This is the kind of talk that people live with in Washington, DC.

Q: Tim Leary's speculation seemed to be that if it was a murder it was connected with this public statement that Phil Graham made, apparently at a convention of journalists in Phoenix, Arizona. This is an extraordinary story to me considering the flap that one hears about JFK's liaisons with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer's name it's not a name that's brought up a lot. You indicate in the book that she had a diary and that it may still exist, that James Angleton took it. There's so much to this story that never gets talked about. May we explore it a little bit more?

A: Mary Pinchot Meyer, after she divorced Cord Meyer, moved to Washington and she was living in Ben Bradlee's garage, which had been made into an art studio and this is where she was living. And when she was killed on this tow path, James Angleton showed up at the garage at the studio. There's two versions of the story that I've heard. One is that he searched for the diary and found it and took it away, and the other is that Ben Bradlee handed it to him and he took it away. Supposedly he burned it, but people that knew Angleton say he never burned anything, he saved everything. So supposedly it still exists. Angleton is dead now, so if anybody has it it's probably his widow.

Q: There's no Freedom of Information way of accessing it I guess.

A: Not unless it's in official government files. It's a sketchbook. Bradlee talked about this in an interview with David Frost a couple of months ago and he said that it was just a sketch book and he's seen it and it only has sketches in it and a few pages of writing, but it wasn't a diary per se. Now I trust Bradlee about as far as I can throw him.

Q: NBC did a series on the JFK assassination this week and the last thing they did was roll a list of people who had been killed that were somehow connected to the JFK assassination and there Mary Meyer's name rolled by.

A: She was alive for another year. I don't know what went on in that year.

Maybe she was trying to expose something. That's something that also worth looking into. There's a man right now doing a book on Mary Meyer which should be very interesting. His name is Leo Damore and I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. I'm sure it's going to have a lot of new information in it. It's not out yet but it will be soon.

Q: Let's turn the conversation back to this term that you coined in the book, mediapolitics, the political uses of information. Is there a way that any average person who picks up the paper to read it and judge it against what is just a regurgitation of a government report or press release and what is actually true?

A: The way to read the Washington Post, and I suppose this applies to any newspaper in any city that you live in, is certain reporters of certain beats. They develop certain contacts with certain politicians, and if you know that and if you know who they're talking to every day and you can just sort of know by whose by-line is on the story where their information is coming from. So you don't read it as this reporter's story, you read it as the politician using this writer to say something. In the case of the Post, even Katharine Graham has described it this way, that the Post is the internal memo system of the U. S. government. I mean, politicians try to get things in the Post to talk to each other. To say, "I have something on you, if you don't play something my way I'm going to leak more of this. This is just a taste of what I know about you." This kind of thing. So that goes on all the time and you have to kind of spend some time studying who your reporters are and who their sources are.

I look at the Washington Post and I see a Bob Woodward piece in there and I say, "Oh, OK," like when he did the series on Dan Quayle. A seven part series on this complete non-entity, all about what a decent human being he is and even though he doesn't have brains, his wife does. It took up more column inches probably than any story they've done since Watergate, and it was Bob Woodward doing it. I thought, "OK, now either he has gotten the word to push Dan Quayle or he's gotten the word that Dan Quayle is going to be it and he wants to get on the band wagon and look like he's in on the big thing." That's the only two ways you can read it with Bob Woodward. And depending on what you know about the reporter, you can understand that.