Why Ben Bradlee didn’t investigate JFK’s assassination
I hope it's OK to post this in General Discussion since it's not dealing with the underlying conspiracy but with a respected journalist's explanation of why he didn't pursue the story. I imagine there's a fair amount of reporting/unreporting that happens today for similar reasons. The conversation comes from Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot.
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/why-ben-bradlee-didnt-investigate-jfks-assassination/#more-16650
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It was a weak explanation, and we both knew it. I pushed him again.
“In retrospect,” I asked, “do you think the Post should have taken a harder look at the assassination?”
And then Bradlee, who surely finds it hard to bullshit other journalists, gave me a brutally honest reply. He didn’t do more to investigate his friend’s death, Bradlee told me, because he was concerned about his career.
“I think I probably felt that since I had been a friend of Kennedy’s that — you know, this is just [two] years later, and the first thing that he does is come over to the paper that he’s hopefully going to run for a while — and he concentrated on that?”
He was afraid, Bradlee continued, “that I would be discredited for taking the efforts [of the Post newspaper] down that path.”
And then he added a wistful little kicker that was stunning in its understatement. If his newspaper had solved the monstrous crime, “it would have been fantastic.”
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