Who’s Who in ‘The Post’: A Guide to the Players in a Pivotal Era (original) (raw)
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The publisher Katharine Graham, left, and Meryl Streep portraying her in “The Post.”Credit...Associated Press; Niko Tavernise/20th Century Fox, via Associated Press
- Dec. 25, 2017
The newsroom crackles with verisimilitude, its rotary phones, staccato typewriters and a veil of cigarette smoke evoking a bygone grittiness. At its heart are a wisecracking editor and matriarchal publisher.
“The Post,” starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep (who was nominated for an Oscar for the performance on Tuesday), may conjure up newspaper dramas like “Deadline — U.S.A.,” the 1952 film noir about crusading journalists that starred Humphrey Bogart and Ethel Barrymore. But those movies were pure fiction. “The Post,” set at The Washington Post as it covered the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, is billed as a docudrama.
Just how accurate is this “All the President’s Men” prequel? Here’s a primer separating fact and fiction.
THE BACKGROUND: The film revolves around the Pentagon Papers, the government’s 7,000-page, 47-volume secret history of the Vietnam War. The documents were leaked to The New York Times, and though the film focuses on The Post and its publisher, Katharine Graham, it was The Times that spent three months reviewing the papers, then publishing articles about them beginning June 13, 1971. The Times defied a Nixon administration warning to stop but abided by a preliminary injunction granted June 15. Leaping into the gap, The Post’s version began appearing on June 18. On June 30, the United States Supreme Court voted 6-to-3 to lift the injunction against both papers, ruling that the government failed to justify prior restraint on publication.
THE SETTING: While “The Post” is a stark reminder of what a company town Washington can be, the movie was actually made at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn. A vacant office building in White Plains, N.Y., substituted for The Post; the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York City on West 44th Street for The Times. The pressroom is The New York Post’s.
THE WASHINGTON POST: “We are not a little local paper any more,” its editor, Ben Bradlee, proclaims in the movie, declaring an end to The Post’s cozy coverage of Washington. In the years before he joined as deputy managing editor in 1965, The Post lagged behind other publications in the capital, including The Evening Star and The Washington Daily News. The company was indeed, as the film has it, preparing to go public when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, and Ben Bradlee himself noted that the newspaper’s Pentagon Papers experience made its coverage of the Watergate scandal possible. The Post later led the way on Watergate; The Times dominated the Pentagon Papers coverage.
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