Up next former Washington Post executive editor ben bradlee appeared on booknotes in 1975 to workaround his journalism career. Mr. Bradlee died this past week at the age of 93. This program is about an hour. Cspan ben bradlee, one of the last things you tell us in your book is that you gave an anonymous gift to harvard and nothings happened. Guest well, i didnt want to have any publicity about it while i was still editor of the post. I thought that would be inappropriate. And so i yeah, i tried to thank the two influences in my life; one was kennedy and one was phil graham and the Washington Post. So i thought giving something to the Kennedy School, endowing a chair, would be appropriate, and i did and theyve been looking ever since. Cspan why has it taken so long . Guest i dont know. Cspan when you. Guest theyll find somebody. Cspan when you give an endowment to a school like the Kennedy School at harvard, how does it work . Guest well, you have first thing, you have absolutely no say about who it is. And i think if you suggest someone, that person is dead. But, you know, theyre going to announce someone one of these days. Cspan what will that someone do . Guest theyre going to teach and study the relationship between the press and Public Policy what it is, what it should be, how it could be improved. And press and politics are the two things that have monopolized my attention for a long time. Cspan if you were going to give the opening lecture, whats the first thing youd tell students about that relationship today . Guest well, tell the truth, and most politicians dont. And a lot of newspapers dont because they dont know the truth. Thats really the jam we find ourselves in. Were trying the best newspapers were trying to find the truth and we have a limited amount of time and limited sources. I mean, if the president of the United States looks you in the eye and says he cant tell you the truth about watergate because it involves national security, youve got to run it. But its a lie. Cspan what are the four, five jobs youve had in your life . Guest well, theyve all been in the newspaper business except one, and that was i was on a little, tiny paper in beverly, mass, as a 15yearold kid. My old man had to drive me to work. I helped start a newspaper in New Hampshire, small weekly paper. I was a reporter for the Washington Post for two sort of odd years. I was the press attache in the American Embassy in paris accepted disastrous diplomat. And then ive been a reporter a Foreign Correspondent for newsweek and for the Washington Post since 1965. Cspan whats your hometown . Guest washington. Boston i was born in. Cspan how long did you live there . Guest well, i lived 20 years i couldnt wait to get out. Its a lovely city now, but i couldnt wait to get out and get going, see some interesting people and do some interesting things. Cspan you learned early that your brother, freddie, was an alcoholic or is an alcoholic and that your father drank a lot. What impact did that have on your life . Guest well, it made me much more appreciative of how hard it is for some people to get on top of that problem, and it taught me enormous admiration for them my god, my brother is i admire him enormously. Hes worked so hard and. Cspan wheres he today . Guest hes in new york city. Cspan your sister . Guest my sister died a couple years ago but it taught me understanding, tolerance. Thats what it did. Cspan what was your dad like . Guest my dad was a wonderful man. He was an allamerican Football Player turned sort of boy wonder banker, and then he went broke in the depression. And he. Cspan this is your dad with your sister. Guest with my sister the day she was married. And then he went broke and he became the manager of the cleaning force and the janitor force at the museum of fine arts in boston, three grand a year. Before that and this was a guy who had made pretty good dough. And then he sold one of his friends had invested in a commercial deodorant called sanivan. It was a crystal that turned purple when you put water in it and he scrubbed out an entire railroad car, the bostonmaine railroad, to try to sell it. He worked hard. And he didnt talk very much, but he had a fantastic sense of humor and a great gift for words. He didnt say much, but when he said it, it was worth listening. Cspan where did you go to school . Guest i went to harvard college. I went to prep school before that and i had a kind of a bent silver spoon that gave me a wonderful education. Cspan where did you get the middle name crownshield . Guest crowninshield. Cspan crowninshield. Excuse me. Guest thats a excuse me, its a very it was a great name. They were a great shipping family in salem, massachusetts. The man i was named for was both a congressman and secretary of the navy. Generally alleged to have been a lousy secretary of the navy didnt do anything. It was a good, strong, Strong Family and then it got kind of watered out. Cspan you spent time in the navy. Guest i spent a long time in the navy and ive just now been able to articulate how much i loved it. Cspan how long were you in the navy . Guest i was in destroyers in the Pacific Ocean for three and a half years, from 42 to 45. And it turned out i was good at it. I loved it. At 21 years old i became qualified for officer of the deck, which means that you run a destroyer for four hours. Three hundred and seventyfive men and this ship 360 feet long, it goes 40 miles an hour and a 21yearold greek major was giving the orders. It