Last night Charles and I watched The Post, the much-hyped feature film about the Washington Post and its race with the New York Times to publish the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” the secret study then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) asked the RAND Corporation to compile as a history of American policy towards Viet Nam from the end of World War II, when Harry Truman put the Americans on the side of the French colonizers against the Viet Minh liberation movement led by Ho Chi Minh, later known as the National Liberation Front (whose military arm later took the name Viet Cong), to 1967, when the Viet Nam war was in full swing, the U.S. was heading towards its peak commitment of 500,000 troops fighting a war for reasons so few Americans could understand that as the war dragged on and consumed more and more of America’s young men as well as the national treasury that was supposed to fund President Johnson’s Great Society, the percentages of Americans who supported the war effort steadily dropped. McNamara commissioned the study — at least according to this film’s writers, Josh Singer (who also wrote Spotlight, the film about how the Boston Globe exposed the scandal of pedophilia within the Roman Catholic priesthood and the extent to which non-pedophile priests covered for their child-abusing brethren) and Liz Hannah — as an historical record that would eventually see the light of day, but not for decades to come.
The study saw the light of day in four years, thanks to a disaffected RAND Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), who in the opening scene is shown actually in Viet Nam, going on an operation with some of the troops and writing about it on a portable typewriter afterwards, in a scene that supposedly takes place in 1966 but is underscored with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Green River,” which they didn’t record until 1969. (But then ever since Apocalypse Now it’s become de rigueur to score scenes of the Viet Nam war with 1960’s rock classics, and if they’re from bands like Creedence who were publicly opposed to the war at the time, so much the better.) Ellsberg is appalled first at witnessing the action in Viet Nam and realizing the U.S. is making no progress whatever in its stated military aims despite ever-increasing commitments of personnel and equipment, then by hearing McNamara tell him privately he’s convinced the war is lost, and then hearing McNamara get off the plane that has been flying him and Ellsberg back to Washington, D.C. and give an impromptu press conference about how wonderful things are and how we’re finally turning the corner — he doesn’t use the infamous phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” but he might as well have. Ellsberg determines to steal the RAND study and leak it to the news media, and he gets it first to the New York Times — whose legendary but also notoriously mercurial star reporter Neil Sheehan holes up for three months, reviews the study and finally starts publishing articles based on it — and then to the Washington Post, who has a contact with him because their star reporter Ben Bagdikian formerly worked at RAND with Ellsberg. The principal characters in the movie are Washington Post publisher Katharine “Kay” Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), who are desperate to get their paper out from the shadow of the New York Times and establish it as America’s premier publication for political journalism, especially since they are based in the nation’s capital.
To this end Graham is having meetings with investment bankers to sell shares in the Washington Post Corporation to the public — which in this age of so-called “activist investors” who buy into a company to make themselves money even if it means totally wrecking the business in the process had me thinking of Henry Ford’s comment that “If you sell any part of your enterprise, that is the same as selling it all” and wanting to yell at the screen, “Kay! Don’t do it!” — so she can get a windfall that will enable her to hire more reporters and expand the paper’s ability to do quality journalism. The Post was directed by Steven Spielberg, who took on the project after he had completed principal photography on his big-budget science-fiction extravaganza Ready Player One but was waiting and waiting and waiting for George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic and the other effects houses working on Ready Player One to finish the elaborate CGI and other effects shots needed to complete that film. On the surface it’s a parable for our own time as well as an historical spectacle, with the heroes being the people who steal secrets and leak them to the newspapers (Richard Nixon is heard inveighing against Ellsberg — and the recorded voices of Nixon and his staff members are their own, from the White House tapes), and the newspaper people themselves, who dare to publish the papers despite negative reactions from their staff attorneys, their investment bankers (there’s a clause in the agreement that if some catastrophic event happens within the first week after the IPO, the bankers can call it off, and through screenwriter fiat that just happens to be the week the Post is considering whether to defy the Nixon administration and publish the papers) and their friends in high places. The top Post people are depicted as having close friendships with political figures that would be inconceivable in today’s far more hostile climate between politicians and the press: editor Bradlee not only regularly socialized with John F. Kennedy both before and during his Presidency but even wrote a book about it called Conversations with Kennedy, and publisher Graham socialized regularly with Robert McNamara and considered him one of her best friends.
