Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism, revised and updated edition

Somewhere there is a line where the old skeptical, combative, publish-and-be-damned tradition of the past in our papers may converge with the new intelligence and the new duties and responsibilities of this rising and restless generation. I wish I knew how to find it, for it could help both the newspapers and the nation in their present plight, and it could help us believe again, which in this age of tricks and techniques may be our greatest need.

When the Pulitzer Prizes celebrated their fiftieth year in 1966, only thirty-three newspapers—a diverse assortment of large and small journals from across the country—could boast having a Pulitzer Gold Medal. A mere handful owned more than one. The New York Times had two, one short of the number earned by the Chicago Daily News, a paper that would not survive the next decade. The Washington Post had none. Starting early in the 1970s, so much would change.

Two of the greatest pure newspaper stories of the century broke, one in June 1971 and the other in June 1972. As foreshadowed at the Pulitzer ceremony by James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, each story would expose Americans to “tricks and techniques” in the halls of government.¹ Each had its antagonists in the administration of President Richard Nixon. (Indeed, some domestic spying authorized by the White House during the Watergate period was a reaction to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the Times.) And each story very possibly would not have seen print at all without the vigilance and courage of the news organization that took charge of the coverage. First the New York Times acquired, analyzed, and published the secret Pentagon Papers, describing deceptions that several presidential administrations had employed to keep Americans ignorant of U.S. policy in South Vietnam. Then the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein parlayed their early scoops about “a third-rate burglary”—as the Nixon administration portrayed the Watergate break-in—into an investigation that gradually exposed White House involvement in that crime and many others.

With their work, both the Times and the Post created invaluable models of public service. And more than four decades later, both still are considered classics of American media history. Yet shockingly, for different reasons, each came very close to being shut out of the Pulitzer Prizes altogether.

The New York Times associate editor Harrison Salisbury tried to capture the power of the Pentagon Papers coverage in his description of the newspaper’s final decision, after weeks of debate, to publish them. (His book Without Fear or Favor contains one of the better remembrances that the Times editors have produced over the years.) Salisbury set the stage on “that limpid Sunday of June 13, 1971,” when the first so-called Vietnam Archive installment appeared, just as the Times publisher Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger was preparing for a trip to London:

As Sulzberger checked over his carefully packed bags he had not the slightest premonition that publication of the Pentagon Papers story that morning was triggering a sequence of events which would lead inexorably, step by step, to the greatest disaster ever to befall an American president, a disaster so profound, so far-reaching in implication that by the time it was over basic relationships in the American power apparatus would be changed; the very system would quiver; a President would fall; the balance of the tripartite American constitutional structure would shift; and the role of the press in America, the role of The New York Times, and even the function of the press in other great nations of the world would be transformed.²

Rosenthal asked his reporter, “Do you have any problem working with classified documents?” recalls Butterfield. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said, ‘I assume you’ve got them. If you don’t have a problem, I don’t think I would, either.’”³ It was the correct answer. Butterfield became one of the first reporters to join Pentagon correspondent Neil Sheehan—who had acquired the documents known as the Pentagon Papers—in a team writing project that was nearly as secret as the documents they would be describing.

Once again, the Times was about to make news, not merely report it. The news would open up government records that officials wanted to keep closed, but it would also reinforce an endangered legal principle at the highest level: that government cannot engage in “prior restraint” of news that it does not want the press to publish.

Why had Butterfield been picked to work on the Pentagon Papers team? He gives two possible reasons. “One was favorable to me: I’d been an undergraduate working on east Asian history, and I’d already been to Vietnam myself. I’d actually been to Hanoi,” he says. “Then there was an unfavorable reason: that I was so junior and so unknown that I could disappear from my beat in Newark, and the Washington Post would not know that I was gone.” That kind of secrecy played an enormous part in the decision making at the Times. A large team was being assembled in a group of suites on the eleventh and thirteen floors of the New York Hilton. Joining Sheehan and Butterfield were veteran Times reporters Hedrick Smith and E. W. Kenworthy, along with editors Allan M. Siegal, Samuel Abt, and Gerald Gold. The group grew to include five secretaries, a researcher, and a makeup editor, all watched over by Times security guards.

