SALMAN RUSHDIE
It is shocking, is it not, to those of us living, as we do, in a time of unimpeachable integrity in public life, to discover that there was a time when the government of the United States lied to its citizens, even about matters of life and death, and then went to extraordinary lengths to conceal the fact that it was lying?
During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration, without telling Congress or the American people, broadened the scope of the war to include the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, increased raids on North Vietnam, and much more. These went unreported in the press. In addition, while President Johnson publicly said that the purpose of US involvement was to protect South Vietnam, he and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara agreed that the true purpose was to contain China, and they further agreed that this would take a long time, cost a great deal of money, and result in a large number of deaths of American soldiers. None of this was admitted publicly.
The Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, afterward known as the Pentagon Papers, contained this explosive information in enormous and irrefutable detail. Of the fifteen copies that were made, two were sent to the RAND Corporation, a global policy think tank, where a RAND employee named Daniel Ellsberg read it and knew, as he afterward said, that the report “demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates.” He photocopied the document and became determined to release it in an attempt to end the war.
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publication of the documents. The paper was hit with an injunction to cease publication and appealed. The appeal moved quickly to the Supreme Court. On June 18, the Washington Post, which also received documents from Ellsberg, had begun to publish too. Judge Murray Gurfein of the US District Court declined the government’s request for an injunction, writing that “security… lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”
Now that we have been told that this same press is in fact the “enemy of the people,” how innocently those lines read!
This time the government appealed, and the two cases, against the New York Times and the Washington Post, were heard jointly by the Supreme Court. In an amicus brief, the ACLU stated that if the government’s vague test of “information detrimental to the national security” were to be accepted, there would be virtually no limit to censorship of the news then or in the future. And on June 30, 1971, by a 6–3 margin, the Supreme Court found for the newspapers and against the government: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
What an absurdly misguided decision!
But to drop the sarcasm, this opinion, by Justice Hugo Black, should be taught in every school and memorized by everyone who attains high public office. It is a part of the bedrock of American democracy.
When I look back at those days, one of my strongest memories is that we were by no means certain that the judgment would go as it did, just as we were not at all sure that, just two days earlier on June 28, 1971, the same court would exonerate the boxer Muhammad Ali. The great liberal-progressive victories of that time did not seem at all inevitable. It felt as if the future teetered on a knife edge.
These victories were hard won. Both cases could easily have been lost, but because they were strongly, closely, even brilliantly argued, they were won, and we are the beneficiaries of those arguments, among them the arguments made by the ACLU.
“To prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.” I doubt that even during the Nixon presidency (during which the Pentagon Papers case was heard) anyone could have imagined the scale and frequency of the deceptions being wrought on the American people today.
Attacks on the press by the president of the United States—on the “Failing New York Times,” and the “Amazon Washington Post” owned by “Jeff Bozo”—have become an almost daily occurrence, and so it’s vital to remember that these newspapers and many others have been, and remain, our best defenses against a capricious, deceitful, and overly mighty executive.
Distrust of the news media had been growing before Trump, and he has done everything he can to feed that distrust. Not long ago, I was lecturing in Vero Beach, Florida, to an almost entirely Republican-voting audience. These folks did not conform at all to the cliché of the Trump voter. They were affluent, white collar, university educated, and read books. Yet they had all drunk the Kool-Aid and bought into the Trump worldview. One questioner demanded, with remarkable heat, “Do you really think the New York Times isn’t lying to us every day? Do you really believe that?” I tried to defuse the aggression by replying, “Well, yes, I do believe that, sir, except when it’s reviewing my books.”
But it’s not a funny problem. I have some experience of countries in which the powers that be control the information media, and I know that the first step toward authoritarianism is always the destruction of people’s belief that journalism is, broadly speaking, pursuing and telling the truth. The second step is for the authoritarian leader to say, “Just believe in me, for I am the truth.” Trump’s repeated use of “Believe me” is intended to have exactly that effect.
The Pentagon Papers case is a landmark decision in the fight for journalistic freedom and against state censorship. The inheritors of that 1971 decision at the Times and the Post have thus far acquitted themselves with honor as they seek to do their duty and expose these deceptions. We can only hope that today’s Supreme Court will follow in the footsteps of the justices of 1971 and be as resolute in the defense of the freedom of the press as their predecessors were.