Ben Bradlee Quotes
When [Lyndon B.] Johnson wanted to persuade you of something, when you got the "Johnson treatment," you really felt as if a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour, had pawed you all over.
Benjamin C. Bradlee, 1921-2014, Editor, The Washington Post, Quoted in M. Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, Putnam, 1980
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Califano was referring to his appearance on a special television broadcast on CBS on September 9, 1965, to inform New Yorkers of the administration’s actions and concern after a power failure had blacked out 80,000 square miles and 30 million people in the Northeast including New York City as well as parts of Ontario, Canada. People were initially concerned that the blackout might have been a Soviet attack
This quotation has been taken as sound advice not only for a propaganda agency but also of nations, national leaders, politicians in general, newspapers, and other media.
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.
