Good Morning.
I watched the movie The Post again recently and realized pretty quickly that the subject matter of the film is very similar to a current issue. In 1970 The Washington Post had gotten hold of The Pentagon Papers, a series of classified documents detailing that several presidents had lied to the country about our involvement in Vietnam and that government officials had known for years that the war was unwinnable but kept sending thousands of troops to fight in it anyway. Many of them, of course, did not survive the conflict or came home with life-changing injuries. The New York Times had already published several unflattering stories about the war and was sued by the federal government and handed a restraining order to knock it off. Katharine Graham, who had taken over The Post after the death of her husband during a time when women had fabulous dinner parties but did not run newspapers, had to decide whether to serve The Pentagon Papers to her readership with the clear possibility that she and her editor, Ben Bradlee, could be rounded up by authorities and even sent to jail. She struggled with her decision, particularly because she was a close friend of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who had been part of the effort to mislead the public, but ultimately decided to publish. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of The Times and The Post.
I remember, slightly more than vaguely, the fuss about The Papers and Daniel Ellsburg, the guy who handed them over to the two newspapers. It was a contentious time when military and government people were insisting that the war was going well when it was not and when senators like Frank Church of Idaho, George McGovern of South Dakota, Pete McCloskey of California, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts, and J. William Fulbright or Arkansas, among others, were trying to get the public's attention about the mess we'd gotten ourselves into 13,000 miles from home. Thousands of young people were protesting in the streets and average citizens were camped in their living rooms, slugging down cocktails so the footage of bombings and body bags wouldn't be as difficult to swallow. My children's father was a reconnaissance helicopter pilot during that time, and one night there was a news report during the dinner hour that the village where he was stationed had been attacked by the Viet Cong. I immediately called NBC News in New York, somehow got through, and complained that it wasn't fair to show a story like that and expect me to wait around for days, maybe even for a couple of weeks, to find out about casualties. At midnight, Edwin Newman, one of NBC's top-flight reporters, called to say that they had checked with their sources on the ground in Vietnam and all was well. I became a big fan of the press that night.
Responsible journalists are not the enemy of the people. They make mistakes and get things wrong on occasion, but they aren't in the business of deliberately lying to the public. They may report on what other people say that massacres the truth but they're committed to get the truth out no matter where it leads. The Mueller Report is the current document at the center of a big tug of war between government officials who are, perhaps, willing to have parts of it released with large portions redacted and those who want to learn the full scope of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. The Washington Post published The Pentagon Papers that contained all kinds of sensitive material and The Supreme Court said it was okay; in the present situation, the Court may have to decide again how much the public is entitled to know.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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