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Chris Lydon [CL]: 1-800-423-8255 makes "The Connection" with Paul Fay, "The Redhead," and the memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on what would be the run up to his 80th birthday. 1-800-423-TALK.
Nick is calling from Iowa City, Iowa. Good morning, Nick.
Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: Good morning, Chris.
CL: Good to hear your voice, brother.
NJ: Well, it's always good to hear your program, and I don't know if Red Fay remembers, but I was Maritime Administrator when he was Undersecretary of the Navy.
Paul Faye [PF]: I remember. That was great.
CL: Nicholas Johnson. Nicholas Johnson. Glad you called.
PF: A major figure in that period.
NJ: I've got his book [Paul B. Fay, Jr., The Pleasure of His Company (Harper & Row, 1966)] here on the shelf.
I was curious as to the opinion of both of you with regard to the change in the way in which the media reports about the President and other political figures. At one time in our nation's history we had a Sedition Act which said if you were too critical you went to jail. That probably is a little harsher than we would like. But it does seem to me that we pay a bit of a price for the kind of criticism, the sort of drumbeat of criticism that we get on some of the late night talk shows, and so forth. I'm just curious as to how you both feel about that.
CL: Red Fay, what do you think?
PF: Well, you know, it's, I think it's sad. You take the Globe, the National Enquirer. I was watching one television show, and somebody who I think took the other point of view. They went back and checked all these stories and they were asked on television, "Well, what do you think? They're 60% accurate?" The person said, "No." "70% accurate?" "No." Finally it ended up they're 100% inaccurate. Now that's an over exaggeration of it, but I think today in order to be able to sell some of these magazines, sell some of these books, the authors go out of their way to recreate things. I mentioned earlier in the program about the "reckless youth." He distorted something because he wanted to make it more dramatic.
NJ: Right.
PF: I think that this happens with many of these things. I was interviewed by somebody, he's going to have a book come out and I'm not going to mention his name because I don't want to give any credit to the book, but he was saying, "Oh, yeah, Jack did this and he did that." And I said, "Well, what is your basis of fact?" He said. "Oh, everybody knows that." Well, that's not the basis of fact. Either you know from first hand experience or you don't know.
CL: Nick Johnson, can I give you my answer to your question?
NJ: Yes.
CL: The trick about John Kennedy is, first, that I think he is always held up as an example of what the press didn't cover. Nobody said he had girlfriends. Nobody said he spent too much money in the election, blah, blah, blah. So it's got to be told now forever because the county missed it in the case of JFK.
Furthermore, the really important point, I think, and the real caution to journalism, is that John Kennedy was more deeply entwined with, in friendship, in a kind of solidarity, and a political movement almost, with the press than anyone before or since in my view. I mean, when I got to the New York Times in Washington the pecking order of the Washington press establishment was basically, corresponded to your closeness to the Kennedys. And the great figures from Reston and Wicker and Ben Bradley and Mary McGory, and all the Boston writers, the first ticket of admission to the press corps was a Kennedy connection. And it was, in truth it was a very corrupting thing. I don't know that it corrupted the Kennedys. It corrupted the press. And I think we're still reacting, in a certain sense, to that fear of an entanglement with the President, and then a kind of cover-up. I think it's too bad for all of us and it's especially too bad for the memory of President Kennedy who, as Paul Fay testifies, was a very different man than the scandal mongers have recreated.
PF: Chris, can I add something on that point?
CL: Yeah.
PF: Ben Bradley, who was a very good friend of Jack Kennedy's, and Ben Bradley is somebody that I admire, and I think he's been a very successful, very enjoyable, and a lot of fun to be with. Ben Bradley in his conversation is profane, and he does it with humor and he does it in a laughing way. He wrote a book, I think it was, I forget what the title of the book was, and it came out and it had Jack Kennedy saying all these things in a profane way. Well, then I checked. Because I, Jack was never profane and wasn't a person who used off color wording to make his point. So I checked with, about, with Jim Reed who was his Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Chuck Spaulding, you name it, about four of five other people who were very close to Jack. I said, " Did you ever remember Jack using that sort of language when he spoke?" And none of us did. And I went to Ben when he came out on a speaking tour for the book and I said, "Ben, how could you have put those words in Jack's mouth?" And he said, well, after a meeting -- well, now, here he is a close friend -- after a meeting where he was present he would go home and write everything down. What he failed to do was, he wrote it down as Ben Bradley would have said it rather than the way Jack Kennedy would have said it.
CL: Interesting point. Paul Fay stand by. We're talking about John F. Kennedy on what would have been his almost 80th birthday. This is "The Connection" from WBUR, Boston.
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