Benjamin C. Bradlee, whose newspaper helped topple one president, says he is convinced that a sexual scandal it did not uncover would have led to the impeachment of another chief executive.
But in his memoirs, "A Good Life," to be published next month, Bradlee says he was in the dark about a number of things while he ran The Washington Post.He knew little about the sexual proclivities of his close friend and former neighbor, John F. Kennedy, and he didn't know the identity of "Deep Throat," the paper's source on Watergate secrets.
Kennedy was his source and a chum - a president who might drop in the Bradlees' Georgetown house unannounced. After Kennedy's election but before his inauguration, Kennedy sent a Secret Ser-vice agent over when the Bradlees were in desperate need of a baby sitter.
Bradlee says he knew Kennedy's reputation as a womanizer, but he didn't know the details. He didn't know that one of the president's White House girlfriends was Mary Pinchot Meyer, Bradlee's own sister-in-law, and another was Judith Exner, also a girlfriend of two Mafia figures, John Roselliu and Sam Giancana.
"I am appalled by the details that have emerged, appalled by the recklessness, by the subterfuge that must have been involved," he writes of Kennedy's predilections.
"If the American public had learned - no matter how the public learned it - that the president of the United States shared a girlfriend, in the biblical sense, with a top American gangster, and Lord knows who else, I am convinced he would have been impeached," Bradlee adds. "That just seems unforgivably reckless behavior."
In the book, Bradlee revisits the ever-tantalizing question of the identity of "Deep Throat," reporter Bob Woodward's source for many of the Watergate secrets that ultimately helped lead to the downfall of Richard M. Nixon.
Bradlee says he is amazed now that he did not insist on knowing from Woodward the identity of "Deep Throat," considering all that was at stake. Instead, he settled for Woodward's description of his source by job, experience, access and expertise.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, Bradlee says he felt a need to know and, sitting on a park bench during a lunch break, asked Woodward to name his source. Woodward did, he says, and "I have never told a soul." Woodward has never publicly identified "Deep Throat."
But Bradlee offers the theory that a Watergate buff could figure it out.
"I have always thought," he writes, "it should be possible to identify Deep Throat simply by entering all the information about him in "All the President's Men" into a computer and then entering as much as possible about all the various suspects" - such as who was not in Washington on days that the book reported a meeting between the source and the reporter.
Bradlee says things were never right between the Bradlees and Jacqueline Kennedy after Jack Kennedy's assassination. A foursome that clicked no longer worked when one member had been removed.
But he recalls how he and his wife at the time, Tony Pinchot Bradlee, tried to bring Jackie Kennedy out of her grief during weekend visits.
After one, a poignant note arrived:
"Dear Tony and Ben:
"Something that you said in the country stunned me so - that you hoped I would marry again. You were close to us so many times. There is one thing that you must know. I consider that my life is over, and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over."
"With my love,"
"Jackie."
Jackie Kennedy ultimately did remarry, to Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate.