Dish by Jeannette Walls Page A

Bradlee, Kennedy also befriended
New York Times
publisher Orvil Dryfoos and the
Times’s
Washington bureau chief, James “Scotty” Reston. As a result, neither the
Times
nor the
Washington Post
would print Kennedy’s dirty little secrets—and in the early 1960s, those two newspapers set the tone for the rest of the establishment media. In early 1963, when a
New York Times
reporter told his editor that he had observed Angie Dickinson repeatedly visiting President Kennedy’s New York hotel suite, the editor said, “No story there.” Once, when a reporter suggested looking into the Durie Malcolm story, Reston declared, “I won’t have the
New York Times
muckraking the President of the United States!”
    “Even if we had written about the girlfriends, our editors would never have published the information,” observed Maxine Cheshire, the society writer for the
Washington Post,
who was as close as the paper had to a gossip columnist. “That simply was not the way one covered the presidency at that time.” *
    The Kennedys’ sex life was not the only topic off limits. On occasion, the journalists whom Kennedy had befriended refrained from printing information they’d learned about questions of national security. The
New York Times’s
Reston would tell a story about how once, while covering the summit conference in Vienna in 1961, Kennedy came into his hotel room after a meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The President sat down on his couch. “Khrushchev raped me,” the President told Reston. Kennedy felt that the Soviet leader didn’t respect him because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “I have to show him we’re not gutless,” Kennedy said to the journalist. “The only way to do it is to send troops into Vietnam…. I’ve got to do it, Scotty, it’s the only way.”
    “Reston told me this story at a dinner party hosted by
[Times
writer] Steve Roberts,” says former
Times
reporter Sidney Zion. “Icouldn’t believe my ears. I said, ‘You’ve got to write that story, dammit.’ There were all sorts of wild conspiracies going on as to why we were in Vietnam—that it was Johnson’s fault, that it was all started by the arms manufacturers—and here was the simple, pure truth as told by the President himself. I was shocked. I said, ‘You’ve got to write that story. You owe it to the readers.’ There were other reporters from the
Times
at the dinner, and they were kicking me under the table trying to make me shut up. Kennedy was so popular among the press that betraying him by printing the truth was absolutely unthinkable.”
    The same held true for the President’s wife. When Cheshire was working on a series of articles about how Jacqueline Kennedy was putting pressure on people to donate money toward redecorating the White House, the president called
Post
publisher Phil Graham. “Maxine Cheshire is making my wife cry,” he complained. “Listen, just listen. Jackie is on the extension!” The President’s wife got on the phone and, sure enough, she was sobbing so loudly that Graham could plainly hear her. Several subsequent pieces in the series were killed, including a well-documented story on illegal kickbacks that the Kennedys had given one of their suppliers.
    Jackie Kennedy was openly disdainful of reporters like Cheshire. “My relationship with Jackie Kennedy was never one of even strained civility,” Cheshire later wrote. “In my opinion, she seemed to be acting as if she lived in a monarchy rather than a democracy.” Nonetheless, her editors refused to allow her to portray the first lady’s darker side. Once, when a reporter for another paper was interviewing the First Lady, who was hugely pregnant at the time, Mrs. Kennedy nonchalantly stripped down to nothing but her maternity panties in the reporter’s presence. “The woman’s own paper had cut the item from her story and stashed the deleted material in a vault,” according to Cheshire. She confirmed the incident and