It’s a movie that investigates not only the basic conflict of freedom of the press vs. the desire of politicians to manage the news, get their own versions of “the facts” before the public and suppress contrary views, but also the sexism rampant in the early 1970’s and still prevalent since (Katharine Meyer Graham was the first woman publisher of a major U.S. paper and, though her family had started the publication and run it since its inception, when she married Philip Graham she turned over the paper to him and he was publisher until he committed suicide in 1963 — and one of the things writers Singer and Hannah get right is the euphemisms the people around Kay use to refer to her husband’s death and her impatience with them) and the bitter rivalry between the Post and the New York Times. This becomes a major issue in the plot when the Nixon administration successfully gets an injunction to stop the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers or any stories based on them, and Ben Bradlee notes that since the injunction names only the Times and its “agents,” a competing paper would be home free to publish the story. Then he gets grilled by the Post’s attorney, Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts), over whether the Post’s source for the papers was the same as the Times’ — and Bradlee has to confess that while he can’t say for sure that the copies of the papers came from the same source, it’s highly likely. Apparently this means, at least in Beebe’s analysis, that the source could be considered an “agent” of the Times and therefore any paper that got the Pentagon Papers from him would be enjoined from publishing them. Nonetheless, after a lot of suspense back and forth and some superb acting from Meryl Streep in close-ups that show her inner conflict (in a performance that otherwise is pretty unspectacular — though she got her umpteenth Academy Award nomination for this film she’s pretty much “phoning it in” and largely repeating her characterization as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady — despite their ideological differences Streep clearly sees Thatcher and Graham as sisters under the skin, similarly powerful women who’ve made their way in a man’s world by showing unbreakable integrity), Graham gives the Post staff the go-ahead to publish the Papers and potentially piss off not only the Nixon administration but their investors as well.
The case eventually goes before the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears it on “expedited review” only a week and a half after the granting of the original injunction, and in a 6-3 decision the Court lifts the injunction and says, in the words of the late Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion (Black was an Alabama politician who is probably the only former member of the Ku Klux Klan I genuinely admire; he was in the Klan briefly in the 1920’s before his attitudes towards civil rights did a major 180° in the 1930’s and he became known as one of the Supreme Court’s fiercest defenders of civil rights and individual liberties; he also wrote the Engel v. Vitale decision banning mandated prayer in public schools, and he wrote as a believer who said it contradicted his own sense of religion to force it on schoolchildren), “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.” The Post was released in January 2018 though the copyright date was 2017, and it qualified for the 2018 Academy Awards and got two nominations (Best Picture and Best Actress for Streep), though it didn’t win and it’s really more a competent movie than a truly great one. Spielberg’s direction is professional but he relies on too many long zoom shots (and quick long zoom shots, at that) and he and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski are way too enamored of the past-is-brown look for my taste. The acting is also competent rather than great; Streep seems like he’s on autopilot and Hanks is good but he’s up against the competition from the unsurpassable Jason Robards, Jr. who played Bradlee in the 1976 film All the President’s Men. Indeed, The Post is presented quite deliberately as a “prequel” to All the President’s Men, since it ends with Kay Graham heaving sighs of relief and saying, “Glad I never have to go through this again” — and then it cuts to a scene almost exactly one year after the Supreme Court decision upholding the Times’ and the Post’s right to publish the Pentagon Papers: a Black security guard named Frank Wills notices the Watergate burglary in process and calls it in to the D.C. police. (It would be interesting to double-bill the two films.)
Of course The Post can’t be viewed out of context of the current political climate, in which the sort of open press-baiting from the White House associated with Richard Nixon has got worse and nastier under Donald Trump, who has publicly called journalists “enemies of the people,” insulted them to their faces and derided their reporting as “fake news.” Spielberg is quoted on the imdb.com page for The Post as saying he wanted to make the film because of the Nixon-Trump parallels, and Meryl Streep is well known for having made a veiled but unmistakable anti-Trump statement at the 2017 Golden Globes, where (without naming him) she derided Trump for publicly insulting and mocking a disabled reporter, and he responded with a typically juvenile tweet calling Streep — who’s won more Academy Award nominations than any other actor of either gender — “overrated.” But The Post is about much more than just the age-old conflict between journalists and politicians; it’s also about sexism in the workplace (and the boardroom), about the conflicts between newspapers and the strangely diminished sense of journalism’s importance between 1971 and 2019 — especially given the rise of the Internet and social media, and the ability of just about anyone to filter out any reporting that might conflict with their previous opinions of what’s going on in their world. The whole sense of an institutional media has been weakened over the years, partly by technological change (the Internet has not only hit journalism by breaking the professionals’ monopoly over what is considered “news,” it’s also hit journalism’s bottom line by taking over a lot of the advertising that used to be the primary financial support of the press), partly by increasing polarization and fragmentation of the news audience, and also by the increasing “corporatization” of the news business and its vulnerability to so-called “activist investors” who are interested in publishing companies only to loot their assets and make money for themselves, public interest be damned. The Washington Post itself would quite likely have gone out of business in the last two years had it not been for Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bailing it out by purchasing it outright — which explains why Donald Trump hates Bezos so much: not only is Bezos, with a net worth of between $100 and $500 billion, way richer than Trump ever has been or could possibly be, he also kept the Post going when Trump was hoping both it and the “failing New York Times” would die natural deaths and thus eliminate two of the most potentially powerful and influential media critics of him.
