On a frigid white January in 1982, an airplane took off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport for Florida, remained aloft for about 30 seconds, and then stalled out and collided with the 14th Street Bridge, plunging into the ice-floe-studded waters of the Potomac River. In The Washington Post’s newsroom, an aghast 24-year-old college-basketball reporter named Michael Wilbon watched live reports of the disaster on the mounted TV banks, heard the urgency among those around him, grabbed a notebook and his jacket, and ran toward the riverbank to report on the rescue efforts, because that was what he’d been schooled to do. He never got a byline—his name never appeared on the story. Reminiscing in a phone call with me last night, Wilbon recalled that the old offices of the Post’s editors, at the newspaper’s former building on 15th Street, had glass walls inside—so on the night of the crash, he could see Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, and his deputies huddling. “They were meeting,” Wilbon remembered. “They kept meeting. So finally, I said, Well, …