The American Experiment

by David M. Rubenstein

  But it’s quite a story. Bob Woodward, then and now the best reporter in Washington, had turned up a story about a CIA operation called Operation Ivy Bells. It was an attempt to intercept Soviet communications with their submarines in the Pacific.

  Kay was taking a bath one morning, and her assistant came in and said, “Mrs. Graham, the president is on the telephone.” So she, always ready for a challenge, got out of the bath, toweled off as best she could, picked up a pad and a pen, and listened to the president. The president said, “Kay, I’m afraid the Post is working on a story that is harmful to the national security, and Bill Casey is here.”

  Casey was then the director of the CIA. He spelled out his complaint in some detail. Then Reagan again said, “Kay, I’m concerned about the Post working on a story that’s a threat to national security, and Bill Casey is here.” And she realized that the president had gone through his three-by-five cards and was back reading the first card again.

  She took the complaint very seriously. Woodward had been working on the story knowing that this secret about Operation Ivy Bells had been leaked to the Soviets by a spy inside the NSA [National Security Agency] named Ronald Pelton, who had subsequently been detected and arrested. So it was true that Operation Ivy Bells was the most secret project. It was also true that it had been compromised.

  I got one call from a president of the United States in my time—from George W. Bush, when a very famous Post reporter, Dana Priest, a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, was working on a story about secret CIA prisons for al-Qaeda detainees in other countries. President Bush was afraid that the story disclosed the names of the other countries and that that would end their cooperation with the United States. We printed that story. We did not print the names of the countries that were hosting those CIA prisons. I believed then and believe now that was the right goal.

  DR: Should the press feel that its job is to protect national security in some way?

  DG: The best answer I can give you is, “It depends.” The most famous Supreme Court decision on the First Amendment refers to an outrageous example, trying to pick the most grievous possible threat to national security. It’s an old decision. It refers to the movement of ships and men in wartime.

  So if a newspaper were to publish that soldiers were traveling from New York to Europe on such and such a ship at such and such a time, they’d be alerting an enemy government that could try to sink the ship. The Supreme Court used that as an example of something that would not be permitted under the First Amendment. Direct, egregious harm to the country, in other words.

  You couldn’t be stronger in standing up for the right to free speech and the right to print than the Post was. Should we have listened to questions such as “If you print this story, might it result in the deaths of CIA agents or American soldiers?” You should listen to that, in my opinion. We did.

  DR: When the government is calling up about national security, is it really more about political embarrassment than national security?

  DG: Not necessarily. It depends on the president, depends on the situation. Let’s take an example you and I both know well because of our age—the war in Vietnam. The government continually asserted that we were winning that war, that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Reporters, and this goes back to the Kennedy administration, kept writing stories that said that wasn’t so. First President Kennedy, then President Johnson, then President Nixon complained bitterly to publishers about stories that basically said government officials weren’t telling the truth.

  History is pretty clear that government officials weren’t telling the truth, or that perhaps they didn’t understand what reporters knew from being in the countryside, that the enemy was a lot stronger than we thought they were. That’s an example of government leaders complaining in good faith.

  In the Nixon administration, I don’t think their complaints were in good faith. President Nixon was desperate to keep the truth about Watergate from coming out, and repeatedly said that national security was involved, because indeed he had tried to get the FBI and the CIA to screw up the investigation in various ways.

  DR: Let’s talk about the Pentagon Papers case. When the Post received those papers from Daniel Ellsberg, were you more worried that they had been stolen from the government or that the publication of them would imperil national security?

  DG: The latter. Remember the circumstances. Ellsberg, who in a sense was the author of the Pentagon Papers, one of their compilers, had leaked those papers to the New York Times. All of them. He also went through them with the New York Times and pointed to areas that he thought in fact would endanger intelligence-gathering sources and methods or in other ways compromise what he took to be actual secrets.

  The Times had months and months to study the papers and prepare a series of articles for publication. They published two, and then were enjoined by a federal court from publishing any more.

  At that point, Daniel Ellsberg called someone he knew at the Washington Post and gave us another set of the Pentagon Papers. They arrived on Ben Bradlee’s living room floor early one morning, and Ben had every national security and foreign policy correspondent at the Post there ready to read them. We did not have months. We had part of the day to consider it.

  Now, I have said that even Ellsberg thought that full publication of the Pentagon Papers would endanger sources and methods of intelligence-gathering, and I still don’t know to this day what those parts were. But the Pentagon Papers were full of details unknown to the American public about the history of the war in Vietnam. On top of that, it was the story everybody in the United States was talking about.

  The Times had published. It had been enjoined. The government was arguing that the publication of the papers would compromise national security. But it wasn’t clear from reading the first two days of stories that there were any national secrets disclosed. There was a lot of diplomatic history and a lot of cases where presidents or secretaries of state or secretaries of defense had said one thing to the public while saying something else in private.

