The Pentagon Papers

by Katharine Graham

  The government then tried to hit another of its points on the list, claiming that there was a Canadian diplomat who had infiltrated Vietnam and was passing information to the Americans, which was a violation of Canadian treason laws. The government’s point was that, if the information got out, this was a capital offense and the man would be executed. Here is where the skill of our reporters helped us. Not only did they write depositions, but they came up with citations proving that the alleged top-secret items had already been published. Chal Roberts promptly supplied several published books to our lawyers, in each of which the Canadian diplomat was mentioned by name along with a description of what he was doing. So much for that argument.

  In the end, Gesell refused to grant the government an injunction against the Post, allowing the series to resume. Later that day, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia continued the temporary restraining order and ordered a hearing before the full nine-judge appellate court, which heard the case on June 22. I attended the proceedings that day also. The court affirmed Gesell’s decision, upholding the Post’s constitutional right to continue the series based on the Papers. At the same time, however, the court continued the restraining order to allow for an appeal.

  The day The New York Times had published its first story, Erwin Griswold, solicitor general of the United States, and his wife were in Florida sunning themselves at a hotel pool and resting after he had made a speech to the Florida State Bar Association the night before. When he read the Times’s story on the Pentagon Papers, he immediately turned to his wife and said, “Well, it looks as though I’m going to have a case in the Supreme Court one of these days.” Much later he told me that he assumed November would be the earliest conceivable moment the case would be brought to the Court. When he got back from Florida, there was a note for him to call the attorney general. Griswold—who had been a Johnson appointee but was still serving under Nixon—said that, at meetings with Mitchell and other Justice Department officials, he consistently “counseled against going ahead with the case. I said, ‘The trouble is you don’t have any ground to stand on.’ But nobody except me ever had any thought of not going ahead.”

  On Friday, June 25, the Supreme Court granted the petitions for certiorari from both the Times and the Post. At the same time, since the Times, because of its separate route through the courts, was still prohibited from publishing, and the Post was not, the Court—at least until a final decision could be handed down—put both newspapers under equal restraints, marking the first time the Supreme Court had restricted publication of a newspaper article. What the Court’s decision to accept the cases meant for Griswold was that he had only twenty-four hours to prepare his brief, still not having seen the Papers themselves. He began to focus on them at once, arranging to see three government people, and asking each of them to tell him what problems might arise if the Papers were published in full. Even after talking with these people, he realized he didn’t have a very strong case.

  Griswold was back in his office early Saturday morning to finish preparing his brief. With no help in the Justice Department on Saturday, he and his secretary ran it off on the mimeograph machine. They then assembled the pages, stamped them “Top Secret,” and went off to court. Griswold had two extra copies of his brief, one for the Times’s counsel and one for the Post’s. He recalled being taken aback when the guard for the Papers asked him what he intended doing with those copies and when he was told said, “Well, that’s treason; that’s giving them to the enemy.” Griswold nearly had a set-to with the security man, insisting it was his professional responsibility to furnish copies of the brief to the other side. So bizarre were the security and secrecy surrounding the case that officials from the government had taken away our own brief, impounding it as top secret!

  On Saturday, June 26, the two cases—that of The New York Times and that of the Post—met for the first time, in that they were being heard together at the Supreme Court. None of us fully understood the nuances of what was being acted out in court after court—national security, prior restraint, the right to know—until we actually got to the Supreme Court. I went to the Court with Fritz and several others from the Post for this unusual special session. The government’s case was argued by Griswold, and the newspapers’ case was argued by Alexander Bickel for the Times and William Glendon for the Post.

  I was in the Post’s newsroom around midday on Wednesday, June 30, when we received word that the Court would convene at two-thirty. Everyone in the newsroom was deadly quiet, waiting for the news. Right on time, Chief Justice Warren Burger announced the decision. Simultaneously, Deputy National Editor Mary Lou Beatty heard the news on an open phone line to the Supreme Court and Gene Patterson heard it in the wire room, then jumped on a desk and called out, “We win and so does The New York Times.” The newspapers were free to publish.

  By a six-to-three vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had not met “the heavy burden of showing justification” for restraining further publication of the Pentagon Papers as endangering national security. At the Post, having regarded ourselves as doing the public’s business, we were gratified by the results and felt that the principle of no prior restraint of the press had been vindicated.

  We were also proud of the Post and its people. In a memo to the staff I said, “I know I speak for all of us when I say what a great moment this is for The Washington Post.” Ben Bradlee was equally proud. He told the staff, “The guts and energy and responsibility of everyone involved in this fight, and the sense that you all were involved, has impressed me more than anything in my life. You are beautiful.”

