Ben Bradlee Quotes
It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
Bradlee, Ben. A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Every military establishment has secrets that they should maintain and are not always forthcoming with facts d explanations. However, the Pentagon is so large with so many layers that there are subgroups and vested interests, prevaricate and lie, even to their own superiors. No one knows how prevalent this is, but there have be a number of major incidents where the were lies and cover-ups—usually to prevent public embarrassment to some element of the military industrial complex.
Arguably, in the intelligence world, most of the classified documents are not truthful because there are many different work products that are designed to obtain all points of view. There have been major areas were NONE of the documents on a subject were true as they were all based on faulty assumptions or ignoring critical information. None of the classified intelligence documents even hinted at the breakup of the Soviet Union for example. By number, most of the documents in the FBI secret files are raw intelligence reports and are full of unverified opinion—including biased and self-serving statements.
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was one of the most prominent journalists of post-World War II United States, serving first as managing editor, then as executive editor at The Washington Post, from 1965 to 1991. He became a public figure when he joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers and gave the go-ahead for the paper's extensive coverage of the Watergate scandal. He was also criticized for editorial lapses when the Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it discovered its award-winning story was false.
