Politico yesterday posted an intriguing if flawed account about the file the FBI kept on Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974.

Intriguing because of such nuggets as J.Edgar Hoover’s characterization of Bradlee as “a colossal liar.” Hoover was the FBI’s long-serving director who died in 1972.

Flawed because the Politico writeup referred to Bradlee as “a man whose Washington Post brought down a president.”

Hardly: Bringing down Nixon wasn’t the Post’s doing.

Not even Bradlee, who died last October, embraced that notion. And most principals at the Post during Watergate rejected that superficial interpretation as well.

Notably, Bradlee pointed out in 1997, at the 25th anniversary of the seminal crime of the Watergate scandal, that “it must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

Bradlee was referring to the White House audio tapes which Nixon secretly made and which revealed the president’s guilty role in attempting to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the breakin of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington in June 1972. The breakin touched off the scandal — and the country’s gravest political crisis of the 20th century.

As I pointed out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, the notion that the Post and its lead Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “brought down” Nixon’s corrupt presidency is a fundamental misreading of history that diminishes “the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Those forces included special prosecutors and federal judges, FBI agents, bipartisan congressional panels, and the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Nixon must turn over to prosecutors the tapes that captured his guilty participation in the Watergate coverup.

Against this tableau, the contributions of the Post and Woodward and Bernstein to the outcome of Watergate were minimal, modest at best. Hardly decisive.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, essentially said as much in 1997. “Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do,” Graham said then. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

Woodward concurred, if in earthier terms. He told an interviewer in 2006:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”