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 champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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The first rough draft of history.
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If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be ‘gotcha’ journalism, but it’s also good journalism.
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I do worry about how newspapers respond to falling circulation figures. I’m not sure that the answer is for newspapers to try to cater to whatever seems to be the fad of the day.
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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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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There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
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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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So, here you are, especially in the Pentagon. Some guy tells you something. He says that’s a national security matter. Well, you’re supposed to tremble and get scared and it never, almost never means the security of the national government.
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The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.
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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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You never monkey with the truth.
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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
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As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.
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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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I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.
BEN BRADLEE