It was no secret in journalism circles that the Times was working on something special. In his autobiography, Ben Bradlee noted that the Post reporters were aware that a “blockbuster” was in the works at some offsite location, although “we never found out who was part of the task force, much less what they were tasking-forcing about.”⁴ Nat Hentoff wrote in a May 20 Village Voice piece about a “breakthrough unpublished story concerning the White House, Pentagon and Southeast Asia.” He also noted that there was an internal debate at the paper and asked, “Is this story going to be published? Or are there still Times executives and editors who might hold back such a story ‘in the national interest’?”⁵

The blockbuster taking shape at the Hilton involved an analysis by the reporters of forty-three volumes of an extraordinary government history of America’s involvement in Vietnam from World War II to May 1968. The entire forty-seven-volume history—seven thousand pages and 2.5 million words—had been commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson’s defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, after he had become disillusioned about the war. It was classified top secret.

Sheehan’s source was a thirty-nine-year-old former RAND Corporation researcher, Daniel Ellsberg, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ellsberg, a former Marine who had helped write the history when he worked at the Pentagon, had studied at Harvard six years ahead of Sheehan and nine years ahead of Butterfield. Ellsberg felt driven to take the Vietnam history public, believing that Americans needed to understand the decades of deception underlying U.S. Vietnam policy. He had tried other channels inside and outside the government but was unsuccessful until Sheehan agreed to copy the documents and prepare them for publication in the Times. Sheehan’s initial okay came from Scotty Reston, the Washington-based columnist and revered elder statesman and vice president of the Times.⁶

Ellsberg held back four volumes as too sensitive, especially with peace negotiations going on in Paris at the time. But on Friday, March 19, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sheehan and his wife received sixty pounds of pages from Ellsberg. They lugged them to all-night copying shops over three nights and spent $1,500 of the Times’s money to make copies before returning the papers to Ellsberg. Sheehan and editor Jerry Gold then spent two weeks sorting through the documents in Washington, discussing alternate approaches that might be taken for publication. Sheehan thought they should run in three parts; Gold in as many as twenty. Such decisions, of course, would be made higher up—if the Pentagon Papers were to be published at all.

Frankel then put the key question to his colleagues—journalistically, did the story warrant defying the government and possible government legal action; did the documents, in fact, betray a pattern of deception, of consistent and repeated deception by the American Government of the American people?

There was agreement in the room that this was precisely what the documents showed. Reston added, “These are the government’s own conclusions. This is not only what our article is about—this is its basic concept.” … It was the lies, the government’s lies, continuing one administration after the other, which lay at the heart of the matter.

So, added Rosenthal, this would be the manner in which The Times would present the material—it would be history. The government’s own version of history.⁷

General counsel Goodale felt that the historical approach could be defended legally. He was concerned, however, that too many people had attended the day’s meeting, and information leaks about the Times’s story could give the government a head start on plans to oppose publication. “Everyone has to remember. Be quiet!” Goodale said as they prepared to leave. “Because everyone in this room may have participated in a felony.”

More tough decisions—and intensive study and writing—lay ahead before the scheduled June 13 publication date for the first installment. The paper’s longtime outside law firm, Lord, Day, and Lord, was firmly opposed to the publication of secret, stolen documents and told Sulzberger that he could be jailed for authorizing it. This was a time of soul searching for editors too. Rosenthal and Topping both considered resigning if the decision was made not to publish. Reston said he would publish the papers in his own small journal, the Vineyard Gazette in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, if the Times decided not to run them.⁸

