THE ADVOCATE 609
VOL. 79 PART 4 JULY 2021
NEW BOOKS
AND MEDIA
By R.C. Tino Bella*
Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative
Facts by David E. McGraw (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019)
Reviewed by Anders I. Ourom
Some readers may recall The Post, a 2017 movie about the publication by
The New York Times1 (the “NYT”2) and then The Washington Post (the “Post”)
of what became known as the Pentagon Papers (the “Papers”). The Papers
were a huge collection of top-secret documents in which the U.S. government
candidly examined its involvement in the Second Indochina War
(a.k.a. the Vietnam War) through the mid-1960s, and exposed its fraudulent
foundations. They were leaked to the NYT and then other newspapers by
Daniel Ellsberg, at a tumultuous period in that country’s history
(plus ça change … ).
Publication of the Papers began with an article on the front page of the
NYT on June 13, 1971—50 years ago, hence the otherwise unnecessary
length of this review—which denounced the U.S. government, particularly
that of President Johnson, as a collection of serial, world-class liars, whose
lies led to innumerable deaths and maiming of Vietnamese, Cambodians,
Laotians, Americans and others. The stars of the movie include Meryl
Streep as Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, and Tom Hanks as Ben
Bradlee, its executive editor, for which much may be forgiven. Still, it somewhat
overplayed the role of the Post in publishing the Papers and fighting
for and winning the constitutional right to publish. In that respect, the lead
(and lede) was largely that of the NYT, hence the citation of the case.3
The NYT’s outside legal counsel advised against publication of the
Papers, but James Goodale, its in-house counsel, had greater intestinal fortitude
and successfully argued that the press had a right under the First