Film on Washington paper’s role in Vietnam leak comes as talk of treason is back and the press is again at loggerheads with a hardline Republican White House

It has been described as a Hollywood all-star team’s riposte to Donald Trump. Steven Spielberg’s new film, The Post, headlined by Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, dramatises the Washington Post’s publication of the classified Pentagon Papers, which exposed government lies about the Vietnam war.



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But while there are well chronicled parallels between the administrations and obsessions of Trump and Richard Nixon, the movie is also provoking debate about the role of media as watchdog – and whether a similar leak today would survive partisan attempts to discredit the messenger.

Spielberg consulted Daniel Ellsberg, the Rand Corporation strategic analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers – a top-secret 7,000-page document detailing US strategy in south-east Asia from 1945 to 1967 – to New York Times journalist Neil Sheehan in 1971. It was a bombshell that revealed the White House knew it was fighting an unwinnable war.

After the Nixon administration won a court injunction that stopped the presses, Ellsberg gave a copy of the documents to the Post and 17 other newspapers. The Times and Post fought the order for 15 days until the supreme court overturned the ban in a 6-3 decision. Justice William Douglas wrote: “The dominant purpose of the first amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information.”

But the justice department still pursued a vendetta against Ellsberg. He went on trial in 1973 on charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property. The charges were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him. The Pentagon Papers were declassified in 2011 and released for the public.

Now 86 and widely regarded as the patron saint of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, Ellsberg had temporarily lost his voice due to illness this week. He corresponded with the Guardian via email from his home in Kensington, California.

Of course I’m glad Spielberg is doing this just now (sorry to say, it would have been just as timely under Obama) Daniel Ellsberg

“Of course I’m glad Spielberg is doing this just now (actually, sorry to say, it would have been just as timely under Obama),” he wrote. “I look forward eagerly to see what they do with it. Great cast.”

Reflecting on the impact of the Papers on the conduct of the Vietnam war and how such a revelation would compare today, Ellsberg wrote: “The Papers affected public opinion (already against the war, then more so) but Nixon was no more affected by general public opinion … than Trump is, except for exactly the same type of voters, who constitute Trump’s base.

“The Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, with documents (still totally secret) would be published, if someone supplied them, by the Times and Post, I believe, with considerable effect on public opinion but probably even less effect (with a Republican-dominated Congress) on actual conduct of the wars than then. (I don’t think Fox and Breitbart would be a major part of the picture.)”

‘There would be even more talk of treason’

Trump has notoriously categorised journalists as “damned dishonest”, an “opposition party” and an “enemy of the people”. His attempts to delegitimise the mainstream media have been aided by rightwing outlets such as Breitbart News which, for example, sought to preemptively discredit Post interviews with women who accused Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct.

The president has also urged his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to crack down on government whistleblowers. Earlier this month Sessions said the justice department was conducting 27 investigations into an “epidemic” of classified leaks, compared with “three per year” in the last three years of the Obama administration. In August, Sessions stated that the administration would be “reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel Ellsberg outside court in 1973. Photograph: BBC/ITVS/AP/ITVS

Ellsberg added: “There would be even more talk of treason now for the Times and Post (and 17 other newspapers) than there was then, not only in Fox and Breitbart but in the White House. More seriously, there would probably be actual prosecutions of Times and Post journalists and publishers. (I was called a traitor – though not indicted for treason, given the actual definition of treason in the constitution – by ex-president Nixon, and by vice-president Agnew while he was in office, before he made a plea bargain.)

“What is little known is that Nixon had indictments and prosecution in mind for Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith of the Times, perhaps others, until his grand jury in Boston investigation of them and others shut down for, almost surely, the same reasons as the ending of my trial. But now the grand juries would go quickly for indictments: and such crimes as warrantless wiretaps are now legalized (though as of this moment, still problematic and controversial against journalists).”

The Pentagon Papers case is now regarded as a key moment for transparency, whistleblowing and holding government to account. Lloyd Gardner, a historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of The War on Leakers, said: “It reaffirmed a tradition in the US against beforehand prevention of the publication of documents. If the government had been able to do that, it would have cast a really dark shadow over journalism.”

If a similar example arose today, “there would be a backlash and it would be a lot more severe this time,” he said. “But Donald Trump has not had a good record with the courts so far, so it’s questionable whether he would be able to squelch that.”

Ellsberg’s leak came in an era when the Times and Post, along with a handful of major television networks, were regarded by general consensus as voices of authority. Revered broadcaster Walter Cronkite’s 1968 warning that the war was doomed to end in stalemate has been seen as a seminal moment. Today’s landscape is more fractured and surveys show public trust in the media has nosedived. A Gallup survey this year found that only one in four Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers.

