"Honest principles in conflict’

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 17

"Honest principles in conflict’

(By

JAMES RESTON.

, of the New York Times News Service.)

NEW YORK, June 18.

Great Court cases are made by the clash of great principles, each formidable standing alone, but in conflict limited “all neither wholly false nor wholly true.”

The latest legal battle, “the United States v. the ■New York Times’,” is such a case: the Government’s principle of privacy and the newspaper’s principle of pub. lishing without Government approval.

It is the old cat-and-dog conflict between security and freedom.

It goes back to John Milton’s pamphlet “Areopagitica” in the seventeenth century against Government censorship, or, as he called it: “For the liberty of unlicenc’d printing.” That is still the heart of it: the Government’s claim to prevent, in effect to license, what is published ahead of publication, rather than merely to exercise its rights to prosecute after publication. Whether publishing the Government’s own analysis of the Vietnam tragedy, or surpassing that story is a service to the republic is the real issue.

It is an awkward thing for a reporter to comment on the battles of his own newspaper, and the reader will make his own allowances for the reporter’s bias. But after all allowances are made, it is hard to believe that the publication of these historical documents s a greater threat to the security of the United States than supressing them, or, as the Government implies, that the “Times” is a frivolous or reckless paper. The usual charge against the “New York Times,” not without some validity, is that it is a tedious bore, always saying on the one hand and the other, and defending, like “The Times” in the 19305, “the Government and the commercial Establishment.” During the last decade, it has been attacked vigorously for “playing the Government game.”

It refused to print a story that the Cuban freedom-fight-ers were going to land at the Bay of Pigs “tomorrow morning.”

It agreed with President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis that reporting that Russian missiles were on the island while Kennedy was deploying the fleet to blockade the Russians was not in the national interest. Beyond that, it was condemned for not printing what

it knew about the United States U2 flights over the Soviet Union, and paradoxically, for printing the Yalta papers and the Dumbarton Oaks papers on the organisation of the United Nations.

All of which suggests that there is no general principle which governs all specific cases, that, in the world of newspapering, where men have to read almost two million words a day and select 100,000 to print, it comes down to human judgments where, all is neither wholly false nor wholly true. So a judgment has to be made when the Government argues for security, even over historical documents, and the “Times” argues from freedom to publish.

That is what is before the Court. It is not a black and white case—as it was in the Cuban missile crisis when the Russian ships were approaching President Kennedy’s blockade. It is a conflict between printing or suppressing, not military information affecting the lives of men on the battlefield, but historical documents about a tragic and Controversial war.

Not between what is right

and what is wrong, but between two honest but violently conflicting views about what best serves the national interest, and the enduring principles of the First Amendment.