Kathryn Meisle and Peter Strauss
photo by Joan Marcus

Top Secret, which opened March 8^th, is a breathless docudrama about the publication, in June, 1971, of the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons. The play focuses on the inner discussions and actions of the Washington Post, and the actions taken by the Nixon Administration to prevent the Post, as well as the New York Times, from publishing the Papers.

For those readers who are too young (or getting too old) to remember, the Pentagon Papers (as they came to be known), were a secret 47 volume, 7,000 page study, commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to review the decisions and actions of our government that resulted in our entering the Vietnam War, and how we then conducted the War. The Papers, which included diplomatic cables and internal memoranda dating back to the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950’s, revealed a pattern of government dissembling and deception, not only of our enemies, but of the Congress and the American people, as well. In short, they extended Bismarck’s axiom that “Laws are like sausages, it is best not to see them being made,” to the conduct of war. Publication of the study was extremely limited: only seven copies were made; four were held under lock and key at the Depts. of State and Defense, one was at the National Archives, and one was in the possession of Mr. McNamara (who by then had moved on to become the President of the World Bank). The last copy was held by the RAND Corporation, a California think tank which conducted highly sensitive studies for the Defense Department. Significantly, the entire study had been classified Top Secret.

One of the employees of the RAND Corporation was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department employee, who had been a supporter of the War but later became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that dissemination of the Papers would help end the War by detailing the series of mistakes and deceptions that led us into the War and to remain there. On March 13, 1971, Ellsberg gave the Papers to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for the New York Times, who had just published a book review raising the possibility of holding war crimes trials against officials who were responsible for the War.

The Times set up a secret team of reporters who reviewed the Papers at a remote location in preparation for publication of a series of articles about the Papers. On June 13, 1971, the Times began publishing its series. Two days later, the Nixon Administration obtained a restraining order prohibiting the Times from publishing further installments pending a hearing on the Administration’s request for a permanent injunction barring all future publication of what it considered stolen government secrets. It is here that the play begins.
Top Secret concerns itself with the deliberations at the Washington Post about obtaining and publishing its own series about the Pentagon Papers. It begins with a young (pre-Watergate) Ben Bradlee, played by Peter Strauss, who is apoplectic about being “beaten on a Washington story by the New York Times.” Realizing that the Post was not covered by the injunction against the Times, he hopes to capitalize on the injunction by getting a copy of the Papers and publishing his own series (“Now that they’re barred from publishing we have a golden opportunity.”). On June 17, 1971, the Post’s Assistant Managing Editor did, in fact, obtain a copy of the Papers, and Bradlee summoned a group of his top reporters to his townhouse to review the 4,415 pages of the Papers they obtained and publish a story by the next day. At first they tell Bradlee that it was “totally unrealistic. . . . the Times had three months to consider this stuff and to produce some great reporting. We’re expected to sort it, read it, understand, and write it in seven hours? This is a mess. Some of it isn’t even numbered. It’s out of chronological order. It’s going to take us days just to sort it out.” Bradlee’s response is not grounded in the great principles of the First Amendment: “Days my ass. I want to stick it to the Times. This is the biggest story of government deception in decades . . . I want a story for tomorrow’s paper.”
As the reporters work on the Papers, a parallel drama is played out in the next room: the Post’s attorney has arrived and is briefed on what Bradlee wants to do. His response is that the New York Court, in issuing an injunction, had determined that the issue concerning the possibly secret nature of the contents of the Papers should be aired in the Courts, not the press, and that if the Post published, it would be flouting not only the government, but the Courts, as well. He suggested that the Post wait a day, notify the government that it had the Papers, and give the Administration an opportunity to demonstrate what documents it found objectionable to publish. This tack would give the paper a stronger case to assert the right to publish in the courts. He says “I am not arguing against publishing, just the rush to publish. What is the rush?” he asks. Bradlee’s response is typical of the way he is portrayed in the play: “I’ll tell you what the rush is. For three days the Times beat the living bejeesus our of us, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let the story slip away now.”

In the end, the decision was kicked upstairs to Katharine Graham, the widow of the Post’s owner and then the relatively new publisher of the paper. She is called out of party honoring a departing staffer and is told of the lawyer’s concerns (rushing into print with possibly dangerous information that might result in the loss of lives; possible criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act, which punishes the willful communication of information relating to the national defense by one who is not authorized to possess such information; and the loss of TV and radio licenses owned by the Post Company), and of the possible public mutiny by the reporters working on the story, who have, by now, written the first installment of the series on the Papers. After protesting that she is being asked to “do something over the phone that took the Times three months to do,” in the emotional and dramatic climax of the play, she overrules her attorney and the Chairman of the Board and says “Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Let’s publish!” End of First Act.

The second act depicts the court proceedings after the government sought to enjoin the Post from publishing, and includes excerpts from the actual trial transcripts, both from that part of the trial that was public and parts that were closed to the public. Predictably, the government attorneys and witnesses are depicted as bumbling and ill-informed (which they very well might have been, since the play is purportedly taken from actual trial transcripts), while the Post’s team, of course, wins the day by showing that materials claimed by the Administration to be supersensitive and having the potential to expose current troop movements, alert the enemy to the fact that we’d cracked their codes, and put our soldiers in harm’s way were all previously in the public domain, having been published or submitted to open hearings in Congress. Although these proceedings might be interesting to lawyers, this reviewer doubts that the attraction extends to the general public. In sum, and with the benefit of over thirty years of hindsight, “all’s well that ends well”: the Papers were published and the Republic still stands!