  We had prevailed, but ours was an incomplete “victory.” Basically, we were challenging the right of the executive branch to prevent a newspaper from publishing material we believed should be available to the public. In court, we had challenged the government’s contention that the material in the Papers was too sensitive for the public eye. We had strongly argued the case against prior restraint, but we had in fact been restrained. We were disappointed that the Court’s decree was both limited and ambiguous. Though the decision was in favor of allowing the newspapers to publish, there was, as I later said, “no ringing reaffirmation of First Amendment guarantees that all publishers yearn to hear.”

  The Supreme Court’s decision had caused enormous rejoicing in the press at large and at the Post and Times in particular, but hidden away in the details of the separate opinions were some views that were of great concern to us, having to do with possible criminal prosecution after the fact. It was clear to us that Attorney General Mitchell felt avenues of criminal prosecution remained open, and that the Department of Justice was continuing its investigation and would prosecute those who in any way violated federal criminal laws in connection with the Papers. Aspects of this threat were made even clearer to me by two strange messages received over the fence. One came from Ken Clawson, then still a Post reporter.

  A few days after the Supreme Court decision was handed down, Clawson told me he had had a message from Richard Kleindienst, then deputy attorney general. At one point, we had independently, and in an effort to act responsibly, decided we wouldn’t publish those items that had been specified in the solicitor general’s secret brief as being those most threatening to the national interest. We didn’t even have some of the volumes of the Papers that the government found most objectionable; others we felt had no news value. Kleindienst, however, wanted me to know that it would not be enough to agree not to publish the portions of the Papers that the government felt endangered national security; rather, the Post would have to relinquish the parts of the Papers it held relating to this kind of information. Clawson emphasized to me that Kleindienst had told him that the Post had been the subject of “considerable talk at Justice.” According to Clawson, Kleindienst had actually mentioned certain regulations barring ownership of radio and television properties after conviction for particular offenses. He also told Clawson that our stock prospectus wou
ld have to carry information relating to our being charged with a federal crime. It was a not very veiled threat that turning over the Papers in our possession would go a long way toward avoiding criminal prosecution. Kleindienst has no memory of sending such a message.

  The second, similar message came through Gene Patterson, who had been called by Joe Alsop. I’m not sure why Joe didn’t tell me directly, but I think he genuinely believed that I was being misled by a bunch of wild men and was doing me a favor. Joe told Gene that he had spent some time with a high Justice Department official—Mr. X. He wanted to convey to the Post Mr. X’s feelings, and those of the government. He talked about how grim the situation was, and said that the government was definitely considering proceeding criminally against The New York Times, the Post, and other papers. He concluded, referring to Nixon and many of those in his administration, “They hate the Post like poison. Knowing Nixon, I think he wants to tear out the guts of The Times, and yours too….I think there’s an even chance he’ll proceed.”*

  On Saturday morning, July 3, Ben and I met in my office with Edward Bennett Williams—not because he was a lawyer but because we both trusted him—to discuss how, if at all, we should respond to what we had heard. We decided to respond indirectly through Bill Rogers, emphasizing to him that we didn’t have in our possession the volumes that we understood contained the information Kleindienst was most concerned about. We also told him that, when we published anything from any of the rest of the documents, we would not publish information based on intercepted communications, signal intelligence, and cryptography in general, adhering to this policy as we had in the past. In the end, no further overt action was taken, but we lived under the threat of repercussions and began to feel the pressure increase as the months wore on.

  —

  IN RETROSPECT, it’s hard to understand why Nixon and his people were so upset by the publication of these Papers, which were essentially a history of decisions made before they were in power. Nothing in them was a reflection on Nixon. I believe the administration’s reaction was an example of its extreme paranoia about national security and secrecy in general. Certainly, their paranoia was evident early on. Griswold acknowledged as much in an op-ed article for the Post, titled “Secrets Not Worth Keeping,” that appeared in February of 1989, at the time of Iran-Contra, saying that there was a “massive overclassification” by the government, and “that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another….[T]here is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past. This is the lesson of the Pentagon Papers experience.” In fact, only a tiny portion of the contents of the Papers was really secret material, and Daniel Ellsberg, the original provider of the Papers, had withheld those portions from the beginning.

  At the end of 1971, I discussed the issues surrounding publication of the Pentagon Papers in a speech I gave at Denison University. I still maintain what I said then, which was essentially that we believed from the start that the material in the Pentagon Papers was just the kind of information the public needed in order to form its opinions and make its choices more wisely. In short, we believed the Papers were so useful to a greater understanding of the way in which America became involved in the Vietnam War that we regarded their publication not as a breach of the national security, as the administration claimed, but, rather, as a contribution to the national interest—indeed, as the obligation of a responsible newspaper.

