All the News Unfit to Print

Other omissions, however, are more innocent by nature. They have the same effect—giving readers a false view of the world’s workings by withholding information from them, but they do so as a kind of by-product. It is not a case of a newspaper publisher or one of his reporters being cunning, but rather being timid.

Yes, timid. It seems a strange word to use to describe the behavior of journalists, especially these days, when it is almost impossible to watch a presidential press conference or a debate among candidates or even an interview between a reporter and a politician with a controversial position and see the press being anything less than aggressive—sometimes properly so, sometimes obnoxiously. But in the first half of the twentieth century, most denizens of the newsroom were just as awed to be in the company of celebrities, political or otherwise, as the rest of us would have been. They did what they were told to do to be granted a place in that exalted company. They did what they were told to do to remain in that company. At some level of consciousness, they had determined that once a figure elevated himself to that stage of life known as eminence, he was entitled to certain privileges. One of them was to be able to manage the news that was reported about him.

There was, however, the occasional exception. For instance, there was the unidentified member of the press corps who was so eager to take a picture of Charles Lindbergh and his new bride, Anne Morrow, on their honeymoon cruise off the coast of Massachusetts that he rented a small boat and kept circling his victims’ cabin cruiser, “hoping the chop of his boat would make the Lindberghs seasick enough to come topside,” into the range of his lens. It did not. Eventually Lindbergh tired of the photographer’s antics, hit the gas, and outdistanced him.

And then there were the two American cameramen sent abroad in 1956 to take pictures of Grace Kelly, the actress from Philadelphia, as she married Monaco’s Prince Rainier and became royalty herself. After the ceremony, the photographers demanded that a Monagasque policeman allow them to drive up the hill from the security gate to the prince’s palace. The policeman explained to them as courteously as he could that there were no parking places at the palace, but to accommodate the press the royal family had arranged for a shuttle bus to provide transportation. The photographers should simply dispose of their car elsewhere and return to the gate, and the bus would be along shortly.

The two men would not hear of it. They had a job to do, a deadline to meet. So, “furious, [they] simply backed their car off—and when, still polite, the policeman tried to stop them, they literally ran him down; he was taken to the hospital.” He survived, although with serious injuries. The cameramen, who did not bother to check on the officer’s condition, roared up the hill and snapped away at the bride and groom until their fingers were sore.

But these and a few other examples were not only exceptions; they were rarities. In the period that we now consider, beginning with the declining days of Richard Harding Davis and ending with the mid- to late sixties, timidity was a much more common trait of journalists than was belligerence, or even perseverance. During this time, when a prominent newsmaker said omit, the press’s most common reaction was to sin.

Andrew Mellon looked like a prominent newsmaker. More than that, he looked like a senior member of a private club of prominent newsmakers, which was also how he thought of himself. His personality, however, always threatened to betray him. He was, according to his son’s description, a “thin-voiced, thin-bodied, shy and uncommunicative man.” But he dressed superbly, tended his mustache so that not a single hair strayed from its assigned position, and kept his fingernails manicured to such perfection that he always showed his hands when he sat for a portrait.

His most thorough biographer, David Cannadine, says that to some people Mellon’s blue eyes looked “dreamy and distant,” and to others resembled “sharp blue daggers.” The latter is a far better description. There was a coldness about the man, in both demeanor and appearance, that was probably his most salient feature. It might have been due in part to shyness, an oddly incongruous part of his makeup, but no less was it a reflection of a ruling elite’s haughty demeanor. When Mellon allowed his face to droop, which it almost always did, he managed to convey, if not a disdain for those with whom he associated, at least a reluctance to linger in their presence. His daggers glared right through them. He talked as little as he could to coworkers, and although polite to customers at the banks he owned, he “rarely looked them in the eye, and he seldom spoke, and then only haltingly.”

It is a wonder that a man like this ever accomplished anything. Yet accomplish he did. As a banker, Mellon was more responsible than any other man, with the exception of Andrew Carnegie, for the western Pennsylvania steel boom of the early twentieth century, which was itself responsible for building booms all over the country: skyscrapers in New York and Chicago; coal barges on the Great Lakes; warehouses in Buffalo and Cleveland; rail lines crossing the Midwest. He knew how to finance them so that both he and the owners would profit. Like Carnegie, he gave away much of his proceeds. Like Carnegie’s associate and in later years his bitter enemy, Henry Clay Frick, he spent profusely on art.

And he was the most influential and controversial secretary of the Treasury in American history since Alexander Hamilton, as well as the only one to serve under three presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. (As such, of course, it might be said that he was responsible more than anyone else for the ragingly pro-business policies that helped lay the groundwork for the Great Depression.) The only modern-day comparison to be made is with former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. But Mellon had more control over the economy than Greenspan did, and he exercised it more selfishly. The three presidents who kept Mellon in office did so because of his brilliance, not because of his civic-mindedness. Unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it could not be said of Mellon that he was a traitor to his class.

Since Carnegie had gone back to his ancestral home in Scotland at a relatively early age, returning to Pittsburgh only when there was a strike at one of his mills or some other kind of emergency, Mellon became the crown prince of the Steel City. When, late in 1900, he decided to marry—and a commoner at that—it seemed as if the nineteenth century was ending in the grandest way possible, by ensuring the future happiness of its leading citizen, a man who would surely blaze a continuing trail of wealth and progress into the twentieth century.

