https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/pentagon-papers-spielberg-film-the-post-celebrates-liberal-myths/
Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission. https://www.city-journal.org/html/true-meaning-pentagon-papers-15834.html
Shrouded in liberal mythology perpetuated by a new Hollywood film, the landmark court case was wrongly decided—and has been wrongly remembered.
In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg offered an account of selfless heroism manifested by the most ordinary of men — a man more pronounced in his vices than his virtues. Oskar Schindler risked everything he had in order to rescue, from the Holocaust, as many of the innocent as he could. It was a story that needed no embellishment.
In his recent film, The Post, Spielberg sets out to tell a story with the sense, again, that the plain facts should speak powerfully for themselves. But here, he has produced a fairy tale. He has offered the narrative that liberals wish to tell themselves, filtering out facts that tell a strikingly different moral lesson. The legend involves the brave owner and editors of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham put herself and the future of her newspaper at risk by doing what even she and her lawyers recognized as a violation of the law: publishing “classified” papers on the war in Vietnam. (The recent controversy over Hillary Clinton and her handling of classified material makes the story sharply relevant.) And what deepened the danger is that her editors were stirring the ire — and the legal resistance — of an administration headed by Richard Nixon.
But then, vindication: The Post could celebrate itself for chalking up a notable victory for the First Amendment, as the government went to court, trying to get an injunction to bar or delay the publication of the papers. When faced with such crises in the past, the government stayed out of court, lest it draw attention to the unwarranted release of secrets. (During World War II, the Chicago Tribune inadvertently published the names of Japanese ships involved in the Battle of Midway. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to put Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s publisher, in jail for revealing that the U.S. had broken the Japanese code. But if the Japanese had not noticed the article, there was no point in broadcasting it through a public trial.) In the case of the Post, though, the classified documents were dribbling out day by day, drawing ever more attention — and making it clearer that the executive branch lacked control over some of its most sensitive papers on national security.
It’s no small irony that Nixon himself was not inclined to respond to the provocations of the New York Times, which took the lead in publishing the purloined papers. If the papers disclosed any wrongdoing, it concerned the record of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara. Some of the documents could be read to suggest an intention to expand the war in Southeast Asia after LBJ won the election of 1964. And he did win it, in part by painting Barry Goldwater as the candidate ready to trigger a war. But it was Henry Kissinger who jolted Nixon from his studied indifference. According to H. R. Haldeman, Kissinger argued that Nixon did not quite grasp “how dangerous the release of the Pentagon Papers was. . . . The fact that some idiot can publish all of the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own . . . could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy. If other powers feel that we cannot control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.” What Kissinger had in mind were the negotiations then in the works to make the breakthrough with China. Those negotiations were bound up, in turn, with attempts to deal with North Vietnam, steer into the agreements over strategic-arms limitation with the Soviet Union, and handle the delicate dance over Berlin.
