Caldwell Journals: Chapter 18

The two of them came from vastly different worlds. But they both had a special relationship with Harvard University, and because of that, in the spring of 1966, their paths crossed. And that's when Bob Maynard and Ben Bradlee learned they each had something the other sorely needed.

Maynard was then in the midst of what he later said was the most exciting and rewarding experience of his life -- his year in Cambridge, where he studied at Harvard as a Nieman fellow.

Bradlee was immersed in an exhilarating experience of his own: he was in the early stages of building The Washington Post into the one of the finest newspapers in America.

To get to Harvard, Maynard had to scratch and claw. He was the son of immigrants from the West Indies. At 16, to have a shot at the life he wanted, he ran away from home. He wanted to write and he was drawn to journalism. He got his start in Pennsylvania Dutch country at the York, Pa., Gazette and Daily newspaper. After little more than three years, his editors saw in his talent something so special that they readily supported his nomination for one of journalism's highest honors, a Nieman Fellowship.

Maynard immersed himself in his Harvard experience. He studied economics, fine arts, social science, philosophy and history. He crammed his schedule with as many lectures as he could. He had found a place to satisfy the huge thirst he had for learning. And he never let go of it. Even after his Nieman year, he kept going back to Cambridge. He became a tireless recruiter for the Nieman Foundation, pointing a whole generation of the best and brightest black journalists to Harvard and the Nieman, including his daughter, Dori J. Maynard.

For Bradlee, a Boston Brahmin whose family tree dated back 300 years, Harvard was a rite of passage. In his memoir, A Good Life, he wrote: "There was never a question that I would get into Harvard, or go to Harvard. My father had gone there. My grandfather had gone there, and many generations of Bradlees before him, a total of fifty-one."

Maynard's year at Harvard was winding down. He had promised to return to the Gazette for at least a year, but Harvard had readied him for something larger. And what he needed next, Ben Bradlee was building.

From the moment he was handed the reins by Katharine Graham in 1965, Bradlee was determined to take The Washington Post to a higher level. He began aggressively to recruit the best reporters. He was hugely successful, but when the riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, The Post was left at the gate. The paper had no Los Angeles bureau, and it took more than a week for newsroom editors to get someone to the scene. Bradlee found the problem. "The newsroom was racist," he wrote in his book. "Overtly racist, in a few isolated cases; passively racist in many places where reporters and editors were insensitive and unsensitized."

On the matter of race, Bradlee conceded his shortcomings.

"To be blunt about it," he wrote, " I didn't know anything about blacks, or the black experience, and I was about to become involved in the leadership of the number-one newspaper in a city that was 70 percent black, and a readership that was 25 percent black. I had no black friends growing up. There were no blacks in my boarding school, only three blacks in my class at college, none of whom I knew at all."

So when they met late that March 1966, in a very real way, Ben Bradlee was looking for a Bob Maynard just as Maynard had an eye out for a Bradlee. Bradlee had been invited to address the Nieman fellows who were spending a week in Washington.

It turned out to be a tumultuous session, sparks flying, smoke rising, jaws dropping. Maynard and Bradlee went toe to toe.

Here's the way Bradlee remembered it:

"He (Maynard) stood out in that crowd, not only because he was black in a profession where there were damn few blacks, but because he was confrontational, argumentative, mean, and skeptical, verging on the obnoxious. Much of my ninety minutes with the Niemans was spent arguing with Maynard."

Maynard, usually soft-spoken, nonetheless had a temper that he sometimes used to his advantage as a journalist. He perfected a style of challenging those who didn't expect it and knocking them off stride.

"As I walked back to The Post," Bradley wrote, "I wondered about him and what the hell it would take to impress him, or even interest him. I doubted that I could impress him."

While Maynard could be confrontational, he also valued strategy and planning. When Bradlee got back to his office, he saw the other side.

"There (Maynard) was sitting in my outer office. He said he thought he might like to work at The Post, much to my surprise. We damn well would be interested and I told him so. One year later to the week, he was back, and it wasn't long before he was the talk of the town, literally. He was a Metro reporter then, and a key building block in The Post's belated commitment to attract high-quality black journalists to the newsroom."

The summer of 1967 was approaching. With the big-city newspaper job he coveted, Bob Maynard joined the ranks of those journalists who would play lead roles in covering the most turbulent period of America's racial conflict.