Unlikely heroes
Film an uncanny evocation of moment Bradlee, Graham rose up to meet history
Steven Spielberg’s new film, The Post, tells the story of the Pentagon Papers, a cache of leaked documents exposing cover-ups and untold truths about the floundering U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which were first published by The New York Times in 1971, with many more following a few days later in The Washington Post. It portrays the titanic struggle between the press and the White House over the right to publish, which laid the ground for the subsequent showdown with Nixon, and harks back to a golden moment in journalism, when the press took on the lies of a sitting administration — and won. It draws its power most from an elegant portrayal of a universal truth — that most people in power will try, sooner or later, to get more of it by silencing their critics.
For those of us who knew Ben Bradlee — I worked for him in the early ’80s — he was always the editor of your dreams. And in Katharine Graham, The Washington Post’s proprietor, he found the ideal partner.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep bring them back to life. Spielberg’s film is much more than a piece of ink-stained nostalgia. It’s a reminder that in every generation, resistance is demanded from some who never expected to find themselves in the front line.
Anyone who worked for Bradlee has indelible memories. Ten years on from Watergate he was still a majestic buccaneer, always catching the tide and rising above it.
Half Boston patrician and half Mississippi riverboat gambler — as someone once said — Bradlee was hopelessly handsome and bold, a man toward whom heads turned sharply, even when he’d reached 90. His voice was frequently a bark, but always alluring — demanding attention, offering a deal, proposing a ruse or a bit of fun. Whether he was pouring a martini — “C’mon, another pop?” — or telling a hapless hack that his copy made his eyes glaze over, he was the embodiment of chameleon charm, able to morph from street-fighting editor to cultured boulevardier, a social pied piper with perfect French, an ear for a good story and an eye for a beautiful woman.
It is hard to know where Tom Hanks learned to move and talk like him, but somehow he has. The cut of the jaw, the swing of a leg and then a slap on the thigh, the steely core in his enveloping charm that would make a reporter run faster to the phone and the stubbornness of the editor who won’t be cowed — it’s all there, spookily authentic. Hanks even laughs like him.
As for the proprietor — Mrs. Graham as everyone knew her — Meryl Streep catches the transformation of a woman who never expected to run the family paper (until her husband’s suicide), and explains how it was that she came to defy her Washington establishment friends, and the newspaper’s board, to risk everything for the sake of disclosure.
The whole affair began when Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned military analyst who’d served in Vietnam, was working on the Pentagon’s study of the two decades of American involvement there. It turned out to be a government ledger of lies and deceit: illegal bombing in Laos and Cambodia, the concealment of the truth about military thinking and early signs of disaster, the reckless commitment of more than half a million men.
By the time Ellsberg went rogue and leaked a huge cache of the papers to The New York Times in June 1971, nearly 40,000 Americans were dead (with many more to come) and the country had been split asunder. Fortunately for The Post, one of its veteran reporters, Ben Bagdikian, was able to beat his own path to Ellsberg within a few days, carrying the vast tranche of papers back to the office. It is The Post’s efforts to catch up that the film focuses on. Bradlee wasn’t going to be beaten by The New York Times.
The story is one of power. Nixon turned to the courts to demand secrecy and protection, and lost. At this time in the U.S., there couldn’t be a better story to tell around the campfire. The same forces are at play as you see in The Post, and the echo is deafening. In the midst of it is an editor who won’t lie down, mainly because he’s an impatient and driven newspaper man who wants the story others don’t have and hates it when they do, but also because somewhere in his relationship with Graham, they both discovered that courage would be required if their paper was going to do its job — and that, if they failed, The Post might well fold. Bradlee found it the most exhilarating thing he’d ever known.