Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bore us to death with virtuous films, first with Bridge of Spies and now with The Post, films that consist almost entirely of old white people standing around and talking, a lot. Bridge of Spies is about one honest man who makes a difference, which I guess can happen sometimes. I’d have to class the film as “unmemorable” because it was made in 2015 and I saw it on DVD and I barely remember it. But I can’t be so snide about The Post, which I just saw in a movie theater and probably will remember for more than a year or two. The Post tells a good story, often a bit “heart warming”, but sometimes better than that. But good stories and the truth, alas, don’t always go together—although if The Post had been more truthful, it might have been both a better film and a more entertaining one.
One problem with The Post is that there is too much story—and, more importantly, too much subtext. The film depicts the ultimately successful efforts back in 1971 of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom, of course) to publish the “Pentagon Papers”—a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam compiled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—without getting thrown in jail by the Nixon Administration, As for the subtext, well, this being Spielberg and Hanks, you don’t have to work too hard to read between the lines: “Listen up, America! In the old days, we had heroes—regular Joes who, when duty called, would square their shoulders and do the right thing! So go thou and do likewise! Oh, and, by the way, Trump = Nixon!”
Stirring words, you bet, but if Steve n’ Tom wanted to memorialize the real heroes of the Pentagon papers, why didn’t they make a film about the man who actually leaked them, Daniel Ellsberg?1 Or about Neil Sheehan and the New York Times, who actually broke the story and also won the Supreme Court case against the Nixon Administration? And if Steve n’ Tom wanted to, you know, make a statement about, you know, today, why didn’t they, as Peter Van Buren asks over at the American Conservative in his aggressively titled piece, Spielberg’s ‘Post’: Clumsy, Inaccurate, Anti-Trump Twaddle”, make it about today’s heroic leakers—Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning—instead of yesterdays? Why an elaborate period piece, à la Mad Men, of White Man’s America and the dawning of feminist consciousness—the dawning of feminist consciousness among the very rich and privileged—instead of, you know, Harvey Weinstein?
Well, since I’m asking all the questions, I’ll give all the answers as well, which are as follows: Hollywood is all about the box office. Hollywood never takes on a “current case or controversy” when it’s actually a current case or controversy. M.A.SH., the legendary TV show, was “about” Vietnam, but set in the Korean War.2 The gutsy, hard-hitting films about Vietnam, like The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Platoon (1986), all came out after the war was safely over. Hollywood admires “speaking out” so much because it’s the one thing they are afraid to do. The reason why The Post is made the way it is is that it’s a “serious” movie that’s meant to sell tickets. And the reason it’s about the Post rather than Ellsberg or the Times is that Post editor Ben Bradlee is already established in the public’s eye—in the old fogy’s public eye, at least—as an official badass swashbuckler for justice, thanks to Jason Robard’s classic performance in All the President’s Men, and, more importantly, the Post’s publisher, Katherine Graham, was a woman. Because these days, it’s all about the dames.
That said—and that’s quite a bit—The Post isn’t all bad. The drama about Katherine “growing" from poor little rich girl3 to gutsy grand dame—taking charge as publisher in a role she never expected to have, which fell tragically into her lap when her husband Phil Graham committed suicide—is laid on pretty heavily, but of course it more or less did happen. And, in the worst of all possible worlds—achieved by the switch of a mere two Supreme Court justices’ votes—Bradlee and Graham could have gone to jail, and the Post could have been bankrupted.
But what is interesting in the film is the attempt to point out the Post’s previous complicity in “covering” for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bradlee accuses Graham of being too close to the Johnson administration—Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his wife in particular—and she replies in kind, pointing out his bad boy camaraderie with JFK. They both first deny and then admit complicity. You don’t get invited to all the best parties by ratting out your hosts, after all, and it’s made clear that both Ben and Katherine do like parties, especially the best ones. Left unsaid, however, is that much of the kind treatment both Kennedy and Johnson received was due to the fact that they were Democrats. Establishment liberalism remained committed to the Vietnam War until Richard Nixon entered the White House. And then all of a sudden he was the bad guy, put on the receiving end of all the resentment and guilt liberals really should have aimed at themselves. Fortunately for liberals, Nixon made himself the bad guy on this one, as he would do over and over again, so they could hate him in good conscience.
