PentagonPapers. BeaconPress. 1972. vol.5. 04. The Media and the Message. JamesAronson.

Copyright © 1972 by James Aronson.

The Media and the Message by James Aronson

The people of this nation, in whose name and by whose ultimate consent all high government officials serve, have both the need and the right to be thoroughly informed on decisions.

Thomas Jefferson did not say that. Robert S. McNamara did, in the preface to a collection of his speeches delivered during his tenure as Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy and President Johnson, and published in 1968 after he had left the Johnson administration to become director of the World Bank. In 1971, Arthur Krock, the former Washington Correspondent of the New York Times, titled his most recent book The Consent of the Governed, and Other Deceits. It is possible that Krock had read McNamara’s collected speeches—an assignment of unusually cruel punishment—but he hardly needed to do so in arriving at his title: at age eighty-five, he had known twelve American presidents and countless cabinet officials.

A less cynical man who has known fewer presidents but more people (as distinguished from government officials) phrased it less elegantly but more pungently just before publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times had been aborted by federal court order. He was Jimmy Breslin, reporter and student of politics-in-the-raw, in the unaccustomed role of Class Day orator at Harvard College on June 16, 1971.

“I was just thinking on the way up here,” said Breslin, “that the Berrigans are in jail and the Bundys are in the street.” Since the brothers Bundy, McGeorge and William P., were so closely identified with Harvard and the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, that comment in Harvard Yard had a piercing point. Breslin continued:

This week we all found out that [soldiers have] died to keep alive the lies of some people who thought they were important. This is a very great institution here. But with these sustained reprisals hanging in the air, I just think that you might think you have something to overcome, coming out of here too.

There are many Americans with something to overcome—and to learn—in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers, not only in the universities and the federal government, but also in the communications establishment with which this chapter is concerned. Few events in recent years have been so revealing of the inner relations between the government and the communications industry. Nothing has borne so directly on the public’s right to know, a concept which for more than twenty-five Cold War years has been far more violated than honored. Few developments have cast a colder light on the credibility of the highest elected and appointed officials and, in reflection and by omission, on the communications industry itself.

For the owners and operators of the newspapers, the managers of the radiotelevision networks, and the men and women who work in the news industry, the summer of 1971 was a crisis point. Since November 1969, Vice President Agnew had been blanketing the lecture circuit with his alliterative assaults on press and television news commentators; the Justice Department had been seeking through grand jury subpoenas to intimidate reporters by forcing disclosure of their news sources; the White House news coordinator, Herbert Klein, had been attempting to circumvent a not entirely compliant Washington press corps to deal directly with flattered news executives throughout the country; the President himself through a series of selective briefings had been anointing his favorite newspapers and columnists, and marking others for outer darkness, or at least for a purgatorial interim.

This was the atmosphere in which the Pentagon Papers were published, first by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, then in relay by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and several other newspapers. The times and events would seem to have called for the most searching kind of selfexamination, not only of the factors behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers, but of the whole question of government-media relations, and the responsibility of the communications industry to the public. The immediate core issue derived from the Nixon administration’s concerted attack on the media; in a larger context, it was related to the origins of the Cold War at the close of World War II and the role of the communications industry in relation to Cold War policymaking in Washington. In this context, an examination of the communications media during—and before—the time span of the Pentagon Papers is in order.

A key question in the examination is this: How much of the information contained in the Pentagon documents was available to the media and, if much of it was, why was it not made public?

The opportunity rarely arises from a left viewpoint to quote with approval a comment by Joseph Alsop. However, on June 23, 1971, Alsop wrote:

The orgy of public hypocrisy, touched off by the ... Pentagon documents, is something that has to be seen to be believed.... In reality, any senator who did his homework and any reasonably realistic and hardworking reporter could easily discover what was actually going on, in the period covered by the Times quotations.

However accurate this appraisal, there remains the question of what the hardworking reporters (presumably including Alsop) did with their discoveries, if and when they made them. Nonetheless, there was confirmation of Alsop’s view from another correspondent who has generally expressed approval of the United States intervention in Southeast Asia. On June 17, 1971, Keyes Beech, a veteran of the Indochina theater, wrote in the Chicago Daily News:

The New York Times report ... held few surprises for the correspondents who have covered this war from the start. In general, the Pentagon account confirms what some of us knew, half-knew, or suspected without being able to document. Some of us had and wrote the story piecemeal. While we could see what was happening here, we could not know what was happening in Washington.

What was happening in Washington, as far as the news corps was concerned, was recorded in the Columbia Journalism Review (Winter 1970-1971) by Jules Witcover, an astute Washington correspondent of the Los Angeles Times. Months before the Pentagon documents were made public, Witcover wrote in his article titled “Where Washington Reporting Failed”:

While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsistencies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps’ job narrowed down to three basic tasks—reporting what the government said, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three categories from the same basic source—the government.

There was a fourth task not cited by Witcover which may be the most pertinent of all. Beyond the question of whether the policy worked, the basic question, unasked, was whether it was wise, whether it was in the public interest? The reason for the correspondents’ confining approach, Witcover ruefully conceded later, and Keyes Beech confirmed in his book Not Without the Americans (Doubleday, 1971), was that the news corps, both in Indochina and in Washington, was still enthralled by the Cold War and its central philosophy—the theory of the internanational Communist conspiracy.

The pervasiveness of this philosophy, even in the earliest stages of the Indochina question, within the media, was delineated by Susan Welch of the political science faculty of the University of Nebraska in a thorough survey of four major American newspapers from 1950 to 1956. (1) The newspapers were the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune. Some of Miss Welch’s conclusions:

It was in the 1950s, not the 1960s, that this distant and undeclared war became established in the minds of both the public and public officials as a showdown between the forces of Communism and anti-Communism, vital to the “free world”; that Ho Chi Minh was identified as a tool of a larger Communist movement, and that victory in Indochina was seen as vital to the preservation of all Asia and beyond. What the press did to help establish these views is important.... The press echoed the administration in its definition of the Indochinese situation. In only one instance was the basic assumption underlying United States policy questioned. The terms of the debate hardened at a very early stage in policymaking, and remained constant throughout. The assumptions of the administration were reiterated and emphasized in news stories and editorials alike.

