Steven Spielberg's film about an historic battle between the press and the White House struck a chord - both because of the story's similarities to current issues, but also because of the differences it highlights in our lives between the 1970s and the 2010s.
Another visit to the cinema this week (yes, yes, we can skip all the jokes about three visits coming along at once – I am a busman, you know), to the impressively refurbished Reel multiplex down the road from us in Burnley.
The film was The Post, Steven Spielberg’s account of the first round of the battle between the Nixon White House and The Washington Post newspaper in 1971 over the so-called Pentagon Papers (round two was the Watergate scandal).
The issue was the leak of a highly sensitive multi-volume report commissioned by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations between 1961 and 1968. The report covered the whole history of the US’s involvement with Vietnam from the 1950s through to the then present time.
The report suggested that successive American presidents from Truman through Eisenhower to Kennedy and Johnson had lied to the American public about the nature and extent of US involvement in Vietnam; and that the administrations had known all along that the conflict was unwinnable, but had persisted with it for reasons of the prestige of the USA or the individual presidents.
When it became clear that the report’s conclusions were being ignored by the Nixon administration, one of its authors – a former adviser to the State Department called Daniel Ellsberg – decided to leak the report. It reached the New York Times who began to publish extracts. When the courts intervened and issued an injunction, the Washington Post took up the cudgels. Shortly afterwards, both papers ended up before the Supreme Court and won the right to publish.
The film tells the story from the point of view of the senior managers at The Washington Post, led by proprietor Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). The controversy came at a difficult time, as under her leadership the company was going public and even though she had done so for eight years, there were still doubts as to her capacity as a woman to run the business.
The Pentagon Papers contained some devastating stuff in an era where people trusted their leaders – the affair did much to undermine the status of the presidency, and acted as a prelude to the Watergate scandal which did further huge damage.
In the film, two of the most moving moments come when people realise that members of their families have been serving there under false pretenses; a young lawyer whose brother was serving there as she spoke, and later Washington Post proprietor Katherine Graham whose son Donald served in Vietnam. She gets to confront McNamara himself over that.
The film is an inspired piece of story-telling, fast-paced and full of brilliant touches. The acting is uniformly superb, but Streep and Hanks are brilliant, totally convincing and portraying a unique and fascinating relationship.
It is also a fascinating reminder of what life was like in a pre-digital age, when producing a newspaper was labour intensive and expensive – hot metal typsetting, manual composition of pages, huge mechanical printing presses which made the whole building shake when they were running. The reporter’s job was radically different too: payphones, shorthand and notepads, typing copy on a manual or electric typewriter.
In many ways, though, the issues faced by the editorial teams at The Washington Post and The New York Times in 1971 were remarkably similar to today’s. For Pentagon Papers, read Wikileaks? Answer: well, up to a point.
The issue of the freedom of the press and public disclosure versus the right to personal privacy and the need for government to think through and make policy decisions in private has not gone away in the 50 or so years since Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to release the papers. If anything, it has only intensified – witness the conflicts over press regulation in recent years in the UK.
But the biggest change of all, of course, is speed. Leak something in 1969 and it took a long time to come out – it had to be analysed, reported on and drip fed through a newspaper that had limited space every day. The courts could intervene – or try to. Nowadays, though, a whole document or set of documents, can be out in the public domain in seconds, for the whole world to read, analyse and reach their own conclusions about.
And what of the American presidency? Is it a case of ‘for Nixon, read Trump’? There do seem to be some similarities, but in many other ways circumstances are different. In the end, though, the lesson from all these scandals – the Pentagon Papers and Watergate in the USA, the Profumo Affair in the UK and a string of other incidents right through to the dismissal of Damien Green from the government in recent weeks – is a relatively simple one: it is the cover-up or the lie that will get you in the end. Swift disclosure of the truth and an apology will ultimately be much less harmful, no matter how difficult it seems at the time.
It will be interesting to see whether, in President Trump’s case, that also proves to be true – always assuming, of course, that there was a misdemeanour to cover up.
Meanwhile, if you’re bored with Trump and Brexit and want to be entertained by a cracking piece of film-making, go and see The Post.