Andrew Mellon was forty-five years old. Nora McMullen, an attractive Englishwoman, demure even for her years, was nineteen. Despite her youth, she apparently had a remarkable skill. “In her presence,” it has been written, “the famous Mellon reserve vanished like a cloud before an April breeze. To establish talkative relations with Andrew was at best a difficult, long drawn out process, but this girl evidently possessed the gift, known to few, of immediately putting him at his ease.” People who saw the couple together saw an Andrew Mellon they were pleased to say they did not easily recognize.

It did not last. Before long, the new husband was reverting to form, finding his ease, if that’s what it truly was, in his banking and other businesses, his philanthropy and art collecting, and his solitude, which he was unwilling to allow other human beings, including his own wife, to penetrate except on rare occasions. He seemed to find fault with Nora more and more, to find fewer and fewer things to talk to her about. She was, after all, twenty-six years his junior; she was not of his generation, not of his world. She did not comprehend banking and economics, steel and coal; he did not comprehend her lack of comprehension, and her increasing lack of interest in his passions. She grew ever more distant from him, and ever more sad and frustrated at the life she had chosen for herself.

In 1907, Mellon and Nora and their two children, one just a few months old, spent the summer in London and Paris—until, that is, a financial crisis back in the United States demanded Mellon’s presence. He left his family hurriedly and, to all appearances, with a certain relief. It was for Nora the final straw. She begged him not to go. He told her he had to. Her tears left him unmoved as he explained to her in cold hard numbers the details of the economic problems that waited him. She listened to a few of them and told him she did not want to hear any more.

A week or two later he wrote her a short note from Pittsburgh, ending by telling her he missed her. Her response was a cri de coeur that still resounds over the years:

I never can understand how you can possibly miss me or want me when I am away from you, for you never seem to want me when we are together. . . . Why must that loathsome business take all the strength and vitality which you ought to give to me? Why should you only give me your tired evenings? Why should I give you all my strength and health and youth and be content with nothing in return? For I am not content and never shall be as long as I have to be second—always second. I am feeling so desperately lonely I could almost kill myself, but I would rather be lonely here than in Pittsburgh.

Nora would not be second much longer. In the heart of Alfred George Curphrey, whom Cannadine believes to have been “a cad and a confidence man who seduced the wives of unsuspecting husbands, a predator of unhappy women of means,” she was about to be first. Or so he claimed. So she believed. The two of them, who apparently met on a ship traveling from England to the United States, would soon begin an affair.

Mellon suspected it almost at once. Hiring a private detective to follow his wife, he found his fears confirmed. Should he talk to her about this man, reason with her, threaten her? Threaten him? Surely he could buy the scamp off. Perhaps that is what Curphrey had in mind in the first place. But he did not, did not even make an offer. Since expense was not an issue, all we can conclude is that Mellon did not want Nora enough to go through the trouble. Ultimately, what he decided on was a divorce.

What a difficult choice it was. Divorces were not common in those days, and in Mellon’s social circles they were not only less common, they were scandalous. One did not break a wedding vow any more than he did any other kind of contract. Of course, Mellon had not broken it. His wife was the one at fault, and everyone who knew Mellon would realize that. Still, people would wonder. Nora was such a sweet young thing, surely not the type to have an affair, especially with a roué like Curphrey, not unless there had been some kind of extreme provocation. What could it have been? What secret lurked in the inner chambers of what had outwardly seemed a marriage so typical of its type? The taint of the union’s failure, Mellon realized, would be a cloud over both parties for the rest of their days. Thus did a gloomy man become gloomier than ever.

When George Seldes of the Pittsburgh Leader took a seat in the courtroom for one of the early days of the proceedings, he was surprised to find himself the only journalist there. Then again, as he later mused, “Why waste a reporter’s time when there was no intention to have him write anything?” He decided to stay anyway. Surely he would find an outlet for his observations sometime, somewhere.

Perhaps in some city other than Pittsburgh. The Mellon divorce was a big story all along the eastern seaboard, and details were more easily accessible elsewhere, as the bride’s family and friends, many of whom had sailed to the United States to support her, were more than willing to talk to the press. As Seldes points out, however, only one newspaper, Philadelphia’s North American, was enterprising enough to ship copies of its publication into Pittsburgh to break the local news embargo. It seemed like a good idea. “But the moment the Mellon forces heard about it, they created another sensational news item: they sent the Pittsburgh police into the streets by the dozens, the papers were grabbed, the newsboys clubbed, their property destroyed. The next day’s bundles were bought up at the railroad station.”

I gave him my notes and he wrote a thousand-word story, which he sent press-rate collect, as usual. It was suppressed by Western Union. He tried the rival company, Postal Telegraph, and again he could not get through. Both great national services deliberately violated the law at Mellon insistence. But even the Mellon hundred-million-dollar fortune could not stop telephonic communication, and this is how the North American got through.

Pennsylvania lawmakers, who had once established such a reputation for corrupt practices that John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil trust were said to have “done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it,” were equally willing to serve the Mellon interests now. The legislature did not violate the law at Mellon insistence; it created a new law. On the spur of the moment, and by a vote of 168-0, it put an end to jury trials in divorce cases in the state. They now became a secret from both the public and the press. The latter never even thought about protesting the decision. In fact, the state’s major newspapers did not even report on the vote.

