Bradley Ducks One-on-One ‘Gotcha’ Game

Bill Bradley, perhaps the nation’s most famous scholar-athlete, refused to take a quiz on world leaders like the one that flummoxed another presidential candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

During a long-scheduled interview, Andy Hiller, political reporter for WHDH-TV, the NBC station in Boston, asked, “Can you identify the leader of North Korea?”

“I’m not going to get into this. I’m not going to play this game,” Bradley answered. “I think these are pop questions, and I don’t think they illustrate, really, the qualities that are important to be president.”

On Friday morning, Bradley joked that he had spent the night boning up on world leaders. But when he met Hiller that afternoon, he objected to such questions.

“Clearly, it’s important to know how a country functions, its leader, who it is at a particular time,” said Bradley, who is competing against Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination. “What I’m objecting to is that this is a technique that’s used to supposedly illustrate the depth of knowledge someone has about, say, foreign policy. . . . And I don’t think that it does.”

Bradley, a former senator from New Jersey and a Rhodes scholar who was a star basketball player for the New York Knicks, said every politician would have to decide how to answer such questions. “People aren’t going to tell journalists what to do, but politicians have to draw the line,” he said. Asked about the propriety of such inquiries, Bradley said, “That is something that legitimate journalists struggle for.”

For those playing at home, the leader of North Korea is Kim Jong-il. Bush, the Republican front-runner, was asked this week to name the leaders of Taiwan, Pakistan, Chechnya and India. He got one right, President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan.