I remembered that I wrote a college paper on The Pentagon Papers case. Sunday was its 50th anniversary.
It was, of course, about Daniel Ellsberg stealing a secret Pentagon report saying, in effect, that we had been lied to about the Vietnam War repeatedly over more than a 20-year period, by more than one presidential administration. Ellsberg got the report to the New York Times, and it and other newspapers printed excerpts from it.
The government sued to have it stopped, which was the first time it had ever done that. The case came to the Supreme Court in record time.
The newspapers won, 6-3, but it was not a complete victory. Few cases are won with utter completeness by the time they get to the Supreme Court. In essence, I remember writing, here's how the Court broke down its opinion:
- Two judges said that the newspapers had an unfettered right to print what they wanted as long as it was true.
- Four judges said that as long as the military information didn't endanger troops who were in the field, the newspapers could go ahead and print the report (the report was printed in 1971, but the scope of it was between 1945-68).
- Three judges said that the report was secret, it had been stolen and printed without the government's permission, and thus shouldn't continue to be printed.
Ellsberg has been called a hero by many and a crook by others. The Times ran a whole separate section on the Papers in this past Sunday's edition, of course celebrating its victory. But it included an op-ed piece by someone not impressed with Ellsberg's theft, well-meaning though it was.
Author Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote that first of all, Ellsberg's attempt to change the American public's view about how the war had been waged, in order to get us to withdraw much faster than we were, failed. The Nixon Administration had already convinced the public that "peace with honor" was the best way to proceed. That meant, in short, that we would withdraw our soldiers on the ground and ramp up our bombing to cover for it. In no small way, too, that paved the way for his re-election.
Ellsberg's efforts were not only futile, but illegal, like it or not. "[Ellsberg] was still a rogue actor," Schoenfeld wrote, "who, if the fundamental ground rules of our constitutional democracy are to be respected, deserves a measure of condemnation along with the celebration that he has already earned."
In terms of law-and-order, Schoenfeld has a point. But questions linger. Didn't we deserve to know that we were being lied to? Wouldn't that immorality override that of theft? Otherwise, who was going to be the purveyor of that truth and the truths that followed? And if all those lies were being hidden, without Ellsberg's entrepreneurship or someone else's, wouldn't that archive still be behind locked doors and the rest of us be no more the wiser?
Exactly how does journalism operate, though, if it has to ask permission from government to print whatever the government wants it to print? Doesn't that encourage, indeed fulfill, the authoritarianism that ex- wanted to promote? Isn't his endless bromide that the press is the "enemy of the people" become a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the government wants to call someone a foe, should we simply accept that?
The answers to those questions are contained, by implication, in another very eye-opening article in the same issue--by a Vietnamese author who knows something about the way the (then North) Vietnamese government reacted to the publishing of the Pentagon Papers.
Lien-Hang Nguyen writes that the then North Vietnamese government utilized the report to buttress its claim that its cause of defeating the South, then establishing a communist-based regime, had been the best idea. So you could say that The Pentagon Papers aided and abetted the enemy, which would support Schoenfeld.
Perhaps, unwittingly, they did. Yet, there is the larger issue: We were lied to. Had that not been so, we probably wouldn't have gotten as involved as we did. Most likely, we wouldn't have lost nearly the 58,000 killed that we did.
But the part that caught my eye was that the (now) Vietnamese government has never released any reports on how it conducted the war. "The doors are firmly shut to Vietnamese academics, scholars and students, or, more plainly put, they are closed to the Vietnamese people," he writes. The Vietnamese people are still in the dark. They still don't know.
Is that the kind of country we want? Secrets are secrets, no matter what? Vietnam does not enjoy the press freedom we have. That government is, truly, an "enemy of the people" when it chooses not to let them know something that might make it unpopular just to avoid an uncomfortable discussion.
If Daniel Ellsberg had not acted surreptitiously, would we have ever known about the study? Wouldn't it still be archived deep in someone's files as we mindlessly accepted that the report was secret as declared by someone we've never met and will never know?
I don't want a country like that. I doubt that you do, either. The battle between a government that wants to control the release of information and a press that wants people to know it as soon as it can goes on. We now know that members of the press were spied upon by ex-'s people to investigate "leaks." That's the very essence of this fight: government should not be doing that, but rogue governments always will.
That's why media must be allowed to operate as robustly as possible. They trust the public to do with new facts what it wishes. Government has a vested interest to perpetuate itself and its image; it cannot be trusted to do the people's complete business. It is messy, it is sometimes confusing, but the alternative is stifling and crushes freedom--which is of the mind, first and foremost.
Daniel Ellsberg was a crook and a hero. He made history and changed it, too. A single person, not in an elected position, can still do that. His actions created a new foundation for press freedom. It's up to all of us, day by day, to reinforce it.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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