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By Root 1157 0

there. Bill Kent in Florida would be around, sometimes. He liked the kind of badinage and everything you could have with them. Much more than his colleagues in Congress, though we had some there. And then—people always used to say that he was so thin-skinned by the press, but that really wasn't true. And it was so funny, because one night Ben Bradlee was taunting him—or, no, he was saying to Ben Bradlee something that was written was untrue. And Ben Bradlee came one night for dinner in an absolute rage because some tiny little Republican newsletter that his John Birch mother-in-law subscribed to had had a paragraph written by—not Tony Lewis but Tony someone who wrote for Nixon—

Ralph de Toledano.52

Ralph de Toledano had written something bad about Ben Bradlee. You would have thought it had been over the front page of the New York Times. Just one or two sentences, and Ben was in a rage. And Jack just sort of lean—I mean he didn't really rub it in, he just leaned back and looked amused and said, "Well, see how you fellows feel when something unfair is written." I guess the one thing he admitted was a mistake was canceling the Herald Tribune.53 He was a little bit more that way in the beginning, but at the end he'd never mention unfavorable things, or if I'd say, "Oh, I think so-and-so is so awful"—when I'd come home to him and he'd say, "Don't think about it. Don't read those things." You know, he just accepted it as part of the—you know, when there was something good, I mean, he wouldn't mention it. I'd say, "Wasn't it wonderful what"—I don't know—"someone said today?" If I could find it.

What about the great statesmen of the press, like Lippmann and Scotty and all the rest of them—and Joe Alsop?

Well, Joe was his friend. And, I think, Lippmann and Reston—Reston was awfully sanctimonious and sort of—so they were never close. I mean, I'm sure Jack saw them in his office and things. And, of course, they had this kind of jealousy or resentment of Jack because for the first time there was a president who probably was brighter than they were, who was younger, who was—Lippmann had two things against Jack, partly his father and partly being Catholic, strangely enough. And you hear this in conversations with other people but he could never sort of purge from this—

Yeah. And I think Lippmann's wife was an ex-Catholic. She was brought up and went to a convent and broke with it and I think that had some—

Well, I remember when—

Though, remember in 1960 that Lippmann wrote marvelous columns.

Yeah. I can't really remember what they wrote and what they didn't, sometimes. But—I mean, he wouldn't sort of be a sycophant to them. I mean, he wouldn't suck around. In the press, he really saw the people who—he liked. Someone funny like Bill Lawrence, just—you know.

But you don't feel that he was unduly sensitive—

Unh-unh [meaning no].

—to the press. One thing a lot of people have written about the administration is that no administration was more interested in its own image, to use that odious word, and so on.54

Well, that to me, it's like reading about someone—you know, it's so untrue. And then they'd all talk about the public relations setup that we had going before the—during—before the campaign, and the this and the that, and our image. Which I'd never thought of as image. And there was never anyone in public relations, except—Charlie Bartlett always used to say, "You're doing too many articles." But he used to say to Charlie, "You know, I have so many—much against me. The only one—and in a certain position that mightn't be the best way to get what I'm aiming for—the nomination. But this way, it is. You know, to just get more and more known and bombard them." So many public relations things were that when they asked for interviews, and he would do them. But he never had anyone advising him and he never thought about our image. In fact, our image—when you think of something so incredible about me, I was always a liability to him until we got to the White House. And he never asked me to change or said anything