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What Ben Bradlee Would Think of Donald Trump
My late husband would not have been impressed. Nor intimidated. He believed the truth mattered.
By SALLY QUINN July 13, 2018
There is a big, white, two-story wall in the center of the newsroom at the Washington Post directly across from the glass-walled Ben Bradlee conference room. On the wall in bold letters in Post font is this quote from my late husband: “The truth, no matter how bad, is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run.”
What Ben believed — that lies are degrading and corrosive to the deceiver no less than the deceived, that truth is liberating for both individuals and societies — is something that at bottom every journalist I know believes. Ben knew Donald Trump slightly but died in 2014 before his emergence as a political leader whose words and values have consequences that echo around the globe.
Amid the daily (make that hourly) torrent of deceit in the Trump era — Trump lies on average six and half times a day, according to one tally, and made 29 false or misleading statements in just one speech last week — I can’t help but wonder how he would be viewing the spectacle.
Ben would not be hyperventilating about Trump, as some journalists are. He encountered plenty of politicians who tried to disguise self-interest as national interest, who suggested that exposing domestic blunders or national security embarrassments was unpatriotic. Trump has broken historic new ground for an American president in calling journalists “the enemy of the people.” But Ben would have exuberantly accepted the challenge, as many top editors are doing today, to assert the independence of the news media and to defend and vindicated the highest values of our profession. He believed to his core that lies might work for presidents for a while, but that there is always a price to be paid, that the truth emerges eventually.
Anyone watching the accelerating descent of American public life in recent years would be fair in asking: Was Ben wrong?
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/13/trump-ben-bradlee-truth-219005