SUNDAY,MAY 16, 2010
NATIONAL SECURITY REVIEW BY LEONARD DOWNIE JR.
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Code red threat: Journalism
NECESSARY SECRETS National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law
By Gabriel Schoenfeld Norton. 309 pp. $27.95
t a time when Americans un- derstandably feel vulnerable to international terrorism, Gabriel Schoenfeld is sounding an alarm about what he believes to be an equally menacing internal threat: journalists. In general, he means journalists “who would subvert democracy by placing themselves above the law” when they publish classified infor- mation “leaked” by government and other sources. And in particular, he takes aim
at journalists at the New York Times who revealed in 2005 and 2006 two secret Bush administra- tion antiterrorism programs: war- rantless surveillance of some Americans’ international tele- phone calls and e-mails, and the ex- ploitation of a Belgian electronic banking clearinghouse to track in- dividuals’ international financial transactions. Schoenfeld forcefully argues, with deeply researched and closely reasoned legal and histor- ical justifications, that publication of those stories violated espionage laws. In his view, Times editors and reporters, from Executive Editor Bill Keller on down, should have been prosecuted and imprisoned. A senior fellow at the conserva-
tive Hudson Institute, Schoenfeld acknowledges that, under the First
Amendment, the government, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case, may sel- dom, if ever, be justified in using prior restraint to prevent publica- tion of anything. But he argues that journalists could and should be prosecuted if they knowingly vi- olate espionage laws. “Necessary Secrets” is an expansion of what he first expressed in a 2006 Com- mentary magazine article and a statement he later made to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Times justified revealing these covert programs by claiming that 1) there was debate about their legality within the government; 2) the programs could involve in- vasions of Americans’ privacy; and 3) the programs’ extraordinary na- ture made them “a matter of public interest.” Such reasoning, Schoen- feld argues, is outweighed by the Bush administration’s determina- tion that these covert efforts were necessary in wartime and should have remained secret. The larger problem, he concludes, is that, ever since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, journalists have come to believe that they alone should de- cide what is in the national inter- est. He depicts them as overly ea- ger to publish every leaked secret they can get their hands on. He raises significant and trou- bling questions about whether some decisions to publish classi- fied information are influenced by journalists’ personal agendas, such as knee-jerk anti-government bias- es or cashing in by writing books
ALAMY
According to Schoenfeld, journalists have come to believe they alone should decide what is in the national interest.
that reveal national security se- crets. But he misleads his readers by implying that classified-infor- mation leaks have been raining down on reporters who care little about the consequences of what they publish. In my experience, most national security reporting involves incremental probing of multiple sources who may even- tually share fragments of informa- tion about important policy issues that must be carefully pieced to- gether and checked for accuracy with senior officials, who are given the opportunity to raise any con- cerns about publication.
Schoenfeld does not dwell on those instances in which the publi- cation of classified information,
sometimes over official objections, has held the government account- able for its conduct, such as The Washington Post’s revelations of secret CIA prisons in foreign coun- tries, where “enhanced interroga- tion techniques” were used on ter- rorism suspects outside the U.S. le- gal system. He does not discuss, perhaps because he does not know, how often news organizations have withheld from publication classi- fied national security information, usually specific operational details, when the government has argued convincingly that disclosure would harm human life, jeopardize mili- tary actions or disrupt covert op- erations. Instead, he dwells on a limited number of instances in
which he believes publication caused largely unspecified harm. His book describes the news media as relatively naive and cava- lier when making decisions about national security stories. I remem- ber from my quarter-century as managing editor and executive editor of The Post that these deci- sions required extensive fact-find- ing, expert consultation, soul- searching and, yes, knowledge of and respect for the law. Yet the weight of his book’s scholarship, the timeliness of its publication and the audacity of its argument make it essential reading for any- one seriously interested in nation- al security and freedom of the press in these testing times.
Of course, if journalists or news organizations knowingly break the law, they can be held criminally lia- ble, just as any other citizen or insti- tution can be. But Schoenfeld clear- ly wants a well-known news organi- zation like the New York Times and its journalists, to which he is obvi- ously antipathetic, to be prosecuted to create what lawyers call a chill- ing effect on the rest of the Amer- ican news media, persuading them to abdicate their right and respon- sibility to decide what they publish and broadcast. That, indeed, would subvert our democracy.
bookworld@washpost.com
Leonard Downie Jr. is the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State
University and vice president at large of The Washington Post.
KLMNO
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To overcome polarization, Obama can gain insight from George W. Bush’s playbook.”
Read about it in Political Bookworm at
voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm.
