The Post

Newspapers and film often serve to inform the public – film perhaps more artfully – and start national conversations about issues.

“The Post,” Steven Spielberg’s new film, is an intersection of the two mediums. It tells the story of the 1971 publication of top secret U.S. government documents by one national newspaper, The New York Times, and one soon-to-be national newspaper, The Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers, as the documents became known, provided an analysis of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam starting with President Harry Truman in 1945. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who ordered their drafting in 1967, meant for historians sometime in the future to read and understand the lessons of America’s long war in Southeast Asia.

However, Daniel Ellsberg, military analyst with the RAND Corporation, a government contractor that housed one of the copies of this massive document, decided the public should know the truth. From one administration to another, presidents knew the Vietnam war was unwinnable – American boys were essentially being sent into a meat grinder – but lied about it.

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled “United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense”, presented it all: from Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, whose administration continued to perpetrate the lie while trying to negotiate an end to the war.

It wasn’t that these successive presidents wanted to see America’s sons and daughters die in a war America could not win without annihilating the small nation. It seems they didn’t know how to admit defeat and find another way toward peace with a communist government. And so, they kept the meat grinder going.

Ellsberg got the papers first to the New York Times, which published them knowing the government under the Nixon administration would react with a court injunction to stop further publication. Then the Post got them from Ellsberg. Despite the injunction – publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee knew they could go to prison and the paper could close – the Post published more documents.

Critics of Spielberg’s film argue the movie focused on the wrong newspaper. After all, it was the New York Times that took the bold step to first publish top secret government documents under pain of imprisonment. No doubt, the nation owes the Times its gratitude.

Yet, who was first to publish, while important, seems rather insignificant when considering the larger picture. The courts effectively stopped the Times from publishing further documents. The story, thus the truth, could have ended there. Fearful of what Nixon, who despised the press, and his Justice Department could do, newspapers could easily have decided not to risk publishing.

What the Post did by defying the injunction, as well as the Justice Department’s request to cease further publication, was to signal that the public’s right to know was paramount on this particular matter over any other consideration.

When a judge asked a Post lawyer whether the newspaper would have printed the plans for D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy that led to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the lawyer answered accordingly. In so many words, he said, the people who run American newspapers are as patriotic as the people who run the government – they don’t set out to put the country in harm’s way.

The Pentagon Papers were not the plans to win the war; they were the narratives about a war that could not be won, a sentiment shared by the national leaders who were needlessly sending troops to die.

Once the Post defied the government, newspaper editors around the country began publishing the documents. They saw it as a journalistic duty to inform the public about their government’s catastrophically failed policy. With this as backdrop, the Supreme Court heard the case of New York Times v. United States, and agreed in a 6-3 decision on the value of a free press under the First Amendment of the Constitution.

As Justice Hugo Black wrote in his concurrence, the free press was “to serve the governed, not the governors.”

The newspapers were free under their obligation to readers to publish the Pentagon Papers.

The day of the court’s decision, which “The Post” artfully captured, was not about newspapers winning and the government losing. It was about democracy thriving under a Constitution written by men who knew their new nation needed to be a nation of laws, not men.

To ensure people had recourse against excesses of the politically powerful, the Founding Fathers enshrined in the Constitution a free press. As a nation, America is great because of its journalistic traditions, which, while not perfect, have shed light on the darkened corridors of power.