Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which tells the story of the 1971 leaking of the Pentagon Papers, conjures a nostalgic image of journalism that feels like another world: newsrooms full of typewriters and cigarette smoke, printing presses, reporters running to the newsstand in the morning to grab the day’s papers. But despite the clear pre-Internet setting, the story feels eerily current. Then-president Richard Nixon’s attack on the free press is all too reminiscent of our own time. By linking the story of a newspaper struggling for recognition with a complex portrayal of womanhood in the 1970s, the film also contends with how we view history, who the “main characters” are, and who a story belongs to.
It was The New York Times who initially published the top-secret government documents detailing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, but the film focuses on The Washington Post, the smaller paper that obtained the documents and picked up where the Times left off when a court injunction stalled them. It is the story of Katharine Graham, the Post’s owner (played by Meryl Streep with characteristic finesse); and her editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks, who evokes both bravado and sensitivity).
The first time we see Graham, she springs awake with an alarmed gasp, sheets of paper falling to the floor around her. Slightly disheveled, she walks into a meeting about the Post’s financial future in the wake of her husband’s suicide. She wants to keep the paper in the family, but never expected its ownership to fall on her shoulders. Seated around a circular table, the only woman in a sea of men, her hands shake as she glances down at her notes. She’s prepared—probably over-prepared—but barely speaks. Later, she overhears one advisor telling another that she’s unfit to run the paper.
This is one of many times that Graham enters a male-dominated space, often leaving a group of women waiting outside the closed door. At a dinner party, when the men start talking politics, the women take that as their cue to leave the room. In one key moment, Bradlee’s wife, Tony (Sarah Paulson), tells her husband why Graham is brave for publishing the documents. She explains what it feels like when people look through you as though you’re not there, when they don’t take you seriously or trust your ability to make a decision. Graham has everything to lose by failing.
Spielberg is no stranger to tackling historical stories. (The past few years alone brought us films like Lincoln and Bridge of Spies.) In response to this one, some reviews wondered why he zeroed in on the Post rather than the Times. But is the most visible, well-known part of history always the most significant? In the end, it was never really about who got there first. The rivalry portrayed in the movie is not between the two papers so much as between journalism and the federal government. “If they lose, we lose,” Bradlee says of the Times.
Maybe the Post, like Graham herself, had more to lose by taking a big risk. When you consider how much was at stake for the less prestigious paper, and what they would go on to do (namely, lead the nation in covering the Watergate scandal), they start to seem less like a secondary player. Like Graham, like all the women who shadow their husbands in the film, remaining in the background, the Post has yet to be recognized for its full potential, and truly seen. “I always wanted to be part of a small rebellion,” the reporter Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) says. The story of the Post is uniquely positioned to shed light on how sometimes, small rebellions can lead to larger ones.
Ultimately, when Nixon challenges both the Times and the Post in court, the ruling in favor of the papers affirms the importance of a free press in checking government power. When Graham walks down the courthouse steps, victorious, through a crowd of earnest, hopeful female faces, it’s hard not to feel like she’s inspiring a new generation of small rebellions—women who overcome their fears of speaking up, talk politics at the dinner table, and ask what’s behind the closed doors.
Originally written for Columbia Journalism School