They discussed the closest apparent precedents at the Times, although the precedents were too old to be of much help. There were the newsroom actions taken before the American-supported 1961 invasion by Cuban exiles at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. The Times had toned down its story, citing national security as the reason. It had, however, still published in advance of the invasion. (Later President Kennedy was to suggest that had the Times published more detail, perhaps the ill-fated invasion would have been called off, and “you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”)

The editors also reviewed the 1908 case of the Times reporter William Bayard Hale’s interview of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, in which the Kaiser had spewed angry words about England and Japan and supported world domination by white people. The paper had consulted President Theodore Roosevelt first and then killed the story after he opposed its publication. (It was Punch Sulzberger’s grandfather, publisher Arthur S. Ochs, who had locked that interview away in his safe, where it remained until it was finally published in 1939.⁹)

Through May, Sheehan and the Pentagon Papers team kept working at the Hilton while general counsel Goodale debated the outside lawyers, who remained strongly opposed to publication. At a May 12 meeting with Sulzberger, the publisher was noncommittal but allowed work to proceed, planning to make a final call later. Still, Goodale was concerned that the publisher might follow Lord, Day’s advice and pull the plug. Word of the internal debate trickled in to the Hilton. The team members worried as they wrote.

On June 10, the publisher reviewed a new opening that was being written for the proposed story. Washington chief Frankel and Sheehan had often been at odds in the Times newsroom over the years, but they had been thrown together into this rewrite—“improbable collaborators on what each now saw as the story of his time,” Salisbury called them.

Editors made last-minute presentations to Sulzberger about how to balance the documents and the reporters’ analysis in the series. Should they cut down the number of secret documents reprinted and run more explanations? That could reduce the risk of the government opposing publication. Their presentations done, they waited for the final ruling from the publisher. He had already made up his mind. But in announcing his decision, Sulzberger didn’t make it easy for the editors.

“I’ve decided you can use the documents—but not the story,” he told them. After a moment of stunned silence, it dawned on them that their publisher was joking. Sulzberger was ready to approve the June 13 start of a series with just the balance of documents and analysis that his editors proposed. His major suggestion was for a review procedure to make sure that no military secrets were being published.¹⁰ According to Floyd Abrams, who became part of the legal team defending the Times after Lord, Day finally backed down: “In retrospect, the decision [to publish] may seem obvious, but it was by no means an easy one at the time, and it remains one for which Sulzberger deserves enormous credit.”¹¹

Back at the Hilton, Sheehan had gotten to drafting the third of the installments to run in the series now dubbed Vietnam Archive. The decision had been reached earlier to start the archive with the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, which President Lyndon Johnson had used to widen the war. When the series reverted to a chronology, the earliest chapters would be written by Fox Butterfield.

The first day’s thirteen-paragraph introduction, being crafted by Frankel, caused problems for some on the team. “Usually we lead with the strongest thing, but you had to read to the jump to see what it was really about,” Butterfield says. “Neil and Rick (Smith) were unhappy with the way it was toned down, too,” he adds. “It was as if you’d thrown a grenade in the room and then tried to cover it up.”¹² The first day’s story ran with a Sheehan byline:

A massive study of how the United States went to war in Indochina, conducted by the Pentagon three years ago, demonstrates that four Administrations progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non-Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort—to a much greater extent than their public statements acknowledged at the time.¹³

Then came the reaction—or rather the lack of it. At first, other media did not seem to notice the Times’s monumental project. Sunday was the slowest day of the week. Still, even the wire services left it alone. Had the weak opening fooled readers into thinking this was just another war story?

An exception was the Washington Post, which played the story prominently. It soon became clear that editors there saw themselves as badly scooped. They scrambled to find a copy of the Pentagon Papers for themselves. Finally one television network did pick up the story on Monday night. Harry Reasoner started his CBS broadcast with: “The New York Times has begun publication of what is an extraordinary achievement in journalism.”¹⁴ The Times staffers at the Hilton watched intently and felt some relief.

