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“The Post” takes place in 1971 and chronicles how The Washington Post defied the Nixon administration to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study about the Vietnam War. The newspaper — along with the New York Times, which published Pentagon Papers stories and excerpts first — faces off against a Justice Department that believes publishing the information is a national security risk, a battle that ends up in the Supreme Court.
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Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Post, whose advisors tell her not to greenlight the stories, as the resulting legal troubles could threaten the paper’s existence. Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, The Post’s executive editor, who believes the information should be printed — for the sake of the public and The Post’s reputation. Here are answers to your potential questions, along with links to our stories about the film and the people it portrays. Screenwriter Liz Hannah came up with the idea and wrote the first draft. Producer Amy Pascal bought it and Steven Spielberg came on as director.
Screenwriter Josh Singer (an Oscar winner for co-writing “Spotlight”) helped rewrite the script. The so-called Pentagon Papers — officially called “Report of the OSD (Office of Secretary of Defense) Vietnam Task Force” — are a secret, 7,000-page study of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered the study in 1967 and it was completed in 1969. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who worked on the study, leaked it to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971. As we wrote in a story in 2011, when the papers were declassified, “their publication in 1971, at a time when the American public had largely turned against the war, was explosive because it revealed a startling gulf between the optimistic public statements of the nation’s top leaders and their increasingly grave private doubts.” Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act, but the charges were eventually dismissed.
He’s played by Matthew Rhys in the movie “The Post.” (Read our story from 2011 on how the. Also check out, and the ).
Katharine Graham, played by Meryl Streep in the film, was the publisher of The Post. Her father Eugene Meyer bought the paper in 1933, then ceded his publisher position to Graham’s husband Philip Graham in 1946. When Philip committed suicide in 1963, Katharine took control for three decades before retiring officially in 1993, succeeded by her son, Donald E. She was the first female chief executive of a fortune 500 company.
(Read her obituary: ) Her memoir, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1998. (Read her researcher Evelyn Small’s recollections of the making of the memoir: ). The New York Times obtained the Pentagon Papers and printed its own stories first, as the film shows. The Post, then considered more of a local paper, strives to gets its hands on the study and write its own stories, in part to boost its reputation.
A explores this issue, pointing out that The Times won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its stories. According to, her original idea was to make a movie about Katharine Graham. She focused on the Pentagon Papers episode because she felt the risky decision to print the stories marked Graham’s coming of age as a publisher. Graham’s story is also.