  So Bradlee turned his reporters loose on this story. The first story that they wanted to publish had to do with dealings with Vietnam in the 1940s, and clearly did not involve any risk to national security. They were going to tell the story in multiple parts, and that was the first part.

  Bradlee had in the lawyers who had represented the Post from a firm called Royall, Kegel, and Wells. Those lawyers looked at the stories not so much from a national security point of view.

  Also, the Post had gone public that week. And just to help things along, the deputy attorney general of the United States called in our Justice Department reporter and said, “I want you to tell Mrs. Graham that if a corporation is convicted of a felony, such as violating the Espionage Act, it cannot own television stations.” We at that time owned two television stations, which amounted to one-third of the value of our company.

  So that was a pretty direct threat. The lawyers continued to read and make recommendations. Bradlee’s writer Chal [Chalmers] Roberts wrote a story. Bradlee said, “I think this story has to run in tomorrow’s paper.” Businesspeople at the Post guided by the lawyers recommended against it. Mrs. Graham had to make the decision on the spot in a telephone call from Bradlee and the leaders of the paper. And she decided to print.

  DR: When it was printed, what was the reaction of the government? Did they go into court to try to get an injunction against further publication?

  DG: They did. They went before a judge in Washington, who denied an injunction. They then went to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which granted the injunction.

  By then, one day had gone by. Courts worked a little faster in those days. We had printed, I believe, a second part of the story, and the appeals court decision came down during the press run. So some copies of the paper had been printed, but not all.

  Gene Patterson, the managing editor of the Post, told me that was the only time that he went down to the pre
ss room, went into the foreman’s office, and said, “Stop the presses.” We ceased printing as soon as we had the order ordering us to desist.

  DR: Then did it go to the Supreme Court?

  DG: Yes. Our case was joined with that of the New York Times, roughly three weeks from the filing of the first complaint against the Times. The Supreme Court felt some imperative to decide the case quickly, as the lawyers for the Times and the Post certainly argued.

  The Supreme Court ruled six to three that the government could not stop the papers in advance from printing a story except in the greatest imaginable circumstances. And it is the law of the land to this day. You get arguments about exactly what the decision says, but it said in this case the papers have the right to print the story, and we did.

  DR: Did your mother ever tell you whether she had second thoughts or whether she came close to saying, “Don’t publish it”?

  DG: It was a very, very close call. The lawyers felt that with the company having gone public so recently, there was some legal threat involved in certain assertions we made. That threat, if it was a threat, never materialized. They also felt that, the Times having been enjoined from publication, we could be found in contempt of that court order for publishing.

  That threat also never materialized. But it was a very close call for both Punch Sulzberger, the great publisher of the New York Times, and Katharine Graham. I think it was the best business day of her life that she made that decision.

  DR: Let’s go on to a couple years later, when two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, are assigned to follow a break-in at the Watergate Office Building. They ultimately produce a set of stories that win the Pulitzer Prize. Was it difficult for the Post to go forward and publish those?

  DG: It’s very hard to describe how risky, how dangerous that period was. Certain things happened then that would be inconceivable today because of the Internet. Kay Graham had a farm in Virginia to which she often repaired for the weekend. I was with her at that farm on the night of June 17.

  Howard Simons, the managing editor, called the next morning and said, “Kay, there’s two great stories I’ve got to tell you about. First, there was a traffic accident in Alexandria and a car smashed the porch of a house and a copulating couple fell down from the second floor on top of the police car in full view of everyone on the street.”

  He said, “And second, there was a burglary in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, and they arrested five people in business suits, including a guy who used to work for the CIA.”

  That’s how it began. I want to emphasize that no one at the Washington Post, not Bob Woodward, not Carl Bernstein, not Ben Bradlee, not Katharine Graham, in June of 1972, or when Bob and Carl began their reporting, had the slightest intimation that this would lead to the White House, that this would lead to the resignation of a president. I think that would have been regarded as ridiculous by any of them.

  Knowing only that there had been a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee under unusual circumstances, they wanted to know what had happened. They just took one step at a time, learning one fact after another, under demanding rules set up by Ben Bradlee.

  Something that couldn’t happen today was this: the Post would print a story, a further piece of information Woodward and Bernstein had learned in the course of the investigation. One tiny step at a time, beginning with how one of the burglars had a notebook in his pocket that included the telephone number of someone in the White House, Howard Hunt. Carl Bernstein called that number, asked to speak to Mr. Hunt.

  The secretary said, “He’s down the hall with Mr. Colson,” one of the top aides to the president. He got on the phone and Carl said, “I want to ask you how your name came to be in the address book of James McCord, one of the burglars arrested at the Watergate.” And Hunt said, “Oh shit,” and hung up the phone.

  That’s where it started. It turned out that McCord had in his pocket money that was traced via serial numbers to a cash contribution someone had made to the Nixon reelection committee. That was interesting.

