As a movie, The Post is going to be a blockbuster. But you expect that with any movie starring both Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep (in alphabetical order). As history, however, it leaves a little to be desired. First, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that had the scoop on the Pentagon Papers, and it was the Times, not the Post, that was sued by the Nixon administration. The Supreme Court case is, after all, New York Times Co. v. United States. However, it could be that the Times’s newsroom did not have a role for Ms. Streep, while the Post did.
Second, I have yet to see the movie, but I hope it makes it clear that the Pentagon Papers were about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations misled the public about the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers were not about Richard Nixon. In fact, according to Henry Kissinger,1 there was sentiment among some political types in the Nixon White House to let the Pentagon Papers be published to show how Kennedy and Johnson had messed up Vietnam. Obviously, President Nixon did not take that approach.
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1 Henry Kissinger, White House Years (1979), p. 729.
UPDATE (1/19/18 12:18 pm): Three follow-up comments on this post. First, after looking at the trailer and the Wikipedia article on the movie, I realize I was wrong to criticize “The Post” for focusing on The Washington Post instead of The New York Times. The dilemma of Katherine Graham as a woman in that position 45 years ago was a focus of the movie. In one sense, I was right: A movie on The New York Times and the Pentagon Papers would not have had a role for Meryl Streep. But that is a legitimate thing to make a movie about.
Second, while I have not seen the movie, at least the Wikipedia article makes it clear the Pentagon Papers covered the Truman through Johnson administrations. I don’t know if the movie does. However, to the extent that the movie ends with President Nixon “demanding that the Post be barred from the White House [not unlike the Obama administration tried to do with Fox News back in 2009], just as a security guard discovers a break-in in progress at the Watergate office complex”, I note that the Watergate break-in occurred a year after the Pentagon Papers were published.
Third, the final question in my original post still applies for both the Times and the Post.
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