To Seldes, a young and idealistic reporter at the time, it was astonishing, a subversion of democracy such as he had never imagined possible. And there was more to come. Many years later, he would write about something he noticed when the case had been concluded and Mellon had won his divorce. “Surely it was not a mere coincidence,” he said, “that the Dispatch, the most respectable of the morning journals [in Pittsburgh], shortly afterwards blossomed with page advertisements for not only the Mellon bank but other Mellon enterprises.” It was Andrew Mellon’s equivalent of a thank-you note for services not rendered to the community.

Sometimes, not rendering services to the community was a matter of good taste rather than a lack of courage. After covering William McKinley’s inauguration as president, Richard Harding Davis wrote a letter to his brother Charles telling him that he chose to portray the event as “a sort of family gathering” rather than a tedious political formality. For instance, he said, he found much to like about McKinley’s elderly mother, ebullient despite her years, and he devoted an unusual amount of space to her in his article. About the new president’s wife, however, he was reticent. “Mrs. McKinley has epileptic fits and can only walk with the help of someone. She is also weak minded like a little girl of ten but her sufferings have given her a really beautiful face. She dressed the part exquisitely in blue velvet but it was a pathetic spectacle.”

Davis included nothing about Mrs. McKinley in the article he published about the inauguration. As he told his brother, he was “not saying anything to hurt anybody’s feelings but praising whenever I can.” Since William McKinley was the story, not Ida, Davis could praise without compromising the integrity of his journalism, and that is precisely what he chose to do.

When McKinley was assassinated a year into his term, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took up residence in the White House and proved himself to be the first modern master of withholding news from compliant journalists. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz points out, “For much of this century, the press and the president really were on the same team.” And during the Roosevelt presidency, more than any other, there was no doubt who the captain was. In 1908, Roosevelt’s last full year in office, Kurtz relates, a reporter for the New York Times named William Bayard Hale interviewed Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser told Hale that he fully expected his country to be at war with the British in the not too distant future. It was a startling admission, and Hale, relatively inexperienced, was not sure how to handle it.

Neither were his editors, with whom he immediately discussed the matter. Did the kaiser mean what he said? Did he make the comment for some political purpose known only to himself, and was he hoping to use the Times to further that purpose? Or was he just having sport with Hale, demonstrating not a political purpose but a perverse sense of humor?

The editors suggested that Hale take his notes to Roosevelt and talk over the matter with him, something newspaper executives would not even consider today, viewing it as a surrender of their First Amendment freedoms. Back then it was different. The editors reasoned that since Roosevelt knew the kaiser, knew how his mind worked, he was the best source of advice available. They would turn to the expert.

So Hale made an appointment with the president, handed over his notebook, and waited for Roosevelt to read and react. It did not take long. The president told him not to publish. The notes would only create hard feelings—or harder feelings—between the two countries involved. No possible good could come out of making the information public, Roosevelt insisted. He returned the notebook to Hale with an imperious glare and dismissed him. Hale relayed the message to his superiors, who followed the president’s counsel, apparently without a dissenting voice—something else that would never happen today.

Six years later, Germany would take up arms against the British Empire in World War I. It was doubtful that the Times felt any remorse about the story it did not publish in 1898. It was simply the way things were done back then, especially when the prominent newsmaker was the most prominent of them all, and a bullmoose of a personality like Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was used to telling reporters what to publish and what not to publish. And he was used to their obeying him, whether the subject was comments made by someone else or comments of his own. The latter was the more common case. Roosevelt knew he had a tendency to speak in a highly unpresidential manner from time to time, using inappropriately belligerent language, sometimes telling what amounted to state secrets, and he expected reporters to edit him even if he forgot to remind them. They invariably did.

On the few occasions when a reporter published something that displeased Roosevelt, the president would not only call the reporter a liar but exile him to the informally organized but nonetheless dreaded Ananias Club, named after the biblical figure who attempted to deceive the Holy Spirit. Members of the club had to repent to and have their repentance judged as sincere by a number of administration officials before the president would speak to them again.

But there were times when Roosevelt wanted his comments, even some of the most incendiary of them, to be published—times when he wanted to deliver the insult, create the controversy, state his position in the clearest, least politic terms. Here, too, he proved that his skills at handling journalists were without equal. Mark Sullivan, in his six-volume history of the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, writes about Roosevelt as follows:

He was the earliest American public man to grasp the syllogism that on Sunday all normal business and most other activities are suspended; that Sunday is followed by Monday; and that, therefore, the columns of the Monday papers present the minimum of competition for public attention—whence many of the public statements, epithets and maledictions with which Roosevelt conducted his fights were timed to explode in the pages of the Monday morning newspapers.

Calvin Coolidge’s personality, to the extent that he had one, was the opposite of Roosevelt’s. As taciturn a man as ever occupied the White House, Coolidge smiled so seldom that his lips might have been sutured into a frown, and he spoke in such short sentences that he might have been hoarding his words, believing he had been apportioned only so many for mortal use and wanted to take no chances on running over. His nickname, “Silent Cal,” could not have been more appropriate.

