The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
BEN BRADLEEThe 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.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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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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There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!
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Generals who can write always make me nervous.
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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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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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More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.
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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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I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.
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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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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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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.
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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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I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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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.
BEN BRADLEE