Blessed Are The
Whistle-Blowers The Saviors Of The Republic-Maybe-Tom Hanks And Meryl Streep’s “The
Post” (2018)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Frank Jackman
The Post, starring
Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and cameo appearances by Richard Milhous Nixon, H. R.
Halderman, Little Johnny Erlichman, Big John Mitchell, and a cohort of cozy criminals
and fixer men around them, 2018
Sometimes in
this age of fake news, alternate facts, and basic bullshit and craziness a story
from the past can come smack dab at you and speak to our times (“our times” for
me being the time in question, the early 1970s when one Richard Milhous Nixon
was roiling the country and the age of Trump when he is roiling the country to
is own tune maybe one of the real disadvantages of age, my age if you think
about it but I digress). Many times in the past I have been as likely along
with guys like Sam Eaton, Sam Lowell, and Ralph Morris of this publication all
of us Vietnam War era veterans of one kind or another and so still pissed off
at what our government did to us and to peoples across the China Seas with whom
we had no quarrel, not guns in hand quarrel,
at least metaphorically bring down whatever government was fouling the
air. These days I am, we are, worried, extremely worried about the fate of the
Republic.
Let’s put it
this way it has been a very long time, since the draconian Nixon times since I
have had that fear crawling up my spine. I do not, once again and do not call it
paranoia because the record is clear on this from every aspect of the crumb-bum
Nixon-era police blotter, to have to look over my shoulder every time I write
an “unkind” word about the government or step out in the public square and blast
away at the perfidious bastards. (I will take a funny lesson from fellow writer
here, young fellow writer by the way Sarah Lemoyne and NOT beg pardon for my language
for I am as riled as I have ever been, or at least a long time, about our
collective fates). With that in mind I review this film The Post about another time when the government did not “want to hear
it, want to see it in the public prints,” was ready to go to the mat to suppress
information we needed to know about. Needed as backup if any was really needed
by the time the material came to our doorsteps, literally with the morning
newspaper oy delivered newspaper. Namely about the long line of post-World War
II decisions that got us, got my generation who had to fight the damn thing, into
the lawnmower of Vietnam. Hell, and get this, we almost came to hot civil war
like these times are portending, for just releasing information about what had
happened in the past. Jesus they were tight-assed about even that information.
Hey, over the
long course of the war, and a decade of serious escalations and refusal to
withdraw, to draw down enough even, many people went from unwavering, unquestioning
acceptance of whatever crap the government (and here I mean the long trial of
POTUS from Harry Truman who dragged the Republic into the quagmire) to undying
opposition. And were willing to pay the price. In my own small case which need
not detain us long for this is about another type of opposition I had gone into
the military in that same unknowing, uncomprehending way and wound up as a
resister for refusing orders to Vietnam (and of course right on course wound up
in the stockade for a over a year altogether). There were other types of opposition
and that was the case with ex-Marine turned news reporter and then being in the
thick of the bullshit coming down from guys like cowboy Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of those deadbeat
POSTUS guys, and the high sheriff whiz kid Robert McNamara who went to his un-mourned
grave saying he was duped, nonsense like that, opponent Daniel Ellsberg who was
thus in a position to “grab” the files. That aspect very important because in reality
few insiders were ready to go down in the mud for their new-found convictions. This
is Ellsberg’s story as much as anybody at the Post (or Times) although the
great thrust of this film deals with the decisions made at the top, at the
executive level both whether to print the material or when the government
pulled the hammer down whether to fight the bastards.
Fight the
bastards in court which would have seemed like the beginning of wisdom and a “slam
dunk” if the various federal courts had had judges and justices who had not
skipped law school classes the days they were discussing First Amendment legal
issues under some freedom of the press and expression theory up against the government’s
desire to suppress everything the have deemed classified information,
Still it takes
a whistle-blower, a person with enough insider information to make it worthwhile
to make it public. Back then the honorable role of whistle-blower was kind of
unheard of as we generally went around assuming that every classified document
needed to placed in that category and whoever made that decision was within his
or her rights to the designation. That working under a general theory on their
part just short of the divine right of kings that the government knows best and
that was that. Although whistle-blowing has been more common it is still rare
that somebody with important documentation will spill the beans. While there is
legislation “protecting” whistle-blowers at the federal level that in honored more
in the breach than in the observance as about a dozen recent cases especially the
Chelsea Manning and now Reality Leigh Winner had made perfectly plain. The government
it turns out is as interested in chilling this aspect of free speech as any other
limitation they want to put on free expression in other contexts.
That is the
whistle-blower part, the part hat gets the ball rolling. Then the questions move
onto who will publish the documents, who will risk that cozy relationship with
the guys and gals at the top of government when the deal goes down. Obviously for
documents the newspaper and now social media are the vehicle. And by a
circuitous way the Times and Post got into the buzz-saw when the Nixon
government went berserk that one of its own “in-house” evaluations of the
Vietnam mud hit the front pages with a vengeance. (That “its own” generic since
it was actually down under the high sheriff with blindfolds on McNamara the
lying bastard who went to his grave, his un-mourned grave, claiming ignorance.
And don’t make too much of that Nixon point although it was probable until
recently the most paranoid government around but not so strangely the liberal constitutionalist
Obama government prosecuted more whistle-blowers than any previous administration
highlighted by that Manning case. (In the interest of transparency despite my riled-up
feelings Obama did at the last minute before leaving office commute her sentence,
for which we are thankful.)
The bulk of
the film though deals with the responsibility of newspapers to fight the good fight
when the government gets overweening. Thus the film highlights the internal
processes at The Post mainly at the
top with increasingly feisty and assertive publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl
Streep’s role) and today strangely heavy-smoker Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks’ role)
about how to respond to the very real full court press the Nixon administration
went to in order to suppress what would become The Pentagon Papers. This struggle, this rare Fourth Estate struggle
is one which the average citizen today a couple of generations removed from the
showdown may not know about. The Supreme Court (SCOTUS in tweet speak) got it
right but this film shows how close a call things could have gone the other way
as we are more aware of these days when they routinely have and how hard it was
to get the material to the public. Not everybody has the resources or the connections
to go the distance. We should all be glad they did although it was a close thing.
And we should hope that in these trying times for the Republic such forces will
come to the fore again when the next governmental hammer comes down.