Much of the information gathered by the press ... was administration sponsored, directly or indirectly.... Support for the position of the administration (both before and after the Republican takeover) as expressed in editorials was high for all but the Chicago Tribune.... [It] was reflected by the rhetoric with which the Indochina war [between the Vietminh and the French] was discussed. News stories also reinforced the preconceptions of the administration largely because most of the stories dealt with quotes and comments of those involved in the decision making.

The conservative Chicago Tribune alone questioned the basic assumptions of administration policy, largely because of the Tribune’s isolationist position. Fighting Communists at home was a worthy pursuit, it felt, but sending American men and money abroad, particularly to bail out the colonial French, was patently absurd. But the liberal press—the Times, the Post, and the Chronicle—reacted with “pre-established programs of action—helping to defend a free—or almost free—people against Communist aggression.” From 55 to 85 percent of the “hard news” items about Indochina were of this variety. When the news source was independent of the administration, and indicated that neither French nor American policy was working, the indications were discounted in the news rooms and the editorial sanctums. The timidity of the press as to the “ideological implications” involved in Indochina was presented dispassionately and clearly by Miss Welch:

There might have been a certain degree of risk in proclaiming too loudly Ho Chi Minh’s nationalistic appeal without immediate disclaimers of his status as a puppet of Moscow, or Peking. The period 1950-1956 involved an internal climate not designed to encourage those who did not see Communism in this prescribed pattern. The whole early Cold War era also tended to mold feelings about Communism into black and white patterns, with little place in the accepted pattern for unusual combinations of nationalism and Communism. The Korean struggle only reinforced already held preconceptions about the aggressive and Moscow-Peking directed nature of Communism.

The excesses of the McCarthy period subsided in the decade that followed, but the institutionalized Cold War philosophy maintained the molded feelings to keep public opposition to governmental policy at a minimum. The media went along. In his Columbia Journalism Review article cited earlier, Jules Witcover raised a significant point anticipating the furor over the Pentagon documents and the reasons for it. He said: “One can speculate how the course of the war might have been affected had more members of the Washington news community relied less on their government and more on its responsible critics in appraising the veracity and effectiveness of government policy.”

In June 1971, public reaction to the publication of the documents was based not so much on an understanding of the issues involved in the American presence in Indochina, as on a realization that the public had been lied to for years. The reaction could not be based on an understanding of the issues because the issues had rarely been presented in a manner that would enable the public to form opinions or reach judgments about the events that shaped the issues. Therefore, in the news stories and editorials about the documents, far more stress was placed on the circumstances involved in obtaining and publishing the documents, and on freedom of the press, than on the contents of the documents. The core issue thus was never fully discussed.

There was a defensive echo of Witcover’s comment in a retrospective editorial in the New York Times, appropriately on July 4, 1971. It said:

Even if these secret decisions, now being revealed in the Pentagon Papers, had been generally understood by the public at the time, we are not at all sure that in the climate of those days, the results would have been any different. Given the fear of Communist penetration and aggression thoughout the ‘50s and most of the ‘60s, it is quite likely that the American public would have supported the basic rationale of escalation even if the respective administrations had been as forthcoming as democratic procedures demanded.

The Times may be sound in this conclusion, but the uneasy question implied is neither asked nor answered directly. Did not the vast majority of the United States media—including the New York Times—advance the myth of the international Communist conspiracy and help engender the atmosphere of fear? They did not dispute Joe McCarthy’s ends—only his methods. They worried far more about damage to American prestige abroad—that is, the credibility of American policy—than damage to Americans and American principles of freedom at home. They did not report on the open and systematic violations by the United States of the Geneva agreements of 1954 (though they did publish the government’s denials), or the reasons for the rise of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Nor did they demand withdrawal of American support for a brutal and corrupt administration in Saigon—until the situation became so untenable that even the administration was forced to take action. The case history of the media and Ngo Dinh Diem, whose life and death figure so prominently in the Pentagon documents, is instructive.

For the American public, the myth of Ngo Dinh Diem seems to have been fashioned in equal measure by Cardinal Spellman, Michigan State University (acting on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency), and a group of publicists led by Joseph H. Buttinger, an Austrian anti-Communist who had won the favor of Colonel Edward M. Lansdale, the CIA chief in Vietnam in the 1950s. Thus, when Diem came to the United States in 1957, as the President of the Republic of South Vietnam, the communications media were prepared to do somersaults for him on the welcoming red carpet—and did.

The New York Times declared that “by establishing democratic forms. President Diem had carved a deep niche in official esteem in Washington.” A New York City banquet was presided over by Henry Luce of Time, and Life applauded his “great accomplishment” in abrogating the 1956 elections, ordered under the Geneva agreements, to decide the future of Vietnam. The Reporter magazine and the New Leader (which had provided two of its editors for the executive committee of the American Friends of Vietnam, along with Max Lerner and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) were effusive in their praise. In 1960, he was still “doughty little Diem” to Time, and Newsweek’^ Ernest K. Lindley described him as “one of Asia’s ablest leaders.”

Thus it went through the period of blatant repression by Diem of all political opposition and the consequent rise of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. These developments went almost entirely unreported in the American press, except for a few left-wing weeklies. Wilfred Burchett, as a correspondent of the National Guardian and a contributor to newspapers abroad, set up a home base in Cambodia and traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia. He was a frequent visitor to North Vietnam (long before any other Western correspondents were there) and was permitted into areas of South Vietnam controlled by the Liberation Front. His cabled and airmailed dispatches appeared regularly in the National Guardian, whose editors regularly had extra proofs run off and handdelivered to the daily newspapers in New York and the wire services. They were ignored.

Occasionally a Burchett report which had been published in the Asahi Shimbun of Tokyo (circulation 5 million) was relayed back to the United States, where it appeared in abbreviated fashion in a few newspapers. Later, when the war was admittedly going badly for the United States forces, and when it became apparent that Burchett had access to authoritative information in both North and South Vietnam, the Associated Press requested articles from him which appeared with an italic precede describing him as a “Communist journalist,” and warning that his dispatches should be read with that in mind. Burchett protested to the Associated Press and the description was modified to “a journalist close to Communist leaders.” In the United States press, the description did not disappear until the late 1960s. Yet while Burchett escaped from his precede, the American public was still a prisoner of the prejudices of newspaper editors and publishers.