was heady and it was a great break for me. Cspan you were married. Guest i was already married i was married when i was 20. Cspan jean. Guest i had to have my dads permission. Cspan without your dads permission . Guest no, i had to have it. Cspan oh. Guest . To get a license. Cspan Jean Saltonstall. Guest Jean Saltonstall. Cspan thats a famous name. Who was Jean Saltonstall . Guest well, she was a cousin of leverett saltonstall, whos the wellknown politician senator from massachusetts. We were both awful young. Cspan how long were you married to her . Guest thirteen years. Cspan did you have any children . Guest one child whos a son whos now an assistant managing editor at the boston globe. Cspan names the same . Guest ben yeah. He wishes i hadnt named him ben. He once said i wish youd called me harvey. Cspan why . Guest well, i think he felt that having the same name was unnecessary. Cspan you know, anybody. Guest albatross. Cspan anybody thats watched you over the years remembered i dont know how many years ago; you could probably tell us that you had a i remember seeing a debate with you with Bernie Mcquaid. Guest Bernie Mcquaid and william loeb. They. Cspan didnt you have a debate with them a long time ago . Guest it was on somebodys show i did. I did. Loeb fired me. We went out of business and sold our paper to loeb and i needed to get fired because i needed severance pay, which is 400 and you know, 400 bucks and change. So i was working as a stringer for Time Magazine and newsweek at that time and he didnt like the exit interview and he bagged me. Cspan now is Bernie Mcquaid the gentleman here. Guest on the right where your finger is. Cspan right there. Guest and he died. Cspan thats. Guest and the guy on the right is blair clock, whos been a childhood friend of mine since the 30s, and he was the publisher they were copublishers and then they had a fight. Cspan what relationship is Bernie Mcquaid to joe mcquaid, who now runs the Manchester Union leader . Guest father. I used to carry little joe mcquaid around on my shoulders, i think. Cspan when you set out to write this book, what was the objective . Guest well, i had thought that it would be interesting to put it all down and get judged by it. I think theres something in us that wants to be judged. I had to wrestle with writing about yourself. In boston, you dont talk about yourself. Youre not supposed to talk about yourself. Youre not supposed to talk about your family, not supposed to talk about money, not supposed to talk about women. But and i wrestled with that for a while, especially the part about yourself examine your motives and relationships and what they meant to you. Cspan when did you start it . Guest oh, god, im embarrassed. Probably three years ago. I started it. Cspan why are you embarrassed . Guest well, i mean it took so long. I hadnt you know, id made a pretty good living as a writer, but when i was just getting to be confident as a writer, they made me an editor and i didnt write much. I wrote leads 125 words, Something Like that 100 words. Howard simmons, who was the managing editor at the post, used to say i was a great sprinter; that i could go like the dickens for 200 words, but after that i got lost. And he probably was right. Cspan you thank a bunch of people in the beginning. Barbara fineman. Guest oh, Barbara Fineman was my researcher and i lost her i should have she writes books herself and shes now helping hillary clinton. Im not sure im supposed to say that, but i just did. Cspan and is it katherine wanning or wanning. Guest katherine wanning, who was a researcher and terrific. I worked for newsweek for a while at newsweek, when you were writing and you ran into something you didnt know, you could always put parenthesis, cpc, checkers, please check. You know, you couldnt remember somebodys age or how to spell his name or whether he had a middle initial or never mind what year it you were talking about. And so if you have some help that people that can do that and then much more, actually, serious stuff, you can speed up the process. And you know, otherwise, youd have to get up, go to the library, interrupt the flow of your thought. Cspan Tom Wilkinson. Guest oh, Tom Wilkinson is an ame at the Washington Post and. Cspan assistant managing editor . Guest assistant managing editor. And hes been a friend for years, but he helped me we sat down and read the Washington Post in microfilm for five or six years the first five or six years that i was there. And we just had it helped jog my memory. And he would ask me, you know, who the hell is that . And, what did you think of him . And, why did you play that story where you did . And it was wonderfully helpful in getting me into the swing of it. Cspan how did you decide what to put in the book . Guest if it was a marking experience in my life, it got in. There are some things that have been were just so joyous in my life, such fun i had that, whether they marked me or not, i just put them in. Im an upbeat soul and i have had a good time en route to a good life, and so i put a lot of those good times in, too. Some of the bad ones, but. Cspan how did you get your job at the post . Guest i got my job at the post i had cashed my savings i had 800 bucks and i bought first, a railroad ticket to washington with a stop in baltimore, and then i had some other interviews scheduled, one in chicago, one in utah and one in santa barbara. When i got to the railroad station i had a letter to an editor of the baltimore sun, and