This play had its origins in a classroom, so it seems appropriate that it is now being performed in universities around the United States. In the mid-1970's, when teaching an undergraduate lecture course in media law. I found that the most important and dramatic way to start the class was with a discussion of the Pentagon Papers Case. The case was of signal importance since it pitted the interests of a free press against the government's need for secrecy when national security may be at risk. Moreover, the facts were riveting. In the midst of a war in which more than 50,000 American soldiers were killed, the New York Times gained possession of a huge trove of documents that traced the origins of the war and described the U.S. government's internal deliberations. Importantly, many of the documents showed government deception -- of the press and the public.

The documents, which soon became known as the Pentagon Papers, had been commissioned by Robert McNamara in 1967, while he was the Secretary of Defense. He wanted the government to be able to gain a greater understanding of the origins and decision making process of the War in Vietnam. Just after President Nixon took office in 1969, the Defense Department published the 47 volume, 7,000 page study, which included about 4,000 pages of contemporaneous documents. It was the most limited of editions. There were only seven copies -- five of which were held under lock and key within the United States government at the departments of state and defense and at the National Archives. The sixth copy was in the possession of Secretary McNamara, who had become the President of the World Bank. The seventh volume was in Santa Monica, at a think tank called the RAND Corporation, which conducts highly sensitive studies for the department of defense.

Practically no one read them.  But one of those who did was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department employee, a one time fervent supporter of the war (or "hawk," in the parlance of the era), who had come to believe that the war was a tragic mistake. With the highest security clearance, he was working at RAND. He quickly became convinced that the Congress and the American people needed to understand what the papers had to say, that they could help to end the war by explaining the series of mistakes and deceptions that had led us to enter Vietnam and to remain there. He and his colleague, Anthony Russo, secretly copied the documents. First, Ellsberg tried to share some of the documents with Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hoping that he would hold hearings and make them public. When that failed, he gave the volumes to a reporter at the New York Times named Neil Sheehan who had just published a book review discussing the possibility that those who had been involved in conducting the war (perhaps including Ellsberg himself) might be guilty of war crimes.

Against the advice of their outside lawyers, who argued that the publication of top secret documents could be illegal, but following the advice of their internal lawyer, the publisher and editors the New York Times set up a secret team to scour the papers and prepare a series of front page articles that made heavy use of the documents. When the first story appeared on June 13, 1971, President Richard Nixon's first reaction was surprisingly benign; after all, the material in the papers ended in 1968, before Nixon took office. But he quickly became concerned about the need to protect government secrets, and he instructed the Attorney General to go to court immediately to block the rest of the series. The government argued that the Pentagon Papers were filled with vital information including codes and battle plans that could put American lives at risk. The district court granted an immediate injunction, pending a formal hearing.

Ellsberg, who was in hiding in Boston, did not give up. Hoping that the Washington Post, which was not covered directly by the court order, would publish the papers, he gave a set to one of the Post's editors, Ben Bagdikian. On June 17, Bagdikian flew back to Washington, carrying the papers in a large box, and went directly to the home of the Post's top editor, Ben Bradlee, who had assembled a team of his top national security reporters to read the documents and, Bradlee hoped, prepare a story or two for the next day's paper. Bradlee and his publisher, Katharine Graham, knew that they would end up in court and that the personal and financial consequences of a defeat could be devastating. But they also believed that they had an opportunity to help solidify the Post's reputation as a great paper as well as a constitutional duty to inform the public by telling the story. Some of those in the Nixon administration, who did not know the contents of the papers, were equally concerned that publication would imperil the effort to win the war.

In the early 1980s, having told the story to students for almost a decade, I decided to write a play that would use the techniques of contemporary political dramas based on documents -- such as "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" and "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer," both of which use the transcripts of government hearings to examine the excesses of anti-communism during the Cold War. Since the Post's story was so much more compressed, I decided to tell the story from the perspective of that paper rather than the perspective of the New York Times, though both cases were dramatic and the Times is, properly, more indelibly identified with the case. I was quickly joined by my friend, the late Leroy Aarons, an immensely talented former Washington Post reporter who had a flair for theater and knew all of the newspaper's participants. How Roy would have loved this new production.

Roy and I interviewed most of the key participants and used all of the documents that were available at that time. It should be noted, however, that some additional materials, including some highly revealing White House recordings, have become available during the past decade. Some of those documents, along with other material that may be of interest to students and others, are available at TopSecretPlay.org.

*******************

As I write these words, issues of the press and national security are very much in the news.  During the War in Iraq, the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers have printed stories that the government says compromise our efforts in the war on terror. The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting about the CIA's interrogations of al Qaeda suspects at secret prisons (referred to as "black sites" inside the government) in eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe. At the government's request, she withheld the names of those countries. In awarding the prize, the Pulitzer committee commended Priest "for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government's counterterrorism campaign."

Meanwhile, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times won a Pulitzer last year for their stories describing the administration's decision to engage in widespread domestic surveillance without a court order -- a practice that has since been changed. The Times reporters were cited by the Pulitzer jury "for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty."

Many people in and out of government regarded those and similar recent stories as great journalism that has helped to protect our constitutional liberties and America's democratic form of government. Others questioned the wisdom of publishing those stories and some went so far as to charge the papers with treason and wanting America to lose the war. (In his radio program, for example, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said of the Times reporters "I think what they did is worthy of jail.")

In June, 2007, in a widely debated decision, the CIA, decided to release a trove of CIA secrets sometimes known as the "Family Jewels."  The director of National Intelligence, Michael Hayden, explained that he had ordered release of the documents because openness can help build trust for the CIA and because the more that the agency can tell the public, the less chance that misinformation among the public will "fill the vacuum."

*************

In any case involving top secret national security documents, there are a series of decision makers: those in the government who classify the materials in the first place; the person with access to the material who decides to give it to the press; the reporters, editors and publishers who decide whether to use the story; the leaders of government who decide whether to take the case to court; and the court itself, which has to decide whether to stop the press from printing -- or to punish the press for what it has printed. The stories that gain public attention are naturally those where the material is "leaked" and where a publication decides to use the material. Those concerned with the battle over government secrets should always be mindful that the best reporters and editors have had access to scores of national secrets that they have decided not to print and that such reporters and editors maintain that they only print those stories which they are convinced have been improperly classified and where the benefits to the public for outweigh any risks to national security. But there are those who believe that new risks will be presented, and new rules may evolve, in an era dominated by the Internet and by concerns about international terrorism.

Geoffrey Cowan July, 2007