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.