Best Selling Books by Ben Bradlee

The classic New York Times bestselling memoir by legendary executive editor of The Washington Post Ben Bradlee—with a new foreword by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and an afterword by Sally Quinn. The most important, glamorous, and famous newspaperman of modern times traces his path from Harvard to the battles of the South Pacific to the pinnacle of success at The Washington Post. After Bradlee took the helm in 1965, he and his reporters transformed the Post into one of the most influential and respected news publications in the world, reinvented modern investigative journalism, won eighteen Pulitzer Prizes, and redefined the way news is reported, published, and read. His leadership and investigative drive during the Watergate scandal led to the downfall of a president, and his challenge to the government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers changed the course of American history. Bradlee’s timeless memoir is a fascinating, irreverent, earthy, and revealing look at America and American journalism in the twentieth century—a “sassy, sometimes eye-poppingly, engrossing autobiography...must reading” (The New York Times Book Review).

An account of the life and career of the National Security Council aide dismissed for his role in U.S. foreign policy operations.

From acclaimed journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. comes the epic biography of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams that baseball fans have been waiting for. Williams was the best hitter in baseball history. His batting average of .406 in 1941 has not been topped since, and no player who has hit more than 500 home runs has a higher career batting average. Those totals would have been even higher if Williams had not left baseball for nearly five years in the prime of his career to serve as a Marine pilot in WWII and Korea. He hit home runs farther than any player before him -- and traveled a long way himself, as Ben Bradlee, Jr.''s grand biography reveals. Born in 1918 in San Diego, Ted would spend most of his life disguising his Mexican heritage. During his 22 years with the Boston Red Sox, Williams electrified crowds across America -- and shocked them, too: His notorious clashes with the press and fans threatened his reputation. Yet while he was a God in the batter''s box, he was profoundly human once he stepped away from the plate. His ferocity came to define his troubled domestic life. While baseball might have been straightforward for Ted Williams, life was not. The Kid is biography of the highest literary order, a thrilling and honest account of a legend in all his glory and human complexity. In his final at-bat, Williams hit a home run. Bradlee''s marvelous book clears the fences, too.

The people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania voted Democratic for decades, until Donald Trump flipped it in 2016. What happened? Named one of the "juiciest political books to come in 2018" by Entertainment Weekly. In The Forgotten, Ben Bradlee Jr. reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land - marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Fundamentally rural and struggling with changing demographics and limited opportunity, Luzerne County can be seen as a microcosm of the nation. In The Forgotten, Trump voters speak for themselves, explaining how they felt others were ''cutting in line'' and that the federal government was taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the idle. The loss of breadwinner status, and more importantly, the loss of dignity, primed them for a candidate like Donald Trump. The political facts of a divided America are stark, but the stories of the men, women and families in The Forgotten offer a kaleidoscopic and fascinating portrait of the complex on-the-ground political reality of America today.

Ben Bradlee’s all-American football player father lost his well-paying job in the Depression and never recovered his income but also never lost his balance and energy. Living on a borrowed estate, he undertook to clear the property, and his young son bonded with his father as they worked alongside each other in the woods. When thirteen-year-old Ben contracted polio, his father nursed him back to health until they could go to work again. Ben Bradlee tells the story of how this lifelong love of working outdoors enabled him to forge an intimate connection with his own son, Quinn, who was born with a heart defect and is learning disabled. Quinn Bradlee writes about how his father gave him courage and confidence, about what it is like not just to be the son of the Ben Bradlee but his father’s best pal. He tells wistfully how their roles have reversed and how he has become his father’s protector. Sally Quinn, wife and mother, offers her observation on fathers and sons in this joyous celebration of a special relationship.