when i got there it was raining as it has never rained before. And i looked out the train and i said i didnt have an umbrella im going to drown if i get out now. So i said ill continue on down to washington and pick up baltimore on the way back. And i got to washington and they offered me a job. Theyd heard about this paper in New Hampshire that we started. Someone had quit the day before and so i got it. Cspan doing what . Guest the lowest of the low well, i ended up in the courts, municipal court, which is a great place to learn the city. And then i did general assignment, which is the best job that there is on a newspaper. And i got in trouble, i thought, because the Washington Post was losing a million bucks a year in those days and there was a very small staff; there was no expansion. They had people there that were entrenched, so i began looking for another job. Cspan you tell a story about a Swimming Pool episode. Guest well, that was one of the things i did on general assignment. It must have been 1949, i think it could have been 1950, too 1950, also. And there were race riots at east potomac park, which was is a public park here, run by the interior department. Six pools in washington six public pools. Three were sort of de facto black, three were white. And this was right after the 48 election and some people whod been members of the Progressive Party thought it would be a fun summer project to see if they could integrate some of the white pools, so they brought some black kids into the white pool, and all hell broke loose. There were pitched battles, there really were. There were 300 or 400 whites on one side of the park, 300 or 400 blacks, and each had weapons. They had sticks with nails in them. The park police were mounted and were charging into these crowds or something. It was an extraordinary i think we were there 36 hours and running. And i was with another reporter and we came back to the post at 6 00 or 7 00 the second night and, you know, we were arguing how they were going to play the thing. Surely it was on page one. Probably not the lead, but maybe the offlead. We couldnt find it on page one because it wasnt there. We couldnt find it in the a section. We looked in the metro section and we couldnt find it on that page one. And then we finally kept thumbing through, growing madder and madder and madder. And it was inside somewhere. And it was a story not about the riot, but about the question of whether pools should be integrated or not. You know, way down in the story there was a mention of a disturbance. They called it an incident a disturbance and an incident. So i was young and sore and i started mouthing off about this great liberal paper. And all of a sudden i felt a little knock on my shoulder and i turned around and there was phil graham, the owner. This was 8 00, 9 00, and he was in a tuxedo and he said, come on upstairs with me, buster. Cspan did you know him then . Guest i knew him as the owner, and it was a much smaller paper then and, you know, he hung around and we saw him. I knew him, but i didnt know him well at all. So i went up to his office and he ushered me in and there were three men in tuxedoes, also. One of them was the president trumans top assistant, clark clifford. The other was the secretary of the interior, krug, and his deputy, oscar chapman. And he said, tell them what you just told me. And so, you know, i didnt need a second invitation and i let it go and all sorts of i didnt embellish it, but i didnt hold anything back, and then i was dismissed. And he said, thats all, and out he went. And i didnt know what happened i felt better, but it turned out that, we learned much later, that he had made a deal with the government, forced them to make a deal in which he said, close that pool the one that was at issue immediately and agree now to open all six pools on a totally integrated basis next year or bradlees story runs on page one tomorrow. Tough. Real hardball. And not something that would be tolerated now. And its kind of interesting. Ive thought a lot about it since i wrote that because you have to the pools did open next year, totally integrated, no incidents, no race riots. There were no race riots in washington for years after that and you have to ask yourself whether such a deal, which i would instinctively call a deal with the devil whether it, in fact, was that or whether it, in fact, saved lives. I dont know the answer. Cspan jump way beyond that, beyond watergate through your 23 days in the woods. Guest when i wrote the kennedy book . Cspan yes. You tell this story about first of all, why did you spend 23 days alone out in West Virginia . Guest well, because i had a cabin there and i wanted to exorcise watergate. Id been living with that for a long time and i wanted to do something entirely different. Cspan what year was this . Guest this was 1974. It was two days after president nixon resigned. I had these notes of some 130, 140 conversations id had with president kennedy, and i thought it would make a book. And so i went up into the woods to translate maybe 30,000 or 40,000 words of notes into a book. And i decided to go up there, to go up there alone. The telephone didnt work. All i had was the radio to listen to orioles game at night after i got up at six, worked until my fingers hurt, which is generally about noon or one, and then id go out in the woods and burn brush and chop, which is my avocation. Cspan were you married then . Guest i was not married. I was involved, but