Watergate: A New History

by Garrett M. Graff

Following the president’s direction, the Justice Department moved quickly to confront the paper legally, filing for a restraining order against the Times to prevent it from publishing additional sections of the Pentagon Papers. The Times accepted the restraining order, and court arguments were set for Friday, June 18. Friday morning, the Washington Post stunned the nation when it released its own stories based on copies of the study that it had obtained, one of the most significant decisions in the history of the paper—until then, it had never been a national player on the order of the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. Katharine Graham, whose family had bought the Post out of bankruptcy in the Great Depression, had become the paper’s publisher in 1963 after the death of her husband; two years later, she’d brought Ben Bradlee in as executive editor, and together they worked to burnish its reputation. The partnership between Graham—the glamorous, wealthy reigning doyenne of the D.C. social circuit—and Bradlee—rakish, handsome, devilishly fashionable with his signature French-cuff Turnbull & Asser shirts, and known for his close friendship with JFK—would be one of the most transformative in American journalism, and no single moment in their thirty-year career together would compare with the pressure, ambition, and risk that came with this one. The move coincided with the Post’s IPO, and the paper’s lawyers and bankers feared that moving ahead with the reporting might s...