The Nixon administration had also seemed to ignore the Sunday exclusive in the Times. For one thing, the archive shared the Sunday front page with presidential daughter Tricia Nixon’s wedding. For another, Democratic presidents bore the brunt of the blame for Vietnam deception because the archive stopped before Nixon took office. The Pentagon Papers story was pushed toward the back sheets of the White House daily news summary. With Monday’s second installment in the Times, however, the administration’s view began to change drastically.¹⁵

One account of President Nixon’s Monday communications suggested that national security advisor Henry Kissinger, concerned about the Paris peace talks being compromised, created a “frenzy” by playing to his boss’ fear of leaks. Kissinger told the president that permitting publication would “show you’re a weakling.” People in the Justice Department took a firm anti-Times stand too.¹⁶

On Monday evening, a message came to Sulzberger’s office from Attorney General John N. Mitchell: publishing the Pentagon Papers was illegal and “will cause irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States.” Mitchell “respectfully” requested that no further information from the study appear.

With the Tuesday paper being readied for publication, the Times brain trust tried to reach Sulzberger in London. As Rosenthal waited, he considered calling the press room and saying “Stop the presses!” That was something he had never done. Instead, he asked the supervisor to “slow things down a bit.” When Sulzberger was finally on the phone, the course of action was briefly discussed. General counsel Goodale was strongly in favor of continuing with publication, as were all the editors. When Sulzberger asked if publication would increase the Times’s liability, Goodale answered, “Not by five percent.” The publisher gave the go-ahead. First Amendment authority Floyd Abrams and his former Yale constitutional law teacher, Alexander Bickel, were retained to lead the legal fight.¹⁷

On the day of the third installment, the Times’s lawyers lost their bid to block a temporary restraining order, which the Justice Department had based on claims of irreparable injury to the nation. Prior restraint in the past had been viewed as acceptable only in the case of clear danger to a war effort, such as a newspaper’s decision to print troop-ship timetables. Judge Murray I. Gurfein’s TRO, which happened to come on his second day on the federal bench, was the first peacetime application of prior restraint. Faced with another choice—whether to honor the court order—the Times chose to halt publication and prepare a legal fight for the right to publish.¹⁸

Meanwhile the Washington Post had managed to get four thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg. An editor had hauled a cardboard box of them down from Boston on an empty first-class seat he bought next to his own. It was a monumental job of reading, sorting, and annotating—done for the most part at Bradlee’s Georgetown house—but an installment was quickly prepared for publication. It was ready just as the Times interrupted its series. Still, the Post needed the go-ahead from its publisher, Katharine Graham. And that decision was every bit as risky as the Times’s. The paper’s parent company was about to go public. A felony conviction for espionage would chill that prospect and could also threaten its ability to retain ownership of lucrative television stations. After clearing publication with the Post lawyers, Bradlee called Graham. Her answer: “Okay, I say let’s go. Let’s publish.”¹⁹

The Times reporters at the New York Hilton, still pounding out installments that now might not run at all, were torn by the developments. “We were very upset to be enjoined, and then when the Washington Post picked them up there were mixed emotions,” says Fox Butterfield. “We were amazed that these people could produce stories in a couple of days, when it had taken us months. On the one hand we were cheering them on for continuing to publish. On the other, we felt sabotaged.”²⁰

Shortly, however, the Post was enjoined as well. And a series of court battles began, providing some of the most inspiring judicial language ever about the media. The first such ruling came when Judge Gurfein, a former Army intelligence officer, lifted his restraining order. He had found that when pressed the government was unable to identify specific portions of the Pentagon Papers that could injure the United States if revealed. He wrote:

As other papers began publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers, new injunctions were issued. (Among the papers obtaining their own copies were the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Knight newspapers.) Attorney Alexander Bickel argued on behalf of the New York Times:

