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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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perfectly legitimate thing to do. Well, about four o'clock, Winnie [William] told me that Senator Kennedy was calling me; he was calling me from Fort Wayne, Indiana, from the airport, he had just gotten off the plane, coming down from Wisconsin, and his voice was very shrill and very loud and he said that he wondered whether I had heard what we had done to him the night before, and how outrageous it was that we had introduced the question of his Catholicism. And we were really shouting at each other. He was screaming at me and I was unnecessarily, I think, upset about it. And at one point when he was hitting this -- the issue of -- or was, in effect, saying how dare we bring up the question of his religion, and I said, “Well, Jack, have you seen the newspapers across the country? This is something that editorials have talked about repeatedly.”

And then he said, “That's got nothing to do with it. They're not regulated by the government. That's different.”

And of course that sent me off. And --

Q:

What did you say to him?

Stanton:

I told him that we had -- under the First Amendment -- we had every right that the press had. There comes some question as to whether the courts would have interpreted it that way, because that's never been taken to the Supreme Court, and I never wanted it, really, to go to the Supreme Court, for another reason. But, I was shouting so loud that Winnie opened the door to stick her head in to see what was going on. And I realized that that wasn't going to get us any place, and I said, “Look, you haven't seen the broadcast and I haven't seen it all. Why don't both of us look at it and then talk?” And his voice dropped and





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