With the benefit of hindsight it seems a storm in a teacup now. In
1971, when the Vietnam War still had three years to run, the New
York Times, closely followed by the Washington Post, published
extracts from a secret history of American involvement in Indochina
that would become known as the Pentagon Papers. Though all the
revelations concerned the Johnson administration, the Nixon
government decided to issue an order preventing the publication of
more revelations on the grounds that they would damage national
security. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court threw the case
out, the papers continued to publish extracts, and no apparent harm
was ever done to national security. At the time, however, it was a
most important issue. No American government had ever before tried
to use national security to muzzle the press, so the case
established case law on issues of press freedom, especially in time
of war. Moreover, it played to Nixon's sensibility that he was
surrounded by enemies, and thus was a vital precursor to the
Watergate affair that would shortly bring his government down. In
this very readable history, Rudenstine, Professor of Constitutional
Law at Yeshiva University, considers every aspect of the case, from
the time the papers were written at the instigation of the then
Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, through their leaking by
Daniel Ellsberg, to their final echoes in the Watergate affair, and
finds the issue was not so clear cut as it appeared at the time.
Though, in the end, he applauds the court's decision to throw out
Nixon's suit, he uses newly discovered documents to show that
Nixon's case was far more justifiable than many of Nixon's critics
are prepared to admit even now. He also shows how the Pentagon
Papers affair was more intimately connected to Watergate than many
people have imagined. (Kirkus UK)
David Rudenstine effectively captures the day-by-day drama of the
Nixon administration's efforts in 1971 to prohibit the New York
Times and the Washington Post from publishing the 7000-page,
top-secret Pentagon Papers. Rudenstine originally shared the
dominant historical view that the government's position fell far
short of satisfying the heavy burden the law required if the courts
were to permanently restrain publication. But after studying
previously classified documents and interviewing key participants
in the controversy, including Robert MacNamara, Clark Clifford,
William Rehnquist, Katherine Graham, and Daniel Ellsberg,
Rudenstine changed his mind.
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