i still was alone. Cspan now you have been married three times. At what point in this process did you marry the second woman . Guest i got married to tony bradlee in 195 this is really unfair 56. Cspan how many children . Guest we had two kids. Cspan and you married your third. Guest and i married sally quinn in it was 78. Cspan back to the woods. You kept referring to the fact you could just clear your head entirely over those 23 days. Guest well, in the woods, i can empty my head. I dont think about anything except, you know, whatever my project is; to clear this area, take down that tree, whatever. Cspan what about the guy that showed up . Guest youve really read it, havent you . Cspan well, thats an interesting i mean, what was that like . Tell the story. Guest well, it was august and i was typing on the this was a log cabin. Its a really rickety place; still, its still very much standing. And i was writing on the porch, which overlooked a kind of a gorge that went down into the cacapon river. And i was typing away. And all of sudden i saw someone come up who was dressed in a black felt hat, all in black. He looked it might have been an amish hunter. And he had a gun a rifle, or shotgun; ive forgotten which crooked in his arm. And i couldnt believe it. Its august, theres no hunting season open which doesnt bother those guys up there much, but i just noted that he had a gun and this was a week or so after nixon had left. And so i said, howdy, nervously, and he said howdy and he came up the hill slowly, slowly, slowly and he got, you know, 10 or 15 feet away from where i was sitting and then he said, are you ben bradlee . And my heart sank. I really didnt know who this guy was, so i said, yes. And i must have said something nervously or something and he said, well, ive got to tell you, i hated everything you did about nixon and watergate. I just think you were wrong as could be or wrong as hell or whatever he said. But he put his cards right down on the table and i cant tell you how remote this place is. Its four miles in off of the main road, and if something had happened to me, the vultures would have had me and. Cspan did you think it was all over . Guest well, i didnt know. It occurred to me, what was he doing with a gun . I mean, i finally asked him what he was hunting and he said, looking for some squirrels. But, you know, i was very skeptical those days about what people told me. Anyway, it did scare me and i got up and tried to move him on and said, well, ive got to get back to work. Im going this way. And he walked off. Cspan do you ever run into anybody anymore that doesnt know who ben bradlee is . Guest oh, sure. I mean, its only since this book that i have any real visual recognition. You know, i think they know the name, a lot of them, but that face was not all that common. Cspan where was this picture taken . Guest it was taken the day i left the city room of the Washington Post and they had a really wonderful sort of twohour goodbye in the middle of the day. And they were telling stories. That was made me laugh, that one. Cspan what do you think of the experience of talking this book out like this . Guest well, i am just stunned at the interest. I am stunned by the hunger that radio and television has for people. I mean, youve got to have new, raw material. And when that need collides with the desire of authors and publishers to sell books, its awesome. I didnt know anything about talk radio, really, until the last 10 days. And there is some very intelligent and interesting i mean, ive been on fm rock n roll stations, and the rule, i was told, that if it has 250 watts, go on it. And then ive been with people who really show an interest and understanding. Cspan what are they most interested in . Guest well, i mean, after they get through watergate and maybe theyll notch it up once to the pentagon papers, they go pretty fast to janet cooke and girlfriends. Cspan john f. Kennedys girlfriends . Guest his and mine. Cspan you say just about everything in here about your own personal life. Why . Guest well, i didnt it seems to some people that its just about everything. I decided that i would include experiences that really changed me and influenced me; that if i was going to write a book about myself and about my times, that i ought to do that. And i led a rather repressed life as a kid. By the time i was really interested i was on a destroyer and, you know, would go. I never saw women of any kind, and so i included some and very briefly. I dont know why people i mean, i never spent any time, theres no prurient detail there of any kind. Cspan when you were in the boss chair at the post, you would get some notes once in a while from an anonymous woman at the post. Guest i did get that, yes. Cspan what kind of notes were they . Guest they were kind of mash notes and i didnt know who sent them, until the person involved quit the post to go be a television anchor in new york and confessed to me that she had written them and said that she was leaving because she couldnt work out her emotions about me. Cspan her name . Guest sally quinn. Cspan what did she say in those notes . Guest well, i cant remember them now, but it was. Cspan did you save them . Guest no, i didnt save them. In fact, i didnt save them at the time, i thought it might be somebody playing a practical joke. You know, these were the days that dirty tricks so i moved on and im awfully glad that she confessed to being the author. Cspan then what happened . Guest