Who’d be brave enough to tell this story today?
THE Vietnam War was the background noise of my young manhood, and I am now amazed to find that I, a poorly informed teenage troublemaker, had a better idea of what was going on than the US government’s official spokesmen. Mind you, they were lying, as governments so often do.
I can also remember when the newspaper business was still in its raucous prime. I loved the gleaming process by which words were set in metal, forged into huge curved plates, clamped on to enormous presses and sent out into the world by fleets of midnight vans. I can remember my desk beginning to tremble as those presses accelerated to top speed, many floors beneath.
And I once had the great privilege of living in Washington DC, that beautiful white marble graveyard of ideals. Plus, I could happily watch Meryl Streep doing the dusting, she is so good at what she does.
So I am perhaps the ideal audience for the new film The Post, about The Washington Post’s very brave decision in 1971 to publish the truth about Vietnam in face of a real danger that they might be shut down for ever by a vindictive Richard Nixon. But even if you don’t share my taste in films, consider this.
The days when newspapers had that sort of concentrated power to defy authority are coming to an end. The internet, all too easily censored and manipulated, is taking over. Without strong newspapers, all the forces of liberty and law are weaker. Is it nostalgia to wish their decline hadn’t happened?