Reflections on Spielberg’s The Post and Comparing Nixon and Trump (article)

In the words of Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again.” There are many echoes of Nixon in the current era. Donald Trump in January 2018 tried to stop the publication of a book about his

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presidency just as in 1971 Nixon enjoined further publication by the New York Times of a highly secret Defense Department report on the Vietnam War, The Pentagon Papers. Soon after Trump attempted to pursue prior restraint came the nationwide release of Steven Spielberg’s The Post (2018) about that newspaper and The Pentagon Papers.

The origins of this film are that Liz Hannah, a former production assistant for actress Charlize Theron, read Washington Post owner Katharine Graham’s memoirs and drafted a screenplay. Former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal purchased it and hired Oscar-winning screenwriter Josh Singer as a co-writer. Steven Spielberg was soon on board, then Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks signed on as the leads. The director told Josh Singer, “Look, the reason I’m gonna get this up this year is because I haven’t said anything about Trump. This is my way to respond to what’s going on” (Matthew Lynch, Vanity Fair, “How The Post Became the Hottest Screenplay in Hollywood,” 2017).

While The Post has a number of different strands, underlying them all is the importance of a free press to check government deception and abuse of power. The film opens in 1966 in South Vietnam in the midst of jungle combat with civilian government employee, Daniel Ellsberg, as an observer. Soon after, on an airplane flight, Daniel talks to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who expresses his skepticism about the war, which Ellsberg shares. When the plane lands, a disingenuous McNamara tells the press how optimistic he is about the war’s progress.

Government lying preoccupies Ellsberg. Later, as an employee of the Rand Corporation, he makes copies of a secret Pentagon report that McNamara had commissioned. This document delineates how Presidents from Truman through Lyndon Johnson deceived Americans about America’s purposes and prospects in Vietnam. Ellsberg quotes someone who said that 70% of the reasons America was in Vietnam was to save face for ourselves in the Cold War. That our sons and daughters died for a cause Presidents knew to be unwinnable deeply troubles Ellsberg. He gets the papers to the New York Times, which publishes excerpts on June 13, 1971. The Nixon administration then gets a court order stopping further publication. It was the first time in American history that the federal government obtained prior restraint of a news story. The rest of the movie focuses on the efforts by Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee to publish The Pentagon Papers, the paper’s owner

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Katharine Graham’s struggles balancing business interests and her commitment to an unfettered press, and the centrality of newspapers as a check on government abuses.

The Post in its own way is reminiscent of the 1939 populist Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur. Both films present courageous individuals fighting on behalf of democracy against powerful interests. Stewart plays a naïve man who is inexplicably picked to be a U.S. Senator after the death of his predecessor. He comes to the nation’s capital as an ignorant idealist, and is a witness to government abuse. He is schooled by one of his staff, played by a savvy Jean Arthur. Mr. Smith eventually comes to expose corruption on behalf of democratic principles. In The Post, Katharine Graham, portrayed by Streep, is neither naïve nor inexperienced. The movie portrays her as at first lacking confidence in her role as publisher. Tom Hank’s Bradlee collaborates with and educates Graham as Arthur does Stewart.

While the characters in the earlier film are middle-class, in real life both Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee were children of wealth and privilege. Graham’s financier father, Eugene Meyer, bought the Washington Post, and later handed the paper over to his son-in-law, Philip Graham. After her husband’s suicide in 1963, Katharine became owner and then publisher in 1967. Bradlee too had been born to affluence in a New England family going back to the 1630s. He graduated from Harvard, became a journalist, then executive editor of the Post in 1968. Both Graham and Bradlee were friends with members of the nation’s power elite.

The central dramatic scenes in the film occur after the newspaper acquires The Pentagon Papers just as the Post is for the first time selling stock in the company on Wall Street. There is a clause with the bank underwriting the stock offering that if within a week there is a catastrophe, the deal can be cancelled. Publishing a report that has already been enjoined could be considered such a dire event. The paper’s lawyers are then brought in to ascertain what jeopardy the Post would be in if they printed the Pentagon document. The business advisers and the lawyers advising caution are in a tug of war with the journalists. Katharine Graham has the final authority, and she is torn in different directions. With the presses ready to roll, tension mounts as the climactic decision approaches.

During the stand-off, Bradlee tells his wife that he is coura-

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geous in fighting for publication of the report. His wife reminds him that Katharine Graham would be much more courageous than he because she is a woman in a man’s world. He appears to absorb this lesson. Graham herself confronts her good friend, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, about how duplicitous his actions were in the Vietnam War. The publisher and executive editor also have a heart to heart about the changing ways of Washington. As mentioned, both had been close with the wielders of power, including Graham going to LBJ’s Texas ranch, and Bradlee being friends with President Kennedy. Each had held information in confidence that was certainly newsworthy. In seeking to convince Graham to publish, Ben tells Katharine that now such relationships can no longer continue, and that they are in a different time in the nation’s history.

Later, as the deadline to publish is almost at the zero-hour, with the financial and legal advisers in the same room with her, Graham no longer can delay a decision. The camera closes in on her while she contemplates her action. After hesitating, she says “Let’s go, let’s publish.” The die was cast.

Nixon’s Attorney General sues to prevent further publication by Graham’s paper. The Supreme Court holds a hearing with the defendants being the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Court rules for a free press; the Nixon administration is defeated. Then later, the camera looks into the White House where, with his back to the camera, the actual voice of Richard Nixon is heard. On the phone, he says that the Post is to be forbidden access to the White House. After his intemperate rant, the next shot is of a security guard finding tape on the door of the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The guard calls the police. This of course is the infamous Watergate break-in. The movie ends. In Watergate, we had a vengeful, angry, paranoid President who was out of control. If Spielberg made this movie to give his opinion about President Trump, Nixon’s actions and anger at the opposition are clearly a prelude to the “Twitter President.”

