The Post

Some notes on The Post (directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks).

God, did that take me back.  Having lived through the events nearly 47 years ago, and, now, living through another set of events that seem at least as strange as did those days in the spring of 1971.

It occurred to me then, and the thought recurs today, that the attempt to keep the Pentagon Papers (as they came to be called--then, they were just the papers) was not really directed at protecting any particular political or military secrets from the North Vietnamese, or the Viet Kong, or the Soviet Union, or China.  They all knew exactly how the war was going, exactly what the U.S. was doing.  The only secrets being kept were from the American people--from you and me.  Because making what our government had been doing in our name would have--and did--lead to outrage.

 As it is, though, then (and now) it occurs that Nixon could have released the whole thing and blamed it on his predecessors, especially Kennedy and Johnson.  It could easily have become another "the Democrats have lost," just as, in the late 1940s/early 1950s, it became "the Democrats lost China."  (A meme, if you will, that Nixon happily embraced at the time.  He could have played it as a shock, as something that could not have happened, and would not have happened, if there'd only been a Republican--him, of course--in the White House.)  Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry says "President Nixon at first planned to do nothing about publication of the study since it embarrassed the Johnson and Kennedy administrations rather than his. But Henry Kissinger convinced the president that not opposing the publication set a negative precedent for future secrets."  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#The_Nixon_administration's_restraint_of_the_media)

 Also what's interesting to recall is how rapidly the Supreme Court moved.  The initial injunction to restrain publication was granted on June 14, 1971—one day after the first publication in the New York Times.  The Times appealed, the appellate court vacated the restraining order.  And a separate district court refused to enjoin the Washington Post’s publication.  The Justice Department appealed directly to the Supreme Court, and the Court heard arguments on June 26.  Four days later, on a 6-3 vote, the Court found for the newspapers.  Justice Hugo Black wrote the decision, which read, in part:

“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

 The Justices who concurred in the decision were Black, William Douglas, William Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, and Thurgood Marshall.  Dissenting, John Harlan, Warren Burger, and Harry Blackmun. 

 The movie does a nice job of dramatizing these events, and Streep and Hanks do well in their roles.  Two smaller roles, however, were (I think) crucial to the success of the movie—Matthew Rhys as Daniel Ellsberg and Bruce Greenwood as Robert McNamara.  I also found myself wondering where they found the linotype machines and letterpress presses and crew to operate them. 

 But it seems clear that we have found ourselves again in a situation in which we have a president whose primary interest is not the best interests of our country, but rather to gather and use power for himself.  In that respect, The Post is an extraordinary cautionary lesson in the abuse of power.  But this time there’s an entire political party prepared to be complicit in that abuse of power.  We can only hope that the institutions of our country prove strong enough, again, to withstand the attacks.

 [As a personal aside.  I was in grad school at the time and had spent a good part of the spring 1971 semester working my way through a pile of things dealing with game theory.  One of which was Daniel Ellsberg’s doctoral dissertation (Risk, Ambiguity and Decision—I had to look it up), and man, that was a struggle.  Here’s Wikipedia on Ellsberg’s Paradox: 

“The basic idea is that people overwhelmingly prefer taking on risk in situations where they know specific odds rather than an alternative risk scenario in which the odds are completely ambiguous—they will always choose a known probability of winning over an unknown probability of winning even if the known probability is low and the unknown probability could be a guarantee of winning. That is, given a choice of risks to take (such as bets), people "prefer the devil they know" rather than assuming a risk where odds are difficult or impossible to calculate.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox)]