As the brilliant editor who steered the Washington Posts history-making exposure of the Watergate presidential scandal, Ben Bradlee, who has died aged 93, became the most lauded and influential American journalist of his era. Yet long after his departure from the job, he still worried about the one big blunder of his career.
As recently as 2006, Bradlee brooded publicly in a long television interview about his dread that one name might appear in the second paragraph of my obituary and it still may. The name: Janet Cooke, a Post reporter who brought the worst disgrace upon the newspaper in its history and Bradlees 26 years as editor over her 1981 Pulitzer-prize winning article about a black male heroin addict, aged eight. She had invented the entire story.
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