JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: President Trump's approach to and battles with many
in the news media have been a consistent feature of the first year of his presidency.
Similar tensions resonate in a new movie about how a former president battled the press.
That fight was over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, secret documents about the
war in Vietnam, a milestone case for press freedom and the First Amendment.
It all started with The New York Times, but the fight was soon joined by The Washington
Post.
Jeffrey Brown has a look behind the movie and the events of that era.
JEFFREY BROWN: June 1971.
MERYL STREEP, Actress: Do you have the papers?
TOM HANKS, Actor: Not yet.
JEFFREY BROWN: But he soon would.
The papers were the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War created by the
Defense Department.
In the film "The Post," Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, played by Tom hanks, and publisher
Katharine Graham, Meryl Streep, must obtain the papers and then decide whether to defy
a court order and publish them.
The all-star project, directed by Steven Spielberg, takes on big and consequential history, and
issues of press freedom and national security that resonate to today.
But Liz Hannah, the screenwriter, later joined by Josh Singer, says her focus was on a smaller
individual story, about Katharine Graham, the high society woman thrust into leadership
of her family-owned paper, finding her way in a male-dominated world.
LIZ HANNAH, Screenwriter, "The Post": This was the first Fortune 500 CEO who is a woman,
and she had been told her whole life that she wasn't good enough.
And then she was put in this position where she had to make this choice and she had to
find her voice.
And there is something very universal about that.
There's something about that, to me, that is very relatable.
I have spent many times in a room where I'm the only woman or I'm the odd man out.
And that's the story I think that we need now, is the story of people finding their
voices.
JEFFREY BROWN: The real Katharine Graham told her own story, including taking over the paper
after her husband's suicide, in a memoir that would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and
spoke of it in interview on the "NewsHour."
KATHARINE GRAHAM, Author, "Personal History": I didn't really transform myself.
Working transformed me, and I went to work not thinking that my role would develop as
it did.
I went to work because I found that I owned the controlling shares of the company, and
I thought, well, if this is so, I need to learn what it is that's at stake here, and
what the issues are, because maybe someday I will have to make some sort of decision
that I have to be intelligent about.
So I had better know.
JEFFREY BROWN: The film is set as The Washington Post Company is about to go public, so the
stakes for Graham were especially high.
We see the cozy relations she had with key political figures, including Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara, played by Bruce Greenwood, the very person who'd commissioned the Pentagon
Papers, and then pushed to have them kept from public view.
BRUCE GREENWOOD, Actor: If you publish, you will get the very worst of them, the Colsons
and the Ehrlichmans.
And he will crush you.
MERYL STREEP: I know.
He's just awful.
But I...
BRUCE GREENWOOD: He's a -- Nixon is a son of a (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
He hates you.
He hates Ben.
He's wanted to ruin the paper for years.
And you will not get a second chance, Kay.
The Richard Nixon I know will muster the full power of the presidency, and if there's a
way to destroy your paper, by God, he will find it.
JEFFREY BROWN: The Pentagon Papers were originally leaked to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan
by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who came to believe the government
was lying about the progress of the war.
Ellsberg spoke in 2010 on the PBS program "POV."
DANIEL ELLSBERG, Former State Department Official: As the Pentagon Papers showed -- and I have
often said that I feel very regretful that I had not put out those documents when I could
have in 1964 and '65 -- I think, that a war really might have been avoided.
JEFFREY BROWN: Times' reporters spent three months studying the papers.
James Goodale, then lead counsel for "The Times," told me there was a lot on the line.
JAMES GOODALE, Former Lead Counsel for The New York Times: The news people were very
concerned that they had fake documents.
They didn't know who Ellsberg was.
And they didn't care who he was, because they wanted to make their own determination whether
the documents they had were authentic.
If they were not authentic, it would be very hard for The New York Times to recover from
that blow.
JEFFREY BROWN: On June 13, 1971, The Times began publishing stories, until the Nixon
administration, claiming a violation of the Espionage Act, secured a court injunction
against the paper, a first in American history.
The movie version focuses on The Washington Post's efforts to play catchup, its success
at getting hold of the papers, and then the decision to publish while The Times was silenced.
In a landmark First Amendment decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the two newspapers.
Tom Hanks told me recently how the story resonated for him, then and now.
TOM HANKS: The truth was so volatile and so -- what is the word I'm looking for?
Almost so -- so toxic, at that time the present day, that no one wanted to talk about it.
And Ben Bradlee and The Washington Post for -- and Kay Graham, for about a week, not only
altered the state of their newspaper empire, but they also altered the state of the First
Amendment and the history of the world.
By what?
By printing the truth.
Dear lord, if that's a dangerous thing to do, we're in a bad place.
JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, in the midst of our current period of media and White House contention,
director Steven Spielberg decided to rush the film into production.
He spoke at a recent forum.
STEVEN SPIELBERG, Director: There were a lot of fires being lit, and, of course, the evening
news was lighting most of the fires.
But we really felt that we could get into the national conversation and make this movie
as quickly as possible, and make it as well as we possibly could.
JEFFREY BROWN: The film has received mostly glowing reviews, and, though losing out at
the recent Golden Globes, is expected to compete for Oscar and other awards.
One criticism, its focus on The Post, when the rival New York Times deserves the credit.
Former Times legal counsel James Goodale calls it a good film, bad history.
JAMES GOODALE: Although a producer has artistic license, I think it should be limited in a
situation such as this, so the public comes away with an understanding of what the true
facts are in this case.
And I think that, if you're doing a movie now, when Trump is picking on the press for
fake news, you want to be authentic.
You don't want to be in any way fake.
JEFFREY BROWN: The film's co-writer, Liz Hannah, believes it gives The Times its due.
LIZ HANNAH: The work that Neil Sheehan did with Dan Ellsberg and with his team at The
Times was remarkable, and we wouldn't have the Pentagon Papers if it weren't for them.
And that is a story in and of itself.
But the story that I wanted to tell was a story of Kay Graham, and then the story of
how Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee became the superhero team that we know them as.
And this was really the beginning of this team.
This is the team that led to Watergate.
JEFFREY BROWN: Indeed, the Pentagon Papers story was followed just one year later by
the Watergate break-in that would lead to the downfall of President Nixon, not to mention
another famous film about The Washington Post.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Washington.