There is a missing link in the film between the publication of the Pentagon report and the Watergate break-in. Nixon established a White House group known as the Plumbers, led by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy. They conducted surreptitious actions to get dirt about Daniel Ellsberg by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office. Later, it was Hunt and Liddy who masterminded the Watergate break-in. Of course, it was the reporting of the Post’s

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Woodward and Bernstein under Bradlee and Graham’s direction that uncovered the activities of Nixon and his associates, which eventually led to Nixon’s resignation as president.

Forty-five years later, the Washington Post, under the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is among those in the forefront of reporting the hidden secrets of Donald Trump. Journalism is much altered since the 1970s. With new technologies, the media is no longer as dominated by the then three television networks, a few national newspapers, and three news weeklies. The proliferation of news organizations in print, on-air, and on the Internet make for a radically different journalistic condition. As the Watergate era was a pinnacle of journalism, we are once again in the midst of a golden era of reporting. The free press was under siege with President Nixon, and Trump views the media as enemies of the people.

That the U.S. has a constitutional protection for free speech and a free press is one of the treasures of our often-dysfunctional political system. Spielberg was right to single out this issue in his film centering on Katharine Graham and the top-secret Pentagon report.

Yet there are important issues Spielberg leaves in the background. During the First World War, radical American journalist Randolph Bourne declared “war is essentially the health of the State” (The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918, 1977, 359). During World War I and World War II, the power of the American presidency, along with the increase in the military and intelligence enterprises, helped alter the nature of the federal government.

After the Cold War became institutionalized, various terms came into public discourse to describe this state of American affairs. Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, historian Arthur Schlesinger had a 1970s best-seller documenting The Imperial Presidency (1973), and others speak of the warfare state. In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, America is a global power with commercial, intelligence, and military interests throughout the planet. Outside of a few incursions into Latin America, all of America’s actual wars since 1945 have been far away in Asia. I served in the army in DaNang, South Vietnam in 1969, 8,373 miles from my Albany, New York home. Between 2001 and 2014 in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the United States spent $1.4 trillion (Linda Qiu, Politifact, “Did U.S. spend $6 trillion in Middle East wars?” 2016). This is big, big business.

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With global power comes many secret endeavors of the presidency, the intelligence services, and the military. The powerful often want to keep what they do secret, and the press often wishes to make what is hidden public. An informed citizenry is seen as integral to a free society.

Beyond this, in the background of Spielberg’s film, Nixon and his cronies are portrayed as a diabolical force threatening American institutions. Spielberg’s stated intentions call for us to compare the personalities and actions of Nixon and Trump. Richard Nixon was a loner with paranoid tendencies, but it would be a stretch to say he had an antisocial personality disorder. However, he sanctioned the criminal activities of the Plumbers, authorized and sanctioned illegal acts of the FBI and CIA, and authorized numerous actions in Vietnam that would get him convicted of war crimes. He had a long history of taking money from shady sources. Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes describes Trump as sociopathic (in Bandy Lee’s The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, 2017).

Following psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg’s findings, another psychiatrist, John D. Gartner, shows the ways Trump’s actions correspond to malignant narcissism. Eminent novelist Philip Roth, whose 2004 novel The Plot Against America is seen as foretelling much of the present, says Trump is a “massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac” (Charles McGrath, NY Times, “No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say,” 2018). Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sees Nixon as having a “mixture of arrogance and paranoia,” but says that Trump’s “first year has been an unremitting parade of disgraces that have demeaned him as well as the dignity of his office….[H]e is the first president to fail to defend the nation from an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power — and to resist the investigation of that attack.” Furthermore, “he is the first to enrich his private interests, and those of his family, directly and openly” (Sean Wilentz, NY Times, “They Were Bad. He May Be Worse,” 2018).

The Post champions a female in power and a free press as well as implicitly warns against Presidential abuse. As much similarity as there is between these two Presidents, Trump brings unprecedented attributes to the Presidency. He cannot carry out the constitutional mandate to take care that the laws are faithfully exe-

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cuted as he is willfully ignorant of the Constitution and the nation’s statutes. Trump is ill-informed, as he does not read the reports submitted to him. In addition, Trump has made over 2,000 false and misleading statements in his first 355 days in office (Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly, The Washington Post, “President Trump has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims over 355 days,” 2018). Trump frequently alters his positions. How can he make America great again when he cannot make up his own mind? As Republican Senator Lindsay Graham said, the President agreed to one deal on immigrant reform at 10:00 am and then nullified that two hours later (Paul McLeod, Buzzfeed, “Lindsey Graham Says Trump Was On Board With Bipartisan Immigration Deal, Until White House Staff Changed His Mind,” 2018). Senator Schumer said: “negotiating with this White House is like negotiating with Jell-O; it’s next to impossible” (Alexander Bolton, The Hill, “Schumer: Negotiating with Trump ‘like negotiating with Jell-O,’” 2018).

Then there is our President’s ineptitude in foreign affairs. Trump is unwelcome in Britain, our closest ally for over a century. He was condescending to Germany’s Angela Merkel, argumentative with Australia’s Prime Minister, plays school boy verbal confrontation with North Korea, has offended most of Africa, and ignores Russia’s violations. In less than a year he has done more to undermine America’s standing in the world than any other president in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Nixon had an enemies list, used the IRS to go after his political enemies, and conducted a secret war in Cambodia, yet Trump has a viciousness and mendacity for anyone who crosses him that equals Nixon’s. Our Commander in Chief is both incompetent and malevolent. Spielberg’s movie may have been his indirect way of commenting on our current President, but as he well knows his allusions to the connections between Nixon and Trump barely scratch the surface of the extraordinary Trump Presidency.

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