‘Spotlight’ journalist got his start at Press-Enterprise in 1970s

Ben Bradlee Jr. was born in New Hampshire, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the son of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame.

Bradlee Jr. gained a measure of renown himself as an editor of a Boston Globe series that uncovered the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal in Boston. The story behind the Pulitzer-winning expose was told in the 2015 movie “Spotlight,” an Academy Award winner for best picture.

Curiously enough, the New Englander’s newspaper career began in Riverside.

From 1972-1975, Bradlee Jr. was a reporter for The Press-Enterprise. How did that come about? A chance encounter a world away in Asia.

“I was in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan two years out of college,” Bradlee Jr. tells me in a recent Zoom interview. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.”

One of his supervisors was Al Perrin, who had joined the Peace Corps after leaving his job as managing editor of the P-E in 1968, the year the paper won a Pulitzer.

“He asked me what I wanted to do. He was telling me about The Press-Enterprise and suggested I apply there,” Bradlee Jr. says. “I wasn’t necessarily sure about being a reporter. But I thought it would be an interesting thing to try. California really intrigued me.”

At Perrin’s urging, Norm Cherniss, the executive editor, hired the 24-year-old in late 1972 — shortly after the Watergate break-in and the reelection of President Nixon. Bradlee Jr. was assigned to the police beat.

“I was pretty rough, a real cub reporter,” Bradlee Jr. says wryly. One of his editors was Marcia McQuern, later the paper’s publisher. “Marcia taught me a lot,” he says.

McQuern doesn’t disagree.

“He was sloppy with his spelling and sentence structure,” McQuern tells me by phone, chuckling. “He was a kid, a green kid. He grew during the time he was there. He became a very good reporter.”

His father was the crusading editor who had co-published the leaked Pentagon Papers, defying the White House, in 1971. That wasn’t lost on the P-E newsroom.

“Everybody knew about his dad,” Lew Harris, then the editor of the P-E’s features section, tells me.

“The son of Ben Bradlee was a big catch,” Harris says. “But Ben absolutely played it down. He was as low-key as you could be. He didn’t play up the Jr. part. He worked hard. He got stories in the paper all the time.”

Among Bradlee Jr.’s notable stories was coverage of a migrant bus crash in the Coachella Valley that killed 19 people. It got him a first place Associated Press award for best news story in California and Nevada in 1974.

Bradlee Jr. recalls Riverside as politically conservative, with orange groves, good Mexican food, an interesting history and heavy smog. The indoor air wasn’t much better: The newsroom had many smokers, including a pipe smoker at the next desk.

Several reporters of that era stick out positively in Bradlee Jr.’s memory, including Jeff Pearlman, Jim Bettinger, Barbara Fryer and Rich Zeiger.

Harris, a friend then and now, says Bradlee Jr. was “frustrated” toward the end of his three years in Riverside, held back from doing “the caliber of work he was capable of.”

Bradlee Jr.’s last important assignment was a career-maker. He covered the third and final trial in the Teel and Christiansen murders.

Officers Leonard Christiansen and Paul Teel were dispatched to a house on Ottawa Avenue for a routine burglary call on April 2, 1971. But the false report was a setup. The two officers were ambushed in the driveway and gunned down.

A suspect, Gary Lawton, was arrested, charged and put on trial. The case was racially charged: Lawton was a Black activist and the officers were White.

Bobby Seale, one of the Chicago Seven, spoke at Bordwell Park. A legal defense committee raising money in L.A. for Angela Davis did the same for Lawton.

The first jury deadlocked for acquittal. A second trial ended with a deadlock for the prosecution.

Bradlee Jr. covered the third trial. It began March 5, 1975 and ended two months later on May 12. Verdict: a unanimous acquittal.

“It was really Riverside’s crime of the century,” Bradlee Jr. says of the murders. “I just became fascinated with the story.”

He resigned from the P-E in mid-1975 to devote himself to further research. The result was “The Ambush Murders,” his first book, published in 1979 by Dodd, Mead & Co. The Library Journal called it “the best true crime book in years.”

In his foreword, Bradlee Jr. writes that he devoted six months to interviewing 158 people and to reviewing “25,000 pages of trial transcripts, hundreds of written police reports and hundreds of hours of taped interviews between investigators and suspects or witnesses.”

“The Ambush Murders” is illuminating about a period of upheaval in Riverside. I read it in 2024 and was struck not only by the story but by the fact that Ben Bradlee Jr. had worked at the P-E. That’s why I sought him out for an interview.

He was pleased to hear I’d enjoyed the product of his Riverside years.

“I began it without a publisher, so it was risky,” he recalls. “I thought it was a worthy story, a story about how justice functions under emotional circumstances when cops investigate the murders of two of their own.”

No one else was ever prosecuted for the murders. Lawton died in 2002.

“He may well have done it,” Bradlee Jr. says. “They certainly, in my view, didn’t have the evidence to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as the hung juries suggested.”

“The Ambush Murders” was turned into a CBS-TV movie with James Brolin — “a B-movie,” Bradlee Jr. jokes — in 1982. By then, he was at the Boston Globe, where he worked from 1979 to 2004.

He’s published four more books, including “The Kid,” an acclaimed biography of Red Sox star Ted Williams. His most recent was “The Forgotten,” a 2018 look at Donald Trump’s 2016 election.

He’d begun work on a biography of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. At 77, he says, he’s probably going to let it go and enjoy retirement.

Unlike “The Ambush Murders,” nobody would call “Spotlight” a B-movie. Bradlee Jr. was portrayed by John Slattery and makes a cameo as a reporter, holding a notepad.

It was a role he began preparing for in Riverside.

David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, three B-columns. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.