Author Hampton Sides at the motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
MARK HUMPHREY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
HISTORY REVIEW BY DAVID J. GARROW
The hunter becomes the hunted
HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
By Hampton Sides
Doubleday. 459 pp. $28.95
T
he assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis is such an intensively studied tragedy that one must wonder whether any- thing new and insightful can be written about it. The gunman, James Earl Ray, appeared both pathetic and puzzling from the time of his capture in London in early June 1968 until his death in 1998 at age 70 in a Tennessee pris- on. An extensive investigation by a House of Representatives select committee in the late 1970s thor- oughly plumbed all of Ray’s con- tradictory claims but was unable to document whether anyone had assisted or encouraged him in his commission of the crime. Serious students of the King as-
sassination know the two land- mark books that reach beyond the congressional probe, the late George McMillan’s superbly re- searched “The Making of an As- sassin: The Life of James Earl Ray” (1976) and Gerald Posner’s impressive “Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassina- tion of Martin Luther King, Jr.” (1998). Hampton Sides generous- ly cites both of those, plus scores of other familiar sources, in his
carefully constructed true-crime narrative of Ray’s stalking of King, the fatal shot and Ray’s subse- quent getaway and capture. Sides, a Memphis native, di- vides his book into four strands. The first one traces Ray’s activ- ities following his April 1967 es- cape from a Missouri prison through the assassination a year later and his flight first to Canada and then to Europe. A second strand follows King’s road to Memphis, and a third paints the city’s racial divisions. The final strand tracks the FBI’s intense hostility toward King and covers its dogged investigation, includ- ing forensic success in identifying Ray and the pursuit of the assas- sin as he makes a bumbling effort to reach white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The author’s depiction of his home town’s role in the story is en- lightening, and his efforts to pre- sent King’s struggles and the FBI’s behavior cover familiar ground with hardly a misstep. When Sides errs, as he does in one instance re- garding King’s personal life, it’s be- cause he unknowingly accepts faulty information from a respect- ed book; when he does his own re- porting — as when, for example, he interviews a Kentucky politician who was one of King’s lovers and was with him that fatal evening in Memphis — he makes a valuable contribution to the historical rec- ord.
But the “hellhound” who right-
James Earl Ray
ly remains the book’s centerpiece —Sides draws his title from a 1937 Robert Johnson blues ballad — is of course Ray. McMillan’s seminal work on Ray and his troubled, crime-steeped family is the re- quired starting point for any reex- amination of his motivations and desires, and Sides draws a memo- rable and persuasive portrait of the amateur assassin whose moti- vation may be simpler to grasp than most previous investigators have realized.
At the time of his 1967 escape,
Ray was facing 18 more years in prison for armed robbery. Oddly meticulous about his personal hy- giene and clothes, he nonetheless slept in dingy flophouses, drank in
David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of “Bearing the Cross,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
seedy dives and patronized the cheapest whorehouses. Sides rev- els in retracing Ray’s steps in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and Los Angeles, just as he also carefully chronicles Ray’s stalking of King as the civil rights leader traveled from city to city. Sides skillfully emphasizes Ray’s early 1968 visits to a pair of self-improvement counselors, one of whom recom- mended a book titled “Psycho- Cybernetics,” by Maxwell Maltz, which Ray had in his possession when arrested. “You must have a goal to shoot for, and a straight course to follow,” Sides quotes the book as saying. “Do the thing and you will have the power.” “Hell- hound on His Trail” suggests that Maltz’s book, coupled with Ray’s well-documented racism, gave a tragic sense of purpose to a man who was otherwise a sad and lone- ly drifter. Sides quotes one of Ray’s lawyers as observing that “he has a strongly developed, fundamen- tal instinct to be somebody . . . a name” rather than just a prison number. Ray’s desire to achieve something in life, Sides convinc- ingly and originally argues, was first and foremost what sent him on his deadly trail to Memphis.
bookworld@washpost.com
New from the author of
the New York Times bestseller SEA OF THUNDER
“What causes the eternal pull of war
on men?...Evan Thomas provides fascinating insights in this gripping narrative.”
—walter isaacson
“Fast-paced and irreverent…
the young Theodore Roosevelt, portrayed with all his eloquence and energy, absurdity and raw aggression.”
—geoffrey c. ward
“Engrossing…hard to put down.”
—ronald steel, new york times book review
“Evan Thomas is a
national resource, and this utterly compelling book reminds us why.”
—michael r. beschloss
www.e vanthomasbook
s.com
AS SEEN ON MEET THE PRESS
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
Hachette Book Group
Also available as an audiobook, in a Large Print Edition, and as an eBook
DAVID WELCH
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