The Post’s Bradlee on the record

In “Free Speech,” airing tonight at 10 on PBS, Jim Lehrer of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” climbs the walls of prime time for an entertaining and sometimes enlightening talk with former Washington Post executive editor and current Vice President Ben Bradlee about their common profession. The title refers to the fact that they are speaking freely, not to any 1st Amendment issues they discuss, since they don’t really discuss any.

Lehrer and Bradlee are friends, and we find them almost knee to knee in matching armchairs in a corner of a room in Bradlee’s Washington town house. But it’s an interview, not a conversation. Lehrer doesn’t really share his opinions or trade anecdotes, although he allows himself the occasional enthusiastic “yeah, yeah” and is perhaps a little more folksy and unbuttoned than usual, especially when asking questions on behalf of “Billy Bob Citizen.” (He puts on different voices for this.)

Bradlee -- who at 84 maintains his wits, his hair and a jaunty stride -- is better known than most newspaper editors because of Watergate, which is really to say because of “All the President’s Men,” in the film of which he was played by Jason Robards, who won an Oscar for the role. (Newspaper editors usually only get famous during a scandal. Bradlee has had those erupt under his watch too, most famously in 1981 when reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize with a fabricated story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.)

Watergate made him in the public mind, or at least that portion of it that didn’t hate the Post for its part in the fall of President Nixon, the very figure of the (carefully) crusading editor whose only cause is the truth. He still wears that suit.

“The pursuit of truth is a holy pursuit,” Bradlee says here, and the business of journalism is to report “not what they said happened, not what you think should happen, but what did happen.” He dances around certain subjects -- as how his friendship with President Kennedy might have affected his reporting, for example -- but Lehrer does not let a question drop until he is through with it.

The talk ranges over conflict of interest, anonymous sources -- the ongoing rage for which Lehrer lays at the Post’s feet, in the person of Deep Throat -- and the low esteem in which journalists are held. Bradlee believes in mandatory national service, that reporters shouldn’t march in demonstrations and that good reporters are made from a range of experience. “I don’t necessarily believe in J school or anything like that,” Bradlee says.

And experience is really what’s on display here. This is the first of a quarterly series for Lehrer, in which he will sit down with big fish from various walks of life. In a time when so much TV talk is conditioned by the transient need to pitch something or comment on a current event, it’s good to see two people of experience speaking for no other reason than that they are people of experience. And while it’s all very well enlisting the hoi polloi in the fictions of reality television, there is a world of actual reality out there to mine and people with remarkable experience to share. I do not mean being stuck on an ice floe for a week or eating 50 hot dogs in 20 minutes, although there is a place to hear about that as well. I mean, having led a long life that touched and possibly shaped history.

Let’s hear it for the old guys.

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‘Free Speech: Jim Lehrer With Ben Bradlee’

Where: KCET

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-G (suitable for all ages)