By 1962 it was clear to the New York Times, at least, that something was going terribly wrong in Vietnam, and it sent one of its ablest reporters. Homer Bigart, to Vietnam (it was he who coined the slogan “Sink or Swim With Ngo Dinh Diem”). Bigart became involved in what became known as the “second war” in Vietnam—the war of the correspondents against the combined United States-Vietnamese authority in Saigon. In fact, it was not a war at all, but a serious conflict between some correspondents (2) and almost all official functionaries as to how to carry out American policy most efficiently—in brief, how to win the war in the shortest possible time. This is not to deny that there were first-rate examples of honest and courageous reporting both in the field and in Saigon. But what was so painfully apparent was the contradiction between the reporting of the best of the correspondents and the conclusions they drew from their own reportage, both about United States policy and the aspirations of the Vietnamese people.

By insisting on presenting to the American public the facts about the Diem government, the “Young Turks” in Vietnam (as they were called) hastened a review of Washington’s tactics, but not its policy. That policy for Indochina has remained unaltered from President Kennedy’s decision in 1961 to corrimit forces in depth to Vietnam until this day. The group of remarkably able and dedicated newspapermen assigned to Saigon in the years 1962-1963 strove mightily to make the American public aware that the “Miracle of Dierh” was a costly myth, and that a change was needed. Their goal, however, was not an end to United States intervention, but reform of that intervention to attain an American victory.

This was reflected in the writings of Halberstam, Browne, and Sheehan after their tours of duty in Vietnam. In 1967, Browne had moved from acceptance of the “credible” American presence in Vietnam (expressed in 1966) to an anguished conclusion that “Asia and America seem doomed to play out the tragic drama to the end.” (3) In 1965, David Halberstam said the United States could not agree to a neutral Vietnam which would create a “vacuum” for Communist “subversion.” Withdrawal would encourage the “enemies” of the West to attempt “insurgencies like the ones in Vietnam” throughout the world. (4) In 1966, Sheehan conceded that “the military junta in Vietnam would not last a week without American bayonets to protect it.” But, he said, there was no alternative to the American strategy to “continue to prosecute the war,” and to develop a “killing machine” to be turned on the enemy “in the hope that over the years enough killing will be done to force the enemy’s collapse through exhaustion and despair.” (5)

There is no doubt that Sheehan and Browne (both now on the staff of the New York Times, as is Charles Mohr) have come a far way from their despairing and limited views of the middle 1960s. So has Halberstam, and it was ironic in its way that Sheehan became so intimately involved in the publication of the Pentagon documents, and that he and Halberstam were called to appear before a federal grand jury in Boston in the fishing expedition following the disclosure by Dr. Daniel Ellsberg that he had given the documents to the New York Times. Perhaps purposeful would be a better description than ironic, for the vindictive arm of government is long, and the malice of government officials seeking to cover their tracks (as so many of the civilian strategists of Vietnam policy have been seeking to do) is pervasive. Sheehan and Halberstam, after all, committed the cardinal sin: they refused as reporters to “get on the team,” and that, at any stage of governmental operations, is an unforgivable act.

Perhaps a clue to the limitations of even the best of the reporters in Vietnam in the 1960s—in addition to their lack of historical perspective and knowledge of the area they were covering—may be found in an examination of journalism’s unwritten and adjustable rules of objectivity. According to these rules, the only reliable sources of information about Indochina were untainted “free world” centers, and most central of all was the government of the United States. Sources of information outside the government were suspect, and radical sources almost entirely rejected. The most distinguished Asian scholars had not quite recovered their acceptability lost during the McCarthy years (6) and, besides, they almost universally disapproved of the American intervention. Why go to them for background when abstracts of State Department white papers abounded?

Correspondents of left-wing American journals and respected European correspondents like Jean Lacouture and the commentators of Le Monde were rarely quoted. The radicals, of course, wanted the Vietnamese to “win,” and the French, once they were out, wanted the Americans to “lose,” because France too had lost.

When Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, in a startling series of dispatches from North Vietnam at the turn of 1967, discredited Washington’s denials of bombings near Hanoi, and confirmed the Burchett reports that had been appearing regularly in the National Guardian, he was charged by Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post with using a subversive typewriter in the service of Ho Chi Minh. The campaign of venom against him by his own colleagues was almost unprecedented (the Times itself, in its devotion to balance and objectivity in the news, featured on page one an article by Hanson Baldwin, its military affairs analyst, taking sharp issue with the findings of Salisbury on the scene in North Vietnam). Salisbury was deprived of a Pulitzer Prize for his series when the Pulitzer board blatantly overruled the committee of editors who had selected Salisbury for the award.

There was an echo of all this at the Paris talks on Vietnam in June 1971. Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (which the New York Times still calls the Vietcong), said that the Pentagon documents “confirm a truth that we have often expressed at this table, to wit, that the American administration ... conceived plans for unleashing war and spreading it stage by stage.”

The North Vietnamese delegate at the same session produced a white paper — published on July 10, 1965, in English among other languages, and broadcast to the world over Radio Hanoi—entitled ““Twenty Years of American Aggression and Intervention in Vietnam.” It was a document of remarkable accuracy, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrate. Included was a description of the infamous Plan No. 6, drawn up by Walt W. Rostow, then chairman of the State Department’s Planning Council, calling for increasing commitments of United States ground forces and air power.

In December 1965, Nguyen Huu Tho, chairman of the National Liberation Front, said in a statement (confirmed by the Pentagon documents) that the United States was operating under a “McNamara Plan” aimed at “pacifying the south within the two years of 1964-1965, and representing a new and greater effort to improve the critical situation of the puppet government and forces, and to concentrate their forces on pacifying the main areas under the Front’s control.” Such statements, said Erwin Knoll, (7) “received scant attention in the American media. They were merely ‘Communist propaganda,’ and our government, which knew better, hardly bothered to issue rebuttals.”

