The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [221]
In March 1971, amid continuing protests of the Vietnam War, the New York Times was leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers—a top-secret and ruthlessly honest history of the decision-making that led the country into and through Vietnam that had been commissioned by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.21 Comprising forty-seven volumes totaling seven thousand pages, the Pentagon Papers showed conclusively that the government had perpetrated a vast deception on the American public. The Times published its account of the scheme on Sunday, June 13.
On June 15, about two weeks after Buffett and Munger had gone down to Washington to meet Graham in her office, a federal district court enjoined the Times from publishing most of the Pentagon Papers. It was the first time in history that a U.S. judge had restrained publication by a newspaper, raising a major constitutional question.
The Post, mortified at having been scooped, was determined to get its hands on the Pentagon Papers. Through informed guesswork and contacts, an editor tracked down their source, Daniel Ellsberg, an expert on the Vietnam War. The editor flew to Boston with an empty suitcase and brought the Pentagon Papers back to Washington.
By then Graham had mastered some of the basics of being a publisher, though she remained deferential and ill at ease. Further, “we were in the middle of going public [but] we hadn’t sold the stock,” she recalled. “It was a terribly sensitive time for the company, and we could have been very badly hurt if we’d been to court or criminally enjoined…. The business people were all saying either don’t do it or wait a day, and the lawyers were saying don’t do it. And the editors were on the other phone saying you’ve got to do it.”
“I would have had to quit if we hadn’t published it,” says Ben Bradlee. “A lot of people would have quit.”
“Everybody knew we had those papers,” Graham wrote later. “It was terribly important to maintain the momentum after the Times had been stopped, because the issue was the government’s ability to prior-restrain newspapers. And I felt what Ben said, that the editors would really be demoralized, that the news floor would be demoralized, that a great deal depended on our doing it.”
Notified on the terrace of her Georgetown mansion that beautiful June afternoon that she had a call, Graham went into her library and sat down on a small sofa to pick up the phone. Post chairman Fritz Beebe was on the line. He told her, “I’m afraid you are going to have to decide.” Graham asked Beebe what he would do, and he said that he guessed he wouldn’t.
“Why can’t we wait a day?” said Graham. “The Times discussed this for three months.” Now Bradlee and other editors joined the call. The grapevine, they said, knows we’ve got the papers, journalists inside and out are watching us. We’ve got to go, and we’ve got to go tonight.
Meanwhile, in the library, Paul Ignatius, president of the Post, was standing at Graham’s side, saying, “each time more insistently—‘Wait a day, wait a day.’ I had about a minute to decide.”
So she parsed Fritz Beebe’s words and his lukewarm tone when he said that he guessed he wouldn’t and concluded that he would back her if she chose a different course.
“I said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.’ And I hung up.”22
In that moment the woman who reached for the advice of others on every decision realized that only she could choose; when forced to reach inside to form her own opinion, she found that she did know what to do.
Before the afternoon was out, the government filed suit against the Post. The following day, June 21, Judge Gerhard Gesell ruled in the newspaper’s favor, refusing to grant an order restraining it from publishing the Pentagon Papers. Less than two weeks later, the Supreme Court upheld him, saying the government had not met “the heavy burden” required to justify, on the grounds of national