“The Post” and Our Times

If you want to read a review of the movie The Post by a competent and thoughtful movie reviewer, then read Allissa Wilkinson. 

This is not a review of the movie, but some questions the movie made me ask.

A Bit on the Movie

Do go watch the movie. The acting is very good, even if it sometimes veers into impressions. If the script is less history than Hollywood at times, then that too is the way of movies. I did not learn anything about the real PT Barnum at The Greatest Showman, but the film was a good time.

This film is for the first amendment and empowering women  and everyone should be for the first amendment and empowering women. If this is not a brave film for Hollywood to make, then it is certainly necessary. Particularly important are the scenes where Kay Graham (Maryl Streep) finds that she is good at running a newspaper despite the barriers the men around her (some well meaning) keep putting up. That part of the movie felt totally true.

Politically the film does not even try to give another side or explain why three Supreme Court justices did not think the Pentegon Papers should be released or why a huge majority of Americans were to react to the news of the day by reelecting Richard Nixon in a landslide. That would have been a better, more subtle film, but this is not a subtle film.

A Thought I Had During the Movie

My mom and dad lived in that time, I was a little boy, and though they both voted for Nixon, they were not opposed to freedom of the press (in general). What they did believe is that the free press was a business and that some politicians (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson) got favorable press, because the press was in the tank for them.

This movie shows that this was true.

It does not seem to occur, even for a moment, to the makers of the movie that everyone at The Post gets a conscience just when their heroes are out of politics and when the standards can be changed for Richard M. Nixon, a man they loath.

I laughed out loud when Graham and Bradlee (Tom Hanks) get righteous toward government when they discover that their pals in government lied to them about Vietnam. We are supposed to believe that Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee did not know that Landslide Lyndon lied? In politics? When years after his death, I moved to Texas and heard older men tell me stories of his  legendary crookedness (bribes!) that they thought amusing?

Or was the anger expressed by the film characters that their pals lied to them? After all, covering up administration ending scandals was not new to The Post or Bradlee since JFK’s parties were mentioned in the film. Every day of the Kennedy administration The Post was not printing easily available stories about JFK that would have ended his career. 1961 was not 2018 morally.

They did not print.

The stories came out after everyone was dead politically. When it counted, my parents’ generation had been told all about the wonderful Jackie-John golden White House love match by the press. The press lied and lied, but this was a lie shared by the titans of the press (Graham and Bradlee) and the government offficials JFK and LBJ. Prudish America did not have the right to the truth, because then America would have missed out on JFK and elected Nixon. Evidently, the lies their pals in government told them, because they might not get the complexities of the truth, were wrong, because . . .

Why?

Graham described her paper as “the first draft of history” and JFK got Camelot as a first draft and not the truth.

What if many people watching The Post think: “I get it. Clinton is in power and the rules are one way. The Clinton family loses so now the rules can change.” Big business papers like The Post will go all first-amendment when their favored team is out.

Nixon called The Post his enemy. Weren’t they? Weren’t they obviously in the tank for his political foes? Why wouldn’t he find it convenient that the rules of political hi-jinks changed when he won? The second draft of history (actual history) reveals LBJ’s duplicity and talent, but the lies about his wealth (for example) were made possible by those who wrote the first draft in the papers.

Would Richard Nixon have become the man he became if the press had been more balanced? Would our politics be less toxic today if the rules for Bill had not seemed very different than for Donald? Maybe some people don’t care about the truth regarding The Donald, because they know the same people telling that truth lied about so many pals for decades. When NBC was selling us The Donald didn’t they know what they report now?

That is what I thought at the end of the film. This is not to defend Donald Trump, who did not get my vote for President. This is not to attack freedom of the press: we need it. God bless any defense of women’s rights. Good.

Yet perhaps, The Post raises questions Hollywood is not as interested in answering about double standards in the first draft of history and entertainment.