The July 1965 white paper was available to the American press immediately after it was published. It was the subject at the time of both a leading news article and an editorial in the National Guardian. No American newspaper of general circulation used it. But Vietnamese were not the only pariahs for the American media. Even certified non-Communist Americans foolhardy enough to be skeptical of or oppose administration policy or pronouncements were ignored or discredited. Consider the story of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964.

I. F. Stone in his weekly newsletter, (8) almost alone among the Washington press corps, presented evidence immediately after the event indicating that the alleged attack by North Vietnamese gunboats against the United States fleet was a fraud. His reports were ignored by his colleagues who, years later, would review his books (based largely on his earlier published material) and honor him as the conscience of the Washington press corps. But the post-mortem flattery smacked of confession-booth relief and even caste condescension. This tenacious little bulldog, as they like to call him, was eminently qualified to be the mascot of the White House Correspondents Association, but never a member. Not that Stone had ever wanted in.

On August 5, 1964, Secretary McNamara held a news conference—maps, pointers, and field-grade flunkies at his elbow—to explain in his computerized fashion what had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. There was not one probing question from the reporters, although it might have seemed inconceivable to at least some of them that two little North Vietnamese gunboats would seek out and attack the mighty American fleet, knowing full well what the reprisal would be.

The New York Times, after Tonkin, saw in the alleged attack “an ominous perspective ... the beginning of a mad adventure by the North Vietnamese Communists.” The mad adventures, however, were on the other side—a fact which became clear in the American escalation of the war immediately thereafter. And the calculated fraud was exposed further in statements by members of the crews of the United States vessels involved in the incident, long before the Pentagon Papers were published.

Dissenting legislators (there were few enough of them then) fared little better than Stone. On August 10, 1964, Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska who, with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, five days earlier had cast the only dissenting votes against the Tonkin Gulf resolution, delivered the first speech on the Senate floor advocating withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The speech was a reasoned and factual presentation of the circumstances of American involvement. The next morning Gruening sought out newspaper accounts of his speech. There was not a line about it in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. Had he been able to repeat the exercise with most if not all other newspapers in the country that day, the search would have been equally futile.

A significant indicator of the communication media’s attitude during the 1950s and 1960s was provided in the New York Times editorial of July 4, 1971. “We do not think,” it said, “that the respective officials involved made recommendations or took decisions that they did not conscientiously believe to be in the public interest. As an early opponent of the escalation of American military force in Vietnam, this newspaper has never attacked the motives of those leaders....”

The key words here are escalation and motives. The Times did not oppose intervention in Indochina, as we have seen. On the contrary, it endorsed it with exhortation to victory (“Thomas Jefferson would have no quarrel” with /Ngo Dinh Diem’s definition of democracy, it said as far back as 1957). The Times did begin to oppose escalation when it became apparent that there could be no military victory in Indochina. Similarly, it never questioned the motives of the succeeding administrations because it subscribed wholeheartedly to the policies being motivated.

Speculation is a doubtful practice at best. But we should include the period before 1960, for which a reasonable speculation might be: If the communications media had presented the history of Indochina and the aspirations of its peoples; if they had opened their facilities to the opponents of developing Cold War policy to encourage a public debate based on realities and not on myth — if they had done these things, would the government, confronted with an informed public, have dared to embark on a venture which has cost millions of Indochinese lives, thousands of American lives, incredible destruction of the lifegiving land of Indochina, and incalculable damage to the spiritual fabric of American life?

This leads to a central question about the publication of the documents bearing directly upon the responsibility of the communications industry and the public’s right to know. The revelations dealt with events that had occurred before 1968. In response to the government’s charge that publication was damaging to the security interests of the country, the Times responded editorially on June 16, the day after publication had been suspended:

It is in the interest of the people of this country to be informed.... A fundamental responsibility of the press in this democracy is to publish information that helps the people of the United States to understand the processes of their own government, especially when these processes have been clouded over in a veil of public dissimulation and even deception.... Once this material fell into our hands, it was not only in the interest of the American people to publish it but, even more emphatically, it would have been an abnegation of responsibility not to have published it.

Obviously the Times would not have made this decision if there had been any reason to believe that publication would have endangered the life of a single American soldier or in any way threatened the security of our country or the peace of the world. The documents in question belong to history.... Their publication could not conceivably damage American security interests, much less the lives of Americans or Indochinese.

Five days later, when the Washington Post began publication, the Times emphasized again that the documents “in no way affect current plans, operations. or policy; and there seems no longer any justification for these papers ... to bear the kind of classification that keeps them from general public access.” The next day, June 22, the Boston Globe began its publication of parts of the documents not yet published. Its editorial likewise assured its readers that “the nation’s security” was not involved in publication.

The implication here was that neither the Times nor the Globe nor, perhaps, any other newspaper would publish classified material relating to current or future events, no matter how salutary to the national interest public knowledge of that material might be. The conclusion was that the Times, in any case, had not altered its policy in regard to such information since the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.

It will be recalled that in April 1961, Times correspondent Tad Szulc came into possession of information in Florida that a United States financed and supported invasion of Cuba was imminent. The Times, at the request of the White House and largely on the advice of James Reston, then Washington bureau chief, withheld publication of key facts of the story on the ground that it was in the national interest to do so.

Again, in October 1962, the New York Times and the Washington Post had firm knowledge during the so-called missile crisis of President Kennedy’s plans for a military blockade of Cuba and for intercepting any foreign-flag ship attempting to reach the island republic. The newspapers withheld publication at the request of President Kennedy. The crisis was resolved by a Soviet agreement to remove missiles emplaced on Cuban territory in return for an American pledge that there would be no repetition of the 1961 invasion attempt.

In the 1961 incident, United States involvement in the aborted invasion of a sovereign state was in clear violation of international law. In the 1962 incident, the Soviet Union was clearly within its rights in placing missiles in Cuba, at the invitation of the Cuban government and under Cuban control, however distasteful it may have been to the government of the United States. The bristling reaction to the missiles (to this day there has been no precise description of their potential) was outrageous in view of the fact that hundreds of American missiles had been placed close to the borders of the Soviet Union.