One evening, according to his wife, as the two of them made their entrance to a dinner party, the hostess walked confidently up to the president and said, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” She looked at him with a self-satisfied grin on her face. The president erased it with his reply. “You lose,” he said.

He was not, then, humorless. But he was better at inspiring humor in others than issuing bons mots of his own. He “could be silent in five languages,” one person said of him. Said another, he appeared “much like a wooden Indian except more tired-looking.” And when told of Coolidge’s death, the noted Algonquin Round Table wit Dorothy Parker is supposed to have replied, “How could they tell?”

Coolidge did, however, have something in common with Roosevelt. He insisted on being in control of his relationship with reporters. His first step was to place them in his debt, which he did by allowing them to come to a number of White House social events, something most of his predecessors had not done; taking them for cruises on his yacht, the Mayflower; and occasionally even inviting them to accompany him on vacation, although making sure they kept their distance from family activities. Granted, he had little to say to the press at these or any other events; still, they were pleased enough just to be in such favored company.

The quid pro quo was obedience. Coolidge insisted that the journalists submit questions for him in writing and in advance, something that even Roosevelt did not require. Coolidge would look through the questions and decide for himself which ones were worthy of a response. Those that he rejected once were not to be presented a second time.

And when Coolidge did answer a question, he was not to be quoted directly. In fact, the president of the United States was never quoted directly by reporters until the Hoover administration. Instead, his answers were to be attributed to a White House spokesman. It was a practice that fooled very few readers and was ridiculed so much that Coolidge finally found it necessary to offer a defense. “The words of the President have an enormous weight,” he said, “and ought not to be used indiscriminately. It would be exceedingly easy to set the country all by the ears and foment hatreds and jealousies, which, by destroying faith and confidence, would help nobody and harm everybody.” It is impossible to know whether Coolidge actually believed this twaddle or was earnestly trying to answer his critics, and using up a significant quantity of his allotted earthly verbiage to do it.

During another meeting with journalists, discussing the fact that they were under orders to quote the White House “spokesman” word for word, interjecting no analysis or commentary or even punctuation marks of their own, Coolidge told them that he was surprised “at the constant correctness of my views as you report them.” Whether his listeners got the joke is also impossible to know.

Of some thirty-five thousand photographs taken of FDR during his years in the White House, only two included his wheelchair, and he does not seem to have been in the device at the time, but seated elsewhere, next to an adviser or a fellow statesman with whom he was engaged in conversation; the wheelchair was out of the frame, off to the side. One would have expected the chair to show up more than twice in twelve years just by accident—the cameraman’s hand slipping as he pressed the button, his foot giving way on a patch of wet lawn so that he lost his balance and the camera swung to the right or left. Considered all together, 34,998 “properly framed” pictures out of 35,000 add up to a remarkable display of omission.

And neither Roosevelt nor his aides even had to insist on it; photographers knew without being told not to shoot him looking “unpresidential.” They were not trying to fool anyone by failing to snap Roosevelt in his wheelchair or struggling to get out of it and into his crutches; they had agreed, either on an individual basis or as a matter of company policy, for what they believed to be the good of the nation, not to reinforce the image of a chief executive who had been stricken by polio. Since the handicap did not seem to affect the way the president did his job, since in fact he seemed a more energetic presence in the White House than several of the men who had preceded him, the cameramen felt that by ignoring his disability they were giving a truer picture of the man than if they had shown him looking compromised.

Nor would they compromise British prime minister Winston Churchill in less serious circumstances. In January 1943, Roosevelt made a seventeen-thousand-mile trip to Casablanca to meet with Churchill about the course of World War II and efforts between their two countries to bring it to a close. After ten days of secret meetings, the president was scheduled to return to the United States one morning at seven-thirty. As Doris Kearns Goodwin writes:

Churchill had intended to see Roosevelt off, but after a long evening of food, drink, speeches, and songs, he had trouble getting out of bed. At the last minute, still clad in his red-dragon dressing gown and black velvet slippers, he raced outside to catch the president’s car. At the airfield, the photographers begged for a shot. “You simply cannot do this to me,” he laughingly remarked, and they obliged, lowering their cameras.

recalled traveling with a small White House press corps to Key West [Florida], where President Truman relaxed. Truman, who normally wore a corset to tuck in his tummy, would hold bare-chested press conferences in swimming trunks. Even though this exposed a pear-shaped profile, Truman did not flinch at this informal snapshot taking. On such trips, the U.S. Navy not only provided billets for reporters but arranged deep-sea fishing excursions for their amusement. Brandon, thinking of the angry confrontation between press and government since Vietnam and Watergate and everyone’s sensitivity to buying influence with favors, chuckled quietly, and asked, “Can you imagine either side putting up with that kind of arrangement these days?”

The two kinds of stories that reporters reported the least during the first half of the preceding century—which is to say, in most cases not at all—involved politicians who had overindulged on women and politicians who had overindulged on liquor. Foremost among the latter was Russell Long, who was born in Louisiana about a decade before the flood that did not destroy New Orleans. Russell was the son of Huey Long, as controversial a politician as this country has ever known and, in his way, as spellbinding an orator. Long père was a former senator from Louisiana and governor of the state, whose “Share Our Wealth” program was supposed to make “Every Man a King,” and who was assassinated in 1935 by someone even more fanatical than he. At the time, Long was planning to run for president, disgusted that the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was not doing enough to dismember the nation’s power structure for the good of the poor and otherwise unfortunate.

