Again the Pentagon Papers

After the New York Times finished printing the ninth and last installment of the Pentagon papers last week, and then quickly published them as a paperback, the man responsible for spreading the documents to newspapers around the U.S. answered some questions. In Washington, Daniel Ellsberg observed that once the Justice Department tried to stop publication in the Times, it became "a matter of keeping a paper or so ahead" of the Government's court actions. Some newspapers were favored because Ellsberg thought they had reported Viet Nam to his taste in the past; others were chosen "rather arbitrarily." He picked the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press "because my father reads them." From the inside of government, Ellsberg added, it seemed easy to control news; he wanted newspapers to be tougher to deal with. "I think they will be in the future," he said.

In fact, along with continuing dissection of the Pentagon papers, new debate was mounting over whether the press could be faulted for not pinpointing key Administration actions much earlier. It could have, argued Barry Zorthian, president of TIME-LIFE Broadcast, who was the Government's information chief in Saigon from 1964 to 1967. "Most competent journalists in Viet Nam at the time had a knowledge of at least the main points of the Pentagon papers--and in many cases much more," he wrote in the Times. "What the correspondents--and their editors--did with this information is quite another question." The Washington Post's Richard Harwood called the Pentagon papers "ancient history." Still, they did provide what the correspondents in Saigon could not uncover at the time: a view of the mentality and motives behind decisions made in Washington.

Follow-Up Failure. Freelance Journalist Walter Pincus, writing in New York magazine, blamed the Washington press corps for not taking high officials to task on Indochina policy. Its "failure to follow up," he declared, assured the Administration "that there was to be no penalty for putting out misleading information." Washington Pamphleteer I.F. Stone praised the press for revealing the Pentagon papers, but added: "We wish they had started earlier." One defense applicable to both press and officialdom came from John Roche in the New Leader: "History is a very different thing when you are approaching it head-on rather than with 20-20 hindsight."

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson insisted that the press should not have printed the papers before checking with Government officials. There is a duty to do so, wrote Acheson on the Times Op-Ed page, and quoting Chief Justice Warren Burger, he noted that "this duty rests on taxi drivers, Justices and the New York Times." Citing the British system as a good example, Acheson advocated a "severe Official Secrets Act" and a "self-governing body for the press" to stimulate more "self-restraint." He quoted Samuel Johnson's advice to Boswell not "to think foolishly."

Deathly Silence. The Times seldom lets its critics go unanswered, and the next day Times Columnist Tom Wicker struck back. To Wicker, it seemed "strange to consider the duties of a Justice, a taxi driver and a newspaper as one and the same." He condemned Acheson for advocating a "formula that would give the Government immensely greater power to make and keep secrets, while the press was policing itself against 'publishing material ethically undesirable.' Samuel Johnson would know what to say to that: 'The mass of every people must be barbarous while there is no printing.' "

Another Op-Ed contributor, Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., called for a ceasefire. With characteristic hyperbole, he compared the U.S. presence in Indochina to the defeated Spanish Armada and pleaded: "Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home."

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