Beyond this, Drew Pearson reported on October 26, 1962, that the missile crisis had been engendered in Washington by the Kennedy administration to shore up its political prospects in the November 1962 elections against Republican charges that it was being soft on communism “ninety miles from our shores.” And Max Frankel in the New York Times of October 23, 1962, indicated that one compelling reason for the need for secrecy about Washington’s plans was fear that the Soviet Union might take the matter to the United Nations and undercut the effect of Kennedy’s ultimatum—an ultimatum which could have led to war between the United States and the Soviet Union. As late as 1966 the Times was still justifying its suppression of the missile crisis story. (9)

There is a connection between the Cuban events and those of June 1971. The Boston Globe sent Crocker Snow, assistant managing editor, to New York during the first week of the publication of the documents to find out how and why the Times’s decision to publish was reached, and how the staff felt about it. Snow determined that there was a “curious relationship” between the June 1971 decision and the one taken years earlier at the time of the Bay of Pigs. He recalled Kennedy’s hindsight comment to Times executive editor Turner Catledge: “If you had printed more about the [Bay of Pigs] operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

Had this “embarrassing memory” played a part in the decision to publish the Pentagon documents? Snow asked. Very little, said the editors. One told Snow: “This is a very, very different thing. These are basically historical documents, and the Cuban stories were about pending missions. I can say honestly that if this secret material now had been about ongoing missions, then we wouldn’t have used it.” This confirms the editorial comment in the Times quoted earlier.

The mind conjures the image of an ashen editorial writer, sitting at a charred typewriter, painfully recording that, in retrospect, the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Peking, in retaliation for the defeat of the American Ping-Pong team by the Chinese at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, was poorly conceived. The Times, the editorial would say, had information that a contingency plan for the preemptive retaliatory protective reaction strike was in existence, but withheld the information because it concerned ongoing policy, and disclosure might endanger the life of even one American airman.

While this fantasy may seem absurd to some, the reality was less absurd to thousands of Indochinese whose charred remains continued to pile up in a noncontingent pattern as a result of ongoing United States policy whose underlying principles were still accepted by an overwhelming majority of the communications media. Who then will blow the whistle on this policy in the genuine national interest?

The Pentagon Papers demonstrated that government not only refuses to give out information but also lies and distorts the facts. Is it not, therefore, the responsibility of newspapers and television networks to make the record public when they are persuaded that a planned government action could bring the nation up to or over the brink of an illegal, immoral, and disastrous war? This is not to argue that the media in a wartime situation should have published in advance, say, the date of the invasion of Normandy in World War II. There are of course situations when security must be maintained. The publication by the Chicago Tribune in World War II of the information that the United States had broken the Japanese naval code was reprehensible.

But Cuba is another matter. We were not at war with Cuba. We simply wanted to smash its revolution, and the media was in general accord with this policy. And Indochina is another matter. War has never been declared there, and a majority of Americans has finally concluded that the United States must extricate itself. If the government persists in thwarting the public will, do not the media have a responsibility to intervene in behalf of the public? If they do not, who will?

“Who elected the New York Times to get into the game? some people ask,” James Reston wrote on June 20, 1971, “and the answer is nobody but the men who wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution.” A fair answer, and one Reston might have given to himself when he advised his publisher not to publish the facts about the Bay of Pigs invasion (Reston still refers to the CIA’s Cubans as “freedom fighters”) and the missile crisis. But the answer implies something more than responsibility in hindsight.

“The political game as it is now played in Washington is like a football game without boundaries, rules, or officials,” Reston declared in the same article. “All the men in the press box can do is report the shambles.” Poorly stated. The men who drew up and fought for the First Amendment privileges and protections for the press did so precisely because they sought to prevent the shambles from occurring. In Reston’s metaphor, they wanted the press to guard the stadium gates like watchdogs to prevent the crooked managers, the fixed players, and the blood-money gamblers from taking over.

The Times was a toothless watchdog when Coach Eisenhower’s Washington All-Stars were playing Russian Roulette in their U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union in 1960, and before. Several Times editors later conceded that the Times knew all about this dangerous game, but published nothing about it. Premier Khrushchev made his famous U-2 accusation just before a scheduled summit conference with President Eisenhower in Paris in May 1960—a conference called to advance the “spirit of Camp David” supposedly established during Khrushchev’s visit to the United States the year before.

The sainted Eisenhower, the nearest miss to General Washington the nation has ever had, lied about the U-2s, and the Times soberly published his lies—even though it knew the facts. The press in general decreed that Khrushchev did not want to talk peace anyway. Then Khrushchev produced the photographs of the U-2 wreckage and mug shots of pilot Gary Powers. The Paris conference broke up before it had begun, an Eisenhower trip to the Soviet Union was canceled. The game was called on account of international darkness, and the nation slid back into Reston’s Cold War shambles. That is the most dangerous game of all, and the Times was an accomplice before and after the fact because it did not genuinely subscribe to the public’s right to know.

In January 1972 an incident occurred which seemingly put to test the question whether the most prestigious newspapers of the country would alter their policy of not publishing government documents about ongoing or future policy. The episode acquired the name “the Anderson Papers,” after Jack Anderson, the Washington-based muckraker whose column appears in 700 newspapers. In his column of January 3 Anderson wrote that he had come into possession of secret summaries of White House meetings of December 3, 4, and 6 disclosing a firmer anti-India attitude by the United States government than had been made public during and following the India-Pakistan dispute over East Pakistan. The creation of the state of Bangladesh had followed the Indian invasion of East Pakistan.

Much of the information in the Anderson columns pictured White House adviser Henry M. Kissinger as the President’s chief spokesman in the matter. Kissinger insisted that Anderson had “wrenched” the information “out of context.” Anderson, to prove his contention, thereupon released the full text of memoranda of the White House meetings, and they were published on January 5 by the Washington Post and the New York Post. The New York Times asked Anderson for the documents and published them in full on January 6. The Washington Post described Anderson’s actions as “an undoubted contribution to the public’s right to know.”