The drama of the Pentagon Papers occurred when the Nixon Administration sought and obtained an injunction halting the Times from continuing to print the series—“prior restraint” being the harshest of all restrictions of First Amendment rights. The Post did take a risk in publishing its own take while the Times was still subject to the court order, and the Post’s action—and the action of 15 other papers to publish stories based on the papers—probably helped persuade the Supreme Court that upholding the Nixon Administration’s “right” of prior restraint in this case would be disastrous.
The film tangentially acknowledges but does not really address what was Ben Bradlee’s true accomplishment—getting the Post recognized as the Times’s equal in the liberal fight against Richard Nixon. The Times had a team of editors and researchers work for three months to prepare its series. The Post waded through thousands of pages of government documents and pulled together a series of “Oh my God I can’t believe they said this” quotes and packaged them in a matter of days. The Times won a Pulitzer while the Post did not. But the Post was the paper that “everyone” in Washington read and Kay and Ben were the stars of virtually every party they attended,4 which allowed them to “control” the story in a way the Times could not. In the film, there is one, brief acknowledgement of this side of the story, when Bradlee gloats over the fact that the Post’s decision to publish a story based on the “Papers” while the Times itself could not forces the Times to run a front-page story on the Post’s story. They’re covering us! Sheer heaven!
Afterwords—a lot of them
I had recently come back from Vietnam when “the papers” appeared and I remember thinking “what’s new?” And the Post itself editorialized, a little shamefacedly, that there was little in the Papers that was really new,5 nothing that could not have been reported in “real time” but was not, because 99% of the conventional wisdom in the U.S. at the time accepted all the Cold War clichés, the “domino” theory in particular, though no one seemed to wonder why it was OK for the Eisenhower Administration to accept, as seemed to be the case, the loss of all of Vietnam in 1954 when the French withdrew, but not OK for a Democratic Administration to accept the same. Lyndon Johnson, who was pathetically fearful of doing the “wrong thing” in foreign affairs, compulsively sought Eisenhower’s private reassurances that he was getting it right in Vietnam, and Eisenhower constantly counseled “firmness”—firmness that he did not display in office.
What was important about the Pentagon Papers is that they revealed the Johnson Administration’s complete duplicity in fabricating an incident that would allow the administration to obtain congressional authorization for effectively open-ended involvement in Vietnam, authorization that, once given, would be almost impossible to retract. “You want to vote for stabbing our boys in the back? Go right ahead!” Both Bush administrations and the Obama administration have been similarly dishonest in lying the American people into war. For some reason, it’s a trick that never gets old.
John T. Correll, former editor of Air Force magazine, wrote a nice history of the Pentagon Papers in 2007, pointing out rather huffily that if the Nixon Administration hadn’t fucked everything up so royally, they could have thrown a lot of people in jail under the infamous Espionage Act of 1917, whose formidable powers to intimidate and even destroy the freedom of the press remained almost entirely unexploited until the reign of former Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama. Let’s hope that, when it comes to the Espionage Act of 1917, Donald Trump proves to be no Barack Obama.6
- Ellsberg is still alive and kicking, with a lot to say. Read his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner or at least this excellent review by Thomas Power at the New York Review of Books. ↩︎
- The film version of M.A.S.H, which came out in 1970, during the Vietnam War, and made the career of director Robert Altman, was not really anti-war at all, portraying doctors acting like entitled pricks (in other words, like doctors), but the “anarchic spirit” of the film appealed to the sixties kids. ↩︎
- I didn’t read much of Graham’s autobiography, because I found it pretty boring, but she did tell one sweet story about herself and her sister. When they were young they were cared for by a French governess whom they addressed as Mademoiselle. One day they were sitting alone in a room in their parents’ mansion. A phone rang and rang and finally Graham’s sister picked it up. “Hello?” a voice demanded. “Hello? Who is this?” “This is the little girl that Mademoiselle takes care of.” ↩︎
- The Post shows us lots of Washington parties, letting us know, for example, that when Kay throws a party for “old Washington,” Ben, while he doesn’t quite have to come in by the servants’ entrance, really must stay in the front hall, so that he doesn’t disturb anyone. ↩︎
- “The story that unfolds is not new in its essence—the calculated misleading of the public, the purposeful manipulation of public opinion, the stunning discrepancies between public pronouncements and private plans—we had bits and pieces of all that before. But not in such incredibly damning form, not with such irrefutable documentation.” (June 17, 1971) ↩︎
- Wikipedia gives an extensive history of the act here. ↩︎
