It may have had more to do with real estate than fate, but the fact that both The Washington Post's Ben Bradlee and the junior senator from Massachusetts chose the 3300 block of N St., NW in Washington helped lead to one of the most productive friendships in the history of D.C. journalism.

		The Kennedys and Bradlees were regular visitors in one another's homes even as Kennedy mounted his campaign to the presidency.

In 1959, Bradlee and Kennedy met on the street of the upscale Georgetown neighborhood.

"I was out, you know, pushing a baby carriage and damned if we didn't pass each other and he was pushing a baby carriage," Bradlee recalled in his interview with Jim Lehrer.

It was the start of a friendship that would catapult Bradlee's access to the highest reaches of the government and put him in the front row for one of the nation's darkest days.

In reflecting on the relationship between reporting and the subject, Bradlee said he was comfortable with the friendship he and Kennedy developed.

"After it became obvious that we were going to see each other and going to see each other a good deal and that I was interested in him as a journalist more than a friend, that we decided ... that we had to have some ground rules -- that if he wanted something off the record, he had to tell me about it and he couldn't do it afterwards," Bradlee said.

With that basic understanding in place, Bradlee was allowed into the inner sanctum of the unfolding Kennedy campaign for the White House.

Bradlee became a regular on the increasingly frequent political trips with Kennedy and his wife Jackie. Ben and his wife Tony Bradlee also traveled to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port in Massachusetts.

The Bradlees found it eerie to watch their new friends emerge on the national stage and mount an increasingly potent campaign.

"Tony and I told Kennedy how strange it was for us that he should be a presidential candidate, and I asked him once if it didn't seem strange to him," Bradlee wrote in his autobiography, "A Good Life." "'Yes,' he said, 'until I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I'm just as qualified as they are.'"

		Bradlee and Kennedy steer a small sailboat during a visit to Hyannis Port, Mass.

Bradlee was there when Kennedy learned he had won the West Virginia primary -- critical to gain the Democratic nomination -- and dined with the Kennedys the night after he was elected president.

During the Kennedy presidency, the friendship was repeatedly tested as Newsweek magazine, which Bradlee helped edit, and the administration clashed over several stories, but Bradlee and Kennedy were able to return to a familiarity and friendship that included dozens of trips to Hyannis Port and elsewhere.

Then came Nov. 22, 1963. Bradlee was in Washington watching the newswires tick with the news of Kennedy's assassination.

He was tearfully writing a piece for the Newsweek special on the president's murder when he received a call from the first lady's social secretary urging him as a friend to be at Bethesda Naval Hospital when the president's body and Jackie Kennedy arrived there from the flight from Dallas.

"There is no more haunting sight in all the history I've observed than Jackie Kennedy, walking slowly, unsteadily into the hospital rooms, her pink suit stained with her husband's blood. Her eyes still wide with horror," Bradlee wrote more than 30 years later.

"She fell into our arms, in silence, then asked if we wanted to hear what happened. But the question was barely out of her lips, when she felt she had to remind me that this was not for next week's Newsweek. My heart sank to realize that even in her grief she felt that I could not be trusted, that I was friend and stranger."

Bradlee returned to the magazine the next morning, bereaved and devastated, to write a personal remembrance about his friend, John F. Kennedy. He composed it in one day, running under the header "That Special Grace," published two days after the assassination.

"John F. Kennedy is dead, and for that we are a lesser people in a lesser land," he concluded.

As a journalist and editor, Bradlee looked back at his relationship with Kennedy as a friendship that never mixed business with the personal.

"[My friendship] got me a lot of good stories and I understood that administration. I knew what was going on," Bradlee told Lehrer, adding that despite their relationship, "I didn't pull a punch."

-- Compiled by Lee Banville for the Online NewsHour