Quotes from Ben Bradlee

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be 'gotcha' journalism, but it's also good journalism.

Maybe some of today's papers have too many 'feel-good' features, but there is a lot of good news out there.

The first rough draft of history.

There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.

I give Cronkite a whole lot of credit.

The Nixon administration really put a lot of pressure on CBS not to run the second broadcast.

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.

I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.

We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury.

It changes your life, the pursuit of truth, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth. It's very, it's very exciting.

But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.

Cherchez la femme" is good advice for investigative reporters. "Follow the money" is even better advice.

I think the conscientious pursuit of happiness by itself can validate decisions to change, to try again, especially when failure to change will lead to lives of duplicity, dishonesty, and deceit.

A moment from another world! Imagine a reporter dictating an exclusive story, a lead story, sourced from the President of the United States, from a telephone just off the White House dance floor to the strains of Lester Lanin's dance band.

It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.

I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

You never monkey with the truth.

Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.

We made only one real mistake. And even then we were right.