Free Dish by Jeannette Walls Page B

column. When the gossip columnist found out about the meeting, he went on a tear. “I say the Administration’s attempt to transform the American press into a propaganda weapon is as iniquitous as it is perilous,” Winchell wrote.
    The aging gossip columnist didn’t stand a chance against the charismatic young president. Winchell lost his television show, and by the early 1960s, his column, which was once syndicated in 2,000 papers, was now printed by only 150. Within a few years, the man who had been the most powerful gossip columnist in history was taking out ads, begging some publication to print his column. “Never claimed being a newspaperman, Mr. Editor. Always called myself a newsboy,” he said in a 1967 ad in
Variety.
“Peddling papers. Why not audition the column for one month?” There were no takers.
    The gossip industry has always involved a struggle between journalists and the wealthy and powerful—be they politicians or movie stars—for control of information about their private lives. During the sixties, the Kennedy family, through a variety of tactics,prevailed in that struggle. While it’s true that politicians have always tried to control what is said and written about them, the Kennedys’ success in doing so was unparalleled before or since. In fact, their willingness to retaliate against reporters who tried to probe behind the mediagenic family myth goes a great distance in explaining why the gossip industry—which had thrived in the 1930s and 1940s with several gossip columns in most major newspapers and during the 1950s with the aggressive tabloid magazines like
Confidential, Hush-Hush,
and
On The QT
—withered in the sixties. During the Kennedy administration, gossip largely disappeared from the establishment press.
    The mood of the times played an important role in this development. The national optimism of the early 1960s made the public reluctant to read unflattering details of the lives of political leaders. The decline of the print media and the rise of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s—particularly in its scandal-shy early years as experienced by Mike Wallace—were also factors in the suppression of gossip published about the family. But the power of the Kennedy family and the Kennedy charisma cannot be underestimated.
    It wasn’t that John Kennedy disliked gossip; to the contrary, he was obsessed with it, a connoisseur of gossip. He understood its power to make or to destroy people. He pumped his Hollywood contacts for the lowdown on celebrities; he quizzed his society friends for the latest scandals; and he regularly debriefed his friends in the press for inside information on the news business. He knew individual reporters’ strengths and weaknesses, their jealousies, even their salaries. “It is unbelievable to an outsider how interested Kennedy was in journalists and how clued in he was to their characters, their office politics, their petty rivalries,” Kennedy’s friend,
Washington Post
executive editor Ben Bradlee once wrote. “He soaked up newspaper gossip like a blotter.”
    Kennedy used his knowledge of journalists to court, seduce, and co-opt them. He granted access in exchange for what amounted to partisan loyalty, and no journalist had more access or was more loyal than Bradlee. Bradlee had lived in Europe from 1951 until 1957; when he moved back to the United States and became the Washington bureau chief of
Newsweek,
he felt likean outsider in a city in which contacts meant everything. “I had fewer politicians as friends than most of my colleagues and all of my competitors,” Bradlee admitted, “and I worried about it.”
    So when Jack Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jacqueline befriended Bradlee, who with his wife Toni Meyer Bradlee lived near the young Senator in Georgetown, the journalist latched on to the politicians and clung to the relationship at the expense of his own integrity. He wrote only flattering things about Kennedy and ignored