  As I concluded in that speech twenty-five years ago, and as I strongly still believe:

  The sobering reality is that the process laid bare in the Pentagon Papers is precisely the process by which most of the business of government is carried forward. We may wholeheartedly embrace the pledge of “No More Vietnams,” but until we open up the system and expose its workings to the light of public scrutiny, that pledge will remain in the realm of empty rhetoric.

  —

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, the minor irritations experienced between the Post and the Nixon administration prior to this, which had slowly ratcheted up the tension in the overall atmosphere, had now turned major. The Pentagon Papers case took the continual, day-to-day sparring between government and the press onto a new level. Rulers and reporters may be natural antagonists, as I said at the time, but the Nixon administration now entered the ring with a particularly deliberate gusto. By sending the Justice Department into court instead of merely using the vice-president as a mouthpiece, they had changed the character of the fight.

  We all began to worry more and more about freedom of the press and about the Nixon administration’s imperious attitude that the authority to determine what the American people should know rests exclusively with the government. We also felt, as Ben later said, that if the press was the target “the victim is the public.”

  The Pentagon Papers may or may not have been the compelling case we all thought it was, but it set in motion certain trends. Although the case came and went, unbelievably, in only two and a half weeks, its ripple effect was great. And publishing the Papers went a long way toward advancing the interests of the Post. As Ben later said, “That was a key moment in the life of this paper. It was just sort of the graduation of the Post into the highest ranks. One of our unspoken goals was to get the world to refer to the Post and New York Times in the same breath, which they previously hadn’t done. After the Pentagon Papers, they did.”

  From my point of view, the Post and I had been hurled onto the national scene almost unwittingly. For the first time in my professional life, we became major players. Eyes were on us; what we did mattered to the press and to the country. To some degree, I gained a measure of self-assurance. This was my first serious visibility on the national scene. I was very publicly exposed, written about, photographed, and interviewed, which both seared me and to some extent fed my ego. The pressure, the intensity, and the rapidly unfolding developments were another extraordinary learning experience for me.

  The whole affair also bound many of us at the Post even more closely together, especially Ben, Howard Simons, Phil Geyelin, Meg Greenfield, and me. The editors had been wonderful. From the late 1960s, these people had worked so well together, having a great deal of fun at the same time. There was trust and affection among them, as well as between them and me. Our group was one of the great strengths that kept me going and lightened my life.

  I gained even more confidence in Ben. He and I had already created a true understanding between us, as well as a respect and admiration for each other, but until the Pentagon Papers we had never been tested publicly in any way. Ben later said that not publishing the Papers could have been a real disaster for the Post, with many people quitting the paper. He reflected that he himself probably wouldn’t have quit, “but I would have been beaten and the goals, the aspirations that we were just beginning to see would have been lost.”

  What Ben and I told each other at the time says a lot about the point to which our relationship had evolved and how much we depended on and appreciated each other. Ben had started a tradition of writing me a letter at Christmastime in lieu of flowers. I always responded in kind, but I wrote him now in the middle of the year, on the very day the Supreme Court announced its decision:

  We always write each other love letters at Christmas—but the paper over the last 2+ weeks is better than Christmas and it’s earlier too. There never was such a show—it was incredible. And it was only possible because of that extra 10% of the 110% that you and those under you put into it….It was beautiful and fun too. And it was a trip—a pleasure to do business with you as ever.

  Ben wrote me right back:

  Doing business with you is so much more than a pleasure—it’s a cause, it’s an honor, and such a rewarding challenge.

  I’m not sure I could handle another one of these tomorrow, but it is so great to know that this whole newspaper will handle the next one with cour
age and commitment and style.

  Indeed, publishing the Pentagon Papers made future decisions easier, even possible. Most of all it prepared us—and I suspect, unfortunately, Nixon as well—for Watergate.

  * * *

  * Recently Henry Kissinger told me he felt that Nixon had always hated the Post. Henry said of Nixon, “He was convinced that the Post had it in for him. At what point he got that idea, I don’t know, but when I met him, he already had that idea. He wanted a confrontation with the press. He really hated the press. As soon as there was an unfavorable article about him, he’d send notes around…prohibiting you from talking to the Post or to this or that reporter. Nobody ever fully honored it, because you couldn’t do your business if you did, but he was antagonistic to the press. It was a big mistake.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, June 17, 1972, Howard Simons called to say, “You won’t believe what happened last night.” He was right. I barely believed him, and listened with equal amounts of amusement and interest as he told me of a car that crashed into a house where two people had been making love on a sofa and went right out the other side. To top that, he related the fantastic story that five men wearing surgical gloves had been caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

  President Nixon was in Key Biscayne, Florida, at the time. His press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed the incident as “a third-rate burglary attempt,” adding, “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” None of us, of course, had any idea how far the story would stretch; the beginning—once the laughter died down—all seemed so farcical.