Russell Long was elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat in 1948, twenty-nine years old when the voting took place, but the mandatory thirty when his term began. He would immediately become a strong supporter of President Truman’s cold war policies and, later, a major obstacle to President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights program.

By this time, the mid-sixties, Long had risen through the Senate ranks to attain the chairmanship of the nearly omnipotent Senate Finance Committee. He was also, as he had been since the first U.S. troops landed in Southeast Asia, a powerful voice for the war in Vietnam. He could not understand why so many Americans were so ignorant as to oppose it, and was pleased to run roughshod over their opposition to provide the necessary funding.

And he was, by this time, reacting to the pressures of his office and its controversial duties by drinking too much, more than he had ever poured down his gullet before. He would drink with his pal Johnson when Johnson tried to persuade him that if the Democrats didn’t become the party of civil rights, the Republicans would, and all those black votes, which counted just as much as the white ones, would go to the GOP—just enough, perhaps, to put the Republicans in the White House. Russell would drink with his pals from the Senate in the Capitol’s nooks and crannies when the topics were not so monumental, and with other friends at parties and with strangers in hotel bars and at home all by himself late at night, his wife asleep upstairs, his marriage of some twenty-five years crumbling around him because he could not stay sober long enough to hold it together.

In 1969, Long, as assistant majority leader of the Senate, and his wife, the former Katherine Mae Hattic, divorced. Predictably, Long’s drinking reached a peak. Sometimes he did not show up on the Senate floor; sometimes he showed up late and so heavily under the influence that he weaved down the aisle to his seat, his voice slurred, his eyes still red, and head throbbing from last night’s binge. He was no longer the “youthful energetic” legislator he had once been, no longer “one of the keenest” young men in all of Washington. He felt like an old man, aging by the glassful, and his remarriage to a former Senate staffer did little to reinvigorate him and nothing to change his drinking habits.

Soon Mike Mansfield, the Democratic majority leader, would replace Long as his top aide with Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, fearing that Long’s boozing had reached a point at which he could no longer be trusted to perform his duties. Kennedy, a drinker himself but better able to control his behavior even when he consumed enough alcohol to approach Long’s standards, was nicknamed Teddy. Long’s nickname was Jack Daniels.

And journalists knew it. They had known it for a long time. In the mid-sixties, before Mansfield had demoted him, Long was so drunk on the Senate floor one afternoon that he held up passage of a bill very important to his Democratic colleagues. It was a tense session of the senior legislative body, with Long thwarting the will of his own party and perhaps not even being aware of it and the afternoon dragging on into evening. New York Times reporter Eileen Page, afraid she was going to miss her deadline, called her editor and told him why. She also told him she wanted to write the story, to let readers know what effect Long’s inebriation was having on the pending measure. Her editor told her she could not. Page argued with him, and with others at the Times, but to no avail; Russell Long’s drinking, and its possible effects on the nation’s governance, would remain a secret from the general public until much later, when the history books, rather than the daily press, got around to revealing it.

Earlier in the century, in fact in its first decade, the Times had developed a new kind of ink to use for its paper, one that did not so easily rub off on the reader’s hands, as most newspaper ink did at the time. As a result, it came up with a new slogan. The New York Times was now the newspaper that would not soil your breakfast linen. It still seemed to have that kind of prissy attitude decades later; it would not allow news of a United States senator’s addiction to the bottle to soil the readers’ belief in the high-toned behavior of their elected representatives.

The Times was not the only paper or news organization to shield the public from knowledge of their seventy- or eighty-proof representatives. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has collected several examples in his book Feeding Frenzy, the first from Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. “I remember as a kid reporter going up to the Senate to watch a filibuster,” Bradlee says, “and seeing Thruston Morton [R-KY] almost fall down as he was talking, and I was just stunned [because] nobody ever reported it.” Bradlee thought the Post should be the paper to report it. The editors disagreed. Poor taste, they thought. Poor government, thought Bradlee.

George Herman, of CBS News, says, “When I first came to Washington there were a lot of senators who were well-known as terrible drunks, including one Senator Herman Welker of Idaho, who burst out of the Senate Republican Cloak Room just in time to hear a unanimous consent motion on something like declaring National Pickle Week, shouted, ‘I object,’ and fell over in a dead faint on the floor, half drunk, and was carried away.” CBS did not cover Welker’s collapse, nor did any of the television stations or newspapers in Welker’s home state.

Jack Germond, of Gannett News, relates, “In 1962 Senator Pete Williams [D-NJ] was running for reelection and he had a drinking problem. We decided we were going to do the story about this guy [even though] that was almost never done.” Nor would it be done in this case, Germond’s resolve notwithstanding. The leading paper in New Jersey, owned by Gannett, refused to run the exposé. Other Gannett papers followed its lead. Pete Williams was reelected handily, and celebrated, one presumes, by elbow-bending with staff, family, friends, and reporters.

All of this was lead-burying of a sort—some of it imposed by politicians, some by publications. It would be years, and in a few instances decades, before the facts were finally exhumed. And surely a few of those facts, because of reportorial subservience to Teddy Roosevelt and Coolidge, among others, still lie interred.

