New York Times Has Said Since 1971 that It Is a “Fourth Co-Equal Branch of Government” and It Will Decide What Secrets of the U.S. Will Be Told to the World

          When the editor of the Times reveals secrets of the U.S. which are seriously damaging the nation according to President Bush in 2006, the editor is merely following the tradition which the newspaper established when it published the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971.

          An editor at the New York Times wrote at that time, “The Times has quite literally become that Fourth Estate, that fourth coequal branch of government.”

            The editor who wrote that was Harrison Salisbury in his book “Without Fear or Favor,” an official book commissioned by the New York Times itself.

           

Pentagon Papers Were Difficult for Many to Swallow --- Including the Publisher

            It was difficult for many to understand in 1971 (including the Publisher of the New York Times, Punch Sulzberger) why the Times should be allowed to publish stolen, classified information from the Pentagon. How could they possibly know whether any of this information would help the enemy?

            If they had reason to believe that this information was classified as “secret” merely because it would be embarrassing to those in charge, should they not have to follow some procedure, such as go to a judge and have him decide in secret whether the information was properly classified? Of course, their concern really was that they didn’t consider the Communist governments that the nation was fighting in 1971 to be “enemy.” It would appear obvious to most that a newspaper should not be allowed to publish every secret document it had stolen.

            Even if one believed that the Times should be allowed to publish the Pentagon Papers, the Times had not done anything particularly difficult. It had not accomplished any great reporting. It only printed the document which had fallen into their lap from Daniel Ellsburg, an “intellectual” who had been a hawk but had soured on the war.

            This became a “great victory” for the Times even though the document showed how stupid the paper had been in promoting our entry into the war. It proved how prescient others had been in shuddering over their stupidity about escalating the war in Vietnam. It was obvious all along that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had lied to them, or the Times had lied to the citizens, or a combination of the above.

            In effect, the Pentagon Papers were an expose of the Times itself.

They would not have made much of a splash if President Nixon had not given them so much publicity. “[Nixon should have] welcomed publicity, making one thing perfectly clear. The Vietnam morass had not begun on his watch but on his predecessors’, the Democrats Kennedy and Johnson,” according to one commentator.

            The lawsuits that followed went through a series of courts as both the Times and the Washington Post brought suits. The case went before the Supreme Court which held 6-3 in favor of the newspapers, but only three judges said that they would never restrain a newspaper from printing such documents. The other three looked at the papers in this

particular case and determined these particular papers posed no real threat to the government. This meant that six of the nine judges would not allow a newspaper to unilaterally publish such documents in the future without court approval.

 

Official History of Times Said Times Was Now a Fourth Branch of Government

            Harrison Salisbury believed the issue had clearly indicated that the Times had become the fourth branch of government. He thought it so important that it prompted him to write his book, Without Fear or Favor. In the foreword, he said:

            “In the past quarter of a century the American Establishment has been shaken to its foundations by what amounts to a new American Revolution. Power has flowed into different and not always steady hands. The country has been passing through (there is no sign that the process is yet complete) an epoch of change which begins to rival those surrealist dramas, Russia in 1917 and China in 1949.

            “The totality of this metamorphosis lies beyond the scope of this book, but what I try here to document is the role of The New York Times, how it has participated in these new currents, affecting them and being, in turn, profoundly changed itself.

            “We think of a newspaper, even a great newspaper like The Times, as holding up a looking glass to history. For many years The Times described itself as “a newspaper of record.” It is my thesis, to paraphrase McLuhan, that, in a sense, the mirror has

become the message; that in showing us what we are and what we are doing; in reflecting the bloat, the complexity, the contradictions of the post-World War II society, The Times has come to fulfill a new function; it has quite literally become that Fourth Estate, that fourth coequal branch of government of which men like Thomas Carlyle spoke. [Emphasis added]

            “I have centered my attention on a half-dozen events, mileposts, if you will, of this process. The great confrontation over the Pentagon Papers takes a central place because it stands as a metaphor of the emergence of The Times into its new social role

and, moreover, is in every respect an exciting, a cautionary and an until-now untold tale ...

