TOP SECRET: THE BATTLE FOR THE PENTAGON PAPERS

The Washington Post Writes...

“Top Secret”: Pentagon Papers, for Your Ears Only
by Nelson Pressley
Published Feb 3, 2008

Publishing the Pentagon Papers was, of course, one of the great dramatic events in journalism. But can the tangled episode actually hold the stage?

It will try to in radio-theater style -- actors holding scripts and working behind microphones -- when “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” plays at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland this Thursday and Friday. The radio troupe L.A. Theatre Works, which first produced the show for broadcast in 1991, is touring this lone theatrical effort by Geoffrey Cowan, a 65-year-old journalism professor who figured he knew a good drama when he taught one.

“I’ve always loved dramas based on fact,” Cowan says from Harvard, where he is a fellow with the Kennedy School of Government. Cowan cites the transcript-driven “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been” (1972) and “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (1964) as favorites, and says he could feel the same kind of intrigue and tension in a media law class he taught at UCLA each time he came to the issues surrounding The Washington Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers.

“I thought it was such a great story when I told it in class,” Cowan says. “And it just felt like a play. The stakes were enormously high, and the characters were terrific.”

The Post, of course, had been playing catch-up in June 1971 to the New York Times, which had received the 7,000-plus-page document from Daniel Ellsberg months earlier. After the Times published for several days, a court order enjoined the paper to stop.

By then, The Post had obtained its own copy of the Pentagon Papers, and reporters and editors huddled over the documents at Executive Editor Ben Bradlee's house. The paper faced a hard choice: Sit on the information for a day or maybe longer as the legal ramifications became clearer, or publish immediately in the name of the people's right to know?

The Times had the scoop, but Cowan saw that The Post’s situation “was more dramatic.” As Cowan put it together with the late Post reporter Leroy Aarons, “Top Secret” divides cleanly into two acts: the first in Bradlee’s house, as reporters scramble to write the story while editors, executives and lawyers wrestle with whether to publish. The second act compresses the next 21/2 weeks of court activity as the Nixon administration pursued its case.

“Top Secret” didn’t go much of anywhere initially. “Just some staged readings in my house,” Cowan says with a laugh. But in 1990, Cowan mentioned that he'd written a play to his acquaintance Susan Albert Loewenberg, the producing director of L.A. Theatre Works.

“I thought, ‘Oh, God,’ ” Loewenberg recalls. She found it “kind of interesting,” but it sat around the office until the Persian Gulf War broke out. With the government and journalists again debating national security and freedom of the press, Loewenberg decided that the script “would make an incredible piece.”

L.A. Theatre Works has recorded more than 400 plays, mainly classic and contemporary American works, for broadcast since 1985. Loewenberg says it typically takes a week to create a production; Hollywood actors are hired to perform five times in front of live audiences, with the results edited together for broadcast on National Public Radio and, in recent years, XM. (LATW has also collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution and Voice of America on a series of broadcasts.)

Since 2005’s “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial,” LATW has toured several productions to more than 250 cities. Loewenberg says, “I thought it would be fun to tour, to show people how a radio show is done live.” (She says if people picture Orson Welles and his 1930s Mercury Theatre, they’ll get the idea.) Cowan is an unabashed fan, marveling at the foley artists who create the sound effects around the actors, and at the imaginative capabilities of a roughed-in production.

“Your mind does amazing things,” Cowan says. “Because you’re not focused on a set, your mind kind of goes with it.”

Loewenberg says that LATW’s recent touring shows have emphasized docudramas “with real issues you can discuss.” The “Top Secret” tour is mainly barnstorming to university campuses, with lectures and panel discussions organized around the performances; this Thursday, Bradlee -- played by John Heard in the production -- will join Ellsberg on a panel before the show.

The show has been revised for this tour, with Cowan taking director John Rubinstein’s advice and augmenting the role of Post Publisher Katharine Graham. It was ultimately up to Graham whether to go with the story, so Cowan has turned her into the narrator, inserting speeches he wrote last summer. Loewenberg says: “She wasn’t really a major character in the play, except for her momentous decisions. Now, she is really the storyteller of the play.”