Sex was not just a topic that journalists did their best to ignore in those days; it was a source of discomfort to the entire mass culture, no matter who was having it or under what conditions. Hugh Hefner had not even been born. There were no miniskirts on the market, no bra ads in magazines, no glorification of starlets getting pregnant out of wedlock and vowing to have their children rather than terminate the pregnancy. There were no wardrobe malfunctions at halftime of the year’s biggest sporting event. There were no sex scenes in movies and fewer of them in books, and those that were published were very circumspectly worded. Even fewer trysts were reported in newspapers, and those usually because a more heinous deed was associated with the copulation; that is, a murder had been committed by one of the members of a romantic triangle. “Newspapers are read at the breakfast and dinner tables,” wrote W. R. Nelson, publisher of the Kansas City Star. “God’s great gift to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it.” Unless, Nelson might have added, absolutely necessary.

Warren G. Harding’s affairs were judged not to be. Harding had developed a reputation for carrying flirtation to its extreme long before his most famous, yet not unequivocally proven, episode: uniting with a young woman named Nan Britton while both remained upright, locked in an embrace resembling a wrestling grasp as they banged against the walls and door of a White House closet, scaring the hell out of those nearby, who thought wild animals had found their way into a corner of the nation’s most famous residence. Either then or on some other occasion, claims Britton, Harding sired her daughter, Elizabeth Ann.

Another tale of Harding’s amours is provided by the wife of a reporter covering the 1920 presidential campaign, most of which Harding spent in his hometown of Marion, Ohio. “Three newsmen invited to dine at the home of one of Harding’s widow neighbors were, during the evening, taken upstairs by an innocent eight-year-old member of the widow’s family, and proudly shown Harding’s toothbrush. Said the child, ‘He always stays here when Mrs. Harding goes away.’”

Not long after this, William Estabrook Chancellor, a professor at Wooster College in Ohio, published a scathing pamphlet about Harding. Chancellor was more of a crank than a true academic, the kind of man who might be seen today in the midst of an urban center proclaiming the imminent end of the world, although in surprisingly literate language. In the pamphlet, published at his own expense, Chancellor gave credence to rumors about the president that had been circulating around Marion for many years that Harding was something less than a purebred American. Without citing any evidence, he claimed that Harding’s great-grandmother was a Negro and his great grandfather had at least a soupçon of Negro blood. And, of course, “like all Negroes,” Chancellor went on, Harding had an eye, not to mention other body parts, for the ladies.

The irony of Harding’s being the victim of Chancellor’s pamphlet, which included some unsavory jokes along with the racial allegations, was that prior to seeking the presidency, Harding had been a newspaper publisher in Marion, and was regarded as one of the most fair-minded journalists in the state. In fact, after he defeated Cox and moved to Washington, some of Harding’s associates jotted down the rules that he had spoken to them as he wandered through the newsroom. They made copies of them, and circulated them not only in Ohio but all over the country. They were talked about and posted in newspaper offices for a decade. Among them:

If it can be avoided, never bring ignominy on an innocent man or child, in telling of the misdeeds or misfortunes of a relative.

Don’t wait to be asked, but do it without the asking. . . . Never needlessly hurt the feelings of anybody. Be decent; be fair; be generous. I want this paper to be so conducted that it can go into any home without destroying the innocence of any child.

In 1940, both presidential candidates were guilty of extramarital dalliances, although Roosevelt’s behavior might have been unknown to most journalists. After all, he was severely restricted in his movements and could not easily go gallivanting around town with Lucy Mercer on his arm. And Mercer was an employee of the White House—Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal secretary, of all things. The president often sent his wife on trips, both domestically and abroad, asking her to serve as a kind of unofficial ambassador and report back to him. For some reason, she seldom took Mercer with her, often traveling with a friend, and perhaps lover, named Lorena Hickok.

Thus the president and Mercer spent many hours together in the White House, some of them alone, without any danger of the First Lady’s intruding. It might well have appeared to a journalist who dropped into the president’s office that Mercer was simply briefing the president on her boss’s activities. Until, that is, the couple repaired to Roosevelt’s private quarters, where they appeared to no one.

But Wendell Willkie’s affair was common knowledge, not only in journalistic circles but in New York social circles as well. The lady in question was Irita Van Doren, who “was not pretty,” according to famed journalist William L. Shirer, “but she was beautiful.” She had acquired her last name by marrying Carl Van Doren, a future Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of Benjamin Franklin. Their union lasted for twenty-three years, from 1912 to 1935, before the pair went their separate ways. Thus she was single, and Willkie was not, when the latter sought the White House. It did not matter to either of them. Willkie was in love with Van Doren and she with him, and they would remain so for the rest of their lives. Van Doren would, in fact, be more of a wife to Willkie than Edith Wilk, the woman to whom, in order to avoid the stain of a divorce, which was in effect in all ways but legally, he continued to stay married.

Irita Van Doren was the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune at the time, a position she held for thirty-seven years. She served not only as Willkie’s mistress, but as the occasional editor of his speeches. So well known was their relationship, we are informed, that “reporters sometimes called Willkie at Van Doren’s apartment at night if they needed a quote for the next day’s paper.” Willkie would answer the phone without embarrassment.

