Dish by Jeannette Walls

anything potentially damaging or embarrassing. Bradlee, for example, was the only journalist allowed to spend the evening of the West Virginia primary with Kennedy, which they spent watching a pornographic movie called
Private Property
about a housewife who is seduced and then raped by hoodlums. Bradlee didn’t mention the film in the otherwise highly detailed account of Kennedy’s West Virginia campaign that he wrote for
Newsweek.
He wouldn’t have written anything, he has admitted, that would have hurt Kennedy’s chances of getting into the White House. “I wanted Kennedy to win,” Bradlee once wrote. “I wanted my friend and neighbor to be President.”
    After Kennedy was elected, Bradlee became the envy of the Washington media world because of his access to the President. The President had weekly dinners with Bradlee, telling him what subjects
Newsweek
should cover and which reporters it should hire. They went sailing together, and Kennedy had highly personal conversations with the journalist, confessing, for example, that he had always been embarrassed by his rather pronounced mammaries, which he called the “Fitzgerald breasts.” Bradlee told Kennedy what was in upcoming issues of
Newsweek,
and Kennedy would let Bradlee know what was going to be in future issues of
Time
magazine, where he also had contacts. Kennedy was often an off-the-record source for Bradlee—and the President even gave Bradlee items for the magazine’s gossipy “Periscope” section and would advise him on tactics for his political coverage. When Bradlee told Kennedy that
Newsweek
was working on a profile of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom the president expected to be his opponent in the next election, Kennedy said, “You ought to cut Rocky’s ass open a little.”
    In addition to rewarding Bradlee when he was obedient, Kennedywould punish him when he was disobedient. The journalist temporarily lost his treasured position in Kennedy’s inner circle, for example, when he was quoted in
Look
magazine discussing Kennedy’s manipulation of the press. Bradlee insisted that his comments to
Look
were supposed to have been off the record, but Kennedy banned him from the White House and refused to speak to him for months.
    In the fall of 1962, however, Kennedy needed Bradlee’s services again. At the time, a story was making the rounds—and had appeared in print in some disreputable publications—that before John Kennedy married Jackie, he had been wed to a socialite named Durie Malcolm. The “other wife” story wouldn’t go away—largely because the White House refused to directly deny it. Kennedy’s spokesman, Pierre Salinger, made Bradlee a proposition: The administration would give Bradlee access to classified government documents if he would write an article for
Newsweek
discrediting the “other wife” story. But Bradlee was presented with a remarkably restrictive set of conditions: He could not copy the government papers, he could not say he saw them, and if he or
Newsweek
was sued, they would not have access to the documents again. What’s more, Salinger insisted that Kennedy would have the right to edit or kill Bradlee’s story before it ran. Bradlee—eager to get back into Kennedy’s graces—agreed. After the article appeared, when any reporters pursued the story, the White House referred them to
Newsweek.
Bradlee’s article, Kennedy later told him, essentially killed the “other wife” story. *
    Bradlee later insisted that he—unlike just about every other reporter in Washington—was unaware of Kennedy’s infidelities. He even claimed that he didn’t know that Kennedy was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. “Extracurricular screwing was one of the few subjects that never came up” in his conversations with Kennedy, Bradlee later wrote, “and in those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend.”
    In addition to