Although Cowan and Aarons based the script on research and interviews, poetic license inevitably has been invoked. Cowan says he’s made reporter George Wilson “the hero of the piece,” for instance, even though he says Wilson wasn’t actually at Bradlee’s house. The court proceedings are condensed into a single event, with a prosecution lawyer and a judge both given fictitious names.

A bit of invention, Cowan says, goes with the theatrical territory. But the journalism professor is happy to compare “Top Secret” with the kind of history-based dramas he admires. He says, “My play is much more accurate than ‘Copenhagen’ or ‘Frost/Nixon.’ ”

And why revive “Top Secret” now? Cowan and Loewenberg believe the Pentagon Papers incident highlights the line between the public’s right to know and the government’s need -- not always illegitimate, Cowan notes -- to keep certain things secret.

That tension escalates during wartime, and Loewenberg points out it’s only grown more complex in the era of terrorism. Cowan cites recent Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting about such dubious government activities as “black site” prisons and secret domestic eavesdropping as proof that the issue remains fresh.

“It’s always relevant,” he says, “because there are always things being told that people don’t want being told.”

Credit: Special to The Washington Post
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

The Philadelphia Inquirer Writes...

Set in 1971, current as latest news from Iraq
by Howard Shapiro; Inquirer Staff Writer
Published February 16, 2008

Some historical plays are all about the past, but really good ones are just as much about now. Watching Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, the lively L.A. Theatre Works production running this weekend at Annenberg Center’s Harold Prince Theatre, I was processing Vietnam - and thinking Iraq.

Top Secret vigorously maintains that the American press is not just a prodder and inciter; it has a rigorous job to do in order for democracy to work. The play is about the Washington Post’s bold 1971 decision to print details from the purloined Pentagon Papers, but it resonates directly into this decade.

Listen closely, and you hear Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction rearing their unfound warheads. Except for the now-dissolved Knight Ridder Washington bureau, widely acknowledged as the sole outfit skeptical about the Bush administration's prewar WMD line, where was media rigor?

The Pentagon Papers, a government-researched history of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, were stamped top secret. The New York Times’ purloined copy yielded details on Page One for three days, until President Richard M. Nixon’s administration got a court injunction, claiming the document’s release could put American lives at risk.

So the Washington Post, led by cold! -sweating yet principled publisher Katharine Graham and aggressive editor Benjamin Bradlee, got its own copy. The Pentagon Papers, the Post staff quickly understood, were full of tales about questionable decision-making and U.S. hubris in high places. But a fatal risk? Only if two decades of American policymakers were to die of humiliation.

Top Secret, by versatile author Geoff Cowan and the late, talented Post reporter Leroy Aarons, is no First Amendment lecture; it’s all the sharper for its dramatic nuance, for plumbing the jittery politics of the ’70s and the internal machinations of the Post. The newspaper was not wholly high-minded about running its Pentagon Papers material. For Bradlee and his staff, federal news was always both a national and a local story; the Post had been burned by the Times’ scoop and could now recoup.

But the decision to publish wasn’t simple: The Washington Post Co. had just gone public and had plenty to lose if its execs went to ja! il under expensive legal challenges; Bradlee and the staff had! as much to lose if they sat on the material once they obtained it.

So great arguments played out, first among Post officials who had to decide whether to print the story (that’s Top Secret’s Act 1) and then with the feds, who clamped down on the Post once it was printing the material (that’s Act 2).

The outstanding L.A. Theatre Works is devoted to radio theater, and Top Secret plays out, at six microphones, with a sterling 11-member cast that includes Broadway and film actors Susan Sullivan, John Heard, Gregory Harrison and John Vickery. A sound-effects artist works on stage, and the actors, radio-style, hold scripts they almost never refer to. They react to each other as if the play were fully staged.

L.A. Theatre Works is a national theatrical treasure, on the air weekly on public radio and often with major performers, but not on any of Philadelphia’s three NPR affiliates.