Sundays at Eight by Brian Lamb

Sundays at Eight by Brian Lamb

Author:Brian Lamb [Lamb, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610393492
Publisher: PublicAffairs


PART TWO

The idea for the CBS documentary about Edward Kennedy was [that he] was [as] close to being an unelected president as we could have had without ever being elected. CBS said the time had come to do an hour on him [since] his appearances on television had been limited to Face the Nation and clips from hearings, but never had he sat down and talked about it. We went to him and said we want to do an hour. We said, “We hope you’ll cooperate, but we’re going to do it anyway if you don’t.” But they cooperated happily…. We shot film of the summer and skiing and all that sort of stuff. We sat down and did the interview in two places. We said we wanted to do two interviews, one up at Cape Cod and one in his office. We did the first one up at the Cape and we talked about [the] Chappaquiddick incident, and we talked about his family and it did not go well. The Kennedys are not easy to interview. They don’t like to talk about themselves a lot. They want control of the questions…. They don’t like surprises, so it was like pulling teeth. The office said, “Because the first interview didn’t go very well, we’d like to do a second.” They had already agreed to do a second one, so the second one was in his office. We are talking about policy and his life in the Senate, and at one point he had said something about differing with Jimmy Carter’s policies and there wasn’t much difference between what he was saying and what the president was saying. I said, “So why do you want to be president?” meaning because the differences weren’t so great, how would you be different than Carter?

[This piece became known as the “Teddy Documentary,”] and his responses enabled a lot of political writers who had not been critical of Kennedy before, but who really liked Kennedy…to write critical pieces of him, so he got beat up in the press. The Kennedy office explanation for his really hapless answer [on leadership] was that he had not really decided that he was going to run. It was not until well into November that he made his announcement, but everybody knew in Washington that he already made his decision to run…. [The Kennedy office] accused me of asking a lot of personal questions, which I had not asked, and they were trying to trash the interview as being unfair on my part.

The question, “Why do you want to be president?” was simply because he hadn’t made up his mind. But, to me, what it meant was that he really hadn’t thought about that. He felt that he was a natural and it was his turn, and he had ascended to the nomination without really having gone to the mountain and asked himself the questions that every candidate asks himself, “Who do you want to help, who do you want to hurt, what do you want to do with the country?” None of that came through in the answer….



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