In 1971 the owners and staff of the New York Times and the Washington Post braved imprisonment, fines and bankruptcy by publishing excerpts from “The Pentagon Papers.” The mammoth collection of top secret documents proved, among other things, that the U.S. government knew the Vietnam War was lost as early as 1965 but escalated the war anyway in hopes of saving face. Since admitting American defeat was unthinkable, Americans would continue to be sent into the jungle to die.
In The Post, director Steven Spielberg dramatizes the press’ courageous response to the government’s attempt to suppress the truth. The film focuses on the role of The Washington Post, its owner Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and its editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks).
The casting of the dual protagonists was well thought. Streep does patrician well (see Florence Foster Jenkins) and depicts Graham as a woman born to the manor. She inherited the newspaper her grandfather founded but became publisher only after her husband’s death. The idea of a woman actually running a daily paper was almost unthinkable even in 1971. She is overlooked in the roomful of men that constitute the Post’s board of directors and patronized to her face, but gradually finds the presence of mind to overrule the gray flannel phalanx and find her own way.
She is moved to act decisively by Hanks’ tough talking, hard-drinking editor. Unlike nowadays, when the wall separating publisher and editor—the business of news from reporting the news—is as porous as a cyclone fence, editors were expected to stand up to publishers and fight for the best interests of the journalistic profession, which is to say, the public interest. Bradlee’s character gives Hanks the range to be good hearted but flinty, an angry apostle of the First Amendment untainted by self-righteousness.
As usual, Spielberg is a master juggler of moving parts in a story with multiple themes and many supporting characters, including the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg (in a pensive performance by Matthew Rhys) and hard-charging Post reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk). Spielberg’s talent for boiling the complexity of reality down to a dramatic moment is on display throughout. Did crucial conversations between Bradlee and Graham really occur in the midst of her garden parties, with the Pentagon Papers’ culprits in attendance? Maybe not, but it’s good cinema.
Although anyone seeing The Post should already know how the story ends, Spielberg keeps the clock ticking and the suspense building. History tells us that Graham will allow Bradlee to publish the Pentagon Papers, despite the best efforts of nervous lawyers and feckless board members to dissuade her. But the momentum of Spielberg’s pacing and the worry on Streep’s face convince us that the ending might not be inevitable.
Two years ago, The Post might have been nothing more than an interesting episode from the past, but the issues surrounding the Pentagon Papers have gained renewed urgency. Then as now, a paranoid, unstable president with many grudges and a hatred for the media occupies the White House. The irony then was that Richard Nixon was never mentioned in the Pentagon Papers. His assault on the press was guided by fear of leaks in his own wall of secrecy. The lesson for now is that an independent press with the resources to investigate crimes and stand firm against the government is essential. Twitter accounts, blog posts and social media can’t do the job.
