Bradlee was born in
Manchester, New Hampshire, to
Ben Bradlee Sr (1921–2014), the future editor of
The Washington Post, and his first wife Jean Saltonstall (1921–2011). His parents, who both came from
Boston Brahmin families, divorced when he was seven. After spending five years in Paris, from the ages of two to seven while his father worked for
Newsweek, Bradlee grew up in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he was given a taste of journalism as a copy boy at
The Boston Globe. He graduated from
Colby College and then served in the
Peace Corps in Afghanistan from 1970 to 1972. Bradlee worked for several years at the
Riverside Press-Enterprise in California but then spent most of his career at
The Boston Globe, where he was successively
State House reporter,
investigative reporter, national correspondent,
political editor, and metropolitan editor. In 1993, he was promoted to assistant managing editor responsible for investigations and projects. He was then deputy managing editor during the time he edited the ''Globe's'' reporting of the
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston's repeated cover-ups of
sexual abuse of children by priests, a painstaking investigation that began in 2001 and continued for two years. The paper's investigation was awarded the 2003
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In the 2015 film
Spotlight, which dramatizes that investigation, Bradlee is portrayed by
John Slattery. Bradlee made a cameo appearance as a journalist with a notepad during and after the scene depicting the Archbishop
Bernard Law's response on television to the
9/11 attacks. He left the
Globe in 2004 to work on a biography of Boston Red Sox icon
Ted Williams, which ultimately took ten years of in-depth research to finish.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams was released in 2013. It received favorable reviews, highlighting the author's research into Williams' concealed Mexican–American identity and troubled family relationships (which culminated in the disputed
cryonic preservation of Williams' head and torso). The book, which was a
New York Times best-seller, has been optioned for a TV
miniseries. Bradlee's first book
The Ambush Murders, an account of the brutal killings of two California policemen, was the basis for a television movie which aired on CBS in 1982. A later book on
Oliver North and the
Iran–Contra affair was made into a miniseries by CBS in 1989. In 2016, Bradlee was appointed by Boston Mayor
Marty Walsh to the
Boston Public Library's Board of Trustees. == Personal life ==