The trailer of Steven Spielberg’s The Post is out, based on The Washington Post ’s fight to publish the Pentagon Papers, outlining what led America “into and through” the Vietnam war. Critics who have had an advance peek are gushing about its topicality — of upholding press freedom against all odds, and severe opposition from the White House — and stellar performances by Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee) and Meryl Streep (Katharine Graham). Both Bradlee, managing editor of The Post , and Graham, who owned the paper, have written on the Papers in their memoirs.
In the spring of 1971, The Post editors began hearing rumours that The New York Times (NYT) was working on a “blockbuster, an exclusive that would blow us out of the water”. As Bradlee says in A Good Life , Newspapering and Other Adventures , “Getting beaten on a story is bad enough, but waiting to get beaten on a story is unbearable.” On June 13, 1971, NYT revealed what the “blockbuster” was: six ages of news stories and top secret documents based on a 47-volume, 7,000-page study titled “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy, 1945-1967”. Graham, in Personal History , recalls that unknown to President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara had commissioned the study sometime around 1967 before he left the Pentagon.
By June 15, however, the Justice Department got a court injunction against NYT , “restraining a newspaper in advance from publishing specific articles.” Graham and Bradlee tell us how The Post got the documents, and the tense battles in several courts till June 30, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favour of the two newspapers to continue publishing the Papers. The Post didn’t initially have a copy and Bradlee recounts how national editor Ben Bagdikian flew first class, booking two seats, “one for a large cardboard carton full of Pentagon papers”, a memory that Spielberg has retained. At the makeshift newsroom at his house, Bradlee had to contend with lawyers who were “marshalling strong arguments against publishing”, reporters who wouldn’t hear of self-censorship and “the ultimate showdown with Kay Graham.” Her account is filled with tense moments. Graham’s editors kept saying, “You’ve got to do it”, her lawyers wanted her to wait. When she Graham finally said, “Let’s publish,” the room erupted in cheers. Watergate was yet to come, but as Bradlee writes, “After the Pentagon Papers, there would be no decision too difficult for us to overcome together.”
