know why they were stoning and screaming at youngsters.
They shouted at him and Hopkins told me it looked ugly for a while. Bradlee, ignoring the danger, refused to close the door. He was eager to get his point across.
He wasn't in the least bit interested in their political and religious differences with the parents of the children, he just wanted to tell them to lay off the kids.
Hopkins's good sense saved him from a possible physical assault, although the tall, ramrod straight Bradlee would have towered over them.
Bradley, having reluctantly agreed to remain in the car, told Hopkins: "I want to get under their skin."
Later, at a BBC Northern Ireland reception, news footage of the scenes outside the Holy Cross school was shown. I saw Bradlee wince as he exclaimed: "They shouldn't do that... look at those children... my God, no!"
A local journalist told him it was a complex situation, to which Bradlee replied: "It isn't complicated. It's simple. It's wrong."
There, in a short sentence, was the straightforward ethical stance that had guided Bradlee throughout his journalistic career. The loyalist protests reminded him of his reporting of the white supremacists' attacks on black people in 1950s Alabama.
Similarly, it was that "simple" moral ethos that had guided Bradlee through the dark times during Watergate when the story looked as if it wouldn't stand up.
Once he had decided that Richard Nixon's administration had done wrong, he refused to let it go. He backed the investigation by his young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in spite of scepticism from some of his older staff.
He also had the bearing and conviction that ensured support from the Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham.
By the time I met him, he had retired from the Post, retaining the title of vice-president-at-large, and had become a consultant for Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media (INM), acting as joint chairman of the group's international advisory board. He loved the role, not least because he liked O'Reilly, another renowned story-teller.
It was a delight to be in Bradlee's company because it didn't take much prompting for him to tell anecdotes about his life, including his friendship with Jack Kennedy. In his trademark gravelly, husky voice he enjoyed recalling his times at the White House
But his most riveting stories concerned his earliest reporting days in the late 1940s when he was a cub reporter on the Post. He recalled being sent to cover race riots but complained that these conflicts were not getting their rightful space in the paper.
The young Bradlee helped to change the Post's agenda on such stories, which were then promoted to front page status. He went on to be the Post's senior editor from 1968 until 1991.
Bradlee was garlanded with awards but remained surprised by such things. When told last year that he was to receive the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, he said:
"Good God, how fabulous. What more can a man get? I feel terribly honoured. What does a person do to deserve this kind of prize?"
I could have told him in a sentence. He changed the nature of journalism in the United States and across the world. He did not invent investigative journalism but he gave it glamour that it has never lost.
Every reporter looks back to the Post's achievement in forcing a president to resign for being implicated in a crime. Now every scandal, no matter how small, is referred to as a "gate." Bradlee did that.