Prior restraints fall on speech with a brutality and a finality all their own. Even if they are ultimately lifted, they cause irremediable loss, a loss in the immediacy, the impact of speech. They differ from the imposition of criminal liability in significant procedural respects as well, which in turn have their substantive consequences. The violator of a prior restraint may be assured of being held in contempt. The violator of a statute punishing speech criminally knows that he will go before a jury, and may be willing to take his chance, counting on a possible acquittal. A prior restraint therefore stops more speech, more effectively. A criminal statute chills. The prior restraint freezes.²²

Even the government prosecutor, Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, was by then half-hearted in his argument. (Griswold was to write eighteen years later in a Post op-ed piece: “I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the Pentagon Papers’ publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was an actual threat.”)

Seventeen days after the first Times story, the Times and the Post resumed running the Pentagon Papers. Editors emerged from the experience awed by the Supreme Court’s support—and relieved at the bullet the press had dodged. Looking back at the June 15 front page, which had carried the headline “Mitchell Seeks to Halt Series on Vietnam But Times Refuses,” managing editor Rosenthal ruminated

that if it had said, “The Times Agrees,” the history of this paper and I believe of American journalism, would have been radically different. If we had surrendered to Mitchell, and had allowed the government, without a court battle, to dictate to us, I really believe that the heart would have gone out of the paper and American newspapering.²⁴

After such a victory, one might expect a Pulitzer Public Service Medal for the Times to be nearly automatic. The public service jurors saw it that way, unanimously recommending a joint award for the newspaper and for Neil Sheehan. “It is fortuitous that the Pulitzer Prizes can recognize the accomplishments of both the newspaper and of a persistent, courageous reporter, and thus reaffirm to the American people that the press continues its devotion to their right to know, a basic bulwark in our democratic society,” the jury wrote.²⁵

But the board was divided. Before the session, Ben Bradlee lobbied board chairman Joseph Pulitzer Jr., editor and publisher of the Post-Dispatch (and JP II’s son), arguing that the Times and the Post should both receive special citations. The Times should not win a prize for “anything hand-delivered by a single source to a newspaper,” according to Bradlee. (He later relented, supporting the public service award for the Times.²⁶) Leading the campaign for the Times, and the Times alone, to win the gold medal was chairman Pulitzer. On the other side was the Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Connecticut Royster, who had concerns “about the propriety of such an award,” according to Pulitzer administrator John Hohenberg. “As the debate flagged, one of the board’s members finally asked Royster with elaborate casualness, ‘Vermont, if the Wall Street Journal had had the Pentagon papers, would you have published them?’ Without a moment’s hesitation, Royster answered, ‘Yes.’”

At that point the board decided that its members could agree on the value of acknowledging the Times’s public service. The vote was unanimous, although the board worded the citation purely to honor the act of publishing the Pentagon Papers. From the beginning, the jury’s proposal for Sheehan to receive his own prize was “set aside as a complicating factor.”

Another barrier developed to the Times receiving the prize though: the twenty-two-member Columbia University Board of Trustees. Under the original terms of the Pulitzer Prizes, trustees could disapprove the decisions of the Pulitzer board, although they were not permitted to pick a substitute winner. The trustees had never before given such a disapproval. But on Sunday, April 30, they held a marathon closed session and twice informally voted down the award to the Times—along with a National Reporting Prize that the board had recommended for columnist Jack Anderson for work unrelated to the Pentagon Papers. After the voting, Columbia president William J. McGill asked them to reconsider. Finally the trustees agreed to let the awards stand. Without mentioning specific prizes, the trustees added a statement that had “the selections been those of the Trustees alone, certain of the recipients would not have been chosen.”²⁷

Awarding the prize to the Times in such a way—over the trustees’ objection and without mentioning Sheehan—was an imperfect solution. Further, the citation itself said nothing of the journalism that had gone into interpreting the Pentagon Papers. And there was no recognition of other newspapers that had taken up the cause when the Times was enjoined, securing their own copies of the Pentagon Papers and publishing them under many of the same threats that the Times faced.