  The stories turned out to be important because they were true. If the stories hadn’t been true, it would have had grave consequences for the Post.

  DR: At one point there was a story that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published that was not accurate. Did the Post say, “We better stop with this story because we could have more mistakes and embarrass ourselves?”

  DG: Months into the Watergate investigation, a grand jury had been convened. It had held hearings for months, and the Post had written story after story after story that turned out to be true. In one story, Bob and Carl wrote that a certain person in the White House had access to the fund that was used to pay the Watergate burglars and that there had been testimony to that effect in front of the grand jury.

  What was not true was that there had been testimony to that effect before the grand jury. What was true was that that person had access to the fund. That was an embarrassing moment. However, by then Woodward and Bernstein had proven right on so many difficult stories, and they and Ben Bradlee immediately came to understand what the mistake was. No one thought about pulling back.

  DR: There’s a famous story where John Mitchell, the attorney general of the United States, tried to send a message to your mother saying that some part of her anatomy would get into a wringer if she didn’t stop this kind of publication. Did she ever feel threatened by that?

  DG: Mitchell’s statement may have been made while he was drunk, but certainly was made late at night to Carl Bernstein. No, she didn’t feel threatened by it.

  Two things that happened in the course of the investigation were very directly threatening. One was that friends of hers told her, “You have to be very careful. You have to assume that your phone is tapped.” These were people in the White House.

  Second, by then we owned four television stations. Two of them were in Miami and Jacksonville, Florida. People came forward in those areas to challenge our licenses. The groups in question were local Republican business groups, and it certainly looked to us to be possible that they had been encouraged to do this by the Nixon administration.

  When the Nixon tapes became public, Nixon, sitting in the Oval Office, directs Charles Colson, one of his top aides associated with dirty tricks, one who subsequently went to jail, to “talk to our friends in Florida” and get them to challenge those licenses for the Washington Post. Had President Nixon not ultimately resigned, those challenges would have gone before the Federal Communications Commission, where the chairman, Dean Burch, was also the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  That remains to this day, as far as I know, the most direct assault on free speech. They wanted to take away those stations because they didn’t like our coverage of Watergate.

  DR: It’s hard to believe, as we sit here talking, that these events occurred almost fifty years ago. In the ensuing fifty years, do you think that publishers have changed the way they look at publishing things that might affect national security or the way the president is perceived by the country? Do you think publishers are more willing to publish, less willing to publish? How has the world really changed in the last fifty years with respect to these First Amendment issues?

  DG: Great news organizations like the Washington Post feel a duty to publish what they think is important to the public, and will run risks to do that. However, I think governments still feel the impulse to strike back when criticized, and I would say such an occurrence occurred this year [2020]. President Trump put out a tweet that Twitter chose for the first time to fact-check. Alongside his tweet, it published links to other sites that, in Twitter’s opinion, suggested that Trump’s tweet wasn’t true.

  Now, under the First Amendment, President Trump has a right to say what he wants, and Twitter has a right to run its site the way it wants. Twitter has an undoubted right not to publish a tweet of President Trump’s. They don’t have the right to alter
it, to put words in his mouth, in other words. But they have the right to treat it as they see fit, not to run it, to run it, or to run it with a fact-check.

  President Trump was furious. He immediately tweeted that what Twitter was doing was wrong. “We’ll strongly regulate or shut them down” is approximately what he said.

  Two days later, the White House published an executive order with three parts. First, government advertising would be taken away from social media sites that, in the opinion of the government, weren’t fair to all sides. Second, the Justice Department was ordered to draft a bill to send to Congress, rewriting what’s called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which sets the legal standard for suits against social media companies such as Twitter. Third, the Federal Communications Commission, to which Trump had appointed the commissioners, would hold hearings on whether they ought to rewrite Section 230.

  I don’t know how much government advertising was subsequently taken away from Twitter or any other social media platform. But that executive order invited the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, OMB [the Office of Management and Budget], and the FCC all to participate in this attack on Twitter. That is really something.

  DR: What are the lessons that you’ve taken away from exercising the First Amendment rights the Washington Post has?

  DG: The First Amendment applies to the press, but it also applies to anybody. Someone speaking up and saying things the government doesn’t like cannot be prosecuted for that, cannot be put in jail for that in our country. What’s important here is not the rights of newspapers, not the rights of news organizations, not the right to broadcast, it’s the rights of all of us.

  Governments are run by human beings. When people are criticized in ways that they think are unfair, they have an impulse to try to strike back. Those who care have a great need to keep reminding everybody in this country that one of the things that’s special is the right of any of us to say what we think without risking attack by the government. I know that in the future, news organizations will stand up as strongly as ever for the First Amendment. And I know that courts are inclined to agree with them. I know that the citizens of this country also are on the side of everyone’s freedom to say what they think.