The playwrights add a scene at the end of the play in which they purport to sum up both sides of the government/press debate. One of the reporters argues that the Times and the Post took on the government because they could afford to retain the lawyers to do so, and that they did so not for themselves, but for “the little guys, the poor guy out there covering the zoning committee for some paper you never heard of. There’re city councils all over the country that would love to cover something up, to freeze out the local reporter.” The Post’s attorney, on the other hand, after alluding to his disillusionment over the government’s apparent concern about its right to lie to the people, ruminates about “how lucky we were. What if there were some real secrets somewhere in that mass of documents? Or what if a batch of real secrets fell into the hands of a kid reporter at the Village Voice? We are fighting for a decision that will apply to activist weeklies as well as professional dailies. . . . And God help the nation if the press doesn’t consider some stories off base. This decision protects your right to publish. But what about your responsibility to keep some things secret? At what point do we draw the line on stolen documents? Do we sanction stealing? How far will we go on anonymous sources?”

Yes, these are important questions, especially in this era of opinionated, highly partisan, 24 hr. cable news networks, whose restraint can hardly be relied upon. Yet, in the opinion of this reviewer, the playwrights undercut their own message by focusing on the Post’s actions, rather than those of the Times. The protagonist, Post Editor Ben Bradlee, is portrayed as being more interested in getting a scoop on the Times, rather than on the principles espoused for the case. When his attorney says to Bradlee that his urge to publish, after only seven hours’ review of some 4,000 pages of secret documents, appears to be “A scoop at any cost,” Bradlee replies, “No. Calculate the cost as best you can. Then go for the scoop.” By putting these words in the mouth of its Editor-in-Chief, the Post is portrayed as acting more like the “activist weekly” decried in the play’s final speech, than the “responsible daily” that was personified by the deliberate, three-month long process undertaken by the Times before publishing its series. Indeed, the way the case is portrayed, it falls more in the category known by lawyers as “bad cases make bad law,” than it would have had the story been told from the standpoint of the Times: here, the good guys win not because of the rightness of their cause, but because of the venality and incompetence of the bad guys and their lawyers. Perhaps the temptation presented by the easy target of the piece -- the Nixon Administration -- proved too much for the authors.

The Theatre Workshop is to be commended for bringing this production to the city of the New York Times. It is both timely and thought provoking and, keeping this in mind, the work was mounted as a “radio play,” with minimal set or costume design to distract the audience from what is the point of the play: its message. The cast, as a whole, was admirable, led by Mr. Strauss, as Ben Bradlee and Kathryn Meisle, as Katherine Graham and narrator of the piece; but, in reality, this is an ensemble play and the cast acted as such. The sole distraction was the decision, presumably because this is presented as a radio play, to have a sound effects person on stage. This device proved more humorous than evocative, given the gravity of the issues being presented.

As it does with its Public Programs, the Theatre Workshop will conduct panel discussions following each performance, sponsored by several human rights and political organizations. In the panel discussion following the preview this reviewer attended, two of the panelists were from the working press, including the current occupant of Mr. Bradlee’s position at the Post. Both told of recent instances where their organization acted as was proposed by the Post’s attorney in the play: they told the government about their proposed story in advance of publication and gave the government the opportunity to comment, to argue for redaction of certain portions of the story, or to present its side of the story. A member of the audience then commented that these actions were exactly the course of action that was rejected by the heroes of the play, whose position was to refuse to advise the government in advance of publication, for fear that the government would seek to enjoin publication altogether. The panelists’ responses were revealing and summed up the importance of the Pentagon Papers case: in 1971, the threat of prior restraint on the press from an administration that viewed the press as the “Fifth Column,” rather than the “Fourth Estate,” in effect required the newspapers to publish without prior notice or consultation, thereby increasing the risk of inadvertent disclosure of secrets. Today, due in large part to the Pentagon Papers case, the right of the press to publish is well established, and the press can afford to be more “responsible” in exercising its hard won rights.
Parenthetically, the Pentagon Papers case sowed the seeds of future consequences for its participants: In reaction to the leak of the Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the Nixon Administration formed a special unit, later to become known as the “Plumbers,” whose first operation was to raid the offices of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a search for evidence to discredit him. This operation, when discovered, led the Judge to dismiss charges against Mr. Ellsberg for violating the Espionage Act, due to government misconduct. The following year, the Plumbers engaged in another botched raid, this time of the Headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. Involvement of the Administration in the conduct and cover-up of the break in, which was uncovered by reporters under the direction and encouragement of the newly confident Editor and Publisher of the Washington Post , eventually led to the impeachment and resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, opened March 9^th and will have a limited run at the New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East 4^th Street (betw. Second Avenue and the Bowery), through Sunday, March 28, 2010. The regular performance schedule is Tuesday at 7:00 pm; Wednesday through Friday, at 8:00 pm; Saturdays at 3:00 and 8:00 pm; and Sundays, at 2:00 and 7:00 pm. There will be a special student matinee on Thursday, March 18^th, at 1:00 pm. Tickets may be purchased online at www.ticketcentral.com , or by phoning Ticket Central, at (212) 279-4200.