There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.
BEN BRADLEEThe first rough draft of history.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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Generals who can write always make me nervous.
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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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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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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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The first rough draft of history.
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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.
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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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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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Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.
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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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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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It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
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In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”
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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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You never monkey with the truth.
BEN BRADLEE