![]() That a prominent case at the intersection of journalism, foreign affairs, and constitutional law should feature a cast of Columbians is hardly surprising, but in the beginning, none of those key players could have predicted just where the story was headed.Ĭertainly this was true of Morton Halperin ’58CC, who in June of 1967 was a twenty-nine-year-old aide to defense secretary Robert McNamara. “Our attitudes about the role of citizens, the role of the press, the role of public servants, and the role of the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular - the Pentagon Papers is one of those grand moments when all of these vital questions come into sharp relief.” ![]() “The great thing about the First Amendment is that it’s always a reflection of how we understand the most basic elements of our political system and our social system,” Bollinger says. Who should decide what gets published? What is the nature of classification? Are people who leak information to the press traitors or patriots? Should they receive protections or punishment? Is press censorship ever appropriate? In its varied rulings and opinions, the case offered a kaleidoscopic answer, and the issues it spotlighted still burn bright. How do you strike that balance between secrecy and the public’s right to know?” “Every democratic society has to figure out how to deal with this problem: governments need secrecy in order to operate, but they also tend to be overly secretive. Bollinger, a preeminent First Amendment scholar. “I think the Pentagon Papers case is one of the two or three most important and interesting First Amendment cases of the modern era,” says University President Lee C. With the Times asserting its right to inform the public about the evolution of an increasingly bloody war - and with Nixon claiming threats to national security - the case shot to the Supreme Court and became an instant touchstone of First Amendment jurisprudence. To many, it was an unthinkable challenge to the First Amendment’s promise that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Never before had the federal government tried to impose prior restraint - preemptive restrictions on what could be said or written - against a newspaper. On Tuesday, June 15, 1971, two days after the Times began releasing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers, the Justice Department under President Richard Nixon filed an injunction to stop publication. Seated at his desk that day, Frankel could not have imagined that this “scoop of a lifetime,” as it would be hailed, would absorb the Times in a high-stakes legal and moral drama packed with intrigue, journalistic heroism, presidential paranoia, and prosecutorial peril. I said, ‘If that’s the quality we’re going to get out of this document, well, that’s gonna be a hell of a story.’” “I saw this information as being of interest to the public: a history done by the government itself, answering the crucial question of how we got sucked into this war. Johnson justification to seek broad war powers. The pages covered the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident and raised questions about the official claim that North Vietnamese boats fired at American ships, a supposedly unprovoked attack that gave President Lyndon B. ![]() “When you see messages between General Westmoreland and McNamara, and it’s top secret - then you know it’s going to be very dramatic reading for anyone interested in how government works,” he says. Now ninety-one, Frankel recalls his excitement as he read over the papers. “I could recognize that the documents were legitimate, and much like the ones I’d seen while covering diplomacy and military affairs,” says Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who joined the Times out of college, rose to the position of executive editor, and retired from the paper in 2000. The material was about the war in Vietnam, and the pages, Frankel saw, were stamped top secret - sensitive. A reporter, Neil Sheehan, had brought him some pages of a classified government report that an anonymous source had offered him. It was March 1971, and Frankel was Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. Max Frankel ’52CC, ’53GSAS remembers the first time he laid eyes on the Pentagon Papers.
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