we got married sometime later. Cspan is it a hard problem in a newsroom, malefemale relationships, working on the job . I mean, did you have any rules at the post about commingling . Guest no. You cant make rules. You cant regulate that stuff. No. And she called me mr. Bradlee until the day she said goodbye. And then she left for new york, so it was a difficult beginning its no more difficult in a newspaper than it is in what you could call real life. Cspan when was the first time you met jack kennedy . Guest pushing baby carriages in georgetown on a sunday afternoon. I think it was probably 58. And. Cspan both of you pushing baby carriages . Guest well, i mean both families. I think i was pushing, i dont know; i cant remember whether he was. And we had Young Children together, and he had moved on the same block as i was. And we ended up in his backyard and in his garden and we were talking and then we actually happened to go to a party that night together and we ended up as friends. Cspan you say in the book that Jacqueline Kennedy never quite got over the fact that you were a newsman and a friend at the same time. Guest i think she had trouble with that. I had trouble with it for a while. Everybody had trouble with it until it became natural. I never dissembled and i would occasionally i worked for newsweek then. I occasionally wrote things that displeased him and ended up in the doghouse at least once for three months. I mean, i never saw him after compared to seeing him once or twice a week. And i think jackie was uncomfortable with that. And i can understand that. Cspan when did she stop talking to you . Guest about three weeks after the assassination. We spent a couple of weekends with her right after the end of november and then what we had together as a foursome didnt show up again as a threesome. And she moved to new york anyway. Tony bradlee helped her buy the house that she bought in georgetown and then she left. I mean, she, in effect, never was happy in washington after that and left. And she didnt like the book i wrote about kennedy. She just said she thought the language wasnt right and that you know, kennedy and i, having been in the navy together at a time when vocabularies are being formed and we used fourletter words, not with any sense of what they meant, just and i reported that. Excuse me. Cspan you said that you passed her a couple of times and she wouldnt even acknowledge you after that. Guest that happened twice. And. Cspan you remembered it, though. Guest well, i sure did. I mean, to go from as close as we were to the deep freeze is unnatural. And it hurt me. I could live with it, but i wished that i didnt want to recreate it and because times change and the caravan moves on, but i didnt want to be, in any sense, hostile. Cspan youve got a picture in here of your former wife, tony. Which one in that picture . Guest on the far side with the stripes. Cspan who are the rest of the folks . Guest next was her mother, ruth pinchot, and then the president and tonys sister mary meyer. At the pinchot estate their uncle was governor of pennsylvania. Cspan when did you find out that president kennedy had a relationship with your wifes sister . Guest i found it out after mary was murdered on the tow path in georgetown. And we received a call that same night from a friend of ours, who was marys close friend who told us of the existence of a diary. That phone call came from japan, and that mary had expressed a desire that, if anything ever happened to me, that diary be destroyed. Cspan when you went looking for the diary, you found James Jesus Angleton. Guest i did. Cspan who was he . Guest well, James Jesus Angleton at that time was, and for many years later was, in the cia. At that time he wasnt quite the ogre that he became painted as. He was an interesting intensely involved in his job. He was a great fly fisherman. He raised orchids. He was a great admirer of elvis presley. He was an allaround interesting man. And his wife, cissy angleton, we were all friends together and his wife was a particular friend of mary meyer. And she, too, had been told of the existence of this diary, and that if anything happened, it should be destroyed. Mary wanted it destroyed. So angleton we soon defined thats why he was there, but how he got in we didnt know because it was locked. And we found it. We didnt find it in marys house. We found it later in a studio, and we found jim angleton trying to pick a lock to get his way in. Anyway, we were all more naive in that way. When we found the diary, mary meyer was an artist and artists have things called paint books, which is predominantly the pages are quite a highquality paper, thicker. And most of the pages had swatches of paint on it and then slight descriptions of how that color was achieved. And she was a colorist. That was the school of painting she belonged to and color was particularly important. And then a couple of pages, maybe a dozen in all, there were some handwritten descriptions of what was obviously an affair no names and what was obviously an affair with the president. And we. Cspan did you ever see that diary, by the way . Guest i did. Cspan you personally saw it. Guest yes, i did. Cspan where is it now . Guest its burned. But it took for a long time to get burned because tony thought that she had no skills at burning it she didnt know how to destroy a document. And it was im sure she didnt consider giving it to me to destroy, so she gave it to her friend, who was a member