Tricky Dick vs. the New York Times: How Nixon declared war on journalism

[DonViejo]

A former Times journalist recounts the Nixon administration's feverish attempts to shut down the paper's reporting

JAMES C. GOODALE

Excerpted from “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles”

On Sunday June 13, 1971, a story was published on the front page of the New York Times under a three-column headline: “Vietnam Archive: Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” I thought it was the most boring headline I had ever read; no one would read this article.

It was the first installment of the series of articles that became known as the Pentagon Papers. When we published it, my colleagues at the Times and I had been expecting all hell to break loose. It was the first article in a planned series based on leaked Defense Department documents showing decades of deception and duplicity: how the American people had been misled about our involvement in Vietnam. But with this boring headline, I wondered if all our expectations of a huge explosion following publication would be wrong. All that day, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t.

Indeed, the nation’s press on that Sunday was more interested in Tricia Nixon’s wedding the previous evening. I had watched excerpts of it on TV. I noted with interest some of the high-placed dignitaries who were there, and wondered how they would react to the bombshell story right there on the front page the next morning, next to coverage of the wedding.

I took a radio with me out to my dock on the lake next to my house and turned it to the news stations to see what sort of commotion the publication had created. None to speak of. The news broadcasts were all about Tricia’s wedding, with a word or two about the Times’ publication of a Vietnam archive.

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