Once, during his campaign against Roosevelt, he went even further. He told the advisers accompanying him that he had decided to hold a press conference at Van Doren’s apartment the next day. The two men dropped their jaws in unison. You can’t do that, they scolded. You want to make headlines, but not like that!

Willkie exaggerated. And despite what we have come to believe since, there were reporters in Washington two decades later who did not know about President John F. Kennedy and his various mistresses. “I never even heard the rumors,” says Sander Vanocur, an NBC correspondent who was not assigned to the White House beat but was one of the best of the time covering politics. So perhaps reports of a widespread, if informal, press conspiracy to protect Kennedy’s reputation over the years have been exaggerated—but not by much.

Most journalists had at least heard the rumors. Many of them knew the rumors to be true. They knew about Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe; about Marlene Dietrich, the aging movie queen who had slept with the president’s father as well and supposedly told Kennedy that his old man was a better bedder; and about Judith Campbell Exner, who was also making her services available to mob boss Sam Giancana. They knew about hastily arranged rendezvous with White House secretaries, White House interns, campaign workers, schoolteachers, real estate agents, stewardesses, waitresses, college students, strippers, prostitutes who had decided to work pro bono for a change—so many women in so many places that Kennedy could not keep track of their names, having sex with them and then calling them “kiddo” or “sweetie” as he sent them on their way afterward with a pat on the fanny and a memory for the ages.

“Let’s sack with Jack,” one newsman suggested as a campaign slogan for the Wisconsin primary in 1960, and the line got a chuckle from his mates. But it did not lead to coverage of a president’s extracurricular sex life. And it seems certain that no president in our nation’s history ever had a busier one than John Kennedy.

It is also likely that no president in our nation’s history has ever been a more genuinely charming human being than Kennedy—and the relationship between his adulterous frenzies and his personality is an important one. Simply put, if it were not for the latter, the former would almost certainly have been front-page news from coast to coast. The reporters who knew about Kennedy’s love life agonized over it more than their predecessors did over Roosevelt’s or Harding’s, not just because the times were changing and sex was inching its way into the various forms of mass media, but because Kennedy could be so blatant about his trouser-dropping. Not only did he do it often, but, if he was not otherwise engaged by matters of state, he talked about it often between engagements, never seeming to worry about where he was or who might overhear:

Bobby Baker, Senator Lyndon Johnson’s aide, once ran into Jack in the congressional dining room where he was sitting with a friend named Bill Thompson and a stunning woman. Thompson waved Baker over, obviously put up to it by Jack, and said, “Bobby, look at this fine chick. She gives the best head in the United States.” Baker glanced nervously at the woman, who was smiling obliviously while Kennedy was convulsed with laughter. “Relax, Bobby,” Jack finally said. “She’s German and she doesn’t understand a word of English. But what Bill’s saying is absolutely right.”

Kennedy was seen once or twice by members of his staff hugging and kissing a woman in public after a roll in the hay. Might there have been someone else who saw, a passerby or two across the street, strolling through a park, just a John or Jane Doe who would gulp in wonder and then tell all of his friends? Might Kennedy’s political opponents have been spying on him and used the information against him, as a means of “persuading” him to alter some of his positions? Might the agents of foreign powers have known about Kennedy’s philandering and threatened him with exposure unless he altered or softened other positions? Historian David Kaiser, in his meticulously researched book The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, writes, “News of the President’s indiscretions, indeed, had traveled through mob circles around the country.” In this case, Kaiser insists, there is no “might” about it.

There are some who go so far as to believe that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was emboldened to place missiles in Cuba because, aware of Kennedy’s often lascivious behavior, he thought the American president a man of little substance, a foe who would not rise to the challenge. It is true that Khrushchev had little respect for Kennedy; there is no evidence, however, that Kennedy’s extramarital behavior had anything to do with it.

To arrange his liaisons, Kennedy enlisted his top aides, who, although often reluctant, felt compelled to accept their assignments and sometimes performed them with a zany choreographic brilliance that the Marx Brothers could not have improved upon, as one woman would be pushed out the back door of a hotel suite as the next was stumbling through the front.

And sometimes Kennedy’s liaisons were arranged without the slapstick. In fact, according to evidence compiled by Kaiser, they were sometimes arranged in a way that could have contributed to Kennedy’s death, although this latter circumstance was not common knowledge among journalists. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that most of them did not know about it at all until later.

Kaiser concedes that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots at the president. But he convincingly demonstrates that Oswald was encouraged to do so, perhaps even paid to do so, by a number of prominent underworld figures. “Where did these men find the audacity to kill a president of the United States? [Government investigator] G. Robert Blakey and [former journalist] Richard Billings speculated convincingly in the 1970s that John Kennedy, because he accepted women as favors through [mob-connected] Frank Sinatra (and perhaps in other contexts as well), had lost the immunity from retaliation that truly incorruptible public officials generally enjoyed.”

Behavior like this from the chief executive of the United States was news—or should have been. But Kennedy’s manner captivated the press. They had never encountered a politician of such grace and style, and to be treated kindly, even intimately, by such a man was not just flattery; it was an honor, especially since most reporters identified themselves as liberals who reveled in Kennedy’s politics no less than his personality.

