BB: A big deal to me. I got it in March [of 1936, at age 14] and I
didn't get up until July. I didn't will myself well, but it did not occur
to me I was going to be crippled, even as I sat with those fucking braces
on. PT: What did you learn about yourself? BB: I learned that optimism as
a way of thinking about life worked for me. The fact that I didn't fear
it and think about it must have had something to do with it. I wasn't
left with anything except I'm slow as molasses now. I can't run fast. I
can't bend.
PT: If you were born after polio ceased to be a danger, then you
just can't imagine it.
BB: It was like the plague in the summer. You couldn't go anywhere,
you couldn't eat fruit. You couldn't go to the movies or swim in a pool.
Polio and the Depression and the war were marking experiences. If I
hadn't had them l'd have been a different person.
PT: What do you make of the reverence you've received? You've been
the subject of articles in the New Yorker and elsewhere. I can't imagine
more positive press than you've had in certain kinds of elite
publications
BB: Well, there is an explanation.
PT: That you're a good guy ?
BB: I hesitate to hit you over the head with it.
PT But it's all true? BB:
I try that on myself and there's a dark voice that says, You won't
be able to sell that. Along this journey, I have accumulated some
like-minded people who have risen to do like-minded things and who are
now writing about me. I also think that in the years since I've left the
city, I have inched inexorably towards legend. People say, "What the
hell's the point of beating this guy over the head? He's pretty good.
Leave him alone." I haven't seen the 60 Minutes piece, but I hear it's
okay. There's Mike Wallace, whom I've known for 40 years, and what is he
going to do, beat the shit out of me at this late stage? He's got Art
Buchwald on. Buchwald is an old friend of mine.
I hear that Buchwald cries to Wallace when he starts talking about
the love that men have for each other. So I called him up and said, "What
the hell did you tell Wallace?" He said, "You wait until you see
it."
Art's quite remarkable. His columns are the first smile of the day.
You read the first three or four 'graphs and you smile and say
"Goddamnit, that's funny and that's true." He's genuinely funny and a
very warm man.
PT: Has being a celebrity been a positive experience for
you?
BB: Richard Nixon made me a public figure. I'm sure I made me a
public figure. Katharine Graham made me a public figure. Sally Quinn made
me a public figure. What am I going to do? Go up into the woods and
ignore it? Where it gets me a little bit is when you walk into a room and
the damn paparazzi start taking pictures. Or when you are walking outside
Penn Station with Annie Leibovitz taking pictures of you at 7:30 in the
morning.
PT: What do you hope to get out of the book. Why did you write
it?
BB: You want to sum up, you want to convince yourself that life had
a certain border and that it made sense. It's kind of a legacy: This is
what I think I did, what I accomplished, and why I accomplished it.
There's something that drives you into being judged that interests me. I
don't quite get it. It's like an actor. Why would you drive yourself to
be judged?
Plus somebody threw a lot of dough at me for doing it. You want to
have something to do. I don't want to go play golf. I don't want to go
drink tea with people
PT: What do you think about the new magazine, George, edited by JFK
Jr.?
BB: I don't know. I haven't seen it yet. I'm not sure that what the
world needs is a comment by Madonna on anything. But I admire the way
that he has said "Okay, they want me to try this and I'm going to give it
a shot." It seems to me he's behaved himself with dignity and class--all
the while he tried to find a personal life. I've only met him a couple of
times. I used to carry him around on my shoulders, long ago.
PT: A publishing type told me that he's extremely nice to the help,
which impresses me.
BB: You have to say about Jackie Kennedy, whatever else you want to
say, that she did a hell of a job raising those kids.
PT: One of the things that you described in your book and you have
no answer for, is that Jackie was mad at you for writing the book
Conversations With Kennedy. She said, "It tells more about you than my
husband."
BB: That was not a compliment--but that I was betraying a
friendship. I don't know. I don't think I betrayed the friendship at all.
Jack would have loved that book.
PT: I was struck by the two encounters you describe having with
Jackie [in which she ignored you]. You had many conversations with these
guys, and knew them fairly well. They had been your neighbors. What I
can't fathom is how disciplined or angry somebody would have to be not to
say hello.
BB: I just don't get it. And I've stood on my head trying to figure
out an explanation. I wrote her a letter before she died but I think I
wrote it too late.
She may have assumed we were complicit in Kennedy's relationship
with Mary Meyer [Bradlee's former sister-in-law],which we were not. If
she thought we were somehow part of that, you can imagine she'd be sore
as hell.
Whatever I feel about Jackie, I would never have ended the
friendship.
PT: What are your thoughts as a guy who's had a full life but knew
a president who was cut down at the height of his glory?
Tags:
asshole,
Ben Bradlee,
big time,
child psychiatrist,
dregs,
family picnic,
fear,
jams,
Kennedy,
map,
news,
occasions,
pee,
reporting,
same wavelength
