Peter Benchley Recollections, date unknown. Tape 1.
LBJ Library
In honor of Shark Week, I wanted to share a video I came across about the author of JAWS, Peter Benchley while I was digging earlier today. The youtube link to the interview is below.
Most people recognize the iconic picture on the front of Peter Benchley's paperback bestseller, Jaws and know the movie was directed by Stephen Spielberg. But I wonder how many know Peter Benchley was a Speech writer and White House Staff Assistant, 1967-1968 in the Lyndon Johnson Administration. I wonder if people know Benchley also had a "Q" security clearance.
The taped interview is Quite interesting. At minute marker 29:37 Mr. Benchley relates he was given Q Clearance, he did not understand it and he did not want it. He says in the interview he was instructed to obtain a shredder however he did not and says he disposed of documents via the waste paper basket. Later in the interview at minute marker 59:14, Mr. Benchley hears and is distracted by a toilet flushing at which point he laughs and says "Hi, just have a pee for me." (Pee tape-where have I heard that lately?)I did say the interview is Quite interesting.
I wonder how many people know Peter Benchley wrote another book called Q Clearance.Q Clearance was not so well known in drawing the attention of the people to "watch the water" for sharks as Jaws did but it could become a late blooming summer blockbuster. The following is a bibliography of Peter Benchley's book, Q Clearance.
Q Clearance
by
Peter Benchley
In this novel the author of Jaws reveals that he knows as much about the White House as he does about the sea: a knowledge which is the 'special ingredient' in an irresistibly hilarious and suspenseful story.
Timothy Burnham works – as Peter Benchley once did – as a speechwriter to the President. He has been in the same room as the great man, but only with a lot of other people, and he likes it that way – he is that rarity in Washington, a man with no appetite for power.
By a quirk of bureaucracy Burnham is given Q Clearance, which means that every day he receives documents crammed with the highest atomic secrets of which he understands not a word, and which he has to shred every night.
Big joke, thinks Burham – but he does not laugh when for unfathomable reasons he suddenly becomes the President's blue-eyed boy. That, he knows, is more than he can cope with – except that, exhilaratingly, the terrifying old man seems to bring out in Burnham more than Burnham knew was there.
While this nerve-racking relationship is developing, Burnham meets a lovely blonde. It does not occur to him that a lovely blonde might show obvious interest in a man with Q Clearance, who enjoys the confidence of his President, for some reason other than their enjoyable compatibility.
Add to this situation a White House cleaning lady from Bermuda who is desperate to procure for her son a certificate of graduation from high school; an enigmatic caterer whose past is known to nobody (or at least, to nobody in the United States); and several members of the President's Cabinet – figures who would be larger than life if they were not so devastatingly true to it – and you have a spy novel that is pure pleasure: a wonderful balancing act between fidelity to a mind-boggling reality and a genius for entertainment.
Peter Benchley (center) with Lyndon Johnson (right)
Peter Benchley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO2jsVip5_s