While the documents undoubtedly did shed light on the insular arrogance with which policy decisions are reached, they added litde to the public’s knowledge of United States attitudes toward India and Pakistan—attitudes whose bias against India was clearly evident in United States actions and comments at the United Nations, and in statements by the White House and the State Department. Further, in any comparison with the Pentagon Papers, it should be noted that the documents were turned over to Anderson from within the government—and there is considerable reason to believe that the leak was motivated not so much by concern for the public’s right to know, as by jealousy and dissension among warring factions within the administration. It was common knowledge in Washington that both the State Department and the Defense Department had long resented Kissinger’s “running the government from the White House basement,” and the Anderson coup had all the earmarks of a palace intrigue to “get” Kissinger.

While Anderson may be credited with nobler motives in making the information public, an examination of the administration’s public statements on India and the secret documents revealed differences only in degree and intensity. Comparisons with the Pentagon documents fall noticeably short. Neither in content nor in significance do the two sets of documents compare. Furthermore, by the time the documents were published, Bangladesh was a fait accompli. In the last analysis, the Anderson papers did not test the willingness of the press to publish major documents about current or future policy.

The leadership of the Times nationally was demonstrated by the chain reaction following its publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers. In rapid order, the documents began to appear in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, the Knight newspapers, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday of Long Island, and the Christian Science Monitor. Granted by then it was too sensational a story to suppress, there was much more involved. It was evident that those newspapers generally regarded as the most responsible understood they had a common and compelling necessity to support one another in the face of an unprecedented government attempt at “prior restraint”—that is, action taken to prevent the publication of a news story or transcripts of documents.

This was the problem that confronted the editors (and the legal department, which sometimes overrules or supplants the editors) at the Times in the three months during which they had possession of the documents and weighed their decision to publish or not to publish. The atmosphere at the Times and in the surrounding mid-Manhattan area could have been appropriate for an elaborate spy melodrama. Men and women were spirited out of the Times building in West 43rd Street to set up secret headquarters at the Hotel Hilton, their privacy protected by Times company guards (eventually the Times had nine rooms on two floors of the hotel). Special secret composing rooms were established with only trusted typesetters admitted. Questions as to the whereabouts of missing Washington bureau men were met with “Don’t ask.”

In Washington there were similar scenes at the Post, of briefer duration but perhaps of even greater intensity. There an all-night battle between the “business side” and the “editorial side” at the home of executive editor Benjamin Bradlee ended with a victory by the editorial side to publish.

First reactions in the newspaper world were marked by indolence and ineptitude and, in many areas, caution. The Times News Service, with 300 clients, alerted its subscribers on the afternoon of June 12 (Saturday) that it would move a major story at 6 p.m. The Louisville Courier-Journal gave prominent place to the story, but the Chicago Tribune ignored it. UPI did not send a story out until Sunday afternoon, and AP waited until Monday afternoon (both services are permitted to pick up stories from member newspapers immediately). Neither Time nor Newsweek remade their pages on Saturday night, although there was time.

The television networks handled the story even more casually. ABC put the Times story aside to read at a future time. At CBS, during the “Face the Nation” program on Sunday with Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (who had been briefed by Attorney General Mitchell as to his possible replies), neither the CBS correspondent nor the New York Times man on the program asked a single question concerning the documents. Only NBC realized the significance of the story and devoted almost half of the time of its Sunday evening news to it.

In general, however, the performance of the television networks was limited in the weeks that followed. While they covered the legal battles and the Ellsberg involvement fully, they paid scant attention to the content of the documents, and it was not until the end of December 1971 that any network devoted any appreciable time to the papers themselves. That was the two-hour program “Vietnam Hindsight,” produced by NBC and devoted mainly to the origins of American involvement and the events leading to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem on November 2, 1963.

But a high degree of excitement was engendered in the last two weeks of June, particularly about the question of freedom of the press and the interpretation of the First Amendment. And the excitement was warranted. Never before in the history of the country had the issue of “prior restraint” been raised in terms of legal action and pursued through the courts by the government—not even during the two-year period in which the Alien and Sedition acts were in force from 1798 to 1800. Even these acts invoked postpublication penalties, and they expired before the Supreme Court was able to rule on the constitutional issues.

A proper question to be asked at this juncture is this: If the Congress is forbidden by the First Amendment from enacting legislation in the area of freedom of the press, by what right did the Executive branch intervene to ask the Judiciary to act, and by what right did the courts accede to the Executive’s requests? There was a sharp exchange on this point during the Supreme Court hearing on June 26, 1971, between Justice Douglas, an unyielding advocate of absolute interpretation of First Amendment freedoms, and, surprisingly, the attorney representing the Times, Alexander M. Bickel of Yale Law School.

Bickel argued that the courts might have the power to restrain the press if Congress passed a law specifically authorizing it to do so. Justice Douglas looked up sharply from his note-taking and said: “The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. Are you saying that Congress can make some laws abridging freedom of the press? [That] is a very strange argument for the Times to make that all this can be done if Congress passes a law.” Bickel wisely made no response.

It was indeed a strange argument on behalf of a newspaper petitioning to lift the judicial restraining order against continuing publication of the Pentagon documents. It was even more strange in view of the position taken by four justices against accepting certiorari (review) on the ground that, because of the First Amendment’s clear language, the court had no jurisdiction in the case.

A head-on test of this principle might have occurred if the Times had ignored the initial injunction in the Federal District Court in New York and continued publication of the documents. But the Times, as a newspaper which abides by the “rule of law,” was not willing to make the challenge; nor, it seems, was any other newspaper. However one might have hoped for such a challenge, it was not logical to expect it from newspapers which have consistently rebuked demonstrators for “going outside the law.”

There was another alternative for the Times: It could have published the entire set of documents in one issue and thus rendered moot the issue of prior restraint —at least in the Pentagon Papers case. But newspapers, however much they may protest that they are a public service, are profit-making enterprises. The Times’s circulation had been declining at a fairly steady rate through 1971. Here was a chance to recoup some losses through a series of articles spread over a period of time with tremendous impact. It would hardly be speculative to suggest that hard heads in the countinghouse prevailed over softer ones in the editorial department.

