The Year the Curtain Parted

If 1970 was the year the sixties finally, officially expired, 1971 is the year America discovered it had been lied to systematically, and started acting like it mattered.

On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing what would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers, a classified Department of Defense history of American involvement in Vietnam that Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who had once believed fully in the war effort, had photocopied page by page and leaked because he could no longer live with what he'd read. The documents proved what protesters had been shouting since Kent State in the government's own internal language, that four successive presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, had known the war was likely unwinnable and had kept escalating it anyway, had lied to the public and to Congress about troop levels and bombing campaigns and the actual odds of success, year after year, while young American men kept getting drafted into a meat grinder their own government privately doubted could ever be won.

The Nixon administration tried to stop the presses, literally, seeking an injunction against the Times in a case that raced to the Supreme Court within days. And on June 30, in New York Times Co. v. United States, the Court ruled six to three that the government could not block publication, a landmark affirmation of press freedom delivered at the exact moment the country most needed to hear it. This is the accountability machine I spent the last chapter insisting was already under construction in 1970 — and here, barely six months later, you can watch it complete an entire cycle from leak to legal fight to publication to a Supreme Court ruling protecting the next leak that was already coming, because Nixon's people, enraged and paranoid after the Pentagon Papers fight, had begun assembling the very "plumbers" unit that would, within a year, break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex and set in motion the scandal that would eventually end Nixon's presidency altogether.

I want to pause on that word — accountability — because it's the load-bearing idea of this entire series of articles, and 1971 is where you can watch it stop being an abstraction and start being a functioning mechanism. A generation of journalists who had come up watching the government lie about Vietnam were no longer inclined to take official statements at face value, and a Supreme Court that had just ruled decisively in favor of publication had signaled, unmistakably, that the press held real institutional power to check the executive branch even when the executive branch invoked national security to silence it. None of that existed with anything like the same force a decade earlier. It existed in 1971 because 1970 had already done the work of teaching an entire generation not to trust power without proof.

I'll pick up the full year from here in the next segment — the music, which somehow found a way to get even better, the films, which got considerably darker and more paranoid in direct response to exactly this kind of institutional distrust, and the war at home that kept grinding on even as the war abroad started, slowly, to show cracks in its official justification.