There’s a certain segment of the population that argues the media is ‘fake news’ and trying to get the president Lloyd Gardner, Rutgers University

Gardner said: “There’s a certain segment of the population that argues the media is ‘fake news’ and trying to get the president. I don’t think it would matter if Jesus Christ came down and read something in Times Square: they wouldn’t believe it. It’s shocking. It started out with Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’.”

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York, and author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, describes the Pentagon Papers as “an epic moment” in the role of the press speaking truth to power. But he too warns of a changed picture in 2017.

“Look no further than the Roy Moore story,” he said. “The fact the president criticises the media institution that broke it reduced its credibility in the eyes of people in Alabama. If the president promulgates the idea that media is motivated by partisan politics, it taints the information they publish in the eyes of those on one side the divide.”

Trump has also been waging a running battle with what he brands the “failing” New York Times. If the Times ran something akin to the Pentagon Papers today, Varon said, “its association with the Times would be a way to diminish its credibility in the eyes of many. It’s an age of hyper-scepticism on partisan or tribal lines.”

The Ellsberg leak did, however, contain official material copied on a Xerox machine and less ephemeral than hacked emails. Even in the current environment, it might be harder to dispute. Jonathan Marshall, a national security analyst and historian, said: “One of the things that’s crucial about the Pentagon Papers is having documentation brings an entirely new level of credibility. No matter how many sources a paper has on or off the record, having an actual piece of paper makes all the difference.”

The Post was announced in March, shot over the summer and will be released next month. Both Hanks and Streep have been critical of Trump, the latter criticising his “instinct to humiliate” and the president retorting that she “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood”. Hanks plays Post editor Ben Bradlee, while Streep takes the role of publisher Katharine Graham.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katharine Graham, left, publisher of the Washington Post, and Ben Bradlee, executive editor, leave court in Washington in 1971. Photograph: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Graham’s son Don, 72, who sold the paper to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013, praised Streep’s performance as “quite wonderful” and said: “It’s not a documentary of what occurred but I’m not about to tell Mr Spielberg how to tell a story.”

The film dramatises Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers despite threats by the the White House including the possibility of criminal charges for violating espionage laws, risking the company’s then-imminent public offering of $35m in stock, and challenges to licenses for the company’s TV stations, then worth about $100m.

“She had Ben Bradlee and every other senior journalist saying you have to print this, it’s the biggest story in the United States,” recalled Graham, who had then just started as a Post reporter. “She had lawyers and business leaders saying it’s extremely risky and dangerous and urging her not to print it.”

With time running out, Katharine Graham finally gave the order by phone: “Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.” Bradlee quickly hung up before she had chance to change her mind, Don Graham remembers.

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Asked if such a decision would play out the same today, he replied: “I don’t know. The Times and Post in 1971 proved they were willing to stand up to pressure in a most difficult situation and I think they would stand up to the most difficult circumstances today. The Times and Post were printing a story taken from government documents - it was a little tough to argue with that.”

‘The Times would have won the case’

Graham believes that the film makers’ use of his mother’s autobiography explains why they chose to focus on the Post rather than the Times. Katharine Graham was the first woman to head a Fortune 500 company. “The New York Times and especially ‘Punch’ Sulzberger [its publisher] deserve all credit for the very brave decision to print the Pentagon Papers in the first place and Kay Graham would have been the first to say that.”

However, former New York Times staff, who have spent years in the shadow of All the President’s Men, a paean to the Post’s uncovering of the Watergate scandal, have expressed disappointment over this missed opportunity to even the score. Spielberg’s title, The Post, appears to rub salt in their wounds.

James Greenfield, 93, who coordinated the Pentagon Papers project as the Times’ foreign editor, said he had spoken to the film’s producer, Amy Pascal, and she reworked the script so the film begins with Bradlee telling his staff the New York Times is on to a big story. “I was a bit concerned they were going to give all the credit to the Washington Post,” he said.

It’s a rip-off, it’s a Hollywoodisation … Am I happy about it? No. This is the tail wagging the dog James Goodale, former New York Times general counsel

James Goodale, who was the Times’ general counsel at the time of the leak, also welcomed the rewrite but said: “The focus is on a virtual non-player in the proceedings. The New York Times didn’t need the Washington Post. The Washington Post added very little to the case. The New York Times would have won the case without the Washington Post.”

Asked if this ought to have been the Times’s version of All the President’s Men, the 84-year-old replied: “It should have been the equivalent and, to that extent, it’s a rip-off, it’s a Hollywoodisation. They’re doing what Hollywood does, taking a little thing and turning it into a big thing. Am I happy about it? No. This is the tail wagging the dog.”

As for Bradlee and Graham, Goodale, author of Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles, mused: “I really think they’d be laughing in their graves if they knew they were getting this amount of credit for the Pentagon Papers case.”

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