            “My emphasis has been placed on the modern Times and its times, and particularly upon the American experience, the experience of the last twenty or twenty-five years [1955 to 1980], the experience of change in the American Establishment and

the American charter. ...

            “It is concerned with Vietnam at home not in Asia; the consequences of Brown v. The Board of Education; with the CIA as a metaphor of homegrown, secret and out-of-control bureaucracy....

            “Amid it The Times reaches out with its reporting skills, identifies the new thrusts, the new players, and tries, sometimes with clumsiness, to act as surrogate for the people, seeking to strengthen the First Amendment powers which enable it to examine, as the people no longer can, the BIGS, Big government, Big Bureaucracy, Big Spying, Big Interests, Big Labor, Big Business, all the multiplicands that have transformed our Jeffersonian society into something quite different, quite frightening at times, seldom understood, carrying on the task, as Mr.Ochs promised, “without fear or favor.”

Not What Founder of New York Times Envisioned

            When Harrison Salisbury wrote about all the “BIGS” in the world, he leftout a very important one: BIG MEDIA, particularly the New York Times.
            This is not what Adolph Ochs, the founder of the Times, envisioned, a newspaper which presents all sides of an issue. That vision was violated a long time ago (1935) by Iphigene and Arthur Sulzberger. They started to put a little opinion into the news and present only the “correct” side — their side.
            It’s gotten worse over the years since then and is now totally out of control with the new occupant of the throne, Pinch Sulzberger.
            What did his father, Punch, think of all this in 1970 when he was making the decisions? It did not thrill him, but he could not move quickly. He had over 900 newsmen. That in itself is quite a “balance wheel” that would prevent anyone from making drastic changes. Punch was only thirty-seven with no experience and no newspaper ability when he was suddenly thrust into running this huge organization. It is amazing he did as well as he did.
            At some level, Punch was troubled by the Pentagon Papers. He realized that there were two sides to the issue, but he was under pressure from the news people and he agreed to the publication, even writing, “We are going to look back on these days as some of the most exhilarating in the history of the Times and ... in the history of American journalism.”
            Tifft and Jones who wrote the best, official history of the Times, “The Trust,” approved with these words: “The publication of the Pentagon Papers was his [Punch] grand, defining moment, a moment in which he took bearings from his heritage and his own values and instincts, and steered the paper safely and surely toward the ‘right’ decision.”
            There’s no question that Punch’s decision greatly increased and solidified his prestige in the newsroom. A question arose during the process whether the Times would actually print the documents or merely quote or paraphrase them. The editors were firmly in favor of printing the documents. Abe Rosenthal, the Editor, felt so strongly that he had privately resolved to quit if Punch did not do so. On the Friday before the Sunday publication, Punch agreed.
            When book companies came after the Times to make the story into a book, the government entreated Punch that this would be a serious mistake. It was one thing to print them in a newspaper which did not have a long shelf-life. Despite what he believed, they said, there was some information that could threaten the life of CIA agents and damage the country’s security. Punch agreed not to publish a book.
            The Pentagon Papers were about 7,000 pages in 47 volumes. The study was conceived by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 through early 1968 who had been the prime architect of our policy in Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He had made it grow from a few hundred advisors when he and Kennedy arrived to more than 500,000 American troops when he left.
            Before leaving, he ordered a small staff in the Department of Defense to do a secret study of America’s decisions about Vietnam since the end of World War II. The study was completed in 1969. Only fifteen copies of the top-secret study were made, but two went to the Rand Corporation where Ellsburg read it. McNamara refused to talk about the war until he wrote a book in 1995 about the war he had created, in which he said the U.S. had been “wrong, terribly wrong.” In a 1999 book, he estimated on the first page that 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed in the struggle.