What was the long-range meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision to permit the Times to continue publication? Perhaps the soundest answer came from one of the nation’s leading authorities on constitutional law, Thomas I. Emerson of Yale Law School. (10) He wrote:

The result was certainly favorable to a free press. Put the other way, a contrary result would have been a disaster. It would have made the press subject to a very considerable extent of advance restriction. It would have changed the whole relationship between the press and government. The outcome was a sound outcome. On the other hand, the legal theory that the court adopted is, I think, cause for concern.

Only three justices came out strongly against a system of prior restraint — Black, Douglas and Brennan, and Brennan would make some narrow exceptions. Black and Douglas apparently permitted none. Justice Marshall probably would go along with them, but actually he based his opinion on a different ground—that Congress had denied the power to the President, and the Court therefore did not get into the question. But if you assume there were four who would vigorously apply the doctrine of no previous restraint, nevertheless there were five whose opinions seriously undermine the doctrine against prior restraint. Certainly the three dissenters would have made exceptions, but also Justices White and Stewart announced that any anticipated publication which raised an immediate danger to national security would be grounds for an injunction, and the dissenting justices would have gone at least that far.

There were two major problems, as Emerson saw the decision: (1) The specified exception—that advance restraint of a newspaper was proper if the government proved a grave and immediate breach of national security—is a wideopen exception which would probably allow the government to obtain an injunction in most cases where the question of national security was raised; (2) if the courts ultimately interpret the concept of “grave and immediate breach of national security” rather narrowly, the very application of the rule would constitute a system of prior restraint because it would hold up publication while the courts investigated whether there was indeed a breach of security.

Emerson found the media to be in a vulnerable position. The rapid changes in the Supreme Court, tilting the balance distinctly toward the restrictive Nixon- Mitchell view of civil liberties, made the position of the media even more vulnerable. On this point, Emerson had some advice for the media in seeking allies to protect its freedom:

I would say that one of the main things that the media can do is to educate the public to the significance of the whole system of free expression.... The New York Times case has opened up the possibility of making people aware of what the role of the press is: that its role isn’t simply to take handouts given by the government; it’s for the people. The major problem with the system of freedom of the press today is the inability of many points of view to find an outlet. That is a very serious problem. I think that it is important for the media to be aware of that, to anticipate it, to try to take account of it. In other words, just as I think the government ought to subsidize an opposition to itself, in a sense monopolistic elements in the communications industry should subsidize some opposition to themselves. I think it would be a much healthier and ultimately more successful system.

It was unlikely that either the government or the communications industry would give serious heed to Emerson’s Jeffersonian counsel. In the more than two years during which the Nixon administration had sought to pressure the com munications industry to cast off even its tepid adversary role vis-d-vis government, the industry to a large extent played the artful dodger, yielding a bit here, making a tentative thrust there, but generally avoiding a direct confrontation with the government. The publication of the Pentagon Papers altered the situation, but subsequent events have not demonstrated that the communications industry has absorbed the obvious lesson of the Pentagon Papers—that the only proper role of the media is not as partner to government, but as spokesman and forum for an enlightened and informed public opinion which it should help to create.

In the first days after the documents were published, there was a heartening closing of ranks to resist the abrogation of the First Amendment—for that is what it had come down to. The directors of NBC and CBS, themselves under governmental siege, voiced their support of the newspapers. ABC, concentrating on a “happy news” approach in accord with the Agnew syndrome, was silent.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors joined the fight, as did the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the Newspaper Guild, and Editor & Publisher, the generally stodgy journal of the newspaper industry. The Boston Globe recalled the dark days of the witch-hunting, black-listing 1950s with a warning that it could happen again. Its political editor Robert Healy wrote: “After all, the issue is not simply the right [of newspapers] to publish these documents, but the right of the people to read them.”

The classic arrogant response to this position was given by General Maxwell Taylor, who served in the deceit elite of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and therefore was a person of prominence in the Pentagon documents. On the question of “the people’s right to know,” he said:

I don’t believe in this as a general principle. You have to talk about cases. What is a citizen going to do after reading these documents that he wouldn’t have done otherwise? A citizen should know the things he needs to know to be a good citizen and discharge his functions, but not to get into secrets that damage his government and indirectly damage himself.

The disclosures, he said, were laying the foundations for “bad history.” That meant, in plain English, that it would make the central figures in the drama — Taylor among them—look bad. And that, at all costs, particularly at the cost of truth, had to be avoided. Opposed to the Taylor view, Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times on June 16, 1971: “No statute exists that says that government officials must be protected from the exposure of their follies or misdeeds. Indeed, the great lesson of the Pentagon record is that the ability to operate in secrecy breeds contempt for that very public in whose name and interest officials claim to act.”

That is a great lesson indeed, but it applies to the newspapers which refused to publish information in their possession during the years of the Pentagon Papers, as well as the government officials who sought to keep secret their policymaking actions. For the communications media it ought to have meant a continuing effort to tear the shroud of secrecy and misinformation from every area of governmental policymaking, and particularly about the seemingly endless war in Indochina. But after a period of vigorous self-congratulation, the media lost interest altogether in the contents of the Pentagon documents, especially as to the light they might cast on current policy and actions, and resorted to their customary way of doing things.

Body counts and kill ratios still dominated the news stories from Indochina, and “Hanoi” was credited with all “enemy” military actions in Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam. Missing from the media—and from the American consciousness— was any recognition of the role of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the Cambodian National Liberation Front, and the Pathet Lao, the liberation movement of Laos, each of which is in control of the major portion of its respective country, and each of which in fact is opposing the forces of the United States and their mercenary troops—not “Hanoi.”

When the bombings of North Vietnam were resumed in force late in 1971, and administration spokesmen, in language which could have been taken verbatim from the Pentagon documents, sought to justify the bombings, the media reported the explanations without contest in the traditionally objective fashion. An enterprising newspaper could have laid the official statements side by side with similar statements from the Pentagon documents, and the point would have been sharply underscored. But such enterprise was not countenanced, if it ever was proposed.

