Suppose you’re one of the best known newspaper editors of your generation, revered for your role bringing down a presidency. Wouldn’t you play that high in your memoir? 

Ben Bradlee did not. The long-time WaPo editor instead chose to craft “A Good Life” as a straight-forward chronological narrative, moving on from childhood illnesses to Harvard hijinks and so on. One third of the way through it, he’s still recounting his friendship with JFK, Watergate several chapters in the offing.

Somehow, I can’t imagine him letting a reporter get away with this approach in the paper. He’s burying the lede.

Bradlee, who wrote this a few years after his 1991 retirement from the Post, should have known better: You never want to lose your reader before you get to the really good stuff.