In addition, Kennedy surrounded himself not with the ward heeler types who had been the advisers of so many chief executives in the past, but with academics, intellectuals, authors, historians, artists. When Kennedy and his associates gathered in the White House it was a salon as much as a strategy session, and when the members of the salon treated the press as warmly as did the president himself, the journalists were even more flattered. Not only were they on the same team as Kennedy and his men; it was an all-star team.

And so the reporters were constantly ill at ease, questioning one another and themselves, wondering whether they were doing their jobs, whether the voices whispering in their ears belonged to demons or their better angels. They talked to one another in bars late at night, the last dregs of their drinks in front of them. “The reason we didn’t follow up [on the womanizing stories],” according to the Washington Post’s David Broder, who followed Kennedy around on the 1960 campaign trail, “is clearly because of that ‘gentleman’s understanding’ that boys will be boys—and it was all boys. Nobody wanted to spoil the fun for anybody else, and besides, the attitude back then was, what the hell difference does it make? . . . The hypocrisy was evident, was acknowledged, and indeed was institutionalized. But I would argue that it was as much self-protective of the press corps as it was protective of the candidate. What people said was, ‘Well, shit, if you’re going to whistle on this guy . . . are we going to go back and start telling about each other? Is that the next step?’”

As far as the press was concerned, there were practical reasons for not writing about Kennedy. Or Long or Morton or Welker or any of the rest of them. They were afraid that if a politician’s drinking or skirt-plundering were revealed, his colleagues, especially those who themselves drank and plundered, would be so upset at this breach of decorum that they would clam up, refuse to make themselves available anymore to journalists, as politicians in Baltimore had once snubbed the Herald’s young Henry Louis Mencken. Theodore Roosevelt, after all, would not talk to members of the Ananias Club until their mea culpas were judged to be humiliating enough. News organizations could not report the news if those who made it would not grant them interviews. The press would rather have access to those who had the scoop on international affairs than get the scoop themselves on matters of less global import like extramarital affairs.

Another reason for not writing about lawmakers under the influence of either alcohol or lust is that news organizations did not want to disillusion the public for what they persisted in believing was insufficient reason. A man’s appetites were a personal matter between him and either his bottle or his libido—weren’t they? To make public what a government official did in private was to break a sacred trust, not just between journalists and those officials, but between journalists and the men and women who read their stories. Besides, was there any way of knowing, really knowing, whether a legislator’s peccadilloes affected the way he did his job? Russell Long showed up for most of the Senate votes and voted in line with the views he always professed. John Kennedy gave every sign of growing more and more competent and knowledgeable during his tragically short presidency.

Yet another reason for journalistically imposed silence, and perhaps the most compelling, is that journalists at the time still had faith in government officials, disagreeing with some of them on this issue and some of them on that, but on the whole trusting them to follow their consciences for the good of the country. If they needed to fortify themselves with a little extra time in the bed or the bar, who was the reporter to pass judgment? What mattered were the results.

During the Vietnam War, reporters like the New York Times’s David Halberstam, United Press’s Neil Sheehan, and CBS’s Morley Safer caught political and military figures in a number of lies—about the goals of the war and its progress, about the number of fatalities so far, and the number of years that lay ahead for an American troop presence in Southeast Asia. Never before had this happened, at least not to such a degree.

Of course a president or a general would bend the truth from time to time about his position on a certain issue, or about whether or not he was going to run for higher office, about the precise strength of his troops in a certain part of the war zone. But this was something different, this was lying on so widespread a basis, misleading the American people on so many different, albeit related, subjects that it amounted to a matter of policy. Before long, the sorrow and eventually bitterness that journalists felt over Kennedy’s assassination turned into a raging distrust of his successor. Kennedy would never have deceived them, of this they felt certain; Johnson and his military advisers did nothing but. Camelot had become cornpone, and suddenly, at this most critical of times, journalists began to feel they were slumming it, no longer attending salons.

And then in 1972 the strained relationship between public officials and the press became something more, virtually a war of its own. This was the year when a band of bumbling burglars, under orders from the White House, broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. To this day, what they were looking for is uncertain. What they turned up was a constitutional crisis.

Most members of the press disliked President Richard Nixon even more than they did Johnson. When Nixon and his top aides began lying to them about the break-in, when the lies began to pile on top of one another, lies being told today to try to control the damage from yesterday’s lies, it was more than reporters would bear. Their fangs came out as well as their pens, and their disdain for Nixon and his inner circle metastasized into a wariness about virtually all politicians, at all levels, with the governmental figures in many cases feeling the same way about those who covered them, hostility feeding hostility.

And with the success of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergaze story, came a new dynamic in the journalist-subject relationship. They rose from mere general assignment reporters to superstars in a matter of months, their names on everyone’s lips, faces on all of the magazine covers, book advances in the millions and lecture fees in the tens of thousands, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing them on the big screen. When all of this happened, the lesson many young reporters took from it was the wrong one. They did not assume that the means of success in journalism was ceaseless and meticulous investigating, as Woodward and Bernstein had done; they assumed it was simply bringing down the mighty. Find a crook in public life and ride the coattails of his degradation to fame of one’s own. The hostility, at least in some cases, became positively venomous.