Even more striking was the treatment in the media, and particularly the New York Times, of the man whose initiative, enterprise, and single-minded purpose enabled the publication of the Pentagon documents. On August 5, 1971, Daniel EUsberg was ordered by a United States District judge in Boston to be removed to California to face charges of illegal possession of secret government documents. The Times, one felt, would regard itself as personally involved—with due regard for the need to protect its own legal position—and deem this news worthy of page one display. It decided, however, to place the story (ten inches of type) on page six of its August 6 issue.

An Appeals Court held up the extradition order on August 6, and the Times on August 7 moved the story up to page four (thirteen inches). Ellsberg was not in court in Portland, Maine, where the action took place, but held a news conference in Boston, and made some statements which could provide a motive for his relegation to the Times’^ inside pages. He said he was disappointed that the newspapers were not printing more of the Pentagon documents. “The New York Times and the Washington Post have most of the papers,” he said, “but the public doesn’t have them. I have to say this means many newspapers in this country which have access to large sections of the Pentagon study are now in the business of withholding it from the public, just as the Defense Department was for so long in that business.”

That was a strong enough statement to elicit comment from the Times or the Washington Post, but none was forthcoming. In fact, Ellsberg dropped out of the Times for the rest of the week, and its News of the Week in Review, on Sunday, August 8, did not consider his situation of sufficient interest for an item in the review, let alone for editorial comment.

Coverage of the Ellsberg case did improve in the Times after the second indictments by a grand jury in Los Angeles in December 1971, but an examination of the Times’s editorials from June through December 1971 yielded only one comment about the Ellsberg case. That was an editorial critical of the government’s use of wiretapping in pursuing persons in the academic community who may have sympathized with or assisted Ellsberg’s efforts to make the Pentagon documents public.

The Boston Globe was prematurely accurate in describing the climate surrounding the Pentagon Papers’ publication as similar to that of the 1950s, “when intellectuals, Hollywood writers, professors and labor leaders were being summoned before a congressional committee and then being judged in contempt because they refused to answer questions about their alleged Communist beliefs.” Substitute the words “grand jury” for ““congressional committee,” and “Ellsberg connections” for “Communist beliefs,” and one has a fair picture of the atmosphere on East Coast and West Coast at the turn of 1972.

Even the most vigorous efforts—if they were indeed to be made—by the media to ensure a fair trial for Ellsberg and the others who were indicted, or may still be, could not absolve the media of their responsibility in the situation. That could be achieved only by an acknowledgment that the wrong persons were being placed on trial, and that the government’s efforts were a diversion to delude the public once again as to the real nature of the American crisis.

In the New York Times of June 13, 1971—the day the first of the documents appeared—James Reston described as persons of “unquestioned personal moral character” Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Walt W. Rostow, and the Bundy brothers. It is a strange characterization for men engaged for years in the process of deliberately deceiving the American public in order to continue killing both Indochinese and Americans to prove the correctness of their policy.

As of January 1972, all of these moral men were still active in public life. McNamara—with a second five-year term—was presiding over the billions in the World Bank; Rusk was teaching history to unsuspecting young people at a Southern university; McGeorge Bundy was distributing Ford Foundation largess as chairman of the board; brother William had been confirmed (by David Rockefeller) as editor of Foreign Affairs, a journal which seeks to present American foreign policy in its most benevolent light; Rostow was heavily engaged at the University of Texas (sometimes known as the University of Lyndon B. Johnson) in Austin, presenting to history as a benign democrat one of the grossest men ever to achieve the Presidency.

All the high-minded editorials about the inviolability of the First Amendment and the “vitality of the American form of government” {New York Times editorial, July 4, 1971) notwithstanding, the communications industry will have abdicated its responsibility completely unless it seeks an answer to the compelling question: How could these things be? If the industry does not stand united in an adversary role to government—the only proper stance for a free press in a democracy— there will be ever greater incursions on its freedoms, and the freedoms of others. Ultimately, the public may be left without a major defense of its interests against predatory government.

And a Berrigan will still be in jail.

Notes

1.      In a paper prepared for delivery at the 66th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Los Angeles in September 1970; and in an article in The Nation, October 11, 1971, part of an essay to be included in Communications in International Politics, edited by Richard I. Merritt (University of Illinois Press).

2.      At the height of the controversy about Diem, only the Associated Press, the United Press International, and the New York Times had full-time correspondents in South Vietnam. When a major story broke, a stream of correspondents poured in from Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Bangkok. Neil Sheehan was then correspondent for UPI, Malcolm Browne for AP, and Charles Mohr was Southeast Asia bureau chief for Time. With David Halberstam, who succeeded Homer Bigart for the New York Times, they comprised the group of journalistic rebels whose dispatches were contradicted by junketeering correspondents such as Joseph Alsop and Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, sent out to Vietnam for that purpose. By July 1966, there were 360 accredited correspondents in South Vietnam, about a third of them actual reporters, the rest technicians, interpreters, and CIA agents.

3.      In a perceptive review of Roger Hilsman’s To Move a Nation (Doubleday, 1967), in The Nation, June 5, 1967.

4.      In The Making of a Quagmire (Random House, 1965).

5.      In an article entitled “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk,” in the New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1966.

6.      Between 1945 and 1950, specialists connected with the Institute of Pacific Relations, a prime McCarthy target, reviewed twenty-two of thirty books about China for the New York Times, and thirty of thirty-five books for the New York Herald Tribune. From 1952 to 1955, the years of McCarthyite prevalence, not one of these authorities was engaged to review a single book by either the Times or the Herald Tribune. These figures are from Roger Hilsman’s To Move a Nation.

7.      In the Progressive, August 1971. Knoll is Washington editor of the Progressive, and coauthor with William McGaffin of Anything But the Truth (G. P. Putnam’s, 1968), about the credibility gap in Washington.

8.      Stone ceased publication of his newsletter with the issue of December 14, 1971, to become a contributing editor of the New York Review of Books. The Weekly is available on microfilm from University Microfilms, a subsidiary of Xerox.

9.      In a speech by Clifton Daniel, Times managing editor, on June 1, 1966, to the World Press Institute at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and printed the next day in full in the Times.

10.   In the Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 1971), an issue devoted almost entirely to the media and the Pentagon documents.