‘The Post’: not the full story.

This is an entertaining film. It’s a compelling story, well acted and with a strong ‘feel good’ factor. It is interesting to speculate why it has been produced at this particular time and why it resonates in 2018. It is unfortunate that the film fails to record the depths that Nixon and his men went to in a quest for revenge.

“The Post” tells how, in 1971, President Nixon stopped The New York Times from publishing ‘The Pentagon Papers’ only for The Washington Post to take up the story. Eventually the US Supreme Court ruled by a majority of 6 to 3 that the constitution of the US gave both papers the right to publish.

Why all the fuss?

The “Pentagon Papers” were a top secret study by the Pentagon of government decision-making during the Vietnam War. The Papers were hugely damaging to President Nixon (among others).

We don’t have to guess why the Pentagon Papers troubled Nixon and his inner circle.  We have a transcript from the Nixon Tapes, recorded in the Oval Office on 14^th June 1971^[1]:

HALDEMAN: Well this thing too is clear, it seems to me it-it hurts us in that it puts the war back up into a high [unclear] tension level, but the facts in it

NIXON:Hurt the other side

HALDEMAN: Don’t hurt us politically so much-they hurt the others-but what they really hurt-and this is what the intellectuals-and why the motivation of the Times must be is that it hurts the government

What it says is…to the ordinary guy, all this looks like gobbledygood, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say’ and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the-the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong”

Why ‘The Post’ feels good in 2018.

Justice Hugo Black’s ruling contained some choice words about the importance of an independent press:-

[T]he injunction against “The New York Times” should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented … . [E]very moment’s continuance of the injunctions … amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. …{ When the Constitution was adopted, many people strongly opposed it because the document contained no Bill of Rights … . In response to an overwhelming public clamour, James Madison offered a series of amendments to satisfy citizens that these great liberties would remain safe … . In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. }The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. 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. … [W]e are asked to hold that … the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws … abridging freedom of the press in the name of ‘national security.’ … To find that the President has ‘inherent power’ to halt the publication of news … would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make ‘secure.’ … The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security … . The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.^[2]

From the start of his Presidency, Trump and his White House have sought to discredit the press and waged war on any media which dare to challenge him. Trump’s instinct for media management is uncanny. He is a genius at this. He has no regard for truth whatsoever – to him it is an irrelevance.

“The Post” reminds us of a time when newspapers were influential and when Courts could restrain a President seeking to sell the Public a lie. The film brings hope that the same might happen again. However, the game has changed and the constraints on government power in 1971 are less effective today. In 1971 news was spread by the physical delivery of printed words. The Papers themselves were around 7,000 pages of documents which were photocopied by Daniel Ellsberg who gave copies to newspapers. Some of the best parts of the film show The Washington Post’s newspaper setting department and the presses rolling, newspapers being bound and boxed and loaded onto trucks for delivery around the US. Today quality newspaper circulation is ever diminishing. Digital media are creating a new world in which the reader can have access to mountains of raw material but most of us lack the expertise to evaluate that material or to put it in context. Worse still, we don’t know which sources we can trust.

“The Post” is a ‘feel good’ movie because it ends with a reference to Watergate. There is no need for the film to say more about Watergate: the audience will bring to mind ‘All the President’s men’ and leave the cinema feeling that even Presidential power can be held to account by the printed word, backed up by the rule of law.

The part that feels less good and was not in the film.

The film would probably have felt less good but been more true to history had it told what happened to Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the papers to the press in the first place. Ellsberg was charged with offences that would have carried a sentence of 105 years in prison. His trial was halted by Judge Bryne on 11 May 1973 because of events which the Judge said ‘offend a sense of justice’ and ‘have incurably infected the prosecution of this case”.

Among ‘the events’ that the Judge was referring to was a government authorised burglary. In August 1971, two months’ after the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman quoted above, Nixon’s deputy assistant, Egil Krogh, two former FBI agents and a member of National Security Council staff met secretly. Together they planned to break into the office of Mr Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding in the hope of finding documents which would enable them to discredit Mr Ellsberg. According to Mr Krogh, John Ehrlichman, assistant to the President, authorised the break in ‘if done under your assurance that it is not traceable’^[3]. The two ex FBI^[4] agents broke into the psychiatrist’s office, forced open filing cabinets but, according to Mr Krogh, they found no documents relating to Ellsberg. However, according to Ellsberg his file was found^[5].

Many years after having served his time in prison for his part in this, Mr Krogh reflected:-

“The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.  …

[After conviction and serving time in prison] I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.”^[6]

It says a lot for the integrity of the US Government prosecutors that it was they who revealed the existence of the break in to Mr Fielding’s office to the Judge. One can imagine the pressure on them to conceal such devastating information.  How easy it would have been to ‘accidentally lose’ or ‘overlook’ the offending documents.   (Since drafting this blog the BBC has reported that in 2014-2015 in England 916 people had charges dropped over a failure to disclose evidence.  This begs the question of how many cases went ahead notwithstanding a failure to disclose evidence)

The man who inspired Daniel Ellsberg.

Randy K

Ellsberg drew inspiration from a little known American pacifist activist: Randy Kehler who refused to fight in the Vietnam War. Kehler knew that his conduct would lead to a prison sentence and in August 1969 he gave a speech at a conference at Haverford College. Ellsberg was in the audience and described his reaction:-

“And he said this very calmly. I hadn’t known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn’t what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that. …

Randy Kehler never thought his going to prison would end the war. If I hadn’t met Randy Kehler it wouldn’t have occurred to me to copy [the Pentagon Papers]. His actions spoke to me as no mere words would have done. He put the right question in my mind at the right time.^[7]”

An ordinary person who few have ever heard of, Randy Kehler, gives a talk to a small group of people in an obscure university .  The way he lived his life lit the fuse that inspired Daniel Ellsberg.  Years later Ellsberg’s actions inadvertently set in train a course of events that, through many twists and turns, eventually led to Watergate and the President’s resignation.   “The Post” is a timely and inspirational film but captures only a small part of the story.  Ellsberg’s story is as newsworthy as the story of “The Washington Post”.  We need to be reminded that seemingly insignificant people who live lives of integrity, standing for truth, make a difference.  

1. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/oval.pdf ↑
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States citing New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. at 714-20. ↑
3. See Krogh’s article sated 30 June 2007 in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30krogh.html ↑
4. Nine months later the same two, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into the Watergate Building on Nixon’s behalf and were caught red handed. ↑
5. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worlds-most-famous-filing-cabinet-36568830/ ↑
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30krogh.html ↑
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg ↑