Cinema

Who Gets to Be a Hero? Spielberg and Hanks on Snowden and The Post

Husam Sam Asi 21 December 2017

A battle over the Pentagon Papers becomes an urgent argument about journalism, political loyalty and the limits of government power.

Husam Sam Asi with Steven Spielberg at The Post interview, 27 November 2017. Photo: Magnus Sundholm for the HFPA.

In his latest film, The Post, Steven Spielberg revisits the legal battle that erupted in 1971 between President Richard Nixon’s administration and the American press after the leak of the Pentagon Papers. The secret study of the Vietnam War exposed decades of American involvement in the conflict and the gulf between what successive governments knew and what they told the public.

Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg initially supplied the documents to The New York Times. Its publication of extracts provoked the Nixon administration to seek an injunction on national-security grounds. The resulting confrontation put freedom of the press, protected by the First Amendment, at the centre of a struggle over the government’s power to suppress information.

At The Washington Post, editor Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, decides to obtain the papers and publish them, risking both the newspaper’s future and his own freedom. But first he needs the approval of publisher Katharine Graham, played by Meryl Streep. Graham is a friend of former defence secretary Robert McNamara, who commissioned the study whose revelations are now shaking Washington.

When I meet Spielberg at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, he describes the film as a precursor to All the President’s Men, which followed the newspaper’s investigation into Watergate.

“When people think about that period, they think about All the President’s Men,” he says. “They don’t think about how it all began, with the Pentagon Papers.”

What struck him about screenwriter Liz Hannah’s story was the movement of a political pendulum: an administration trying to prevent first The New York Times, and then The Washington Post, from printing the truth.

“That pendulum had swung back across the years to the moment when I was reading the script,” he says. “I thought: my God, the pendulum is now in 2017. I’m watching what happened before happen again, right now. I couldn’t believe it.”

“We have to tell this story now”

Politics alone did not draw Spielberg to the project. He was already working on another film when producer Amy Pascal sent him the screenplay she had acquired from Hannah, then a little-known writer.

“The story was exciting,” he says. “The screenplay was full of fascinating elements: the government withholding facts, secrecy, the suppression of truth and Richard Nixon’s paranoia.”

He quickly met Hanks and Streep to discuss the leading roles. They agreed that the film could not wait.

“We looked at each other and said we have to seize this moment and tell this story now. This is its moment. People’s ears are open to it. We can’t wait another year or two.”

President Donald Trump’s hostility towards the press gave the project an immediate political charge. Spielberg, Hanks and Streep wanted to remind audiences of journalism’s role in protecting democracy and the freedoms on which it depends.

“You cannot have a free and democratic government without the scrutiny of a free press,” Hanks tells me. “You can call them liars or say that what they’re reporting isn’t true. You can deny that something happened, as the Nixon administration did over Watergate. They said it had never happened, but they were wrong.”

Streep places the responsibility on journalists to question everyone who holds power.

“A free press asks difficult questions and holds all people in power accountable,” she says. “Without that, the burden on you as a journalist is enormous. It is written into our Constitution. We have to have it because people depend on it. This is the people’s government. It doesn’t belong to a king.”

Husam Sam Asi with Tom Hanks at The Post interview, 27 November 2017. Photo: Magnus Sundholm for the HFPA.

Principle and competition

Yet the relationship between the press and political power is rarely simple. Bradlee was himself close to presidents, particularly John F. Kennedy, with whom he spent weekends. Graham’s friendship with McNamara similarly complicated the decision to publish. Was Bradlee driven purely by a defence of press freedom, or also by a desire to beat The New York Times?

“There’s no question that he was competitive,” Hanks says. “He also wanted to beat The Washington Star, which was the number-one newspaper in Washington at the time. He thought Washington was the most important city in the world before a lot of other people did.”

But speed was not enough. Bradlee wanted the story to be right.

Watch the interviews

Husam Sam Asi speaks with Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep about The Post and freedom of the press.

What Hollywood thinks of Free Press in Trump’s era? — Husam Sam Asi

“In one of the documentaries, he says you don’t want to be wrong, because if you are wrong you have to eat it for the next 24 hours, and it will never taste good.”

Ellsberg, Snowden and the limits of sympathy

The Pentagon Papers also raise a more contemporary question. Ellsberg, who faced prosecution under the Espionage Act, remained an advocate of whistleblowing and a supporter of Edward Snowden, who disclosed National Security Agency surveillance documents in 2013. How would Bradlee have responded to Snowden?

“It would be interesting to know his view of Snowden,” Hanks says.

Hanks does not see Snowden’s disclosures as carrying the same significance as the Pentagon Papers. He says he was not surprised to discover the extent of government surveillance.

“We should know that the government is tracking everything, and then we can react to that,” he says. “If there are enormous mainframe computers somewhere storing all that information, someone is going to hack them. So, honestly, I wasn’t surprised that the government was doing the same thing. Facebook and Google make a lot of money based on our interests. Is that forbidden?”

His answer exposes a tension in the film’s defence of individual freedoms. Does admiration for a whistleblower depend partly on whose administration is being challenged? Snowden’s disclosures came during Barack Obama’s presidency. Hanks, Spielberg and Streep had supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton against Trump.

For Spielberg, the distinction begins with Ellsberg’s purpose.

“Snowden was different for me,” he says. “He revealed a great deal about the government and agencies that have the ability to invade our privacy, listen to telephone conversations and read emails.”

Ellsberg, he argues, was trying to stop the Vietnam War by exposing a history of deception across successive administrations.

“When the Pentagon Papers were published, demonstrations and protests erupted over the illegitimacy of a false war in which tens of thousands of men were sacrificing their lives, when the government had no intention of winning. The Pentagon Papers helped shorten it. That is why, in my view, Ellsberg was a hero.”

Pressed on whether Snowden might also deserve that description, Spielberg acknowledges the limits of his knowledge.

“I don’t have the same information about Snowden because I spent so much time studying Ellsberg, not Snowden. So I can’t answer that without really knowing enough about him.”

Streep, who used her Golden Globes speech to criticise Trump, accepts that political friends must face the same scrutiny as opponents.

“We have to demand that our friends live up to the same standards we demand of those whose political views are hostile to ours,” she says. “And I think that is the message of the film.”

Is The Post, then, principally a defence of press freedom, or also part of Hollywood’s confrontation with Trump? Its historical outcome carries an unmistakable warning: the newspapers overcome Nixon’s attempt to stop publication, and the later Watergate investigation helps bring down his presidency. The question hanging over the film is whether a similar reckoning could happen again.