It’s very hard to stand up to the government which is saying that publication will threaten national security. People don’t seem to realize that reporters and editors know something about national security and care deeply about it.
BEN BRADLEEThe first rough draft of history.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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To hell with news! I’m no longer interested in news. I’m interested in causes. We don’t print the truth. We don’t pretend to print the truth. We print what people tell us. It’s up to the public to decide what’s true.
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Generals who can write always make me nervous.
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I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.
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Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.
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National security is a really big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security, but the law talks about anyone who endangers the security of the United States is going to go to jail.
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I don’t want to disappoint too many people, but the number of interesting political, historical conversations we had, you could stick in your ear, it wasn’t that many. We talked about friends, family and of course girls.
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Our best today; better tomorrow.
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Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.
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It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
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Nothing’s riding on this, except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys f-k up again, I’m gonna get mad.
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Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That’s just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.
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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
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You never monkey with the truth.
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The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: Jack Kennedy really liked newspaper people and he really enjoyed sparring with journalists.
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It changes your life, the pursuit of truth, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth. It’s very, it’s very exciting.
BEN BRADLEE