Jon Schwarz has an excellent critique of The Post at one of my favorite sites, The Intercept.
I wrote this comment about the Post and legendary publisher Katherine Graham.
The Post has always been at social center of plutocracy. Owner Edward McLean bought the Hope diamond for his wife, who wore it socially. Cursed or not, he died in a sanitarium, and the Post was purchased by the boy financial wizard of his time, Eugene Meyer, who had made $15 million dollars before the age of 40 in 1915. He used the pages of the Post to rail against the New Deal. Katherine Graham is his daughter. Eugene gifted the paper mostly to her husband, but also partly to her.
Certainly the paper represents the plutocratic class. Does it also represent the Deep State, CIA, and so on? It has long been alleged, and nothing in the facts would dissuade one from that belief. It's also been called the Pentagon Post.
By 1965 the Vietnam War was obsolete, the ultimate domino, Indonesia, having been taken by a client dictator and purged of adversaries. Johnson Advisors including McNamara were decrying pointlessness. Noam Chomsky has written the capitalist class was turning anti-war by the last years of the 1960's. But the war was a political inconvenience for some people, and opportunity for others. I narrowly escaped the draft years, but somehow never learned for decades that Nixon officially ended the war just before the 1972 election, the ultimate October Surprise. So it had finally served its purpose.
Anyway, printing the Pentagon Papers was gutsy and admirably, but hardly an act of treason either to the capitalist class or the national security class of the day.
Nixon, though he did oversee the undoing of Allende, was not proving the domestic neoliberal that the capitalist class really wanted, and finally got with Reagon, after Carter having done some capable preparatory work. Chomsky has called Nixon the last New Deal President, and Nixon's last unrealized proposal was national healthcare reform based on employer mandates. THAT is what was undone by exposing the Watergate Burglary.
*** end of comment posted.
The Book on Katherine Graham was originally written in the 1970's, entitled Katherine the Great. It exposes much of the way the government used the paper as a propaganda mouthpiece for the government. Katherine Graham herself suppressed the mainstream publication of the book.
I found this great background information site looking for info on Philip Graham and the CIA. Important...read all the comments! Mr Graham had a stellar rise, as editor of Harvard Law Review, clerk to Felix Frankfurter, and assistant to William O Donovan, the colorful "Oh So Social" director of the OSS. Then he marries into the Washington Post by marrying Katherine Meyer, and turns it into the nation's most efficient conduit for pumping out pro-cold-war disinformation cooked up at CIA under Project Mockingbird.
But by the late 1950's, Philip's father-in-law begins to have doubts about the arrangement. Philip and Katherine are living separately, often forcing friends to take sides. Philip has a new mistress, and tries to get his will re-written 3 times to make her inheirit the Post. Ultimately, at a press convention in the spring of 1963, he launches a tirade about government manipulation of the media. He names a name. His wife rushes to the scene, Philip is put in a strait jacket and put into a sanitarium (reminiscent of what happened to Edward McLean). Later, Katherine drives him back to the country home, where he is shortly found dead in the bathtub, the death ruled a suicide. The last will is ruled intestate, and Katherine becomes the full owner and publisher of The Post. All this, the efficient elimination of a potential independent voice, someone who has actually had enough and won't take it anymore and might go public about the whole corrupt establishment--conveniently occurred just 4 months before the Kennedy assassination, when there might need to be good media control.
As her fate becomes secure Katherine Graham continues the Post's proud traditions of boosting war and plutocracy and otherwise serving the Deep State better than any major paper, ultimately becoming the last major US newspaper to denounce the Vietnam War.
The Post's leading role in exposing Watergate is also in the comments brushed away as I have done, against the background of the plutocracy deciding Nixon is too independent minded to implement the desired new regime of neoliberalism to replace the New Deal, so he is done in by the Deep State through their friendly local newspaper, somehow always owned and operated by friends, the Post.
I wrote this comment about the Post and legendary publisher Katherine Graham.
The Post has always been at social center of plutocracy. Owner Edward McLean bought the Hope diamond for his wife, who wore it socially. Cursed or not, he died in a sanitarium, and the Post was purchased by the boy financial wizard of his time, Eugene Meyer, who had made $15 million dollars before the age of 40 in 1915. He used the pages of the Post to rail against the New Deal. Katherine Graham is his daughter. Eugene gifted the paper mostly to her husband, but also partly to her.
Certainly the paper represents the plutocratic class. Does it also represent the Deep State, CIA, and so on? It has long been alleged, and nothing in the facts would dissuade one from that belief. It's also been called the Pentagon Post.
By 1965 the Vietnam War was obsolete, the ultimate domino, Indonesia, having been taken by a client dictator and purged of adversaries. Johnson Advisors including McNamara were decrying pointlessness. Noam Chomsky has written the capitalist class was turning anti-war by the last years of the 1960's. But the war was a political inconvenience for some people, and opportunity for others. I narrowly escaped the draft years, but somehow never learned for decades that Nixon officially ended the war just before the 1972 election, the ultimate October Surprise. So it had finally served its purpose.
Anyway, printing the Pentagon Papers was gutsy and admirably, but hardly an act of treason either to the capitalist class or the national security class of the day.
Nixon, though he did oversee the undoing of Allende, was not proving the domestic neoliberal that the capitalist class really wanted, and finally got with Reagon, after Carter having done some capable preparatory work. Chomsky has called Nixon the last New Deal President, and Nixon's last unrealized proposal was national healthcare reform based on employer mandates. THAT is what was undone by exposing the Watergate Burglary.
*** end of comment posted.
The Book on Katherine Graham was originally written in the 1970's, entitled Katherine the Great. It exposes much of the way the government used the paper as a propaganda mouthpiece for the government. Katherine Graham herself suppressed the mainstream publication of the book.
I found this great background information site looking for info on Philip Graham and the CIA. Important...read all the comments! Mr Graham had a stellar rise, as editor of Harvard Law Review, clerk to Felix Frankfurter, and assistant to William O Donovan, the colorful "Oh So Social" director of the OSS. Then he marries into the Washington Post by marrying Katherine Meyer, and turns it into the nation's most efficient conduit for pumping out pro-cold-war disinformation cooked up at CIA under Project Mockingbird.
But by the late 1950's, Philip's father-in-law begins to have doubts about the arrangement. Philip and Katherine are living separately, often forcing friends to take sides. Philip has a new mistress, and tries to get his will re-written 3 times to make her inheirit the Post. Ultimately, at a press convention in the spring of 1963, he launches a tirade about government manipulation of the media. He names a name. His wife rushes to the scene, Philip is put in a strait jacket and put into a sanitarium (reminiscent of what happened to Edward McLean). Later, Katherine drives him back to the country home, where he is shortly found dead in the bathtub, the death ruled a suicide. The last will is ruled intestate, and Katherine becomes the full owner and publisher of The Post. All this, the efficient elimination of a potential independent voice, someone who has actually had enough and won't take it anymore and might go public about the whole corrupt establishment--conveniently occurred just 4 months before the Kennedy assassination, when there might need to be good media control.
As her fate becomes secure Katherine Graham continues the Post's proud traditions of boosting war and plutocracy and otherwise serving the Deep State better than any major paper, ultimately becoming the last major US newspaper to denounce the Vietnam War.
The Post's leading role in exposing Watergate is also in the comments brushed away as I have done, against the background of the plutocracy deciding Nixon is too independent minded to implement the desired new regime of neoliberalism to replace the New Deal, so he is done in by the Deep State through their friendly local newspaper, somehow always owned and operated by friends, the Post.
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