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