of an organization that presumably was very good at destroying things and she gave it to angleton to destroy, and he said he would. And then two or three years later two years later, i think, when the president s affair with mary meyer became public. She wanted to know. She saw angleton and said, you didnt destroy that document, did you . And angleton said no, that he hadnt. And so no one knows what angleton did with that thing, but he gave it back to tony and she destroyed it in a fire. Cspan james angletons dead, mary meyers dead, john f. Kennedys dead. And what were the mary meyer did they ever find the person that killed her . Guest no. There was a trial and the jury acquitted him. She was murdered on the tow path. A man was found about 50 feet away crouching in the potomac river, and he said that he was fishing and had fallen in. And nobody believed him, but he was acquitted. He had been identified only by one person and that person was looking across the canal into the afternoon sun. And the lawyer was able to create a reasonable doubt. Cspan you write this deep in your book about this whole event in your life. We were left to work out how the news had changed our opinions of president kennedy and mary meyer, meaning the affair. The answer for me was not all that much. They were attractive, intelligent and interesting people before their paths crossed in this explosive way and they remain that way in my mind. Did the president ever lie to you . Guest i never discussed women with him. I mean, imagine having dinner with your wife and the president and his wife and i know what youre go i dont know all the things youre going to talk about, but i know one thing youre not going to talk about, and that is extracurricular fooling around by either one of you. Its not going to happen. So i did not know. People have trouble believing that, but its the truth. Cspan is there any difference in your mind what john kennedy did when it came to these extracurricular affairs and what president nixon did lying to the country over watergate . Guest well, except i never heard kennedy lie about it. I mean, nobody ever asked him. I mean, the rules sure changed afterwards, but, you know you were around then. The numberone item on the journalists agenda was not to pin some sexual escapade on the president. There were really other things that had higher priorities. Cspan what changed this whole approach by the media . Guest well, i think i dont know the answer to that, but i think two things. One is, i think, the counterculture that was born in this country in the 60s changed americans attitudes about sex, among other things. They changed American Attitudes on all institutions. And then i think that watergate you know, when Government People started to lie. Put those two things together and people sort of said, by god, president s arent going to lie to us anymore, and especially about sex. Cspan the pentagon papers what was that . Guest well, that was the great the pentagon papers were a 7,000page study commissioned by Robert Mcnamara to explore how come we got into vietnam. And it was considered, even though it stopped at 1968 or 69, in 1971 the New York Times got a copy of them, 7,000 pages, and they worked for months on it. And the word on the local tomtom, grapevine was the New York Times had a big, big story and they were going to bust in on the Washington Post. And we were going to quiver there for days. And then pretty much what happened, it was a big, big story because vietnam was such a powerful story at that time. Three, four stories a day on page one about vietnam for years. Cspan why did you send some reporters to chief justice burgers door . And what happened . Guest we finally published it. We finally got a copy of it and we published it three days, four days after the New York Times. We published, i think, three days worth before we got enjoined, just the way the New York Times had been enjoined. And the case was going from judge caselles court, the District Court up to the appeal court down, up, down and this way. And we thought that somewhere along the line there was going to be some all happening late at night that there would be some appeal to the chief justice by the lawyers for the government if , when we won. So we sent two reporters out there that night just to wait to see so that wed know who and when and what was happening. And. Cspan to chief justice burgers house. Guest to chief justice burgers house. And after waiting a while, they went up and rang the door i mean, this is one of the great sights that i conjure up in my life. Cspan twelve oclock at night. Guest twelve oclock at night. And the chief justice comes down in his what do you call them . Night robes, his jammies with a gun. And he didnt know who the hell it was out there. And there was this very dicey conversation while these two reporters established their identity to the justices satisfaction and. Cspan why did he open the door . Guest i dont know. Because they were so sweet and innocent looking maybe. I dont know. Anyway, he said, well, go down to the end of the road and stay there. But the trouble was that they all wanted to the guys at the post wanted to run that story. And we were on our way up to the Supreme Court with an appeal, and i just thought that maybe the chief justice i didnt want to anger the chief justice and i kept it out of the paper. And im not particularly proud of that, but we did it. Cspan that story. Guest that story. Until nick von hoffman, who