The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.
BEN BRADLEEI 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.
More Ben Bradlee Quotes
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You never monkey with the truth.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
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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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Generals who can write always make me nervous.
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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 never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
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Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.
BEN BRADLEE