Film provides reminder of whistle-blowers’ necessary role
The soon-to-be released movie “The Post,” starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, dramatizes the 1971 fight between the U.S. government and two of the nation’s preeminent newspapers over the right to publish a secret study that exposed decades of official deceit and miscalculations in Vietnam.
Director Steven Spielberg, determined to get the details right, summoned the whistle-blower who leaked the Pentagon Papers for consultation. Daniel Ellsberg was asked to describe everything from his briefcase to the Xerox machine that was used to copy the thousands of documents.
The former Rand Corp. researcher and onetime defense official who helped put together the report also was asked for his perspective on the enduring implications of the fight over the Pentagon Papers.
They are enormous — and are especially relevant today, with a president who derides journalists as “enemies of the American people” and pressures his attorney general to prosecute those who leak classified material. President Trump has called such leaks “un-American.” Yet the 7,000 pages in the Pentagon Papers highlighted how government secrecy can lead to disaster.
It took great courage for Ellsberg, and
then the journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post, to risk imprisonment to bring the uncensored history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam into public view.
If Ellsberg has a regret, it is that he did not act sooner.
“A war’s worth of lives may be saved by telling the truth,” Ellsberg, now 86, said in a phone interview last week. He joined the Department of Defense as a special assistant in 1964. “I wish I had done it in 1964 ... maybe the Vietnam War could have been averted. And that’s a very heavy load that I have to carry. I’m glad that I did reveal it, but it was years later when we were heavily involved in the war.”
President Richard Nixon was furious at the first disclosures in the New York Times on June 13, 1971. Attorney General John Mitchell fired off a telegram to the Times, demanding that it halt any further publication on the grounds that it would cause “irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States.”
On the day after publication, White House aide H.R. Haldeman warned Nixon in the Oval Office that the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers would send a message that “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.”
Actually, the lesson of the Pentagon Papers is that America is hurt badly when presidents and people around them divine a sense of infallibility and assume they can lie to the public or defy the law with impunity. Nixon was neither the first nor the last U.S. president to conflate national security with political security.
“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his opinion on the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Times and the Washington Post (which subsequently obtained the papers from Ellsberg) to resume publication.
The ruling had a profound impact on the balance of power between government and journalism. Most nations, including Britain, reserve the right to censor news. The Pentagon Papers ruling cemented the principle that such prior restraint is at odds with the U.S. Constitution, and that government faces a “heavy burden” to show that a disclosure would truly imperil military operations or public safety.
In other words, news organizations do not need to seek government permission to reveal government wrongdoing.
In the ensuing decades, Americans have learned of myriad scandals through leaks of classified information: Watergate, the clandestine sale of arms to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the warrantless monitoring of Americans’ emails and phone calls, the post-9/11 establishment of CIA prisons on foreign lands where suspected terrorists could be interrogated and even tortured beyond the rule of U.S. law.
These were stories the government had wanted to hide from us.
The June 30, 1971, Supreme Court ruling in favor of the newspapers’ right to publish did not stop the Nixon Justice Department from trying to imprison Ellsberg. He went to trial in 1973 on charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property. The charges ultimately were dismissed.
Ellsberg’s plight underscores the risk he was willing to assume to let Americans know the truth about Vietnam. His current worry is Trump’s saber rattling about North Korea.
“I would like every member of his administration, top to bottom, to see this movie (‘The Post’) and ask themselves: ‘What should we be doing? Should we keep our mouths shut for the sake of our careers?’ ” he said. “I don’t think this movie will affect Donald J. Trump. But it could affect practically anybody else in his administration.”
All Americans should know the story of the Pentagon Papers and what it instructs about the value of whistleblowers and a free press willing to challenge a government when it goes astray — and the folly in believing the “implicit infallibility” of any president of the United States.