was a columnist, sneaked it in two or three weeks after the pentagon papers was all over. Cspan a former booknotes guest is a Washington Post reporter by the name of David Maraniss. Hes written a book about president clinton, and in the middle. Guest great reporter. Cspan . In the middle of your book, you tell a story about how David Maraniss played a role in the janet cooke story. Guest well, i think his title was deputy metro editor. He was Bob Woodwards deputy when woodward was metro editor. And we had learned that janet cooke had probably fabricated this entire story about an eightyearold heroin addict, but she hadnt admitted it yet. And we had sort of been trying to get her to admit that. Cspan how old was she . Guest her late 20s. Cspan what year was this . Guest nineteen eightyone. Cspan she was a black woman. Guest black woman beautiful black woman and a terrific reporter; great writer. Cspan vassar graduate. Guest she wasnt a vassar graduate, that was the problem. She had attended vassar for one year, and thats how we were tipped of that when she you know, the worst possible thing that could happen to her happened; she won the Pulitzer Prize for this story. And the Pulitzer Committee put out her biography, and in the biography, which was written from information she had supplied, it said that she was a vassar honors graduate. And i got this call some days later saying from somebody in the deans office at vassar saying, i think weve got a little problem. And we sure did. But anyway, maraniss some editors said, you know, take us to the house of this little kid, and she couldnt do it. And we had people speak Foreign Languages to her that she couldnt speak although she said she could. And then finally we left her alone with maraniss, and it was then that she had said, i was scared theyd leave me alone with you because i can handle the other guys, but i cant handle you. And she confessed that shed made it all up. And. Cspan you say you tried to find her and get her to talk about it. What happened . Guest we. Cspan now, i mean, real life. Guest oh, now. Well, theres one person at the post who tells me that she stays in touch with janet cooke. And i asked her to ask janet cook eif she would please talk to me because i remain absolutely hypnotized by that case. It was a very, very serious blow to our credibility and the word came back that she didnt want to see me. Cspan where is she . Guest i dont know. She was then in toledo. This was months ago. I think she was in toledo. Thats where she came from. Thats where her mom and dad live. Cspan a lot of names are in your book in journalism and you have some opinions of them. A fellow who you say is the son of a minor count or hes a minor count, arnold debordre. Guest well, he was the son of a count and he was the editor of the washington times. Cspan arnold debordre. Guest yes. But hes a professional journalist and is a friend. I succeeded him as the newsweek correspondent in paris and i didnt approve of the reverend moon or his paper and arnold and i just disagreed about that. Cspan what do you think of him today . Guest hes my friend. Cspan what do you think of al neuharth . You mention him in there. Guest not as much as he mentioned me in his book. Well, i think newhart is so interested in polishing his reputation that hes a little off base. He got in real trouble when he wrote a book by trying to buy copies of his book himself, or getting the foundation that he heads to buy them to manipulate the New York Times bestseller list. Cspan you follow this kind of thing closely. There are those who say that you said nice things about bill safire in your book and he threw you a wet kiss, quote, unquote, in his review of your book in the times. Guest did you read mary mcgrorys answer to that review . She said that, who the hell is safire to talk about withholding documents and. I thought safire, when he first came into the newspaper business, he came in fresh from being an insider, a nixon insider, and i was not ready to accept his credentials. If Richard Cohen isnt the best columnist in washington, he is safire. I didnt know who was going to write that review. And, in fact, id heard that wicker was going to write it, tom wicker. And then it turned out that tom wicker wrote the review for the Washington Post, which i couldnt find out, they wouldnt tell me, and i didnt want to poke around for fear that id get caught asking and create some suspicion in someones mind. Cspan whos written the worst review . Guest well, i. Cspan and what didnt you like about it . Guest i dont know the worst review. I know the worst headline for the review. Cspan which was . Guest is that what youre trying to get me to say . Cspan no, i havent i dont know which one. Guest the wall street journal wrote a review by a man called john corry and the headline was the great horny editor. And i thought that was, you know, extraneous. Cspan you dont like the pulitzers very much. Guest well, im so conflicted about it because id rather win them than lose them, and yet i think it distorts. I think people work towards pulitzers when they should be working on a story. I doubt that the best journalism always gets the Pulitzer Prize. I dont think it does. Cspan were you disappointed when Carl Bernstein and bob woodward came to you and said, we think we should have won that pulitzer not the post . Guest yes. I think that was a day that on sober, Second Thought they shouldnt have, and i think they do agree now. I mean, the post the