BB: He was on the brink of fulfilling all his promise.
PT: What is the meaning of it all now?
BB: There was a recklessness in Kennedy's life that I didn't see, a
sexual recklessness I don't understand. I'm appalled at the sharing of a
woman with a gangster, a gangster's moll. She had terrible friends. It
boggles my mind, truly. Whether it lessened his presidency in any way, I
don't know.
PT: Why do you think he did that?
BB: I think it must have heightened the excitement of it.
PT: Do you think he needed excitement one way or another in order
to feel he was alive--is that fair?
BB: It turns out to be closer to the truth than I knew. Maybe the
furtiveness of the sex or the scandal of the sex made sex more
interesting to him. I don't quite dig that but I can imagine it.
PT: Do you feel more, or less sentimental about Kennedy as you get
older?
BB: I feel a greater sense of potential and a feeling that he was
much more human. His second term would have been a dinger.
PT: So he would have been president for another four years. Then
who?
BB: Then Bobby.
PT: So there would have been a liberal Democratic consensus for,
say, 16 or 18 years.
BB: Yeah.
PT: What ever happened to Janet Cook [the Post reporter who won a
Pulitzer Prize for an article, about an eight-year-old drug addict, that
proved to be made up]?
BB: It always comes down to Janet Cook. She wouldn't talk to me. I
don't have much to say to her. I think I know why she did it.
PT: She wanted to get famous?
BB: Rich and famous. And her worst fears were realized: She became
poor and famous. Last I heard, she was in Toledo.
PT: What would you ask her if you could?
BB: It's easy to see how it could happen. And at the end of the
day, if somebody wants to lie to you straight-faced and is very smart
about it, they can do it. Boy, my colleagues, did they tuck it to
me.
PT: Well, when you get played in a movie by Jason Robards and you
become your own larger-than-life character, they're after you.
BB: But there was the allegedly famous Bradlee instinct, the shit
detector. How did I miss that?
PT: Do you worry about it?
BB: No, it's the only one I missed.
PT: Are there certain stories that you wish you had done?
BB: There are a lot of stories that I wish I'd done that I didn't
know about when they were there. That's the problem.
PT: What do you think about Dole? What makes him think he can be
president?
BB: Because he can be whatever anybody wants him to be. If he makes
president, he'd be an okay president because he's so sensitive to what
people think of him that they'll force him into a middle-road position
and he won't be his worst.
PT: You think he'll be elected?
BB: I don't know. It seems to me that the positions that Powell is
taking about gun control and racial opportunities are going to make him
awfully hard for the Republican Party, as it now exists, to swallow.
That's going to force Dole into putting somebody acceptable to them on
the ticket -- and that will reelect Clinton.
PT: What's the dumbest thing that you ever did?.
BB: It was to take Janet Cook's story.
PT: And the moral of the story for people who aren't in the
reporting business?
BB: Be sure you don't want something so badly that you lose your
judgment. PT: Your favorite newspapers?
BB: Well, I think the Post and the Times are in a class by
themselves.
PT: Favorite editors?
BB: I think newspapers are scared of strong editors.
PT: The dangerous editor, that is the lesson of Watergate: Whenever
you get down to it, lots of people don't tell the truth.
BB: They don't. The motherfuckers lie. PT: They lie
straight-faced.
BB: But nobody gets upset about it. PT: Who is there to get
upset?
BB: The papers, the editors ought to get upset about it. Reporters
ought to get upset about it.
PHOTOS (COLOR): Ben Bradlee
Tags:
asshole,
Ben Bradlee,
big time,
child psychiatrist,
dregs,
family picnic,
fear,
jams,
Kennedy,
map,
news,
occasions,
pee,
reporting,
same wavelength