Public Service prize and the pulitzer is won by a newspaper and the citation. Although the citation talked about the extraordinary work of bernstein and woodward, the paper won the prize. And i told them that they were going to become folk heroes whether they won it or the post won it and the post should have won it. The post especially the editorial writers, herb block, the great cartoonist, and Katharine Graham they are the people who really put everything into it. Cspan you say Howard Simons wasnt very happy with the way he was portrayed in the movie. Guest well, he wasnt. He thought that i got more credit than i deserved and he got less credit than he deserved. And im not going to get into that. Ive talked to alan pakula about it, who was the director of that movie and who was a great friend of howards, an admirer. His feeling is that you had to have sort of one catalyst type editor and not two or three. So many people worked so hard on that, its unfair to single one out and i got singled out. Cspan you wrote this on page 128. I am instinctively prosunshine. Against closed doors, prolet it all hang out in smokefilled rooms. I believe that truth sets man free. I have to yield every inch of the high ground, but i am less sure today than i was when phil graham made the secret deal that the public is best served by knowing everything the second an incident happens. What did you mean by all that . Guest well, i think since ive left the newsroom, the speed that is so important to journalists my god, you hear it and youve got to get it in is less important to me now. I think that maybe. I just wonder, thats all. I mean, i just wonder whether the incident with phil and the race riots made me what my greek teacher used to say, sober Second Thought. Was the public badly served by that deal . I dont know. My instinct is to say yes, but im not sure its i could prove that now. Cspan would you have been as big a success as youve been without jfk and your friendship with him . Guest oh, i would like to think so. I wouldnt have been without Katharine Graham, thats for sure. But with kennedy, i dont know. That gave me a profile, it sure did, but there was a little rub to it. There were people saying that i went bail for kennedy and i didnt tell the truth all i knew about kennedy, which is not true, but that was the minor, minor, minor downside of the relationship. Cspan would you advise a young reporter today to be as close to a. Guest well. Cspan . Source as you were . Guest . I dont know. You cant assign a guy to cover a politician and sort of understood that that person will get close. Youve got to get close to know youve got to get close to the politician and to the people around him or else you wont know him. You wont be able to report accurately. I dont see how you can say a get close but dont get too close. As soon as he really gives you something good, bail out. Theres a great deal of selfregulatory mechanisms in that relationship. If you think for a minute that my colleagues werent reading every word in newsweek about kennedy and if they had found some consistent exclusives, god, i can imagine hugh sidey who was my opposite number on time going both to the president and to salinger and people like that saying, why the hell are you what are you doing giving bradlee all that good stuff and you dont give it to us . Second, selfregulatory thing is the reporter himself. I dont want to go through life and end up in history as a batman for any man. They used to call them coat catchers in boston. You know, the guy gets his coat takes his coat off and theres somebody around there to catch his coat. And the third regulatory force is the editors. They know of the relationship because it has to be public knowledge. You have to tell your editors that youve developed this relationship. They loved the skinny i was getting out of the white house. They just loved it. And they dined out on it, but they went through everything with a finetooth comb again. Cspan whats it like living in robert todd lincolns former home . Guest well, sally and i had a great house over in dupont circle. And then this miracle occurred; we had a baby and we lost the guest room and each of us lost a study. So we went looking for a bigger house. Sally said we have to have a bigger house. And she found one. I mean, it must be the biggest house in the whole world, but its this Beautiful House that was built in 1790 and robert todd lincolns wife died there in 1935. Most people would think that lincolns daughterinlaw died a whole lot before that. Cspan biggest house in georgetown . Guest no, i dont think its the biggest, but you might have to measure it. Its big hasnt got all that many rooms, but theyre big rooms and its got a big garden. Cspan when does your next book, how to read a newspaper come out . Guest i wish youd tell me. Ive had a vacation every year, obviously, but i havent had days off. If somebody calls me up and says, would you like to play golf today . I have never done that. So id like to smell the flowers for a while. Im 74 years old. But the present plan calls for me to teach a course at georgetown in the fall of 96. Cspan that would be a year from now. Guest a year from now. And then i would think that in the process of that i could be writing a book, so god, i just got finished this one. Give me a break. Cspan heres the book. Ben bradlee, newspapering and other adventures a good life. Thank you for joining us. Guest is it over . Cspan it is over. [inaudible conversations]